Bullshit - the academic view

Bullshit annotated

Robert Kirby: LOOSE CANNON
From Weekly Mail & Guardian - 06 October 2006 03:59

In an engaging paper given last week under the aegis of the Philosophy Society of the University of Cape Town (UCT), Dr Ben Kotzee expanded on a subject one wouldn’t ordinarily expect to see on a list of academic monographs. Kotzee’s title was Our Vision and Our Mission: Bullshit, Assertion and Belief. So portentous a title cries out to be misconstrued. Has the UCT philosophy department decided to absolve itself in some cathartic ecstasy, a washing of the dialectic feet? Is the department proclaiming yet another unsettling mutation of postmodernism? In short: has bull­shit come home to roost?

That’s if you fall for the joke of the title. In fact, its faux profundity is, itself, sly ridicule: heading a paper on bullshit with a title that is pure bullshit is a most welcome light touch. Most academic humour is like being slugged with a sand-filled sock.

Kotzee’s paper examined and expanded on an academic oddity from which has sprung an energetic colloquy. His paper is the most recent of a fair battery of writings and reflections kicked off by the oddity, a 67-page miniature entitled On Bullshit. This curious little best-seller was published a year or so ago by the Princeton University Press. It is compiled of several short papers and articles by a professor emeritus at Princeton, Harry G Frankfurt, who speculated on the way bullshit hovers in some communicative limbo between truth and untruth, being not quite one nor the other. Hence its widespread use in places where bullshit reigns supreme, such as the world of advertising or politics, and where bullshit is the mother tongue, the only language spoken. Kotzee was honest enough to acknowledge that one of bull­shit’s most prolific assembly lines is academe itself.

In an article reviewing Frankfurt’s book, and published in The New Yorker last year, the critic Jim Holt summed up a definition of bullshit by quoting Frankfurt: “The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.” On this Holt expanded: “The bullshitter’s fakery consists not of misrepresenting a state of affairs, but in concealing his own indifference to the truth of what he says. The liar, by contrast, is concerned with the truth, in a perverse sort of fashion: he wants to lead us away from it. As Frankurt sees it, the liar and the truthteller are playing on opposite sides of the same game, a game defined by the authority of truth. The bullshitter opts out of the game altogether.”

Kotzee’s paper delved into the writings that have followed hot on Frankfurt’s heels, also on several others more or less on the same broad theme that have preceded Frankfurt. In their reasoning and expression, some of these essays and papers are disturbingly suspect: academic smoke and mirrors? It is entirely possible to bullshit when writing about bullshit.

Bullshit -- or to give the phenomenon some more tranquil term such as “humbug” (a word Dickens often used), “balderdash”, “claptrap” or “hokum” -- has enjoyed previous attempts at formal clarification. In a 1983 essay, the distinguished analytical philosopher Max Black called humbug “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody’s own thoughts, feelings or attitudes”.

As Kotzee pointed out in his paper, the sheer ubiquity of bullshit in today’s world shows how much further things have been taken. Nowadays it’s almost impossible to avoid it. There are the “instant talking heads analyses” of news, so popular on television and radio, the sheer bullshit that constitutes so much of radio talk shows and, of course those wastelands of fatuity, the “mission statements”, the “team-building” sessions, “policy pronouncements”, “vision initiatives” capped by empty promises of “service delivery” and “performance targets”; all the other drivel of spin-doctors and their like. Bullshit’s always there, to lesser or greater degree an essentiality of normal human discourse. It’s the student writing an exam for which there’s been no real preparation by filling pages with half-remembered technical phraseology, it’s the misleading bilge of the used-car salesman. There are infinite fields of the most odious of leftist bullshit: the paralysing vernacular of fundamentalist political correctness.

There’s another recent book on the subject by Laura Penny, a Canadian college teacher, that I’m trying to get hold of. It has a fascinating title: Your Call Is Important To Us: The Truth about Bullshit. Jim Holt describes her approach, where she applies the term “bullshit” to every kind of trickery by which powerful moneyed interests attempt to gull the public; the promises of “products which will change your life” are of the prime editions. “Never in the history of mankind have so many people uttered statements they know to be untrue,” says Penny. And then adds that George W Bush is a “world-historical bullshitter”.

In the confines of a column I can do no more than give a taste of Kotzee’s splendid paper. It takes Frankfurt’s work a most satisfying legion further along the road, auspicious in its sense of humour and irony. It can be read in full -- and well deserves to be -- on the internet at www.uct.ac.za/depts/philosophy/philsoc.htm.