The following text was written by McKenzie Wark, an Australian academic who had the following text for a while on his Macquarie University site. Both he and the original webpage are now gone as he has been working in the United States for the past 7 years. (For those interested in more information his current personal website is:
http://www.ludiccrew.org/wark/)
In any case, we thought the text had continued relevance and is still likely to cause a chuckle or two...
The Dictionary of Recieved Ideas (Third Edition)by McKenzie Warkaffirmative action: any practice whereby the underprivileged get into school through privileged treatment, which is disgraceful. As opposed to the practice whereby the privileged get in through privileged treatment, which apparently is not.
alterity: a bit of the other.
analytic philosophy: branch of the theory of knowledge that tries to achieve a consistent theory of thought by abolishing those aspects of thought that are inconsistent.
anthropology: tourism -- made tax deductible.
architecture: formerly modern, which everybody hated. Now postmodern, which nobody likes.
agency: term used in sociology for 'doing words' (i.e. verbs). As opposed to structures (i.e. nouns). Hence the structure-agency problem (i.e. the difficulty sociologists have stringing readable sentences together).
appropriation: (in art). Plagiarists who, knowing that they are bound to get caught nicking ideas from the small stock of art history they understand, own up to it in advance.
art: anything an artists says is art, is art.
artist: anyone who makes art as an artist.
art criticism: explaining why something is art because an artist made it, and why an artist is an artist because they make art. Not as easy as it looks.
author: dead, but still pocketing the royalties.
author-function: the pocketing of the royalties.
Bell curve: theory which scientifically proves that stupidity and moral turpitude in middle class white people can be caused by faulty genetics.
Benjamin, Walter: liked smoking hash and shopping.
Bennett, William: thought that America needed a Book of Virtues -- after serving in Republican cabinets.
Barthes, Roland: run over by a laundry van.
books: form of interior decoration used to line shelves in colourful patterns. Make sure you get ones the right size.
communicative action: the rather irritating person assigned to every class who won't shut up.
canon: books so famous no-one read them, and now obscure that Literature professors are paid to have read them.
conference: where some people go to give papers that have been competitively reviewed -- and other people go to score.
conservatives: intellectuals who defend a past they haven't mastered.
cultural literacy: knowing what books you should have read so that you don't have to.
culture: a good thing. Everybody should have at least one.
critical theory: the defence of left wing shibboleths by means of the proof that reality does not conform to them.
criticism: the production of books by means of books alone. Textual Onanism.
critics (cultural): go to work to watch television and go home to read books.
critics (literary): go to work to read books and go home to watch television.
cyberculture: the revenge of computer geeks -- that people who have a life now think geeks have more fun.
deconstruction: puns -- about puns.
democracy: used to mean a form of power where all the people rule through their political representatives. Now a form of power where some of the people rule through their sales representatives.
desire: found reading books, apparently.
difference: be in favour of it -- like everybody else.
discipline: the maintenance of a professional boundary defining the limits of whatever it is a group of academics are arguing about the definition of.
discourse: words.
discursive: more words.
discursivity: the wordiness of words.
economics: theorists who hold that the best way to allocate resources is to have a free market in everything, except economists.
ecriture: (from the French) writing which not even its author understands.
empirical evidence: gossip.
enlightenment: the irrational belief in the supreme and unchallengeable power of reason.
essentialism: no one is quite sure what, in essence, it is, but it makes an excellent insult.
eternal return: Brady Bunch reruns.
faculties: bunches of scholars quartered together because they have lost them.
feminism: more dignified term for nagging.
footnotes: a form of fetishism, involving the coveting of small, well crafted appendages. Common perversion amongst scholars.
Foucault, Michel: dead French leather queen.
Frankfurt school: thought that Benny Goodman signalled the end of civilisation as we know it.
free speech: be passionately for it, so long as it is used only by fellow conservatives.
Freud, Sigmund: took too much coke and had a very strange way of chatting up interesting women.
funding: the one constant in the universe according to all theories across the humanities is that while nobody can quite define what this substance is, there is always too great a quantity of it being given to someone else.
globalisation: scholars with frequent flyer programs.
graduate school: not so much being trained into how to do the job of an academic, as being trained out of ever holding any job at all.
Habermas, Jurgen: so firm a believer in "communicative action" that he writes at least five books a year.
history: Is traditionally divided into two periods: BT and AT, or Before Television and After Television.
humanities, the: indispensable. No one knows exactly to what.
identity: its not what you know; its who you are -- and once you know that, you no longer have the identity you thought you had, but at least you have a theory about it.
ideology: a delusion other people suffer from.
imperialism: the power maintained over poor countries by shooting at them with gunships. Made obsolete by power maintained over poor countries by lending them money.
Irigaray, Luce: wrote a feminist poetics based on lesbian sexuality. Much read by people who want to score with feminist philosophy students.
internet: a virtual tea-room.
intertextuality: see plagiarism.
irony: is the wetnurse of history.
Jameson, Fred: got lost in a Los Angeles hotel. Wrote a book about it.
jouissance: useful French term for adding a veneer of respectability to scholarly discussions of sex.
journalism: writing it is a good way to prevent colleagues from over-estimating your intelligence.
Lacan, Jacques: tied knots in bits of string.
Levi-Strauss: wrote the structuralist cookbook.
liberalism: (in the United States) term of abuse used by the right against the left. (In the UK and Australia) term of abuse used by the left against the right.
library: where books go to die.
logocentrism: talking too much.
literature: books that one absolutely must read for compelling reasons nobody can quite figure out other than that one absolutely must read them.
marginal: try to be marginal. If you are white, anglo-saxon and protestant, try at the very least to be gay.
markets: are always free. Except when they are there to exert market discipline.
methodology: pretending you know what you're doing.
modernism: old hat. Be against it.
multiculturalism: talk about how nice the food is.
neo-conservatives: conservatives volunteer theories that fit with rich people's self interest. Neo-conservatives are similar but demand to get paid. The latter are mostly proteges of the former.
Nietzsche, Fred: did philosophy with a hammer. A pioneer of mechanical engineering.
novels: pretend to have read them.
Oedipus: had a thing about his mother.
performance art: never work with children, animals or performance artists.
penis envy: the theory that women want what they haven't got because they haven't got what they want, and men want what they haven't got because they've got what they have.
philosophy: necessary qualification for taxi driving.
photocopying: ancient ritual practice, said to be descended from Tibetan prayer wheels, by which the wisdom of books can be magically transferred into one's head by exposing them, a page at a time, to the light.
political: the personal is the political. The political is also very personal -- be sure to gossip in the staff tea room about one's rivals.
political correctness: dignified bitching.
polysemy: something to do with having many meanings, only nobody is quite sure which meanings it means.
postcolonialism: a good way to get on in London, New York and Chicago if you are from the sticks.
postmodernism: more books about buildings and food.
post-history: nobody knows what happened because everybody watches too much television.
poststructuralism: marketing category for books that defy categories.
psychoanalysis: where nothing is true -- except the exaggerations.
queer: what people you meet at conferences calls themselves when they are not exactly straight, gay, lesbian or bisexual, but desperate.
queer theory: luscious bout of decadence designed to show that gay studies is a cabal run by a bunch of closet straights.
radicalism: the promotion of revolutionary agitation, become revolutionary agitation for promotion.
rationalism: the belief in reason.
reality: abolished by postmodernism. Ignore.
research assistance: photocopying.
Routledge: the Rupert Murdoch of the scholarly book trade.
scholarly journals: the ones where bad writing is dignified by being scrutinised closely, before being published, by at least three bad writers.
seduction: like desire, only less boring.
semiotics: linguists slumming.
simulacra: semiotics disappearing up its own orifi.
sociology: formerly fashionable discipline now noted, like most formerly fashionable disciplines, for its earnest hostility to fashions.
Spivak, Gayatri: opposes the colonial structure of discourse by enduring its benefits.
strategic essentialism: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
structure: any word in sociology that has solidified into jargon.
structuralism: one of those things which only ever existed in the first place so that it might be prefixed with a 'post'.
subject, the: use instead of 'person' - sounds less humanist.
supervisor: the staff member who is personally designated, on every occasion at which you need help with your thesis, to be out of town.
tenure: comes from ruminating on every inch of your field for so long and so well that they put you out to pasture.
text: say instead of book. Sounds more serious.
theory: used to find things in novels that aren't there.
thesis: instrument of torture so refined that the sufferer is obliged to torture themselves by making it.
think tank: a group of thinkers -- paid not to.
totalitarianism: theory held by conservatives which proves that the Soviet Union cannot collapse.
truth: its all relative, isn't it?
unconscious: that part of your brain that is secretly in love with Kramer from Seinfeld.
virtual reality: an afternoon class after a four vodka lunch.
