I have more trouble with pseudo-academic "internet discourse" than I do with actual academic works. I think it's fine for highly-specific fields, be they mathematics or political philosophy, to naturally develop their own jargon suited to talking about ideas or distinctions that aren't concisely described in everyday speech.

What I don't understand is the online manifestos that read like prose poetry, where everything is expressed in metaphors and examples that seem to be united by a vibe rather than by a coherent argument.

EDIT: Making academic work accessible to people outside of the field is traditionally the domain of "popularizers" who specifically are good at expressing the debate in a way that doesn't require a background, and I think that's a reasonable division of labour in theory.

Sometimes. I typically don’t bother engaging if I sense the writer is being willfully obscurantist.

Taking it further seems rather too close to anti-intellectualism. This line of thinking has been used by reactionaries as a tactic to repress radicals and anarchists since time immemorial.

As long as academia is written with academics as the target audience it will never become easier to understand for the normal person. This makes me wonder if language doesn’t exist to explain some topics in an understandable way because of how far abstracted the topic is from the real world, but at that point, why?

Yes.

But also: I really think it depends - not only on the field, or the academic (person), but on the actual text itself. Now i can't talk for every field, but if i were to compare all the papers i've ever read, i don't know, they're all really different from each other. There's some that are really easy to understand, and others that take you forever - and it has nothing to do with their quality. I've read good ones that were easy, shit ones that were hard and vice versa.

that being said, academia definitely has huge problems with its communications - accessibility for one. Even if you were to understand everything, it's of no use to you if you don't have access. There's this argument in the open science movement, which demands that the public should have access to scientific research, because they are the ones paying for it.

edit: typo

The only reason I was able to read as much of The Ego and Its own as I did was because I really enjoyed Stirner's criticisms of secular humanism, Protestantism, and Liberalism. The points after that were a bit of slog; I remember having to reread a bunch because I either glazed over or couldn't really understand what was being said; eventually, I just stopped reading it. I haven't read Wolfi's re-translation, so I don't know if it's just a case of a bad translation or not. I think I've pretty much gotten what I needed from Stirner anyway.

But everyone struggles with that, I think. It's just a matter of whether or not you think it's worth it. And you can tell that it's worth it when you really want to understand.

language just sucks

I struggle often, but when I do the payoff is sometimes really good. With some good work, its important to be hard and tangled, because the struggle to understand what is really being said is the same as the process of coming to understand something outside of common sense. Regular ways of using language often reproduces the values of the world as it is, and challenging fundamental ways we understand words and meaning and being is often done pretty well by forcing people to engage with texts as tough texts.

Plenty writing is obtuse and bullshit for no good reason though, I assume.

I think this point is very important. The instrumentalization of the language by the academia builds an actual intelectual hierarchy. This is very remnant of the bolshevism, the inteligentsia creates the words and concepts, and an hermetic theory distant from the average people.

I read a lot of critique of philosophersr like foucault and deleuze that appear to write obscure text just for the sake of writing hard.. an inverted poetry of sorts of you like.

Anyway, burn the academia, Social Theory is dead, Political Theory is dead, burn the social science libraries. The life is on the Streets, not in dead ink on dead paper. [Now you can throw a brick at me for the edgy remark]

I think you're too charitable. It's obscurantist bullshit, and it's not even worth trying to understand or engage with.

Edit: I don't mean to say that anything above my comprehension level is obscurantist. Sometimes, I have to admit that I'm not someone's intended audience or I lack the necessary foundational knowledge or raw intellect to understand an advanced concept.

if they use uncommon words or use words in an obscure alternate meaning and don't bother to define the terms then I won't even bother with reading the whole work most of the time

Frankly, life is too short to read people like Delueze and Spivak. I have a job I enjoy, friends I like to talk to, political volunteering I need to do, and fiction I like to read. I mostly read a lot of "readers" and secondary sources for that reason.

EDIT: to expand on this I think there is a reason academics use some of the jargon they use and it's useful in communicating with other academics. some works just aren't meant for people who don't have phds in the subject.

also i saw an interesting opinion in r/CriticalTheory:

Judith Butler's 'A Bad Writer' Bites Back' addresses this.
Zizek's well known quote: “We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.” is another way of articulating the need for new language and concepts as well.
I think bad writing can tend to be jargon heavy but that's a condemnation of presentation/style rather than the jargon itself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/l49hci/the_role_of_jargon_in_left_politics/gkn7m3v