Academics behaving "badly" (regarding profanity)

I am fascinated by those instances in which scholars "break" with the norms of academic prose and interject surprising images or words into their texts--the more highly theoretical the work is otherwise, the more interesting the rhetorical effect of a well placed "damn" or some such "improper" utterance is. I am, in fact, in the process of collecting these examples as I run across them, hoping to make some kind of conclusion about their place in academic discourse (a genre that itself is beset by conflicting definitions--it is safe to say, I think, that those of us who are pushing against the boundaries of academic writing are, in this posthuman age, almost unsure at this point where those boundaries lie any more). The following example comes from Donna Haraway, in a chapter from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women entitled "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective," in which she explores feminist objectivity--this quote is taken from a compelling section on "vision" as a metaphor:

"And like the god-trick, this eye fucks the world to make techno-monsters" (189).

For some background, Haraway is a biologist whose interests also intersect with the humanities--primarily what we in the humanities might term "medium studies"--and her work that I am most familiar with is that on cyborg feminisms. Her prose is rich/dense, and I marvel at just how much revision she must have gone through to consistently produce sentences such as this:

"In our efforts to climb the greased pole leading to a usable doctrine of objectvity, I and most other feminists of the objectivity debates have alternatively, even simultaneously, held onto both ends of the dichotomy, which Harding describes in terms of successor science projects versus postmodern accounts of difference and I have sketched in this chapter as radical constructivism versus feminist critical empiricism" (188).

In order to "get" Haraway, you need a good deal of critical theory behind you (i.e. a basic understanding of Marx, Derrida, and Lacan is essential). Point being, if you spend a morning reading Haraway (as I did today), and go on to pick up Kenneth Burke later (as I also did), reading Burke will feel like zipping through a Dick and Jane novel. (And Burke is also fascinatingly, relentlessly metadiscursive, which is a topic for another post.) But this is not to say that she is dense in an off-putting way--quite the contrary--her work operates on such a high level theoretically that I constantly feel I have to stretch to fully understand her and effectively apply her to my own work (a journey that is well worth the effort).

But what does this all have to do with the eye that "fucks the world to make techno-monsters"? Precisely this: Haraway depends on a keen rhetorical sense in order to make her multiple perspectives and positions converge in a text that is understandable, even enlightening--she made a choice to use the "f" word (no, not "feminism"-the other one) in the context of vision as a metaphor for the masculinist "gaze" that lords over much technological innovation. She simply had no other way to convey this fact, and pushed the boundaries of depersonalized academic prose a little further.