"The fiction of the natural is homologous with the discourse of the gendered body."

Over at Stuff Academics Like, the latest addition to my blogroll, you will find much to entertain you. For example, "The Guessing Game" is a regular feature listing a bunch of real conference paper/article titles and one fake one (readers have to guess the fake), but I've been entertaining myself today with the Academic Sentence Generator, linked to in this post.

Hence the title for today's post. The way it works is that you have four categories, each with a predetermined set of terms. You choose one term from each category, and, bingo!, you're on your way to generating outstanding academic prose, as confoundingly obtuse as it gets. Here, let's generate some more (all I did in these gems was change one word):

The fiction of the natural furnishes a provisional lens for the analysis of the discourse of agency.

The fiction of the natural is virtually coextensive with the discourse of power/knowledge.

The fiction of the natural is strictly congruent with the discourse of the public sphere.

The fiction of the natural clarifies the position of the discourse of linguistic transparency.

The fiction of the natural replays (in parodic form) the discourse of the nation-state.

The fiction of the natural is always already participating in the discourse of print culture.

The fiction of the natural asks to be read as the discourse of the image.

The results get a little repetitive after a while, but I swear I could write a paper around one of these suckers -- if someone wanted to pay me. But that's the thing about academia: We've all swallowed the shitte-covered lie that our work is worthless to society beyond the Ivory Tower, that we should generate sentences and lectures and original research all for free, all for luuuuuurv and not money, because if it's "academic" it can hardly be "useful." How many things can you find wrong with that logic?

Yeah, so here's what I say: The fiction of the natural has been coopted by anti-intellectual forces in our society to make decisions about what should "naturally" be funded or defunded. Naturally, higher education is at the top of the list, because, why would you want a majority of educated voters capable of asking embarrassing questions about who and what DO receive funding? Naturally, you want a populace as dumb as possible in order to get voters to vote against their own best interests. Naturally, you don't want too many people around who can tell the difference between fact and fiction, and you certainly don't want anyone around who would attempt to make meaning out of computer generated gibberish sentences.

Naturally, the capacity to make sense out of nonsense is dangerous.

But if you lack the basic capacity to recognize that to be human is to live in a world always and forever mediated by language and that language remains an imperfect medium, you easily become a pawn in the power games played through political, social, economic, and cultural discourses by those who very well know how to use language to their own advantage by telling you what you want to hear.

Damned English professors! How dare they train people to recognize where meaning lies!! (pun intended)

Now, go on over to the Academic Sentence Generator and figure out a title for your next conference paper. Your department may not have the money to fund your trip to that conference (aw, aren't budget cuts the best?), but, hey, at least you can call your paper anything you please. And no one will be the wiser.