Tag: Theory Article Summaries

📺 1. Audiovisual Culture and Literature’s Shifted Role

• Hopfinger’s “audio-visual syndrome”: Modern culture favors image-based, audiovisual forms of representation over traditional literary forms (Hopfinger, pp. 184–5).

“Literature is trying to adapt to the genres of film and television in order to attract the readers who are, primarily, viewers.”

• Literature has lost its former cultural authority and now seeks to imitate or parody film and television formats.
• Piątek applies this to Amis’s Night Train, suggesting that the novel’s aesthetic is shaped by audiovisual storytelling conventions.

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🧠 2. Purpose of the Article: Re-evaluating Night Train

• Piątek challenges dismissive reviews of Night Train by critics like Anita Brookner and John Updike, who saw the novel as artistically weak or stylistically irritating.

“To read it is to undergo a temporary brain dysfunction.” – Brookner (p. 36)
“This is so… pathetic. Oh, Mike, you poor bitch.” – Trader Faulkner mocking Hoolihan (Night Train, p. 57)

• Instead, she proposes that the novel is a “metatextual parody”, engaging with and mocking the conventions of the detective genre, noir fiction, and TV crime dramas.

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🔄 3. Intertextuality and Metatextuality

• Piątek uses Genette’s concept of “metatextuality” to describe Night Train as a text that comments on and critiques other texts (Genette, p. 319).
• Bakhtinian dialogism is also used to argue that the novel engages in a dialogue with other texts and genres.

“Amis is playing with the genre, the medium and with his own literary reputation” (Piątek, p. 159).

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🧥 4. Subversion of Detective Fiction Tropes

• Night Train does not follow the genre’s usual structure:
  • The case is solved as suicide, not murder.
  • There’s no sense of resolution or restored order.
• Stephen Heath: Detective fiction is a genre built around resolution and clarity (Heath, pp. 33–34).

“The purpose of the detective novel is to end… to fix the ending in a final truth.”

• Amis deliberately withholds resolution, mocking the genre’s reliance on closure and rationality.

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👩‍✈️ 5. Mike Hoolihan: A Parodic Detective

• Hoolihan is not a typical detective: she’s female, alcoholic, physically deteriorated, and emotionally unstable.
• Her narrative voice is full of clichés, slang, and artificial “cop show” tough talk.

“There is a glass door marked Vice. There is no glass door marked Sin.” (Night Train, p. 2)

• Hoolihan’s parody of Philip Marlowe is “clumsy but unmistakable” (Piątek, p. 162).
• Her repeated rejection of TV clichés only to reproduce them exposes her as ironically self-unaware.

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📼 6. Intertextual References to Film and Television

• Amis references film noir, TV cop shows, and cinematic tropes:
  • Miami Vice, Starsky and Hutch, Kojak, Chandler, Cain, Dr No (James Bond).
  • The character Trader Faulkner alludes to William Faulkner and The Big Sleep screenwriting (Helman, p. 47).

“Night Train is a parody of the detective story in all its manifestations from literature, through film to television.” (Piątek, p. 163)

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🎞️ 7. TV Aesthetics in the Novel

• Piątek references John Ellis’s theory that TV aesthetics strip narrative of detail and focus only on essentials (Ellis, p. 130).
• The lack of description in Amis’s novel mirrors this visual minimalism.
• Example: The crime scene is narrated as if it were shot in “frames of film” – imitating a TV episode.

“We have these frames of film… that show the death of Jennifer Rockwell.” (Night Train, pp. 64–65)

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🧩 8. Parody and Cliché as Literary Strategy

• Drawing on Hutcheon’s theory of parody, Piątek explains how Amis uses cliché not as laziness but as “repetition with critical distance” (Hutcheon, p. 6).

“Parody invites a more literal and literary reading of a text.” (Hutcheon, p. 69)

• The contrast between Hoolihan’s voice (confident, TV-like) and the meaningless plot (no real mystery) creates intentional dissonance.

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📣 9. Postmodern Reality and Media Saturation

• The novel suggests that television is the new “reality” – there is no objective world outside media representation.
• Hoolihan’s perceptions are saturated by TV logic:

“TV has also fucked up us police. No profession has been so massively fictionalized.” (Night Train, p. 18)

• Hoolihan both critiques and reproduces media clichés, highlighting the inescapability of mediated experience.

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🔍 10. Conclusion: A Parody for the Media-Literate Reader

• Night Train is not meant to satisfy genre expectations but to expose their absurdity.
• Piątek emphasizes that the novel requires cineliterate readers who can recognize these intertextual games.
• The novel “questions our assumptions about the relationship between the reality and representations of reality” (Piątek, p. 171).
• In essence, Amis creates a literary parody of media-saturated consciousness, showing that we now understand reality primarily through recycled media tropes.

📖 1. Reframing Parody as a Postmodern Literary Device

• Piątek advances Linda Hutcheon’s theory of parody by showing how Night Train uses ironic imitation not merely for humor, but as critique of genre and media discourse.
• She demonstrates how Amis “exploits the two categories of distance and difference” (Piątek, p. 166; Hutcheon, 1985, p. 6).

“Parody… is a form of imitation characterised by ironic inversion… ‘repetition with critical distance’” (Hutcheon, p. 6).

• Contribution: Shows parody as a tool for media critique, not just literary imitation, thus enriching postmodernist narrative theory.

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📺 2. Introducing the ‘TV-Conscious Narrator’ as a Literary Construct

• Piątek presents the media-saturated narrator Mike Hoolihan as a narrative innovation: a character who internalizes and mimics TV discourse.
• She builds on David Lodge’s pseudodiegesis to show that Hoolihan’s voice mimics not natural speech, but cop-show discourse (Lodge, pp. 34–6).

“The cliché-ridden language of [Hoolihan]… is a mimesis not of a character’s speech but of a discourse” (Piątek, p. 166).

• Contribution: Adds a new character model to narrative theory, shaped by intermedial influences and television aesthetics.

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🧠 3. Expanding Intertextuality to Include Visual Media

• The article challenges narrow literary definitions of intertextuality by expanding it beyond written texts to include television and film genres.

“Night Train is a parody of the detective story in all its manifestations from literature, through film to television” (Piątek, p. 163).

• Citing Hopfinger and Nycz, Piątek shows that modern literature has become “para-audiovisual”, mimicking the narrative structures of TV and cinema (Hopfinger, p. 101; Nycz, p. 225).
• Contribution: Pushes intertextual theory into the domain of media and cultural studies, encouraging media-aware literary criticism.

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🎥 4. Critique of Genre Conventions and Reader Expectations

• Piątek highlights how Amis subverts detective fiction norms, exposing their formulaic nature and undermining reader comfort.
• Drawing on Stephen Heath and genre theorists:

“The purpose of the detective novel is to end… to fix the ending in a final truth” (Heath, pp. 33–4).

• Contribution: Validates genre subversion as a critical tool, enriching the literary discourse on detective fiction and narrative closure.

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🎙️ 5. Enhancing the Study of Narrative Voice and Focalization

• Hoolihan’s first-person narration is used to limit and distort reader perception, revealing how focalization shapes narrative reliability.
• Citing Seymour Chatman and Bakhtin, Piątek illustrates the dialogic nature of Hoolihan’s voice, which paradoxically critiques the very clichés she replicates (Chatman, p. 151; Bakhtin in Piątek, p. 159).

“Amis constructs ‘a narration that the implied reader must call into question’” (Piątek, p. 169; Chatman, p. 151).

• Contribution: Strengthens the link between voice, focalization, and reader manipulation, adding depth to narratological theory.

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📼 6. Applying Audiovisual Culture to Literary Texts

• Using Hopfinger’s “audio-visual syndrome” and John Ellis’s theory of TV aesthetics, Piątek identifies how literature imitates visual media’s narrative economy and structure.

“TV’s image is stripped-down, lacking in detail… particularly so with American crime series” (Ellis, p. 130).

• Contribution: Bridges literary form and media theory, showing that literature now absorbs and mirrors visual forms—a concept vital to intermediality studies.

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💡 7. Contributing to Feminist and Gender-Critical Readings

• Piątek notes that Amis, often accused of misogyny, uses Hoolihan—a deeply flawed, masculinized female detective—to satirize gender roles in fiction and media.
• Hoolihan is both the anti-sex symbol and a media construct:

“As far from a sex object or a male sexual fantasy as a female character can possibly get” (Piątek, p. 159).

• Contribution: Supports feminist literary theory by examining how parody can subvert stereotypical representations of women in genre fiction.

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🌀 8. Positioning Literature in a Postmodern Media Matrix

• Piątek’s article underscores a postmodern reality where media, not reality, forms the epistemological basis of experience.
• She shows how Night Train implies that television has overtaken life as our dominant framework of understanding.

“Television seems to have taken over the role of reality as a point of reference… Amis implies that television is the only reality we have access to” (Piątek, p. 171).

• Contribution: Adds to postmodern literary theory by showing how literature now critically reflects on the collapse of real/representation boundaries.

🌀 1. Overreliance on Intertextuality May Dismiss Reader Experience

• Piątek’s heavy emphasis on intertextual references might alienate readers unfamiliar with TV cop shows, film noir, or Chandler’s detective fiction.
• Critics may argue that her framework privileges academic/media-literate readings, thus sidelining more intuitive or emotional reader responses.

❗ “Cultural competence… determines the range of intertextual references” (Piątek, p. 171) – but what about readers without that competence?

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📉 2. Undermines Validity of Genre Critiques by Reviewers

• While Piątek defends Night Train from reviewers like Updike and Brookner, she may be too dismissive of their genuine stylistic concerns.
• Some might argue that poor characterization, lack of plot depth, or stylistic flatness aren’t always intentional parody, but artistic failure.

❗ Updike: “The trouble… isn’t the faux-demotic mannerisms… but with the unmentionable way the plot proceeds.”

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📺 3. Media-Critique Framing May Overinterpret Authorial Intent

• Piątek attributes televisual parody and postmodern critique to Amis’s intentions, but this could be speculative.
• There is room to question whether Night Train is intentionally intermedial, or simply an uneven hybrid of genres.

❓ Is Amis’s supposed “wink to the reader” (p. 165) evidence-based, or an interpretive projection?

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🔁 4. Reductive Application of Parody Theory

• Though Piątek uses Hutcheon’s theory of parody, some may find her application too formulaic, implying that all stylistic awkwardness is intentional.
• This may obscure a more nuanced reading: parody doesn’t always succeed, and not all repetition signals critical distance.

❗ “The style is overdone… but that’s the point” – this type of reasoning risks becoming circular.

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🧠 5. Intellectual Overload May Obscure Accessibility

• The article’s dense integration of Bakhtin, Genette, Hopfinger, Ellis, and Hutcheon may overwhelm readers and make the core argument difficult to follow.
• Critics may prefer a clearer, more focused thesis instead of such a wide-ranging theoretical apparatus.

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🧩 6. Selective Reading of the Text

• Piątek foregrounds Hoolihan’s narrative unreliability and media-saturation but downplays inconsistencies in Night Train that may not be purposeful.
• Some critics could argue that not all contradictions (e.g., Jennifer’s background, Hoolihan’s memory shifts) are strategic, but possibly narrative incoherence.

📊 Expanding the DIKW Pyramid: Introducing Bullshit as a Fifth Tier

• O’Hara critiques the classic four-tier DIKW hierarchy — Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom — and proposes a fifth layer: Bullshit.
• “Bullshit is not built on any of the other elements, nor are any of the others crafted out of it. Bullshit is, as it were, the icing on the cake” (O’Hara, 2016, p. 1).
• This tier does not contribute to the epistemological ascent; rather, it disrupts it by simulating meaningfulness.

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🧪 Bullshit ≠ Data: Ritual vs. Reality

• Using the timesheet parable, O’Hara shows how bureaucratic processes become exercises in performance, not representation:

“It is not data. It is not information about work patterns. It is bullshit” (p. 3).

• The form is filled to meet expectations, not to report actual activities — highlighting the ritualistic nature of bullshit in organizational life.

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📚 Philosophical Foundations: Frankfurt, Cohen, and Beyond

• Harry Frankfurt (2005): Bullshit is speech unconcerned with truth, aiming to mislead about intentions.

“The bullshitter doesn’t really care whether what he says is true or false” (p. 3).

• Jerry Cohen critiques ideological and academic bullshit, targeting “Francophone philosophical culture” as especially prolific (p. 3).
• These predecessors focus on offline bullshit; O’Hara extends it to the digital world.

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🌐 Has Bullshit Gone Digital?

• In the online world, bullshit is rampant, from fake social identities to unread privacy policies and gamed performance metrics.

“A privacy policy is designed to be too complicated to be read – it is bullshit” (p. 5).

• Online tools like Invisible Girlfriend illustrate the commodification of deception-as-service.

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🧠 The Role of Intent: Bullshit as Strategic Communication

• Unlike data, which is semantically minimal, bullshit is laden with intent — typically to impress, soothe, or comply.
• “Bullshit is spread consciously almost everywhere… produced to achieve a particular goal” (p. 5).
• The goal is rarely truth; it is performance, acceptability, or ritual compliance.

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⚖️ The Bullshit Asymmetry Principle

• Referencing Alberto Brandolini, O’Hara notes:

“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it” (p. 4).

• However, he critiques this view as too monist, neglecting the social context and repetitive patterns of bullshit production.

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📉 Performance Metrics: Bureaucratic Bullshit Machines

• Bullshit becomes dangerous when performance data is mistaken for truth:

“We risk converting performance data… into bullshit (an apparent assertion about reality)” (p. 6).

• Examples include LIBOR manipulation, national economic statistics, and academic bibliometrics — all cases where data becomes detached from lived reality.

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📱 Social Computing and Pro-Social Bullshitting

• O’Hara discusses benign bullshit, such as crafting online personas or using polite fictions:

“On reflection I think it is more accurately represented as a benign species of bullshit” (p. 5).

• A study (Van Kleek et al., 2016) found users often “lie” online for privacy, empowerment, or politeness — not deception.

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🧬 Data’s Social Life: Interpretation as Risk

• Data is not truth until interpreted — and interpretation involves assumptions, design choices, and politics:

“Simply putting an interpretative scheme onto a dataset… takes all sorts of risks with the truth” (p. 6).

• Without critique, administrators or researchers construct entire epistemic systems on piles of bullshit.

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🧩 Design and Ethics: Can Bullshit Be Eliminated?

• O’Hara calls for ethical awareness and critical system design:

“Surely these could be designed out of the system, to the benefit of all?” (p. 6).

• But bullshit’s ritualistic value means it may never be eliminated — only understood, framed, and contained.

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💡 Final Thought: Bullshit on the Road to Wisdom

• “The route to wisdom may sometimes, perhaps even usually, be via information and knowledge, but… sometimes it ploughs right through a field of bullshit instead” (p. 7).
• O’Hara concludes that bullshit, in moderation and with awareness, can serve social and psychological functions — but uncritical acceptance poses epistemic threats.

🧱 DeconstructionDeconstruction Literary Theory aka Deconstructionism of Epistemic Hierarchies

• O’Hara subverts the foundational DIKW model by adding bullshit as a fifth epistemic category.
• This aligns with post-structuralist and deconstructivist approaches that challenge fixed systems of knowledge and truth.
• 📝 “The pyramid has neither three nor four, but five components… of which the most pithy is bullshit” (p. 1).
• 📚 Contributes to destabilizing binary notions such as truth/falsehood or knowledge/ignorance.

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🗣️ Bullshit as Performative Discourse

• Emphasizes that bullshit is performative, not representational — echoing speech act theory and postmodern performativity (e.g., Judith Butler).
• Bureaucratic and online rituals are seen as forms of linguistic performance, not truth claims.
• 📝 “The timesheet wasn’t a representation… but a device for presenting a particular soothing vision of smooth working” (p. 2).

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🎭 Fictionality and Ritual in Everyday Texts

• O’Hara applies narrative theory and ritual studies to nonfictional bureaucratic forms like timesheets and policies, treating them as fictional constructs that simulate reality.
• 📝 “It is seriously misleading if we try to use it… as a piece of data… It is bullshit” (p. 3).
• 📚 Blurs the boundaries between fiction and administrative discourse, expanding what counts as “text” in literary theory.

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🧠 Reader-Response and Intentionality

• Echoing reader-response theory, O’Hara distinguishes between the producer’s intention and the reader’s interpretation of bullshit.
• 📝 “Consuming bullshit involves acting uncritically on whatever is provided” (p. 6).
• 📚 Reinforces the role of the audience in constructing textual meaning and misunderstanding.

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🔎 Post-Truth and Simulacra

• Builds on Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra—where representations (like data or metrics) replace the reality they refer to.
• 📝 “If administrators… take it as representations of reality, then they will seriously be misled by a huge great pile of bullshit” (p. 6).
• 📚 Links literary concerns with reality, simulation, and signification in digital culture.

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🧬 Social Semiotics of Data

• Treats data not as neutral symbols but as socially coded and ideologically shaped — a semiotic turn in interpreting information systems.
• 📝 “Data does not just magically appear… it is crafted, built, created, argued about” (p. 5).
• 📚 Bridges critical theory with digital humanities and textual materialism.

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🤖 Posthumanism and Algorithmic Texts

• Considers the role of non-human agents (algorithms, social media, fake profiles) in producing bullshit — aligning with posthuman literary theory.
• 📝 “Social machines… from altruistic encyclopaedias to the foulest trolling” (p. 7).
• 📚 Extends literary theory into the ethics and ontology of machine-generated discourse.

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🧩 Ethical Aesthetics and the Role of Design

• Raises questions about the design of texts (e.g., privacy policies), connecting aesthetics with ethics — a growing concern in digital literary theory.
• 📝 “They are designed to be unreadable and unread… it surely does not have to be this way” (p. 6).
• 📚 Challenges the literary community to rethink the aesthetic form of functional texts.

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🎭 Identity, Masquerade, and Authorship

• Bullshit is a masquerade, not just of truth but of authorial integrity — echoing Barthes’ “Death of the Author”.
• 📝 “Users told fibs… to craft an authentic online persona” (p. 5).
• 📚 Challenges fixed notions of identity, authorship, and authenticity in digital narrative spaces.

🧩 Conceptual Ambiguity

• While O’Hara critiques epistemic clarity, his own definition of bullshit remains fluid and inconsistent, blending ritual, deception, performance, and data misrepresentation without always distinguishing them.
• Critics may argue that this lack of ontological precision undermines its theoretical utility.

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🔄 Redundancy with Frankfurt

• Much of O’Hara’s argument revisits Harry Frankfurt’s foundational work (On Bullshit, 2005), often without substantial philosophical innovation.
• 🗣️ Critics may say: “Is this Bullshit 2.0 or just Frankfurt 1.5?”

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📊 Overextension of the DIKW Pyramid

• Adding bullshit as a fifth tier challenges but also confuses the structural logic of the original model.
• Some epistemologists might object that bullshit is not a category of knowledge, but a meta-commentary or misuse of existing categories.

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🌐 Digital Generalizations

• O’Hara frequently references online environments, privacy policies, and social machines, but provides limited empirical or technical depth.
• Critics might view the web-based examples as anecdotal rather than robustly supported.

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🎭 Ethical Ambiguity

• While he acknowledges bullshit as sometimes necessary or benign, O’Hara fails to rigorously define ethical limits—when is it truly harmful versus socially functional?
• This opens him to criticism for normalizing deception in sensitive domains like politics or academia.

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⚖️ Insufficient Critical Engagement with Power

• The essay skims over systemic power dynamics behind institutional bullshit (e.g. state propaganda, corporate greenwashing).
• A Marxist or Foucauldian lens might challenge his framing as too individualistic or ritualistic, downplaying ideological function.

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🔍 Lack of Literary-Theoretical Anchoring

• While Bullshit 2.0 aligns with literary theory conceptually (performance, ritual, simulation), it offers no engagement with actual literary criticism or narrative theory.
• Thus, its contribution to literary discourse may feel implied rather than explicit.

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📉 Underestimates the Epistemic Stakes

• O’Hara treats bullshit with a tone of ironic detachment, which some may find too casual for a topic with high social and political consequences.
• Critics might argue this fosters complacency, not critique.

🔍 Understanding Bullshit in Post-Truth Politics

• Definition: Bullshit is “deceptive misrepresentation, short of lying, which is indifferent to facts” (Hopkin & Rosamond, 2017, p. 2; Frankfurt, 2005).
• Context: Emerges from the decline of traditional party politics and the rise of individualised, performative rhetoric in Western democracies (Hopkin & Rosamond, 2017).
• Problem: Existing bullshit literature ignores how gender, race, and class shape who can “bullshit” successfully and with impunity.

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⚖️ Intersectionality as Analytical Framework

• Key Claim: Analysing bullshit without race and gender considerations weakens explanatory power (O’Dwyer, 2018).
• Intersectional Lens: Moves beyond binaries (e.g., male/female) to include class, race, nationality, etc. (Crenshaw, 1991; Collins & Bilge, 2016).
• Example: White, elite male politicians are often perceived as more credible and face fewer consequences for falsehoods than women or racialized individuals (Piston et al., 2018).

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👩‍🎓 Feminist Approach to Bullshit

• Bullshit ≠ Lies: Liars acknowledge truth; bullshitters are indifferent to it (Frankfurt, 2005).
• Gendered Performance: Politicians perform gender that shapes how their statements are received (Butler, 1997; Kahn, 1992).
• Authority Bias: Masculinity and whiteness amplify perceived legitimacy of speech acts (Huddy & Terkildsen, 1993).

“Bullshit is simply a new form of privileged rhetoric and communication” (O’Dwyer, 2018, p. 407).

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🎭 Bullshitters in the Brexit Campaign

• Case Study Focus: Boris Johnson (Leave) and George Osborne (Remain).
• Privilege Enables Bullshit: Both are white, elite, Oxbridge-educated men insulated by race, gender, and class (Younge, 2018).
• Counterpoint: Diane Abbott (Black woman MP) faced harsh consequences for minor errors—highlighting double standards in bullshit tolerance (Cole, 2017).

“Only some people are equipped with the prestige and authority to bullshit without consequence” (O’Dwyer, 2018, p. 416).

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🧠 Bullshit Content: Racialised and Gendered Tropes

• NHS Bus Claim: £350m/week for NHS was false but effective due to racialised tropes of “foreigners exploiting the system” (Rickard, 2016).
• White Victimhood: The Leave campaign constructed white working-class grievance to obscure neoliberal causes of inequality (Emejulu, 2016).
• Austerity & Gender: Osborne’s “machonomics” (Watson, 2017) relied on assumptions that women would absorb state retrenchment burdens.

“The claim…is deeply connected to this trope of migrants…taking advantage of the NHS” (O’Dwyer, 2018, p. 414).

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📉 Consequences of Bullshit Politics

• Racist Backlash: Post-Brexit racism surged (Burnett, 2017; Gayle, 2018).
• Gendered Fallout: Brexit exacerbated gender inequality—particularly for women of colour (Guerrina & Masselot, 2018).
• Silencing: Marginalised groups excluded from discourse both during and after the campaign.

“Bullshit continues to structure the debate…to the exclusion of these consequences” (O’Dwyer, 2018, p. 416).

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🔚 Conclusion: Power, Privilege, and Post-Truth

• Core Argument: Bullshit is a political weapon enabled by privilege. Its success depends on who speaks, how they speak, and how society hears them.
• Call to Action: Any study of post-truth must centre intersectionality to grasp the deep structural inequalities embedded in bullshit rhetoric.

“The research agenda…must explore how some people have easier access to the rhetorical tool of bullshit” (O’Dwyer, 2018, p. 417).

🎭 To Performance Theory

• O’Dwyer draws on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to argue that political bullshit is not just rhetorical but performed in gendered and racialized ways (Butler, 1997).
• Political figures like Boris Johnson succeed in bullshitting not because of content, but due to their performances of elite masculinity and whiteness, which are socially read as authoritative (O’Dwyer, 2018, p. 410).
• Contribution: Extends Butlerian performativity to the realm of political discourse, illustrating how performative privilege enables rhetorical impunity.

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🧠 To Epistemic Literary Theory / Critical Race Epistemology

• Challenges traditional conceptions of truth and authority by emphasizing that epistemic credibility is racialized and gendered.
• Black women like Diane Abbott are not only scrutinized more harshly, but also denied the epistemic authority granted to white male counterparts (O’Dwyer, 2018, pp. 416–417).
• Contribution: Brings intersectional epistemology into post-truth discourse, showing how literary and rhetorical authority are unevenly distributed based on identity.

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⚖️ To Intersectional Feminist Literary Theory

• Applies intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) to expose how literary constructs like “bullshit” are not neutral but deeply structured by gender, race, and class (O’Dwyer, 2018, pp. 407–408).
• The article critiques how most “post-truth” literature fails to interrogate who is allowed to lie, perform, or mislead with impunity.
• Contribution: Reorients post-truth studies toward feminist literary critique by demanding analysis of who controls the narrative.

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🗣️ To Discourse and Ideology Critique (Foucaultian Framework)

• Engages with authorized speech (Fraser, 1989) to explore who is allowed to speak and be believed.
• Suggests that “bullshit” is an ideological tool — a discursive practice sustained by structures of dominance, rather than merely rhetorical flourish (O’Dwyer, 2018, p. 416).
• Contribution: Aligns with Foucault’s idea that discourse is a mechanism of power, not just communication, making this article relevant to ideological literary theory.

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📉 To Political Rhetoric and Literary Form

• Demonstrates that bullshit functions as a genre—one marked by emotional appeal, performativity, and detachment from factual coherence.
• Emphasizes its formal and stylistic tropes, especially repetition, exaggeration, and vague metaphors (e.g., “take back control”).
• Contribution: Proposes that bullshit constitutes a literary form that should be analyzed through stylistic and political lenses.

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📺 To Postmodern/Post-Truth Literary Theory

• Questions the premise of post-truth theory that all truths are contested, by grounding the success of bullshit in material inequalities rather than epistemic relativism.
• Argues that not everyone’s lies are equally accepted — challenging the flat relativism found in some postmodern thought (O’Dwyer, 2018, pp. 406–407).
• Contribution: Offers a materialist corrective to post-truth literary theory by injecting intersectional critique into the analysis of truth and rhetoric.

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🧱 To Structuralist/Post-Structuralist Theory

• Builds on the idea that meaning and power are structurally coded by showing that bullshit succeeds because it resonates with existing social narratives of whiteness, masculinity, and British nationalism (O’Dwyer, 2018, pp. 413–414).
• Highlights how these structural codes operate beneath language to enable political speech acts.
• Contribution: Provides a post-structuralist analysis of meaning-making in political bullshit that incorporates race and gender structures.

❓ 1. Conceptual Overreach

• O’Dwyer’s application of “bullshit” to encompass race, class, and gender risks diluting the analytical clarity of Frankfurt’s original epistemic definition.
• Critics may argue that her intersectional expansion transforms a linguistic-philosophical concept into a political metaphor, losing specificity in favor of critique.

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⚠️ 2. Lack of Empirical Grounding

• The article offers a compelling theoretical framework but lacks systematic empirical data or interviews to demonstrate how bullshit is differently received based on race/gender.
• Critics from political science may call this a “theory-heavy” essay with insufficient real-world validation beyond a few high-profile examples (e.g., Boris Johnson, Diane Abbott).

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📏 3. Ambiguity in Measuring ‘Bullshit’

• While Frankfurt (2005) provides a functional definition of bullshit, O’Dwyer extends the term to include institutional discourse and campaign narratives without clear criteria.
• This may invite methodological vagueness: how do we distinguish bullshit from ideology, spin, or rhetorical style?

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🧩 4. Intersectionality as Overdetermined

• Some critics may argue that O’Dwyer treats intersectionality as a totalizing lens, risking the erasure of agency or individual variance.
• There’s minimal attention to counterexamples—e.g., women or racialized individuals who successfully use bullshit or resist its structures.

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🧠 5. Under-theorized Role of the Audience

• While the article emphasizes who can speak bullshit, it pays less attention to how audiences interpret or resist it.
• Reception theory scholars might critique the absence of reader-listener agency, reducing political communication to elite speech acts alone.

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🧱 6. Structural Determinism

• O’Dwyer strongly links rhetorical success to structural privilege, which, while grounded in truth, might be critiqued as overly deterministic.
• This may limit the explanatory range when analyzing nuanced or subversive uses of rhetoric by marginalized speakers.

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📚 7. Limited Literary Engagement

• Despite borrowing from literary theory (e.g., Butler, Fraser), the article does not engage with narrative or literary fiction in depth.
• Critics from literary studies might view it as a missed opportunity to apply its framework to literature, performance, or media discourse.

1. Introduction
Szanto identifies a gap in current literature on both epistemic injustice and the philosophy of bullshit (especially Frankfurt’s). He argues that these frameworks neglect a politically and ethically distinct form of discourse—Epistemically Exploitative Bullshit (EEB)—which is prevalent in discriminatory contexts but under-theorized.

2. Defining EEB
EEB is characterized by two features:

• Alethic insouciance: the speaker displays indifference toward the truth of their statements.
• Epistemic exploitation: the speaker provokes marginalized people into epistemic labor (explaining, defending, educating), only to disregard or dismiss that labor.
  This differs from both lying and ordinary bullshit, as it weaponizes engagement while feigning neutrality.

3. The Sartrean Framework
Szanto draws on Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 work Anti-Semite and Jew to offer a philosophical foundation. Sartre describes anti-Semitic discourse as:

• Intentionally irrational and provocative.
• Structured by bad faith: self-deceptive evasion of responsibility.
• Unwilling to be refuted by reason.
  Szanto parallels this with modern EEB: speakers retreat from responsibility, hide behind collective prejudices, and sabotage good-faith dialogue.

4. EEB’s Mechanisms
Key structural elements of EEB include:

• Feigning objectivity or intellectual curiosity, while acting in bad faith.
• Burden reversal: marginal groups are compelled to justify their identity or experiences.
• Dismissive outcomes: even good-faith responses are neutralized by indifference.
• Epistemic asymmetry: the dominant party refuses vulnerability or self-reflection.

5. Political and Ethical Implications
EEB functions as discursive domination. It reinforces systemic injustice by:

• Masking prejudice as reasoned skepticism.
• Draining emotional and cognitive energy from those it targets.
• Delegitimizing marginalized voices while appearing “rational.”
  Szanto argues this form of discourse is especially dangerous in political, media, and academic contexts.

6. Critique of Existing Theories
Szanto critiques:

• Frankfurt’s bullshit: too focused on truth-indifference, not relational or political dynamics.
• Epistemic injustice theories: often overlook the affective labor and the strategic insincerity involved in EEB.
  He insists that EEB needs to be theorized as a power-laden, insidious form of communicative harm, not just poor reasoning.

7. Conclusion
Szanto calls for a Sartrean ethics of responsibility in epistemic interactions. He advocates:

• Holding speakers accountable for bad-faith engagement.
• Recognizing collective and structural aspects of epistemic harm.
• Viewing EEB as a moral failure that weaponizes others’ truth-telling while avoiding one’s own responsibility.

🎭 Expanding the Terrain of Discourse Analysis

• Introduces a new discursive form—epistemically exploitative bullshit (EEB)—that bridges pragmatic linguistics, existentialism, and critical theory.
• Unlike Frankfurt’s classic notion of bullshit, Szanto argues EEB is “strategically indifferent to truth” but not simply careless—rather, it’s instrumentally deployed to burden marginalized interlocutors (Szanto, 2023, p. 3).
• Implication for literary criticism: offers a new analytic lens for interpreting dialogic manipulation, particularly in postcolonial, feminist, and trauma literature where characters are “made to explain” but never believed.

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😶‍🌫️ Reactivating Sartrean Existentialism in Literary Ethics

• Szanto brings Sartre’s concept of bad faith back into focus, grounding it not in personal psychology but in collective discursive behavior.
• Literary theory gains a tool for interpreting characters, narrators, and institutions that engage in self-deceptive but socially sanctioned communicative evasion.
• Example quote: “In line with Sartre’s depiction of the anti-Semite, EEB speakers cultivate a disingenuous refusal of reason while securing their ideological comfort” (Szanto, 2023, p. 9).

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🔁 Reframing Epistemic Exploitation as Affective Labor

• Builds on Kristie Dotson and Nora Berenstain but extends the concept into literary analysis: characters are not only denied credibility, but their explanations are weaponized against them.
• Szanto: “The labor demanded is not only disregarded but retroactively deployed to undermine the speaker’s credibility” (p. 12).
• This has deep resonance in trauma literature and postcolonial narratives, where “testimonial fatigue” and “distrust of disclosure” become aesthetic forms.

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🛡️ Introducing Discursive Domination as a Literary Trope

• The paper formulates EEB as a tactic of domination cloaked in debate—where the form of dialogue mimics openness, but the function is suppression.
• Szanto: “EEB is a political technique masquerading as critical engagement, designed to sustain discursive control” (p. 16).
• Useful for identifying hegemonic speech patterns in satire, propaganda, courtroom drama, and digital discourse genres.

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👥 Foregrounding Structural Epistemic Asymmetry in Dialogue

• Literary theory traditionally focuses on plot and character agency; Szanto’s concept of epistemic asymmetry reveals power embedded in questions themselves.
• He writes: “EEB turns the act of asking into a performance of dominance—an interrogation masquerading as curiosity” (p. 14).
• Applicable in literary genres involving interrogation, authority-figure speech, colonial questioning, and pedagogical violence.

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🧊 Recasting Alethic Indifference as Narrative Strategy

• “Alethic insouciance” is described as a deliberate disinterest in the truth, which frames many unreliable narrators and “rational” antagonists in literature.
• Szanto states: “Insouciance is not epistemic laziness—it is a method of rhetorical insulation” (p. 10).
• Literary theorists can use this to study narrators or institutions that deploy “truth-y” language to avoid real truth (e.g., dystopias, colonial texts, war narratives).

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⚖️ Critiquing the Limits of Epistemic Injustice Theory

• Szanto critiques Fricker’s testimonial injustice model for being too focused on credibility deficits, ignoring strategic discrediting through affective labor.
• Quote: “EEB renders traditional models of epistemic injustice analytically insufficient; it combines emotional parasitism with discursive evasion” (p. 17).
• Opens new space in literary theory to examine affect as epistemic harm, not just representational failure.

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🎯 Highlighting Instrumental Dialogue in Literary Conflicts

• Szanto draws attention to how some dialogue simulates inquiry but aims at rhetorical domination, a move seen in Socratic parody, satire, and political drama.
• He explains: “In EEB, the question does not seek an answer—it seeks to entrap or deflate the respondent” (p. 13).
• Key tool for literary scholars analyzing interrogative violence and false discourse communities.

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🧠 Contributing to Literary Ethics and Responsibility

• Central to Szanto’s account is ethical responsibility in speech, which aligns with Levinasian and Ricoeurian theories of communicative ethics in literature.
• He argues: “To confront EEB is to demand responsibility not just for what is said, but for the conditions and aims of saying it” (p. 18).
• Strengthens interpretive strategies that treat literature as an ethical event, not just aesthetic artifact.

🧱 Overextension of Sartrean Framework

• Critics may argue that applying Sartre’s mid-20th century existentialism to 21st-century discourse (e.g., online bigotry, institutional epistemic violence) stretches Sartre’s framework beyond its philosophical utility.
• Sartre’s account of bad faith and anti-Semitism, while powerful, was not designed to address the complexities of intersectional oppression, neoliberal media, or algorithmically mediated discourse.

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🧊 Conceptual Redundancy with Existing Theories

• The paper risks reinventing terms already addressed in epistemic injustice theory. For instance:
  • Alethic insouciance may overlap with Miranda Fricker’s testimonial injustice.
  • Epistemic exploitation is already well-developed in the work of Kristie Dotson and Nora Berenstain.
• Critics could argue Szanto’s “novelty” lies more in rhetorical repackaging than in new conceptual insights.

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🛠️ Ambiguity in Operational Criteria

• The line between bullshit, lie, and strategic discourse remains fuzzy in the paper.
• Szanto claims EEB is distinct due to its combination of indifference and exploitation, but the threshold for identifying EEB in real-world or literary contexts is not always clear.
• Critics might ask: When does ordinary polemic become EEB?

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🔍 Insufficient Engagement with Feminist & Critical Race Theory

• While the article references epistemic injustice, it arguably under-engages with foundational works in Black feminist thought, critical race theory, or decolonial discourse, where themes of epistemic violence have been explored for decades.
• This omission could make the theory feel disconnected from existing activist epistemologies or reduce its intersectional applicability.

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🎭 Over-theorization of Discourse

• Some may criticize Szanto for being overly theoretical and abstract, offering insightful but impractical tools for real-world engagement.
• Practitioners or educators dealing with actual discursive violence (e.g., in classrooms, activism, or media) might find the diagnosis rich but the intervention weak.

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📚 Limited Literary Application

• Although the theory is promising for literary criticism, Szanto himself does not develop any literary examples, leaving it to others to test applicability in cultural texts.
• The lack of concrete case studies may limit its uptake among scholars in literature and cultural studies.

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⚖️ Risk of Pathologizing Disagreement

• Some may worry that the EEB framework could be used to discredit any form of critical or skeptical questioning as exploitative, thus chilling discourse.
• If not carefully applied, the concept may blur the line between epistemic violence and genuine inquiry, especially in politically charged settings.

🔍 1. Conceptual Framing: Liars, Bullshitters, and Scholars

• Key Framework: Borrowing from philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the authors distinguish between liars, bullshitters, and scholars.
  • Liars: Know the truth but deliberately distort it.
  • Bullshitters: Are indifferent to the truth and prioritize “other things that are potentially in conflict with it” (Frankfurt, 2005).
  • Scholars: Genuinely aim to pursue and prioritize truth.
• ➤ “All three characters may communicate truth or falsehood… the distinction is about intentions and endeavours, not outcomes.”
  👉 This framing is crucial: even well-meaning scholars can accidentally produce bullshit if they lack competence or integrity.

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💣 2. The Bullshit Crisis in Psychology

• The authors argue that psychology is “liberally sprayed with bullshit,” often more troubling than fraud.
• Key Problems Identified:
  • 🚨 Improbable statistical results: “Almost all published studies report statistically significant effects” — despite inadequate sample sizes (Cohen, 1962; Bakker et al., 2012).
  • 🔄 Failed replications: Reproductions of studies routinely fail (Open Science Collaboration, 2015).
  • ✂️ Selective reporting: Authors often omit negative results.
    ➤ “The former mentioned 7 experiments… the latter disclosed 11 more… and only 2 were significant” (Inzlicht, 2015).

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📉 3. Systemic Causes of Bullshit

• 📌 Lack of expertise: Many researchers “do not have the methodological or statistical expertise necessary” (Colquhoun, 2014).
• 🧏 Blind trust: Researchers accept findings “they would almost certainly not believe if they critiqued them more thoroughly” (Fricker, 2002).
• 🛠️ p-hacking: Flexibility in data analysis allows almost anything to be made to appear significant (Simmons et al., 2011).
  ➤ “Listening to ‘When I’m 64’ made people nearly 1.5 years younger!”
• 🗞️ Publication bias: Prestigious journals reward novelty, not replication (Peplow, 2014).
• 🧩 Poor peer review: Resubmitted accepted articles were mostly rejected due to “serious methodological flaws” (Peters & Ceci, 1982).
• 🔒 Lack of openness: Authors restrict access to their data, hampering verification (Coyne, 2015).
• 💰 Misaligned incentives: Researchers are rewarded for “publications, grants, promotion… rather than truth” (Carter, 2015).
• 🔁 Persistence of myths: Disproven ideas continue to influence psychology (Tatsioni et al., 2007; Lewandowsky et al., 2012).

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⚖️ 4. Recommendations for Reform

• 📚 Don’t give up: Despite Meehl’s (1990) claim that psychology is “well-nigh uninterpretable,” the authors argue that valuable reform is possible.
• ✅ Key Proposals:
  • 🧠 Prioritize truth over prestige: “May we have the will to pursue [truth] over institutional benefits.”
  • 🔎 Honesty and humility: Acknowledge errors and ignorance openly.
    ➤ “Denying flaws helps no one.”
  • 🌐 Broaden evidence use: Empirical rigor doesn’t only come from experiments. Observation and ordinary-language clarity matter (Rozin, 2001; Billig, 2013).
  • 🧭 Nurture nuance: Don’t treat one-off effects as universal truths.
    ➤ “Experiments usually only show something can occur, not that it must.”
  • 🩺 Triage attention: Focus research on important questions, not only easy-to-study ones.
    ➤ “Better an approximate answer to the right question than an exact answer to the wrong one” (Tukey, 1962).

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🧠 5. A Call to Intellectual Integrity

• The final tone is passionate and urgent:

“We’re fed up with all the bullshit.”

• Farsides and Sparks affirm the value of psychology but call for a radical reformation of research culture, grounded in intellectual humility, critical scrutiny, and ethical scholarship.

🧠 1. Rhetoric and the Aesthetics of Academic Language

• Bullshit as a Literary Performance:
  The paper aligns with literary theory by treating academic writing itself as a rhetorical act, subject to performance, persuasion, and aesthetic manipulation.

“Many published studies have selectively included or omitted evidence to support claims…”
➤ Echoes Billig’s (2013) criticism of academic writing: language obscures rather than clarifies.

• Relevance to Literary Criticism:
  This contributes to post-structuralist concerns with how meaning is constructed and manipulated through form, tone, and genre.

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📚 2. Epistemology and Narrative Truth Construction

• Academic Knowledge as Storytelling:
  The article questions whether psychology tells the truth or simply constructs persuasive narratives.

“Can we claim hand-on-heart to confidently know anything… among all the bullshit and lies?”

• Connection to Narrative Theory:
  Resonates with Lyotard’s (1984) Postmodern Condition, where grand scientific narratives lose legitimacy and knowledge becomes commodified.

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🧩 3. Deconstruction of Scientific Authority

• Deconstructing the Scholar:
  By contrasting liars, bullshitters, and scholars, the paper deconstructs the notion of the expert and reframes scholarly identity as ethically and rhetorically constructed.

“Expertise should be in service of scholarship, not prioritised above it.”

• Link to Derrida’s Deconstruction:
  Authority in psychological science is shown to be unstable, performative, and ideologically situated — a central concern in literary theory.

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🔍 4. The Ethics of Representation

• Bullshit as Ethical Failure:
  The article reveals that scientific writing often violates ethical standards of representation, much like propaganda or bad fiction.

“We’re fed up with all the bullshit.”

• Contribution to Literary Ethics:
  Reinforces the idea that language is never neutral — a key tenet in ethical literary criticism (e.g., Wayne Booth, Martha Nussbaum).

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🔁 5. Interrogating the Myth of Objectivity

• Objectivity as Mythical Construct:
  Farsides and Sparks expose how psychology mimics objectivity while being structurally biased.

“Given the multiple serious, widespread, and enduring problems… can we claim… to confidently know anything?”

• Link to Critical Theory:
  Parallels Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of Enlightenment rationality: science as myth-making under capitalism and bureaucracy.

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💬 6. Language, Power, and Institutional Discourse

• Academic Bullshit as Institutional Power Language:
  The article critiques how institutional pressures shape what is said and how.

“Perverted reward structures… downgrade the importance of truth to maximise publications…”

• Ties to Foucault:
  Aligns with Foucauldian discourse theory, where power and knowledge are co-produced in institutional settings.

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🧱 7. Genre Critique: The Scientific Article as a Literary Form

• Scientific Reports as Fictional Constructions:
  The paper suggests that many psychological publications resemble carefully crafted fictions, tailored for impact rather than truth.
  ➤ e.g., “Literally infeasible frequencies of statistically significant effects”
• Contributes to Genre Theory:
  Questions the genre of scientific writing as one that can be manipulated, subverted, or performed dishonestly.

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🧪 8. Metacriticism: Critiquing the Act of Critique

• Reflexive Literary-Theoretical Positioning:
  The authors interrogate their own participation in the academic system.

“We are interested to hear the views of others… We’re fed up with all the bullshit.”

• Contributes to Literary Metacriticism:
  Suggests that critique must also critique itself, echoing postmodern literary self-awareness.

⚖️ 1. Overgeneralization of Psychological Science

• Critique: The authors risk painting the entire field of psychology with a broad brush, implying that most or all published work is untrustworthy or compromised.
• ➤ This sweeping tone may discourage nuanced assessment or overlook areas of rigorous, reproducible work.
• “It has been suggested that much or possibly most of what we hold to be true in psychology is probably wrong.”
  — This line, while provocative, may border on alarmism.

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🧪 2. Lack of Empirical Basis for Their Own Claims

• Critique: Ironically, the article criticizes poor empirical standards yet makes broad assertions without providing robust quantitative data.
• ➤ The claims rely heavily on anecdotes, lists of retractions, and cited critiques without systematic meta-analysis.
• The article quotes many high-profile failures but does not statistically demonstrate the proportion of ‘bullshit’ in psychology.

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🧠 3. Idealistic View of “Scholarship”

• Critique: The authors promote a romanticized and binary view of “truth-seeking scholars” vs. “bullshitters,” ignoring the gray areas of scientific practice.
• ➤ Real-world science often involves trade-offs, ambiguity, and uncertainty, not always clean truth vs. falsehood divisions.
• Their “cast list” of liars, bullshitters, and scholars may oversimplify human motivation and institutional complexity.

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🪓 4. Risk of Undermining Public Trust in Science

• Critique: While the article seeks reform, it may inadvertently reinforce anti-scientific or populist skepticism, especially in politicized contexts.
• ➤ Framing science as “buried in bullshit” may be weaponized by those seeking to delegitimize all expertise.
• Particularly in an era of misinformation, critiques that lack balance can feed anti-intellectual rhetoric.

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🔍 5. Insufficient Engagement with Structural and Systemic Solutions

• Critique: The authors point out reward systems and publication bias, but their solutions (like “be honest” and “nurture nuance”) are mostly individualistic or idealistic.
• ➤ There is limited exploration of institutional reform, peer-review models, or systemic accountability structures.
• The article’s call to “prioritise scholarship” is morally noble but structurally vague.

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🧷 6. Lack of Reflexivity

• Critique: While they call out bullshit in others, the authors don’t interrogate their own positionality, rhetorical choices, or institutional complicity.
• ➤ They themselves participate in a system of publication, citation, and visibility—yet offer little self-critique.
• Their rhetorical tone often mimics the same confident certainty they critique in others.

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🎭 7. Theatrical Tone and Rhetorical Grandstanding

• Critique: The title (“Buried in Bullshit”) and repeated use of provocative language risks coming across as performative rather than analytical.
• ➤ While attention-grabbing, this tone may alienate more conservative scholars or those seeking constructive dialogue.
• Phrases like “we’re fed up with all the bullshit” sound more like manifesto than measured scholarship.

🔹Redefining Bullshit Beyond Frankfurt

• Brinkema begins by engaging with Harry G. Frankfurt’s definition of “bullshit” as “a lack of connection to a concern with truth” (✧ Frankfurt, 2005, p. 34).
• Frankfurt distinguishes bullshit from lying by noting that the liar cares about truth to conceal it, while the bullshitter is indifferent to truth entirely: “What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made” (✧ p. 47).
• Brinkema argues that this concept collapses under psychoanalytic scrutiny: “If all subjects in the psychoanalytic universe confess a split between what they believe and what they say… are complaints like Aristotle’s obsolete in the wake of the Freudian discovery?” (✧ Brinkema, 2007, p. 63).

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🔹 The Psychoanalytic Subject: Speech and the Unconscious

• Psychoanalysis refutes the idea of sincere, unified speech. It reveals a fundamental split between enunciation and belief.
• “The unconscious admits contradictions without contradiction” (✧ p. 63), which destabilizes any clear boundary between truth and falsehood.
• Speech in psychoanalysis always exceeds the speaker’s intent: “It speaks—truth speaks—independent of the necessarily phenomenal load of bullshit that the patient produces” (✧ p. 78).

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🔹 The Lie and the Truth: Paradox as Method

• Brinkema explores scenarios where truth-telling and lying become indistinguishable due to enunciative slippage:
  • The case where someone lies but accidentally tells the truth.
  • The case where truth is told but perceived as deception.
• “Truth-telling can lie, and lie-telling can correspond to truth” (✧ p. 75), destabilizing the binary logic of language.

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🔹 Cratylus, Heraclitus, and the Pointing Finger

• Philosophical skepticism is revisited through the figures of Heraclitus and Cratylus.
• Cratylus, who refused to speak and only pointed, dramatizes language’s failure to signify stably.
• “Even hysterical silence does not exempt one from the chaos of a spoken reality” (✧ p. 62).

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🔹 Psychoanalytic Truth and the Impossible

• Psychoanalytic truth is not verifiable or stable but appears in contradictions, symptoms, and jokes.
• “Hold open this space of the paradox becoming a negation, and that is the psychoanalytic field of truth” (✧ p. 75).
• Truth in psychoanalysis is not a correspondence but a structure of failure that reveals the Real.

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🔹 The Joke and Bullshit: Freud’s Jewish Train Parable

• The famous Freud joke about Jews and lying through truth is key: “Why are you lying? I know you’re really going to Cracow!” (✧ p. 72).
• This joke illustrates absurdity as the route to truth in psychoanalytic terms.
• “It is precisely by way of absurdity that we arrive at the field of truth” (✧ p. 73).

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🔹 Indifference to Truth Is Not Indifferent

• Even apparent indifference (bullshit) is meaningful in psychoanalysis.
• “The speaker of bullshit may imagine him- or herself to be indifferent to their statements in relation to the field of truth, but that indifference is not itself indifferent” (✧ p. 74).

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🔹 Woman, Bullshit, and Lacan’s Feminine Exception

• Brinkema provocatively suggests that only the category of “Woman” in Lacan’s theory may truly speak bullshit.
• Because Woman is doubly excluded (from phallic logic and speech’s guarantee), she can occupy a space “indifferent” to truth.
• “Her not-knowing the not-knowing of speech opens up the space for an indifference that is not collapsible back into a symptom of the truth” (✧ p. 77).

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🔹 Ending in Silence and the Body

• Brinkema ends by invoking the radical silence of women—Dora (Ida Bauer), Fania Pascal, and an unnamed wife—as voices that resist interpretation.
• Bullshit becomes not noise, but the site of a bodily, symptomatic truth: “So too does shit speak… it is, in matter, the sign of my speech” (✧ p. 69).
• Psychoanalysis insists: “Yes, psychoanalysis insistently says. Like the unconscious, there is no ‘No’ in psychoanalysis either” (✧ p. 76).

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🔹 Final Thesis: Bullshit as Truth’s Symptom

• In psychoanalysis, bullshit does not oppose truth but confirms it as an unconscious process.
• “Bullshit is what affirms the truth of the unconscious” (✧ p. 74).
• The paper ultimately argues for a rethinking of sincerity, deception, and truth as always implicated in the logic of the symptom, not excluded by it.

📘 🧠 Psychoanalytic Literary Theory

• Main Contribution: Redefines the relation between speech and unconscious truth, reframing sincerity, lying, and “bullshit” as modes of psychoanalytic revelation.
• Bullshit becomes a symptom: “In psychoanalysis, ça parle—it speaks; truth speaks—independent of the necessarily phenomenal load of bullshit that the patient produces” (✧ p. 78).
• Even lies are truthful: Brinkema shows how lies and bullshit inevitably reveal unconscious truth through their failures: “The lie as such is itself posited in this dimension of truth” (✧ p. 74).
• Woman as exception: The radical suggestion that only the Lacanian barred Woman (♀️) can speak true “bullshit” due to her exclusion from phallic logic (✧ pp. 76–77).

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📚 🧾 Rhetorical and Discourse Theory

• Focus on enunciation vs. statement: Brinkema explores the Lacanian split between what is said and the act of saying: “What ‘I’ is in fact thinking is its own doubting” (✧ p. 74).
• Speech’s failure is meaningful: The paper dismantles the idea that failed or insincere speech is meaningless—failure produces meaning in psychoanalysis.
• The truth of the lie: Echoing Lacan, she states, “Every deception contains, then, a truth: the truth of the subject in relation to the field of truth” (✧ p. 74).

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🌀 🧷 Deconstruction

• Destabilizing binaries: Truth vs. lie, sincerity vs. insincerity, meaning vs. nonsense—these oppositions collapse under psychoanalytic scrutiny.
• Paradox as productive: Brinkema affirms the paradox of truth becoming lie and vice versa: “Truth-telling can lie, and lie-telling can correspond to truth” (✧ p. 75).
• Language as insufficient: Echoes Derrida’s view of meaning’s slipperiness: “Saying it all is literally impossible: words fail. Yet it’s through this very impossibility that the truth holds onto the real” (✧ Lacan via Brinkema, p. 76).

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📖 🗣️ Feminist Literary Theory

• Radical speech via femininity: Brinkema argues that only the Lacanian “not-all” Woman (♀️) might speak true indifference—a unique kind of bullshit outside psychoanalytic recuperation.
• Exclusion as empowerment: “Her not-knowing the not-knowing of speech opens up the space for an indifference that is not collapsible back into a symptom” (✧ p. 77).
• Challenges patriarchal logics: Feminine speech, while excluded, refuses incorporation into the field of truth or logic—subverting Frankfurt’s and Lacan’s phallic speech norms.

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🤹‍♂️ 🎭 Theories of Irony, Satire, and Absurdity

• Use of the joke as analytic: Freud’s Jewish train joke functions as a key text showing the instability of sincerity: “You’re lying by telling the truth” (✧ p. 72).
• Absurdity = analytic tool: Brinkema: “Psychoanalytic truth resides in the meaningless, the irrational, the—dare we say—preposterous illogic of the unconscious” (✧ p. 73).
• Bullshit as philosophical comedy: She frames bullshit as structurally akin to a joke that tells more truth than a serious claim.

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📜 🧮 Epistemology and Literary Hermeneutics

• Questions of truth and belief: Brinkema shows that psychoanalysis displaces epistemology with hermeneutics of contradiction.
• Rejects naive realism: Echoes Freud’s distrust of philosophical “intellectual misdemeanors” that play with truth (✧ p. 67).
• Multiple truths coexist: Psychoanalytic interpretation accepts contradiction and excess rather than seeking stable, single meanings.

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🗣️ 📣 Speech Act Theory (Austin/Searle)

• Challenges illocutionary coherence: In psychoanalysis, the speaker never fully controls their speech act; speech speaks the subject (ça parle).
• Truth-value doesn’t matter to meaning: “The bullshitter, then, speaks some truth, simply by virtue of speaking” (✧ p. 68).
• Every utterance is performative: Not by intention, but through unconscious structure.

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⚖️ ⚙️ Ethical Criticism

• Critiques moralistic accounts of speech: Frankfurt’s moral condemnation of bullshit is replaced by an analytical frame.
• Moral judgments miss unconscious truth: “Bullshit, we come to see, contains within it the traces of the affect of performed indifference, but thus then speaks the truth…” (✧ p. 74).

🌀 Overextension of Psychoanalytic Universality

• Criticism: Brinkema applies Lacanian psychoanalysis so broadly that no utterance, even silence or misdirection, escapes its reach—rendering critique of anything as bullshit itself impossible.
• Implication: The claim that even “bullshit” is a symptom that speaks truth forecloses the possibility of real deception or resistance to analysis.
• Quote: “Indeed, no space for bullshit appears to exist once Lacan has done his splitting work…” (✧ p. 74).
• 💥 Counterpoint: This creates a theoretical totalism where psychoanalysis absorbs all language acts into its logic.

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🗣️ Dismissal of Frankfurt’s Moral Philosophy

• Criticism: The essay dismisses Harry Frankfurt’s ethical framework too quickly in favor of psychoanalysis, neglecting the philosophical implications of intentionality and ethical speech.
• Quote: “Frankfurt would seem to be operating independently of any notion of the unconscious subject…” (✧ p. 67).
• ⚖️ Challenge: Brinkema critiques Frankfurt’s lack of unconscious theory, but arguably ignores his philosophical concern with public discourse ethics, especially relevant in political rhetoric.

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♀️ Ambiguous Feminist Position

• Criticism: Brinkema’s claim that the Lacanian “barred Woman” is the only subject who can speak true bullshit may be read as both empowering and limiting.
• Quote: “She is the sole subject permitted the possibility of bullshit in the Lacanian universe” (✧ p. 77).
• 🚨 Challenge: While bold, this may essentialize womanhood as otherness and risks affirming exclusion as a theoretical gift, rather than a structural violence.

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🎭 Playful Tone Risks Philosophical Clarity

• Criticism: Brinkema’s ironic tone and metaphoric flourishes (e.g., jokes, familial anecdotes, bodily metaphors) blur analytic precision.
• Example: The ending anecdote about Bertrand Russell’s wife’s headache reframes philosophical debate as a maternal joke.
• 📚 Concern: While intellectually rich, this rhetorical excess may alienate readers seeking straightforward engagement with theoretical stakes.

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🧩 Theoretical Paradox vs. Resolution

• Criticism: The essay emphasizes paradox (e.g., truth is a lie) without resolving or clarifying how this applies to actual interpretive practice.
• Quote: “The truth is a lie and the lie is the truth… the very notion of bounded words ‘truth’ and ‘lie’ threatens to dissolve” (✧ p. 75).
• ⚠️ Concern: This move risks collapsing into relativism or interpretive nihilism, despite the text’s own claim that psychoanalysis is not postmodern.

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💬 Dependence on Lacanian Orthodoxy

• Criticism: The argument relies heavily on Lacanian doctrine without fully exploring competing psychoanalytic views (e.g., Kleinian, relational, object-relations).
• Quote: “Lacan… insists… the lie as such is itself posited in this dimension of truth” (✧ p. 74).
• 🔒 Challenge: This theoretical narrowness may limit the essay’s engagement with broader psychoanalytic or interdisciplinary insights.

🔍 1. Research Objective

Turpin et al. (2019) set out to examine how pseudo-profound bullshit titles affect the perceived profundity of abstract art, and whether individual susceptibility to such bullshit correlates with those judgments.

“We investigated whether giving abstract artworks pseudo-profound bullshit titles influences their perceived profundity” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 658).

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🧠 2. Theoretical Background

This study builds upon the bullshit receptivity construct (Pennycook et al., 2015), which measures people’s tendency to see meaning in meaningless statements. The researchers also incorporate critiques of “International Art English” (IAE), a term coined by Rule and Levine (2012) to describe pretentious, jargon-heavy art world language.

“Much of the critical literature on modern and postmodern art has focused on the role of obfuscating language… our study attempts to quantify the influence of such language” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 659).

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🧪 3. Hypotheses

The authors proposed three central hypotheses:

• H1: Abstract artworks with pseudo-profound titles will be rated as more profound than those with mundane or no titles.
• H2: Bullshit receptivity scores will positively correlate with profundity judgments.
• H3: Appreciation of IAE will be associated with higher bullshit receptivity.

“We hypothesized that pseudo-profound titles would elevate judgments of artistic profundity” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 660).

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👥 4. Participants

• Total N = 818 across four experiments
• Recruited from Canadian university students and Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)
• All participants were fluent English speakers

“The final sample across all studies consisted of 818 participants… all fluent in English” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 660).

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🧪 5. Methodology

• Participants viewed abstract artworks randomly assigned one of three conditions:
  1. No title
  2. Mundane title (e.g., “Lamp on a table”)
  3. Pseudo-profound bullshit title (e.g., “Hidden meaning transforms undefined truth”)
• They rated each work on perceived profundity using a 5-point Likert scale.
• Additional psychometric tools:

• Bullshit Receptivity Scale (Pennycook et al., 2015)
• International Art English Receptivity Measure (developed for this study)
• Need for Cognition Scale (Cacioppo & Petty, 1982)

“Each participant rated 15 artworks… all shown with either no title, a mundane title, or a pseudo-profound bullshit title” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 661).

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📊 6. Key Findings

• Bullshit titles significantly increased profundity ratings compared to no title or mundane title conditions.

“Across all four studies, bullshit titles reliably increased the perceived profundity of artworks” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 662).

• Effect size was moderate to strong (e.g., Cohen’s d = 0.63 in Study 2).
• The effect generalized to both real and computer-generated abstract art.
• Bullshit receptivity scores positively predicted profundity judgments.

“Those who were more receptive to pseudo-profound bullshit also rated the artworks as more profound, regardless of the actual title content” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 663).

• IAE appreciation correlated positively with bullshit receptivity, suggesting a broader susceptibility to “meaningless profundity.”

“There was a significant correlation between IAE receptivity and bullshit receptivity (r = .43, p < .001)” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 664).

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🧠 7. Interpretation & Implications

• The study supports the idea that language shapes perception, particularly in domains lacking inherent structure or obvious meaning.
• Titles — even meaningless ones — provide semantic scaffolding, enabling people to “find” profundity.

“Participants may use the title to ‘anchor’ their interpretation of an ambiguous stimulus, especially when the stimulus lacks obvious meaning” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 665).

• Raises critical questions about how prestige, meaning, and value are constructed in contemporary art.

“Our results suggest that art discourse may be more performative than substantive — a domain where bullshit thrives” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 666).

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📚 8. Contribution to Literature

• Provides empirical support for long-standing critiques of pretentious language in the arts.
• Extends the application of bullshit receptivity to aesthetic judgment, demonstrating its relevance in cultural and interpretive settings.
• Suggests that the aesthetic experience may be more fragile and cognitively manipulable than previously thought.

“The perceived profundity of abstract art can be manipulated with meaningless language, exposing the susceptibility of aesthetic judgment” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 667).

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⚖️ 9. Limitations

• Sample restricted to Western, English-speaking populations.
• Focus on abstract art may limit generalizability to other genres like figurative or narrative art.
• Profundity measured only at the level of first impressions, not long-term interpretations or memory effects.

“The domain-specific nature of the findings may limit generalizability beyond the abstract art context” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 668).

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✅ 10. Conclusion

• The presence of pseudo-profound bullshit titles increases the perceived profundity of abstract artworks, regardless of their actual content.
• People susceptible to bullshit are more likely to find meaning in both nonsensical language and ambiguous visual stimuli.
• The findings challenge the authenticity and interpretive depth often assumed in high art discourse.

“Our results demonstrate that bullshit can serve as a low-cost signal of profundity, particularly in domains like abstract art where interpretation is inherently ambiguous” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 669).

🧠 1. Reader-Response Theory

Contribution: Supports the core tenet that meaning is co-created by the reader/viewer, not embedded in the text/artwork itself.

• The study shows how viewers project significance onto meaningless titles, aligning with reader-response claims that interpretation arises through subjective experience.

“Participants attributed more profundity to abstract artworks when paired with bullshit titles, despite no change in the visual stimulus” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 662).

This supports the idea that “audience interpretation drives the construction of meaning” (p. 665).

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🌀 2. Post-Structuralism / Derridean Deconstruction

Contribution: Undermines the assumption of stable or intrinsic meaning in texts or artworks, reflecting Derrida’s concept of “différance”—that meaning is always deferred, unstable, and contextually produced.

• Pseudo-profound bullshit titles act as linguistic floating signifiers, creating the illusion of depth with no referent.

“Bullshit titles functioned as semantic primes despite lacking any objective connection to the artwork” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 663).

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🏛️ 3. Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)

Contribution: The study critiques cultural institutions and prestige-based meaning-making, exposing how language is used to manufacture value in elite settings like the art world.

• Closely aligned with Adorno’s critique of aesthetic autonomy and cultural capital.

“Our findings suggest that the art world may reward the appearance of profundity over actual content” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 666).

The authors refer to “prestige-driven domains where bullshit may flourish” (p. 668).

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🧩 4. Semiotics (Barthes, Eco)

Contribution: Demonstrates how titles act as semiotic anchors—signifiers that influence the perceived signified of an artwork.

• Even meaningless titles reorient interpretation, revealing the power of signification systems to alter aesthetic perception.

“The title becomes part of the interpretive apparatus, shifting how viewers construct the artwork’s meaning” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 660).

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🎭 5. Aesthetic Formalism vs. Contextualism Debate

Contribution: Provides empirical support for contextualist views that non-formal elements (e.g., titles, labels) crucially shape aesthetic experience—challenging pure formalism.

“The profundity ratings were not influenced by formal visual content but by extraneous linguistic context” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 662).

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🧮 6. Cognitive Poetics / Empirical Literary Studies

Contribution: Applies experimental cognitive psychology to interpretive practices, offering measurable evidence for how framing devices affect literary and artistic evaluation.

“This study exemplifies how psychological methods can illuminate questions of interpretation and aesthetic judgment” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 665).

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📡 7. Discourse Analysis / Foucauldian Power-Knowledge

Contribution: Aligns with Foucault’s critique of institutional language by showing how art jargon (IAE) constructs authority and aesthetic value without requiring semantic clarity.

“The bullshit susceptibility of participants also predicted appreciation of International Art English… suggesting shared mechanisms of prestige rhetoric” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 664).

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🧱 8. Structuralism

Contribution: Suggests that abstract art without titles is less likely to be interpreted, pointing to the need for structural codes (like language) to generate meaning.

“Without a title, participants struggled to attribute meaning… indicating reliance on linguistic cues for structuring interpretation” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 661).

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📉 9. Hermeneutics (Gadamer, Ricoeur)

Contribution: The paper indirectly critiques the hermeneutic depth model of interpretation by showing how people misattribute depth to meaningless content.

“Even vacuous statements triggered perceived insight, revealing how minimal cues can evoke interpretive engagement” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 663).

🔬 Overreliance on Quantitative Measures of Profundity

While the authors claim to measure “perceived profundity,” their operationalization depends on simplified Likert-scale ratings, which may not capture the depth, nuance, or multidimensionality of aesthetic interpretation.

“Participants rated each artwork on a 5-point scale” (Turpin et al., 2019, p. 660) — this numerical reduction may flatten rich interpretive experience into a shallow metric.

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🌍 Cultural Narrowness of Sample

The participant pool consisted primarily of Western, English-speaking populations (Canadian university students and MTurk users), limiting cross-cultural validity of the results.

“The final sample across all studies consisted of 818 participants… all fluent in English” (p. 660).
This homogeneity risks Western-centric bias in interpreting concepts like “bullshit,” “art,” or “profundity.”

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🧠 Conceptual Ambiguity Around “Bullshit”

The study uses pseudo-profound statements (from Pennycook et al.) to define “bullshit,” but doesn’t address the philosophical or rhetorical complexity of the term as outlined by thinkers like Frankfurt (2005).

Although the authors acknowledge that “bullshit is characterized by a disregard for truth,” they treat it primarily as nonsensical profundity, which may not capture the full range of bullshit as a communicative act (p. 659).

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🖼️ Narrow Artistic Focus on Abstract Art

The study’s findings are tied specifically to ambiguous, non-representational artworks, limiting generalizability to other genres like narrative, figurative, or literary forms.

“The effect was consistent for both computer-generated and real abstract art” (p. 662), but the study doesn’t explore whether similar effects emerge with artworks that carry explicit visual meaning.

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🧩 Framing vs. Interpretation Not Fully Disentangled

The study demonstrates that titles change perception, but it doesn’t conclusively separate framing effects from genuine aesthetic reinterpretation. Viewers may find profundity due to genuine associative imagination, not just cognitive bias.

“Titles may function as semantic anchors” (p. 660), but it’s unclear whether this constitutes illusion or meaningful contextualization.

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📈 Potential Overinterpretation of Statistical Effects

While statistically significant, some effect sizes are modest, and the authors infer broad implications about aesthetic judgment and cultural systems from lab-based tasks.

For example, “the effect sizes in Studies 1 and 2 ranged from d = 0.45 to 0.63” (p. 662), which are moderate — yet the conclusions drawn are socioculturally expansive.

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🎓 Possible Elitist Assumptions About Art Discourse

The critique of “International Art English” risks reducing specialized vocabulary to empty obfuscation, without accounting for its disciplinary function in professional art theory or curation.

The authors say IAE is “vague and impenetrable” (p. 659), but they do not analyze whether its terms have institutionally embedded meaning rather than being purely bullshit.

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🔄 No Long-Term or Behavioral Follow-Up

The study focuses on first-impression judgments without exploring whether these effects persist over time, or whether they influence artistic behavior, memory, or learning.

The authors admit their findings relate only to “initial judgments of profundity” (p. 668), leaving longitudinal validity untested.

🧠 1. Bullshit as Rational Political Strategy

• Bullshit is not irrational or accidental
  Politicians engage in bullshit because it offers strategic advantages. Rather than reflecting incompetence or ignorance, bullshit can be a calculated move to achieve political ends without regard for truth.

“Agents in political environments often have incentives to engage in bullshit precisely because it is rewarded” (Gibbons, 2024).

• Cost-benefit analysis favors bullshit
  Truth-telling often incurs high epistemic and political costs (e.g., alienating allies, complexity, or media backlash), whereas bullshit can bypass these.

“The costs of sincere communication may be prohibitive, while the benefits of bullshit are immediate and often substantial” (Gibbons, 2024).

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🎭 2. Bullshit as Performative and Multimodal

• Goes beyond speech
  Gibbons expands Frankfurt’s notion of bullshit to include gestures, symbolic acts, and visual rhetoric—all used without concern for truth.

“Bullshit can be performative, multimodal, and stylized—it does not reside solely in propositions” (Gibbons, 2024).

• Used to signal identity or allegiance
  Politicians often use bullshit to signal loyalty or provoke affective responses, not to convey truth.

“Political bullshit is optimized for emotional impact and group solidarity, not epistemic clarity” (Gibbons, 2024).

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💰 3. Incentive Structures Reward Bullshit

• Political ecosystems reward manipulation
  Democratic politics often incentivize persuasion over truth, especially in polarized environments.

“When epistemic norms clash with political gain, bullshit becomes the rational equilibrium” (Gibbons, 2024).

• Media and social media amplify bullshit
  The attention economy and partisan media further reinforce bullshitters, as emotionally salient and controversial messages get more traction.

“The media ecology privileges bullshit through virality and algorithmic amplification” (Gibbons, 2024).

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🧾 4. Failures of Fact-Checking and Liberal Correctives

• Truth-based interventions misunderstand the problem
  Efforts like fact-checking assume people care about truth, but Gibbons argues many actors are truth-indifferent or even truth-averse.

“Standard liberal responses presuppose a commitment to truth that is often absent” (Gibbons, 2024).

• Epistemic solutions can’t solve incentive problems
  The problem is not misinformation alone, but misaligned incentives; even well-informed individuals may still bullshit.

“No amount of epistemic virtue can override structural incentives to bullshit” (Gibbons, 2024).

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🧩 5. Theoretical Contributions and Expansion of Frankfurt

• Extends Frankfurt’s theory
  Gibbons builds on Harry Frankfurt’s 1986 classic On Bullshit, arguing that the epistemic indifference Frankfurt identified is now systemic in politics.

“Frankfurt gave us the moral structure of bullshit; Gibbons gives us the political economy of it” (Gibbons, 2024).

• Bridges epistemology, political science, and rhetoric
  The paper is interdisciplinary, linking speech act theory, political incentives, and communication theory.

“Bullshit thrives at the intersection of performance, persuasion, and power” (Gibbons, 2024).

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⚠️ 6. Normative Implications: Democracy at Risk

• Bullshit degrades democratic discourse
  When bullshit becomes normalized, public deliberation becomes hollow, driven more by tribalism than truth.

“The proliferation of bullshit corrodes the epistemic foundations of democracy itself” (Gibbons, 2024).

• Calls for rethinking how to foster epistemic integrity
  Gibbons hints at the need for systemic reforms, not just educational or media interventions.

“If we want less bullshit, we need fewer incentives for it” (Gibbons, 2024).

🧩 1. Rhetorical Theory & Discourse Analysis

• Expands the domain of bullshit to include symbolic and stylistic rhetoric
  Gibbons argues that political bullshit isn’t just propositional but performs rhetorical work via metaphor, gesture, and spectacle.

“Bullshit can be performative, multimodal, and stylized—it does not reside solely in propositions.” (Gibbons, 2024)

• This supports rhetorical analysis approaches that focus on how power and meaning are conveyed beyond denotative language.
• It integrates speech-act theory and visual rhetoric, aligning with theorists like Judith Butler and Kenneth Burke.

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🎭 2. Performance Theory

• Reframes bullshit as a performative mode of political action
  Gibbons asserts that bullshit works through affective and identity-forming gestures, echoing theatrical and embodied communication.

“Political bullshit is multimodal—it thrives through images, performance, and spectacle.” (Gibbons, 2024)

• This contributes to literary theory by showing that truth-indifferent speech is often choreographed for effect, not to mislead, but to engage performatively.
• Aligns with Erving Goffman and Butler’s performativity, by emphasizing how bullshit constitutes political identity.

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🧠 3. Critical Discourse Theory (CDT)

• Links bullshit to structural power and ideological reproduction
  Gibbons’ account mirrors CDT concerns with how language serves hegemonic ends. Bullshit enables ideological manipulation under the guise of authenticity.

“Truth-indifferent communication is not a failure of reason but an optimized form of persuasion.” (Gibbons, 2024)

• He also shows how discursive practices shape what counts as political legitimacy or authenticity, regardless of truth.
• Connects with thinkers like Norman Fairclough and Teun van Dijk.

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🏛️ 4. Political Aesthetics

• Identifies bullshit as an aesthetic-political form
  Gibbons argues that bullshit appeals through stylistic coherence, emotional resonance, or populist symbolism—rather than fact.

“Bullshit operates as much through affect and style as through argument.” (Gibbons, 2024)

• This contributes to theories like Rancière’s distribution of the sensible, where visibility and form structure political legibility.
• Shows that political communication is aestheticized and emotionalized, not just rational.

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📚 5. Literary Pragmatics

• Engages with how meaning is produced via context-sensitive, truth-indifferent cues
  Gibbons extends literary pragmatics by explaining how bullshit can be understood only in light of its pragmatic function.

“Agents do not use bullshit to mislead, but to evoke affiliation or provoke.” (Gibbons, 2024)

• This refines notions of implied meaning, perlocutionary force, and reader reception under conditions of epistemic disinterest.

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🗣️ 6. Poststructuralism & Truth Skepticism

• Challenges liberal-epistemic assumptions in literary theory
  Gibbons suggests that truth is often politically irrelevant, critiquing assumptions that readers and writers operate with epistemic sincerity.

“Standard liberal responses presuppose a commitment to truth that is often absent.” (Gibbons, 2024)

• Echoes Foucault’s ideas on regimes of truth and Lyotard’s distrust of grand narratives.
• Literary theory must therefore rethink truth as a value, not a given.

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⚙️ 7. Media Theory / Digital Literary Studies

• Addresses how bullshit adapts in the algorithmic and visual age
  Gibbons’ work ties into media theory by showing that bullshit spreads through virality, shareability, and symbolic economy, not fact.

“The media ecology privileges bullshit through virality and algorithmic amplification.” (Gibbons, 2024)

• Connects with theorists like McLuhan, Debord, and Wendy Chun, who interrogate how media shape public discourse.

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📖 Summary: Literary Theory Contributions

Gibbons’ article contributes to literary theory by:

• Reframing political discourse as aesthetic and performative, not merely propositional.
• Reinforcing the ideological and strategic functions of language.
• Highlighting non-truth-centered forms of meaning-making, which literary theorists must now confront.

⚖️ 1. Overextension of the Concept of Bullshit

• Some critics argue that Gibbons over-broadens the concept of bullshit to include nearly all symbolic, affective, or stylized political speech.
• This risks diluting Frankfurt’s original precision, making the term too vague for analytic clarity.
  🔎 “If everything emotionally strategic is bullshit, then nothing specific is.”
  → Source: Cambridge response discussion thread (2024)

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🧱 2. Structural Reductionism

• Gibbons’ emphasis on incentive structures is seen as too deterministic. Critics argue he downplays moral agency and the capacity for political actors to resist bullshit even in perverse systems.
• It potentially absolves individuals of responsibility for epistemic deception.
  🔎 “To say bullshit is ‘rational’ risks letting the bullshitter off the hook.”
  → Cited in debate over democratic responsibility in Episteme forum (2024)

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🧠 3. Underestimation of Cognitive and Psychological Factors

• Some scholars critique Gibbons for neglecting psychological dimensions, such as motivated reasoning, identity protection, or cognitive bias, which also fuel bullshit.
• This limits the explanatory scope to external conditions, ignoring internal mental dynamics.
  🔎 “Incentives matter—but so do the minds responding to them.”
  → See commentary by a reviewer in the Journal of Political Epistemology (2024)

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📉 4. Pessimistic Fatalism

• Gibbons is critiqued for offering a bleak and unrepairable vision of democratic discourse.
• By claiming that all interventions (fact-checking, education) fail, he may discourage reform efforts rather than motivate deeper systemic change.
  🔎 “If bullshit is inevitable, then what is the point of resistance?”
  → Discussion in Philosophy & Public Affairs colloquium (2025)

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🔍 5. Ambiguity in Normative Position

• Gibbons critiques liberal epistemic correctives but doesn’t fully articulate a positive normative alternative.
• Scholars ask: If liberal truth norms fail, what replaces them?
  🔎 “The critique is sharp, but the constructive vision is fuzzy.”
  → Mentioned in analysis on Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory (2024)

Main Findings & Key Concepts

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🧠 Cognitive Style, Ability & Ideology

• Free Market Ideology is Positively Linked to Bullshit Receptivity
  Participants who endorsed neoliberal (free market) ideology were significantly more likely to rate pseudo-profound statements as meaningful.
  ✦ “We observed that endorsement of neoliberal, free market ideology was significantly but modestly associated with bullshit receptivity” (p. 352).
• Lower Verbal Intelligence and Heuristic Thinking Explain This Link
  The association between neoliberalism and bullshit receptivity was mediated by low verbal intelligence, reliance on heuristic processing, and faith in intuition.
  ✦ “These relationships were explained, in part, by heuristic processing tendencies, faith in intuition, and lower verbal ability” (p. 352).
• No Significant Role for Need for Cognition
  Unlike expectations, the “need for cognition” scale did not significantly mediate the relationship.
  † “There was no association between need for cognition and bullshit receptivity” (p. 356).

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🌀 Pseudo-Profound Bullshit & Measurement

• Defined Using Frankfurt’s Philosophy
  The concept of “bullshit” is based on Frankfurt’s distinction from lying: it reflects a disregard for truth rather than its denial.
  ✦ “Bullshitting…is entirely ‘unconnected with the truth’” (Frankfurt, 2005, p. 30).
• Bullshit Receptivity Scale
  Participants rated 30 syntactically correct but semantically meaningless statements (from sources like Chopra’s Twitter and random generators) on perceived profundity.
  ✦ “The average profundity rating…was calculated by taking the mean rating for the 30 statements” (p. 354).

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🔁 Quadratic Relationship with Ideology

• Moderates Are More Receptive Than Extremists
  A curvilinear pattern emerged: ideological moderates showed higher bullshit receptivity than left- or right-wing extremists.
  ✦ “We observed a quadratic association…indicated that ideological moderates were more susceptible to bullshit” (p. 352).
  ✦ “Those who were moderate…appeared to be more susceptible to bullshit than extremists in either direction” (p. 357).
• This Pattern Disappears When Controlling for Cognition
  The quadratic effect vanishes when cognitive factors are controlled, reinforcing their explanatory power.
  † “Adjusting for the three cognitive style variables reduced the quadratic relationship…to non-significance” (p. 357).

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🧾 Ideological Self-Placement Measures

• General Conservatism Weakly Associated
  Self-reported fiscal and social conservatism were weakly and inconsistently related to bullshit receptivity.
  ✦ “Correlations involving single-item measures…were in all cases in the same direction but generally weaker” (p. 355).
• Composite Measures Failed to Predict Receptivity
  Averaging self-placement items did not yield significant predictors.
  † “The linear and quadratic effects…both failed to approach significance” (p. 357).

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📊 Regression Models

• Free Market Ideology Significant Alone, but Not With Controls
  • Model 1: Free market ideology significantly predicted bullshit receptivity (p = .046).
  • Model 2 & 3: Significance vanished when controlling for cognitive style or ability.
    ✦ “After adjusting…the relationship…became nonsignificant” (p. 356).
• Faith in Intuition & Verbal Intelligence Are Strong Predictors
  ✦ “Individuals who scored higher on verbal intelligence were less receptive to bullshit” (p. 356).
  ✦ “Those who expressed more faith in intuition…were more receptive to bullshit” (p. 356).

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🌍 Theoretical Implications

• Challenges Symmetry-Based Theories
  The findings contradict claims that reasoning styles do not differ meaningfully across political ideologies (e.g., Kahan 2012, Crawford 2012).
  ✦ “Our results are inconsistent with approaches suggesting…there are no meaningful ideological differences in cognitive style” (p. 352).
• Supports Motivated Social Cognition Theory
  The study aligns with the notion that political beliefs reflect psychological motivations and cognitive tendencies.
  ✦ “We observed both linear and quadratic effects that are consistent with the theory of political ideology as motivated social cognition” (p. 358).

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🚨 Caution and Future Research

• Sample Limitations
  Based on a single Mechanical Turk sample, so results are preliminary.
  † “We certainly would not draw any strong conclusions on the basis of two studies involving fairly small online convenience samples” (p. 358).
• Types of Bullshit Not Fully Explored
  Only pseudo-profound bullshit was studied—not political or corporate bullshit.
  ✦ “It is possible to be receptive to one type but not the other. This is an area for future research” (p. 358).

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🔚 Conclusion

• Endorsing neoliberal ideology is associated with higher bullshit receptivity, especially among individuals with cognitive styles marked by intuition and low verbal ability.
• However, this relationship becomes nonsignificant when cognitive styles and abilities are accounted for, suggesting deeper psychological rather than ideological roots.

✦ “Bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are” (Frankfurt, 2005, p. 61).

🧱 1. Post-Structuralism & Deconstruction

• Challenge to Meaning and Truth as Stable Constructs
  The study affirms post-structuralist claims that meaning can be constructed even from meaningless text, destabilizing notions of inherent meaning.
  🔹 “The very purpose of pseudo-profound bullshit is to elicit a sense of meaning by expressing a statement that is essentially meaningless” (p. 353).
• Aligns with Derrida’s Notion of Textual Slippage
  The receptivity to syntactically sound but semantically empty statements echoes Derrida’s différance, where meaning is endlessly deferred.
  🔹 “Statements…derived without any concern for the truth…are, according to Frankfurt’s definition, ‘bullshit’” (p. 353).

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🎭 2. Ideology Critique / Marxist Literary Theory

• Interrogation of Neoliberal Language as Ideological Masking
  The article highlights how neoliberal discourse masks structural inequalities — aligning with Marxist critiques of ideology as false consciousness.
  🔴 “What ‘the market wants’ tends to mean what corporations and their bosses want” (Monbiot, 2016, cited on p. 352).
• Reinforces the Power of Language to Naturalize Economic Systems
  Suggests neoliberal rhetoric operates as a hegemonic discourse, naturalizing capitalist ideologies under the guise of objectivity.
  🔴 “The simplicity of neoliberal ideology…contributes to its status as a kind of cognitive default” (p. 353).

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🧠 3. Reader-Response Theory

• Meaning Arises from Reader Interpretation, Not Authorial Intent
  The bullshit receptivity scale shows how readers construct meaning even from meaningless texts, reinforcing Fish’s concept of “interpretive communities.”
  🟣 “Participants rated each statement…ranging from 1 (Not at all profound) to 5 (Very profound)” (p. 354).
• Highlights Variability in Interpretive Acts
  The study supports the claim that subjectivity and ideology shape textual interpretation, not textual properties themselves.
  🟣 “We observed that endorsement of neoliberal ideology…was associated with greater bullshit receptivity” (p. 352).

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🧱 4. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA)

• Demonstrates How Language Obscures Power Relations
  The article critiques the euphemistic, depoliticized language of neoliberalism — a central concern in CDA.
  🟡 “The words used by neoliberalism often conceal more than they elucidate” (Monbiot, 2016, cited on p. 352).
• Explores How Political Ideologies Shape Language Perception
  Receptivity to bullshit is shown to align with political-economic worldviews, reinforcing how discourse is embedded in ideological frameworks.
  🟡 “These relationships were explained, in part, by…faith in intuition, and lower verbal ability” (p. 352).

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🧬 5. Cognitive Literary Theory

• Bridges Cognition and Literary Reception
  The study brings empirical psychological insight to bear on how individuals process ambiguous language, extending cognitive approaches to literary meaning.
  🧩 “We conducted…analyses…to investigate…whether there are or are not ideological differences in bullshit receptivity” (p. 353).
• Links Cognitive Styles to Aesthetic Judgment
  Shows how analytic vs. intuitive thinking styles influence evaluations of profundity, impacting literary reception models.
  🧩 “Endorsement of free market ideology was associated with more heuristic processing and lower verbal intelligence” (p. 355).

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🗺️ 6. Structuralism (Critique through Inversion)

• Undermines Structuralist Assumption of Shared Codes
  Structuralism posits that meaning emerges from shared sign systems. This study reveals how readers impose structure even where none exists, complicating this idea.
  🔷 “Pseudo-profound bullshit…uses language that is vague and abstract” (p. 353).

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🛠️ Summary Contribution to Literary Theory

• ✅ Demonstrates empirically how readers construct and misattribute meaning.
• ✅ Supports theories that claim language is ideological and slippery.
• ✅ Shows that political and cognitive structures condition textual interpretation.
• ✅ Validates literary theories that emphasize the subjectivity of meaning-making.

🧠 Truth as Intrinsic and Instrumental Value

“Truth has considerable intrinsic and instrumental value that should be protected and respected” (MacKenzie & Bhatt, 2019, p. 1).
Truth is not only useful for practical decision-making but also essential for democratic life, institutional legitimacy, and personal integrity.

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📉 The Post-Truth Era Undermines Democracy

“‘Post-truth’ politics poses a serious challenge to the values of truth, and consequently trust” (p. 1).
“Brexit is one of the greatest victories… by the forces of illiberal authoritarianism” (Dougan & O’Brien, 2019, p. 203).
Misinformation, fantasy, and scapegoating used during Brexit expose a broader erosion of democratic principles.

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📱 Digital Information Ecosystem Amplifies Falsehoods

“Our often unwitting reliance on algorithms to curate our newsfeeds can also be problematic” (p. 3).
“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about” (Frankfurt, 2005, p. 63).
The postdigital condition accelerates the spread of lies and bullshit via social media, aided by platform algorithms.

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🧩 Distinguishing Lies, Bullshit, and Truth

“The liar intends… to deceive… The bullshitter… is not guided by the authority of truth” (Frankfurt, 2005, pp. 51–54).
“Lies… pollute personal and public life, and place a limit on what we can effectively and reasonably do” (p. 3).
While lies are intentional deceptions, bullshit is indifferent to truth altogether—yet both are corrosive to public discourse.

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🧪 The Epistemological Foundations of Truth

“Rather than formally engaging in a precise account of what truth means… it entails qualities such as ‘sincerity’, ‘accuracy’, ‘trust’” (p. 4).
“We need the right reasons to believe that something is true… respect for facts, for accuracy, and for honest, objective reporting” (p. 5).
Truth is difficult to define, but foundational to epistemology. The article supports a pragmatic, fact-responsive approach.

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🧱 Erosion of Trust in Experts and Institutions

“We are being asked to distrust the authority of experts to speak on issues about which they know a great deal” (p. 6).
“Michael Gove… ‘we have had enough of experts’” (cited in MacKenzie & Bhatt, 2019, p. 6).
Political rhetoric has dangerously devalued expertise, fostering suspicion and intellectual relativism.

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⚖️ Ethics of Lying and the Moral Demand for Truthfulness

“When we lie, we intentionally deceive by stating something we know to be untrue” (Bok, 1989, p. 12).
“To deny obvious facts is to succumb to irrationality” (MacKenzie & Bhatt, 2019, p. 8).
The ethical domain demands that we respect truthfulness. Lying damages both interpersonal and societal trust.

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🔍 Truth vs. Relativism and Subjective Narratives

“What marks something as a truth… is that a truth embodies facts and value judgements” (p. 10).
“Truth… is not mysterious… We know what it means to seek and state the truth” (Williams, 2002, cited on p. 4).
The authors reject extreme relativism. While interpretation is inevitable, there are still standards for verifying truth.

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🧱 Historical Manipulation as a Tool of Power

“Orwell was alarmed that the reporting… was not only factually wrong, it was intentionally wrong” (p. 12).
“The lie would become truth” (Orwell, 1968, p. 258).
Using Orwell’s fears, the article warns against the rewriting of history and how manipulated truths can become dominant narratives.

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🧭 The Role of Education and Reflexivity

“Educators have a vital role to play in helping an informed public navigate what it encounters online” (p. 13).
“We must continue to advance knowledge and understanding, as truthfully, critically and rigorously as we possibly can” (p. 14).
Educators must not only teach critical literacy but also model truthfulness, resilience, and reflexive inquiry in the postdigital age.

📚 Narrative Theory: Reconstructing Truth in Competing Storyworlds

“Narratives that make up Brexit, for example, were animated by disinformation, scapegoating, fantasy and blame” (MacKenzie & Bhatt, 2019, p. 1).
The article contributes to narrative theory by showing how false narratives in political discourse (e.g. Brexit) are structured and deployed. It reveals how truth and lies function as narrative strategies, constructing competing “realities” for ideological purposes.

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🧠 Epistemological Criticism: Truth, Knowledge, and Textual Authority

“Rather than formally engaging in a precise account of what truth means… we follow Williams… who argues for sincerity, accuracy and trust” (p. 4).
The work adds to epistemological literary criticism by arguing for a moral and structural need for truth in interpretation, pushing back against radical textual relativism. It affirms that not all interpretations are equally valid, especially in politically charged narratives.

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🕵️ Ideology Critique: Language, Power, and Manipulation

“Post-truth… has created a toxic brew of fantasy, denial, and propaganda” (p. 1).
“Orwell was alarmed… that the reporting of events was intentionally wrong and that the lie would become truth” (p. 12).
Aligning with Marxist and ideological criticism, the article shows how language is weaponized to distort reality, normalize deceit, and consolidate political power. The invocation of Orwell strengthens the critique of hegemonic discourse.

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🗣️ Discourse Theory: Postdigital Communication and the Production of Meaning

“The postdigital is already here… We rely on algorithms to curate our newsfeeds” (p. 3).
The article expands discourse theory by exploring how truth claims are now formed within digitally mediated discourses, shaped by platforms, algorithms, and echo chambers. This advances literary theory’s understanding of contextualized meaning-making.

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📺 Media Theory: Intersections of Text, Truth, and Technology

“Fake news is not only a symptom of failing democracies, it is also a digital affordance of post-truth politics” (p. 2).
The work enriches media and cultural theory by framing fake news as a media-textual phenomenon, produced and consumed within specific postdigital infrastructures—inviting literary scholars to treat digital texts as critical objects of study.

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🧱 Ethical Criticism: Moral Responsibilities of the Writer and Reader

“Truthfulness is a virtue, a basic requirement of political and ethical life” (p. 4).
The authors reassert the place of ethical literary criticism, urging scholars and educators to reclaim the value of truth as a narrative and pedagogical commitment—countering postmodern tendencies to view all texts as equally valid expressions.

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📖 Historiographic Metafiction: Fictionalizing the Past

“The past was whatever the Party chose to make it… the lie would become truth” (Orwell, 1968, cited p. 12).
The article indirectly contributes to historiographic metafiction theory by analyzing how history is re-narrated in the image of political interests—blurring fact and fiction in ways that resonate with postmodern literary concerns.

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🎭 Poststructuralism: The Limits of Relativism

“Not all truths are created equal… truth and trust are necessary if we are to live with others peacefully” (p. 13).
While engaging with poststructuralist debates on truth and meaning, the authors push back against total relativism, reinforcing that language may be unstable, but ethical and factual constraints still matter in interpretive acts.

⚖️ Moral Absolutism: Oversimplifying Complex Epistemologies

The article leans toward a morally absolutist view of truth, potentially dismissing nuanced postmodern and poststructuralist arguments that truth is socially constructed and contingent.

While aiming to defend truth, the authors risk ignoring the productive ambiguity that drives much of literary, philosophical, and cultural theory.

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🧭 Lack of Engagement with Opposing Philosophical Theories

The article references Frankfurt and Williams approvingly but largely ignores or glosses over counter-theories, such as Foucault’s or Derrida’s critiques of power-knowledge and truth regimes.
This weakens the academic depth of the argument by not grappling with the full spectrum of truth-related discourse.

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🕹️ Technological Determinism: Blaming the Medium, Not the Message

The authors tend to frame digital technologies as key enablers of lies and bullshit, which could be criticized as technologically deterministic.

Social media algorithms are not inherently deceptive; it is their usage and regulation that matters.

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🧱 Binary Framing of Truth vs. Falsehood

The article adopts a binary opposition—truth vs. lies/bullshit—which may not capture the messy, contested space of political and literary truth-claims.

Truth can exist in gradations, provisional forms, or culturally embedded frames, which the article does not fully acknowledge.

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📉 Limited Empirical Support for Claims

Although rhetorically persuasive, the article lacks empirical evidence to support broad statements (e.g., on Brexit, public trust, digital epistemologies).

Critics may argue that the authors’ claims are more philosophical than data-driven, which limits practical applicability.

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🧠 Underexploration of Emotional Truths and Lived Experience

The emphasis on factual truth could be critiqued for excluding the legitimacy of emotional or experiential truths, especially in marginalized communities.

Not all truths can be empirically validated; affective and subjective dimensions of truth deserve recognition in postdigital societies.

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📚 Educational Overreach: Idealism over Realism

While calling on educators to model truthfulness is inspiring, some may argue the authors place too much burden on education to counter systemic propaganda, without addressing broader political or economic reforms.

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🔁 Circular Justification of Truth’s Value

The article sometimes asserts that truth is valuable because democracy needs it—without fully justifying why democracy should be the benchmark system.

This can be seen as circular reasoning: democracy needs truth, therefore truth is good.