‘Learn’d spew’: Ally Louks, opportunistic conformism, and the death of English studies

Pepe le Pew, a member of the marginalised skunk community, about to experience olfactory prejudice

When Ally Louks created a Twitter storm after announcing 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, the subject having being covered in books and papers across disciplines for decades (William Miller’s 1997 book The Anatomy of Disgust examines disgust as a way to maintain social hierarchies, Alain Corbin's classic study The Foul and the Fragrant is almost 40 years old, and Classen et al's Aroma: the Cultural History of Smell is now 30 years old).

To defend herself from criticism and mockery Louks, in response, posted the abstract for her thesis online. It proved to be an egregious example of mimetic, boiler-plate academese, giving an insight as to why the numbers choosing to study English literature are at their lowest ever, and dwindling year by year, with departments being scrapped or reduced in size. 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 probably 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 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 cliched vector of race and gender theory, and social justice activism? People conflate jargon with specialist idiolects: the latter are reasonable and to be expected in any academic discipline, but jargon is a synonym for gibberish, a word describing debased language. A specialist idiolect can become jargon in the mouths of the wrong people, through fraudulence, intellectual over-reach, or idiocy.

Louks dishonestly tried to create the false victim-narrative that her critics were mostly male and uneducated, whereas many 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 and muting spree. One of these, the New Statesman's Ella Dorn wrote on her blog: “You shouldn’t send rape threats to PhDs or tell them to have babies instead, but you are allowed to be pissed off if you like literature and if those at its highest echelon are using the opportunity to shoehorn 2014 politics into past work rather than actually discovering or doing anything interesting .... A person who is at the forefront of national intellectual life should be able to construct a thesis that is beyond the intellectual reach of the editorial teams at Bustle or the Huffington Post circa 2014.”

Her abstract is no mere matter of infelicitous phrasing: I put each sentence of its first half into the Hemingway app, and each one scored very highly for unreadability, only 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, liek a parody of a postgraduate abstract, although it has to be said, there are much worse.

The banality-veiling, obfuscating jargon that such texts comprise is exclusionary, and is meant to be so, its opacity intended 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 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 its language is necessarily recondite and difficult 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, and 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 words that you'll find repeated ad nauseam in countless 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’, and ‘interrogates' (never just ‘asks’). Of course, there's a word split into two by parentheses, '(dis)pleasurable': this tic has been around since the late 80s and has been as hackneyed as 'herstory' for decades, but still appears in may PhD and book titles. The Bronte Sisters in other Wor(l)ds was one I spotted recently, or how about this perfect storm of imbecility: Queering babies (Auto)ethnographic reflections from a gay parent through surrogacy. 'Ecologies’, 'modalities', 'problematise', and ‘liminal’ are also part of this pre-set lexicon. But these words have a significance beyond their meaning: they are counters used for a text to be accepted as contemporary academese. Such silliness should raise a rueful, indulgent smile and a shake of the head from someone marking undergraduate work, but for prose like this to be endemic at PhD level constitutes a crisis.

This kind of writing, strewn with specious multisyllabic glitter intended to beguile readers, 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 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 game of academic Chinese whispers, into an occluding opacity, or as Hegel put it, "erudition begins with ideas and ends with ordures". The peer-reviewing of articles in this discipline has become a closed, self-affirming, self-nourising coprophiliac circle, excreting and ingesting the same orthodoxies year after year.

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 she had three years to finesse and sophisticate, is now in a position judge and mark the prose of others. Some slack ought maybe be cut for Louks because she was trying to impress to pass, and so some grandliloquence is understandable. It was also natural to want to please and imitate her supervisors, one of whom also writes in this style. Louks may actually be able to write, but it's more likely that her thesis is written in the same as-if-parodic style as its abstract. This perhaps why there is an embargo on the release of her thesis until at least 2028, and only 47 people have thus far been given permission to read it.

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 thus far 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.

Louks, in addition to her mimetic sesquipedalianism, also uses modish, activist buzzwords, rather than 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 fealty to a faux-ideology. Theses such as Louks’s are manifestations of herdthink, so many academic moos. The comically 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.

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 backs 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 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.

As English departments shrink and opportunities to teach become scarcer, and competition more fierce, so nepotism and shows of ideological fealty become increasingly important, which is why so many theses display the opportunistic conformism exhibited in Louks’s abstract. Not blind, unthinking mimicry, but deliberate, self-serving mimicry, which has the egregious result of further eroding objectivity and the barrier between scholarship and activism. 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 who destroy those bodies and institutions from the inside.

Here is a taster of what you’ll come across from today’s English PhD candidates and 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, more capacious style of Marxist literary criticism ... 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 specialisations are black feminist studies in cultural theory, with particular focus on the ethics of representation, migration and the UK's 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 ... My work is inflected by feminist, Marxist, critical race and queer theory as ways to imagine and materialise a world that moves beyond white, heteronormative patriarchy and the systemic structures that endorse its prejudices and ideological investments ... intervene in the fields of Caribbean studies, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, and feminist cultural studies" by "examining the interconnections between Caribbean (im)material cultures of fluidity and the politics of quotidian island life ...My academic career is driven by the interlocking projects of inclusivity, student support, queer pedagogy, queer research, and institutional transformation.” And so on and so on and so on.

This kind of language has spread like a gangrene through the humanities, and there is only one discipline where the pus is as toxic and pungent and that is in Queer Studies, slavering, monstrous offpsring of Postmodernism, the deranged apotheosis of subjective idealism. English Studies and Queer Studies in the UK and US are now closely intricated, and Judith Butler is the prime exemplar of this link (the discipline began, however, in the UK, at Sussex University, with Alan Sinfield). This ideologically determined language-use is not blanket across the whole field, but is fast becoming dominant. Over the years, it has become harder and harder for an undergraduate to avoid Critical Theory and radical politics, just as it has become difficult for postgraduates to have research approved that is not inflected by one or both of them.

The politicisation and political correctness of English departments is nothing new, and 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 they have now gone into overdrive and become more extreme with the intake of staff since 2014 and the baleful influence of Critical Race Theory, decolonisation, Queer theory and, most recently, BLM. As long ago as the mid-70s departments were filling up with those who self-identified as Marxists, convinced that producing Marxist interpretations of literary texts somehow makes one a revolutionary, and who see no contradiction between self-declaring as Marxist whilst putting all one's energy into entering and maintaining one's position within the upper-middle-class via academia (which is not to say they that some weren't some who produced intersting, good work).

It is not Louks’s thesis that’s the real problem, but the fact that it was considered acceptable, that someone actually passed unreadable, cackhanded prose like this, something indicative of corruption in Higher Education at this level, for one such paper can lead to a comfortable, lifelong 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 those groups (nepotism is rifer than ever, and I personally know of three people whose PhDs were marked by close personl friends).

To these financial barriers to higher education have now been added insurmountable ideological and linguistic barriers. 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. If some English departments give the impression of being woke madrassas it is in no small part due to research-funding decisions over the years by the AHRC, and other funding bodies such as the Leverhulme Trust and the British Council.

Like the Arts Council, the AHRC is now one element of the progressive middle-class’s grotesque upside-down version of communism, whereby the despised proletariat has its wealth taken from it in the form of taxes, which are 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, and this demand for uniformity and ideological obedience innevitably leads to fraudulent, dishonest art and scholarship.

What irked me most about Louks in particular 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. This, like 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'. This no small matter for someone whose metier is language: Louks proved that she’s willing to use language in bad faith for social prestige, in order to be considered part of what she thinks of as the socially dominant 'ingroup'.

As for her 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, and I doubt that that evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology make an appearance in Louks's thesis. 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 writing on X 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, 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 commentariat as soon as possible. It didn't seem to bother her that her social media celebrity allowed her to leapfrog  to a book deal over other young academics doing interesting and original work, with a trail of peer-reviewed articles and years of teaching behind them. Indeed, on the anniversaary of her tweet, she posted that it was the post, and not her PhD, that had "allowed er to build the life " she'd always"dreamed of". On her X bio she describes herself as a 'smell commentator' as if she already has a column or show, whereas in reality such commentary is 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 that 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 reason as they appeared. You sometimes see it asked on X whether or not you’d date someone who uses preferred pronouns, but an equally valid question is would you date someone who once had preferred pronouns. Finding out that a partner had once voluntarily used them would be like tearing off their false face to reveal circuitry underneath, or a writhing mass of alien tentacles.

†Several times over the years whilst living in London a bus-stinker boarded the bus on which I was travelling and passengers 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 work every day from King's Cross to Farringdon. 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 . 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 flight 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, and would wager that had anyone done so, they would have been the one subject to censure from bystanders.

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