Sophistication gestures, a definition and list

There’s a whole series of terms in the social sciences and humanities (and I’m sure there are equivalents in the hard sciences, I just don’t know them that well) which do a couple of things:

1. Signify that the writer or speaker sees themselves as more sophisticated than a crude establishment.

2. Gesture towards theory, but in a way that doesn’t do any specific theoretical work.

3. Wash hands of the (often quite real) sins of the past- epistemic, and in some cases moral. A friend called it epistemic deodorant.

Many of the terms in what follows have a clear meaning but have been appropriated for these purposes. Where there is a clear meaning, my point is not to criticise the concepts themselves, but their appropriation for this purpose. Others were always extremely vague. Many are in the middle. Collectively I call them sophistication gestures.

A partial list would include:

Assemblage

Biopsychosocial

Constructed

Contested

Contextual

Context-sensitive

Contingent

Co-constituted

Cybernetic/cybernetics

Dialogical

Dialectical

Discursive

Dynamic

Ecological

Embedded

Embodied

Emergent

Enacted

Entangled

Heterogeneous

Historically mediated

Historically situated

Holistic

Institutional

Integrative

Intersectional

Interpretive

Intersubjective

Liminal

Lived experience

Material-discursive

Meaning-making

Mediated

Multidimensional

Multilevel

Multiscalar

Multivalent

Narrative

Nonlinear

Nuanced

Overdetermined

Phenomenological

Plural

Pluralistic

Polysemous

Processual

Recursive

Relational

Rhizomatic

Sense-making

Situated

Socially constructed

Sociocultural

Spectrum

Symbolic

Systems-level

Transdiagnostic

World-disclosing

Of course, just as, if not more, important is the inverse list. The signifiers of unsophistication which the author can reject. Policing borders to complement planting flags:

absolutist

ahistorical

atomistic

binary

Cartesian

crude

deterministic

disembodied

essentialist

foundationalist

individualist

instrumentalist

linear

mechanistic

methodological individualist

monocausal

monolithic

naïve

naturalized

objectivist

ontotheological

positivist

reductionist

reified

static

teleological

thin

totalizing

universalist

unmediated

unreflexive

Again, many of these terms on all the lists above are quite valuable, and I imagine forbidding them would simply create alternatives. I will continue to use many myself, and do so shamelessly. My aim is not to create a list of naughty words or concepts, but to identify a naughty instinct for which these categories are used, a vague gesture at “I am one of the people who knows things are complex” and “I am one of the good ones”.

There may be, on occasion, room in good writing for these words even used as sophistication gestures. If I’m writing an essay narrowly on mercury and insanity in the Victorian period, and I haven’t got time to touch on the many social dimensions of madness, simply acknowledging that madness is “socially co-constituted” or some such invocation might reassure the reader that I’m not just some klutzy brute stumbling around. But though there are exceptions, when these words are used as sophistication gestures, the right general stance is deep scepticism. If you have to tell me that your ideas are intellectually complex, I begin to strongly suspect they might not be. Whatever you think of show-don’t tell as a general rule, it’s almost iron clad here. Writers aren’t supposed to tell readers they’re smart or sophisticated. If they feel it’s a point they want to make (and look, all power to them, the academic job market is brutal) then they should show it.

I’d also note, in passing the problems of the total picture. All of these words have perfectly valid uses but when taken collectively as a sign of the sophistication markers currently common in the field overall they point to a worldview that was quite decisively critiqued by Kieran Healy in his wonderful little paper Fuck Nuance.

Look, we’re all humans. We all want to belong to clubs. We all want to belong to the cool kid’s club in particular. But we should reject these terms when used as sophistication gestures because:

A) Have some decorum. Desperation to be taken seriously is unseemly.

B) We want to know whether the writer has a real, interesting, possibly even original point. These terms are all too often squid ink disguising emptiness or, in some cases, throat clearing and coughing sounds hiding a genuine and important point.