When Ally Louks created a Twitter storm after announcing on X that she’d passed her Phd with her thesis Olfactory Ethics: The Politics of Smell in Modern and Contemporary Prose, it gave outsiders a rare glimpse into postgraduate English studies in the UK. Based on the title alone, any criticism was unwarranted: it sounded innocuous enough, and potentially interesting, though not original (for instance William Miller’s 1997 book The Anatomy of Disgust examines disgust as a way to maintain social hierarchies, even analysing the same Orwell book as Louks).
To defend herself from criticism and mockery Louks posted the abstract for her thesis online. It proved to be an egregious example of mimetic, boiler-plate academese, and gave an insight as to why the numbers choosing to study English literature are at their lowest ever, and dwindling year by year. In essence, Louks’s Abstract claims that negative perceptions of, or reactions to maladour, if the funk comes from ‘marginalised’ groups, are down to prejudice, are racist or sexist, and possibly imaginary.
Louks was being disingenuous when she tweeted that people were jumping down her throat for using ‘academic jargon such as olfactory’: most people know what this word means, and it is neither ‘academic’ nor ‘jargon’. It was her use of the lexicon of contemporary activism, and the pompous pretentiousness of her prose that was being pilloried. She denied being an activist on the one hand, but on the other confirmed it in sanctimoniously moralising tweet after tweet, claiming that she would “continue to call out ‘olfactory racism’. She accused her critics of being 'anti-intellectual', and not able to deal with ‘long words’, yet what could be more anti-intellectual than deforming a scholarly discipline into a vector of race and gender theory, and social justice activism,?
Louks dishonestly tried to create the false victim-narrative that her critics were mostly male and uneducated, whereas many of her critics were not only highly educated but also female, affronted lovers of literature. Louks simply pretended they didn't exist, carefully curated her replies, and went on a blocking spree. One of these women, Ellie Dorn, commented on her blog: “You shouldn’t send rape threats to Phd’s or tell them to have babies instead, but you are allowed to be pissed off if you like literature and if those of its highest echelons are using the opportunity to shoehorn 2014 politics into work rather than actually doing or discovering something interesting”.
The abstract is no mere matter of infelicitous phrasing: I put each sentence of its first half into the Hemingway app, and each one scored highly for unreadability, only very slightly lower than the score for actual gibberish. It uses the passive voice, is overstuffed with redundant words, prepositional phrases and adverbs, and contains errors in word usage. This short text is an exercise in circumlocution, and with its tortuous syntax almost a parody of a postgraduate abstract.
The kind of banality-veiling, obfuscating jargon to be found in it is exclusionary, and is intended to be so, its opacity meant to elide critique and, despite so many of the writers of such prose identifying as socialist, to undermine language as communication, in order to consolidate class injustice. It characteristically serves to either disguise that someone has nothing of substance to say or that what they are saying they know to be false or unfounded – in the end you’re asked to give such texts the benefit of the doubt. The study of literature and literary criticism are civilised and civilising, and the more the better. Like philosophy it has its schools and movements, and some of it is necessarily recondite, diffucult to gain a purchase upon. Rabelais hilariously lampooned Scholasticism and the over-latinate language of the universities of his time, but at least those philosophers and scholars were being sincere. The meretricious tendencies displayed in work such as Louks's represent a new kind of Scholasticism at best - at worst the cultural vandalism of young Red Guards, betrayers and perverters of language, fast reducing the university to a bog of stupidities.
Her abstract is full of the words that you'll find repeated again and again ad nauseam in abstracts for English literature Phds, words such as ‘instantiation’ and ‘valencies’ (both misused in this abstract), ‘bifurcated’, which means split into only two (the word Louks actually needed is unimpressively monosyllabic). Yet again we get the the ubiquitous, but pretentious and incorrect ‘logics’ (the plural of 'logic' also being 'logic'). ‘Iterations’, ‘interrogates' (never just ‘asks’) ,‘ecologies’, and ‘liminal’ are also part of this pre-set lexicon, and no doubt will be present in her thesis: but these words have a significance beyond their meaning, and are counters used for a passage to be accepted as contemporary academese.
This kind of prose, strewn with specious glitter intended to beguile coutsiders, ultimately stems from Critical Theory, whose influence Camille Paglia anatomises in her essay Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders: Aacademe in the Hour of the Wolf, where she shows how such meretricious language-use quickly became inextricably linked to cynical careerism (she reserves most of her ire for the influence of Foucault.) What began as a corrosive clarity decades ago in France has degenerated, through a kind of game of academic Chinese whispers, into an occluding opacity, or as Hegel put it, "erudition begins with ideas and ends with ordures".
I used Robert Burton’s phrase ‘learn’d spew’ for my title, because prose like this exhibits not learning, but the repetition of that which has been obediently learned by rote, and brought up half-digested. Her abstract has been put through what Camille Paglia called “the meat grinder of hack work gibberish”. It's depressing to think that the person who wrote this rebarbative mess, which they had three years to finesse and sophisticate, is now in a position judge and mark the prose of others.
To show that such writing can come from the highest echelons of English studies, here is a typical paragraph from Judith Butler, one that won first prize in Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing contest:
“The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.”
Five subordinate clauses, two main clauses and a scattering of adverbial phrases. And that’s before you have to cope with the vocabulary. There’s no evidence that Butler could write clearly if she wanted to, but this is deliberately opaque, bad writing, intended to prevent anyone even trying to make sense of it.
All disciplines in the humanities have their own lexicons and literary studies is no exception: it’s a specialist discipline with an ever-changing specialist language used to discuss it. But Louks, in addition to her mimetic sesquipedalianism, also uses modish, activist buzzwords, not the language of literary scholarship. This is the other lexicon you’ll find in any number of English Phd abstracts and proposals produced over the past fifteen years or so: ‘queer’, colonial’, ‘decolonialise’, ‘intersectional’, ‘gender’, ‘power structures’, ‘colonial legacies’, ‘social reproduction’.... a ritual incantation of cant, adverting to fealty to a faux-ideology.
Theses such as Louks’s are manifestations of herdthink, so many academic moos. The innevitable ‘intersectional’ comes from the American Critical Race Theory of Kimberly Crenshaw, whilst ‘misogynoir’ comes from the writings of BLM activist Moira Bailey: her work was in reference specifically to the treatment of black women online, but like most of the claims put out by BLM, even this proved to be statistically wrong. And in the real world - the one which Louks will never inhabit - the misogyny to which black women are subject comes in the main from black men. (Ironically, the larping of the middle classes as revolutionaries over the past 15 years has done more harm to actual left-wing causes and thus the communities they act on behalf of than the right could ever have hoped for.)
With her thesis and her tweets, Louks seems to be trying to create a comic character, academia’s Tatania Mcgrath. On the day of Trumps inauguration, she tweeted: “Just want to send support and solidarity to any of my American followers who have been made to feel unsafe these past few days.” At first this might just seem the clownish stuff of satire, but as an English don she is supposedly a guardian of language, and here she has grotesquely distorted the meaning of the word ‘unsafe’, albeit as a craven, virtue-signaling prophylactic against social ostracism. How is one to take her other uses and judgments of language seriously if she is willing to casually do such violence to it, to histrionically catastrophise and exaggerate in order to obtain social approval? In Spinozan terms, those who use language in the way that Ally Louks uses it, who automaton-like repeat every woke mantra, have a such a paucity of self-determination and independence of thought, such an insubstantiality of existence, that they are not merely not-free, but barely exist as humans qua humans. For such people, with their flags and pronouns in their X bios, who who have been hysterically caught up in each successive mania of the past few years, to say 'I' is almost an impertinence.
This activist language, like the tired language of Critical Theory, is signal and entry key, caste-language and secret handshake, serving as a sign that those who use it want to enter the elite progressive world. Louks is an upper middle class beneficiary of structural class inequalities, busy producing the symbolic capital that allows her entrance into the parasitic world of progressive elites, and is particularly abhorrent in the way that she rides opportunistically on the back of the genuinely marginalised. ‘Marginalised peoples’, the impoverished and radically subaltern, do not use the language of middle-class activists, and the practical help Louks will ever give to the marginalised or poor will amount to absolutely nothing - it’s doubtful that she’ll ever even meet any working-class black women except to be served by them.
This inactive activism pretends to be part of a wider social revolt external to the academy, but the very style that in which it is written means it will never (thankfully) go beyond it. The anti-racism and prosociality of upper middle-class academics, like that of the bourgeoisie in the third sector, is feigned, and tthey act only in their own self-interest, for preferment and pelf. Through her thesis Louks is ingratiating herself with elite gatekeepers in order herself to become an elite gatekeepe.
As English departments shrink and opportunities to teach become scarcer, competition for academic posts becomes fiercer, and so nepotism and shows of ideological fealty become more and more important, which is why so many theses display the opportunistic conformism, the admixture of devilry and stupidity, evinced in Louks’s abstract. Not blind, unthinking mimicry, but deliberate, self-serving mimicry. The result is that English departments, like other public bodies and cultural institutions, end up being dominated by activists, who consolidate their power through the possession and dissemination of this new symbolic capital, and go on to destroy those bodies and institutions from the inside. ('Activist scholarship' is as oxymoronic as 'activist art' or 'trans-inclusive feminist').
Here is a taster of what you’ll come across from today’s English lecturers:” My work is inflected by feminist, Marxist, critical race and queer theory as ways to imagine a world that moves beyond white, heteronormative patriarchy ...I write about Marx as a philologist, critical theorist and Marxist ... I reinterpret Marx’s theory of value to show how it provides the basis for a new, ore capacious style of Marxist literary criticism ... Reading trans, queer, Indigenous and diasporic poetries from the US ... a feminist reading method attuned to the ways social forms are shaped by capital’s inner logics and tendencies ... Marxist studies of racialisation, relating to black feminist methodologies ... I wrote about performativity, temporality, capital, and queerness as utopia ... primary research specialisation are black feminist studies in cultural theory ... with particular focus on the ethics of representation, migration and the Uks hostile environment ... its four interconnecting parts are ‘transing queer reading’... ‘reading queer ecologies’, ‘queer reading as practise’ and ‘reading queer futures’ ... exposes the ways postcolonial partition territories were always in the process of spatial reproduction, which determines identity so that it is understood as identification.” And so on and so on and so on.
This kind of thing is not blanket across the whole field, but is fast becoming dominant. The politicisation of English departments is nothing new, and political correctness within them has been decried since the 80s, notably by Harold Bloom, and by Camille Paglia in the 90s, as Critical Theory took hold on campuses. But this politicisation has gone into overdrive and become more extreme with the intake of staff since since the ‘Great Awokening’, and the increasingly baleful influence of Critical Race Theory, decolonisation, and Queer theory: a Cultural Revolution has taken place, and some of its Red Guards are esconced in university English departments. As long ago as the mid-70s departments were filling up with those who self-identified as Marxists, convinced that producing a stream of Marxist interpretations of literary texts somehow makes one a revolutionary (which is not to say they that some weren't excellent writers and didn't produce good work).
A good example to ilustrate how far back these tendencies go is Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. This essay, and the notion of 'the male gaze' seems entirely oblivious to the nature of cinema and of the dynamics of cinema audiences, and of the film noir genre. A very clever child could savage it, but not only does it pass muster, it is considered iconic and is still taught to undergraduates. She writes as if a visit to a cinema is actually a visit to a porn cinema, as if the motives and reactions of male cinemagoers are wholly libidinal, whereas women (who outnumbered male visitors three to one during the era of classic cinema she focues on) going into cinemas entirely lacking one, seemingly oblivious to one of the reasons for the success of a Clark Gable or Robert Mitchum.
With comic predictability, it eventually led to the ideas of 'the colonial gaze' and the 'white gaze'. Mulvey's piece, relying on clumsy misapprehensions of Freud and Lacan, is proleptic not just because it is terrible yet nevertheless celebrated, but also because Mulvey writes as if she loathes the medium she's discussing - over the years this attitude has become more and more prevalent, and is clearly present in Louk’s work, that attitude whereby the purpose of the research is to disclose the moral failings in the (largely white, male) creators of a text or artwork, rather than to formally analyse it. Reading the titles of papers by, and research interests of many English academics you get the impression that they hate much literature and many of its creators.
It is not Louks’s thesis that’s the real problem, but the fact that it was considered acceptable, that someone actually passed unreadable prose like this, something indicative of corruption in Higher Education at this level, for one such paper can lead to a comfortable, upper middle class living. The truth is Phd’s have always largely been bought, in that their fees, and the cost of living without earning for three years, creates an enormous financial barrier, which is why the majority of those that undertake them are middle class, and why most English lecturers are also middle class. Higher education has always given off a rank stench of class privilege, and even scholarships to help with costs given to various victim groups tend to go to middle class people within them.
To these financial barriers to higher education have now been added what are fast becoming insurmountable ideological and linguistic barriers. If a Phd proposal is not ‘woke’, doesn’t have some element of activism, isn’t informed by Marxism, Marxist-feminism, Queer Theory, decolonisation (a deliberately misleading misnomer), Critical Race Theory and so on, there will, these days, be difficulty getting it approved, or put forward for funding. The main funding body for the humanities is the highly politicised AHRC, and if one looks at what Phds (and other projects) it funds, it reads like satire – the same progressive shibboleths and overused activist buzzwords appearing in title after title, abstract after abstract, all written in the same tortuous, try-too-hard prose.
Like the Arts Council, the AHRC is now an active element of the progressive middle-class’s grotesquely distorted version of communism, whereby the despised proletariat has its wealth taken from it in the form of taxes, which is then redistributed to this parasitic sector of the bourgeoisie, otherwise known as ‘the blob’, taking in civil service departments, consultancies, advisory bodies, NGOs, charities, trusts, think tanks, sections of the mainstream media that propaganidises for it, most of the cultural sector and now, increasingly, academia. Potential artists, and now academics, are forced to play up to ideological expectations in order to obtain their funding (most artists in the UK have a second job of making applications for grants, residencies and so on), and this demand for uniformity and ideological obedience innevitably leads to fraudulent, dishonest art and scholarship.
What irked me most about Louks was not so much her abstract, or even the condescending, self-regarding and disingenuous way she responded to criticism, but the fact that she has *preferred pronouns in her X bio, and that she repeatedly claimed there is a genocide taking place in Palestine. This, in common with the lexicon of her abstract, amounts to an opportunistic conformism, a cynical toadying intended to help her 'get on', and to obtain social credit. Like all the (exclusively) middle-class people who claim it is the case, Louks is lying, and cannot possibly believe that ‘trans women are women’, which is the idea with which the imbecilic display of preferred pronouns is intended to indicate agreement, or 'allyship'. Likewise, the idea of genocide in Gaza has been debunked repeatedly since the first time the claim was made (absurdly, only hours after the conflict began), and is also something which Louks cannot possibly believe.
These are no small matters for someone whose metier is language: Louks proved that she’s willing to use language in bad faith for social prestige, to be considered part of what she thinks of as the 'ingroup', to the extent of supporting the profound misogyny and homophobia of trans ideology, and taking part in anti-Semitism by proxy with her crass barbarity-chic.
As for her supposed take on maladour, Louks claims that disgust at foul smells emitted by humans is an “unhelpful emotion”. In the first place it isn’t an emotion at all, it is a physiological reaction hardwired into the brain, and an inescapable fact of social life. There’s an enormous body of work on the phenomenology of smell, and on disgust, that spans across evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychology, anthropology, psychology and social history, and the main point about this disgust is precisely that it is ‘helpful’. To claim that it is not entails rejecting the findings of whole disciplines (I doubt very much that the works of Mary Douglas and Norbert Elias are cited in Louks’s thesis, but get the feeling Moira Bailey and Judith Butler will be at some point, and that evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology make no appearance whatsoever). It’s helped us advance as a species, there is a neuroscience behind it, and visceral disgust for a bad odor has been part of humanity’s escape from disease, as well as part of the West’s long ‘civilising process’. The ability to detect disease, infection, corruption and dirt, our repugnance for bad smells, are survival mechanisms that have helped us avoid sources of infection and contamination.
Louks pretends to see smell through the distorting lens of a racialised Marxist Critical Theory such that she can claim that people only think they’ve perceived an odour out of pure prejudice. However, to pursue ‘olfactory racism’ as a new branch of woke victimology she is going to have slim pickings, for as a thing that operates in the world in this way – and in texts - it is insignificant to say the least. ** In my experience, too, people are generally tolerant of maladour.
Aversion to malodour and ascribing it to the Other is universal, found across all cultures. This is not just a trivial matter of some black people saying online that white people smell like pennies – all non-whites when they have come into contact with whites historically have ascribed malodour to them (and vice versa). The phrase ‘looks like they smell’ which Louks singled out for criticism in tweets may seem like a casual, malicious insult, but the human eye and brain have evolved to detect uncleanness from the smallest visual signs and the ascription is likely to be accurate, it being aimed generally at those whose photographs contain visual information indicative of potential pong.
This whole affair reeks not just of privilege, but also of impatient worldly ambition: Louks's X account was monetised and she made it known she was looking for both a job and book deal, and she comes across as desperate to become part of Britain's smug commentary circuit as soon as she can, which is fitting, as that circuit is yet another de facto welfare system for rich kids. Louks on her X bio describes herself as a 'smell commentator' as if she already has a column or show, whereas in fact she still limited to her X posts. Whether the fact that she cannot write comprehensible sentences in English will make any difference to her progress remains to be seen. It's unlikely that it will, for you don't need to be particularly perceptive to recognise that the medium Louks is most interested in is not the written word but television, with more of an eye to becoming the next Alice Roberts than the Judith Butler of olfaction.
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* Just as Amelia Louks did not have preferred pronouns on her bio five years ago, in another five years’ time they will be gone, and for the same reasons. You sometimes see it asked on X whether or not you’d date someone with preferred pronouns, but an equally valid question would be would you date someone who once had preferred pronouns. Finding out that a partner had voluntarily used them would be like tearing off their false face to reveal circuitry underneath, or a writhing mass of alien tentacles.
'Preferred pronouns' illustrate well the curious fact (one that makes you reassess what is meant by ‘intelligence’) that it is the ‘educated’ middle classes that historically have proved the most credulous and have been swept up in social contagions, mass delusions and crazed ideologies, from theosophy to Wicca, from Western Maoism to Lacanian psychotherapy, from trans ideology to Nazism (which was a middle-class affair and one which swept through academia: those who burnt books were university students and lecturers, and many senior Einsatzgruppen had Phds).
Perhaps there is a neuroscientific explanation for this weakness for fads, following and mimicry, some link between midwittery and conformism. As I read them, I get the eerie sense of something blindly phsyiological taking place within the liberal commentariat, something over which they have no control, an unconscious, ventriloquial force. The groupthink and herd-like behaviour of the progressive middle-classes, and the repetitive sameness of woke academia, puts me in mind of a haunting passage from E T A Hoffman's The Sandman: "...the story of the automaton had taken root, and a dreadful mistrust of human figures seeped into their souls. In order to be completely convinced that they were not in love with a wooden doll, quite a few lovers demanded that their beloved sing something off key or dance out of step, that they embroider and knit while being read to, or play with the little pug; above all they demanded that they not just listen, but also say something in such a way as to demonstrate that their words came from actual thought and feeling. As a result, the loving bond of many couples grew stronger than ever, while others quietly drifted apart."
** Several times over the years whilst living in London a bus-stinker boarded the bus and people opened windows, retched, fled upstairs or got off at the next stop gasping for air and oh-Jesus-Christing – but I never once saw anyone say or do anything unpleasant or bullying to the person responsible for the reek. In the early 2000s I had, for a period, to catch the tube to Farringdon every morning from King's Cross. Each morning a dumpy little Indian bag lady in late middle age, with her bag full of bags, would take a seat on the bench at the end of the platform, or stand beside it if it was full (I haven't seen a bag lady in at least 15 years: presumably improved mental health services led to their decline as a social phenomenon). The near-emetic stench that came from her person was unimaginably awful, a thing of not just olfaction, but one of gustation, too. It was amusing to watch people who didn't know better swiftly scatter and shoot away from her and leave the bench and its environs retching, swearing and gasping, and amusing not just to me: following this expulsion she would rock herself backward and forwards in an exaggerated mime of hilarity. (I wonder if she was taking a kind of malodorous revenge on the world, on the circumstances that had led her to flee into the sanctuary of madness).But the point is that never once did I hear anyone berate, reproach or insult her.
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