A while ago I posted some thoughts about creating a mindmap of your blog. I’ve spent the last couple of evenings fiddling around with tags, a little easy php and Ucinet, some SNA software. I thought I’d post the rough…

Alternatively, you can take a concept you don’t understand and riff on it. If it’s out of your audience’s expertise as well they may either a, call your bluff and ask questions, though doing so riskes exposing the holes in their own knowledge; or b, smile and applaud your genius. The answer, in some departments at least, is to complement the emperor on his fine clothes:

_Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science_ By ALAN SOKAL and JEAN BRICMONT

a quick introduction, snipped from the website for the book (below)
great blog, btw!

http://human-nature.com/reason/books/sokal-bricmont.html

2) Importing concepts from the natural sciences into the humanities or social sciences without giving the slightest conceptual or empirical justification. If a biologist wanted to apply, in her research, elementary notions of mathematical topology, set theory or differential geometry, she would be asked to give some explanation. A vague analogy would not be taken very seriously by her colleagues. Here, by contrast, we learn from Lacan that the structure of the neurotic subject is exactly the torus (it is no less than reality itself, cf. p. 20), from Kristeva that poetic language can be theorized in terms of the cardinality of the continuum (p. 40), and from Baudrillard that modern war takes place in a non-Euclidean space (p. 147)–all without explanation.

3) Displaying a superficial erudition by shamelessly throwing around technical terms in a context where they are completely irrelevant. The goal is, no doubt, to impress and, above all, to intimidate the non-scientist reader. Even some academic and media commentators fall into the trap: Roland Barthes is impressed by the precision of Julia Kristeva’s work (p. 38) and Le Monde admires the erudition of Paul Virilio (p. 169).

4) Manipulating phrases and sentences that are, in fact, meaningless. Some of these authors exhibit a veritable intoxication with words, combined with a superb indifference to their meaning.

These authors speak with a self-assurance that far outstrips their scientific competence: Lacan boasts of using “the most recent development in topology” (pp. 21-22) and Latour asks whether he has taught anything to Einstein (p. 131). They imagine, perhaps, that they can exploit the prestige of the natural sciences in order to give their own discourse a veneer of rigor. And they seem confident that no one will notice their misuse of scientific concepts. No one is going to cry out that the king is naked.