From The Atlantic:
When people use the academic term problematic, they should say what they’re objecting to.
Academics like me love to describe things as “problematic.” But what do we mean? We’re not saying that the thing in question is unsolvable or even difficult. We’re saying—or implying—that it is objectionable in some way, that it rests uneasily with our prior moral or political commitments.
For instance, when I described applying Ancient Greek free-speech ideals to social media as “problematic” in a recent article, I wasn’t saying that Socrates’s audience was impossible to please. I was saying that these practices were premised on exclusion in a way that modern egalitarians won’t like. Or when my Oxford colleague Amia Srinivasan describes stand-up comedy in Los Angeles as “problematic,” she’s not saying that she struggled to understand the jokes. She’s saying that they relied on sexism in a way that she—and everyone—should find morally bad.
In principle, every usage of the term problematic should be followed by an explanation. Is the situation or person in question unjust, immoral, or unfair? Racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted? Wrongheaded, perhaps, or just plain wrong? All too often, the explanation never comes.
Snark artists on Tumblr have parodied pretentious, pejorative uses of problematic for years. Yet today, they are as popular in mainstream publications as with professors. According to a recent article in Scientific American, JEDI is “problematic” as an acronym for “Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion” initiatives because, among other issues, the Jedi protagonists in Star Wars employ “toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution.” Elsewhere, we’re told that the facial features of Bond villains are “problematic” because they cast aspersions on people with disfigurements, or that West Virginia’s long history with the coal industry is “problematic”—at least,according to members of the Rockefeller family.
Which other academic buzzword can boast of going so decisively and pervasively mainstream? Conventionally, problematic just means “presenting a problem or difficulty,” a usage that The Oxford English Dictionary traces back to 1609. But this definition can’t explain the word’s current popularity.
Like the verb problematize, the adjective problematic came into its own in the 1980s with the importation of French structuralism into American academia. The philosopher and historian Michel Foucault presented “problematization” as a process whereby something previously taken for granted comes to be understood as a problem to be addressed.
We ultimately owe problematic, however, not to Foucault, but to his Marxist colleague Louis Althusser, for whom the phrase la problematique described a structured, theoretical system through which ideas are processed. Incidentally, Althusser also strangled his wife, Hélène Rytmann, to death in 1980. The fact that many who embrace his terminology today would now reflexively describe Althusser himself as “problematic”—instead of “misogynistic” or “violent”—illustrates how successfully the word has slipped the bonds of social theory to become an all-purpose term not of art but of opprobrium.
Problematic may have escaped the academy, but scholars and teachers still bear a lot of responsibility for its current use. Like any casual Twitter user, academics use problematic as an innuendo, or better yet, an “insinuendo.” Rhetorically, this usage divides our audiences between those who know already what our commitments are—in many cases because, on a politically homogeneous campus, they share them—and so are presumptively in the know about what we find objectionable. To this audience, problematic indicates where the problem is; they do not need to be told what it is.
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In effect, problematic communicates that those who don’t share our commitments at the outset are not wortharguing with, let alone persuading. It relies on a subtle sort of bullying in place of mutual justification. It excludes,rather than explains.
Link to the rest at The Atlantic