Comedy & Philosophy

[Retinend]

Habermas and Foucault were raising issues in epistemology that fit with what was going on at Anglophone departments.

What, really? I hope he had more insight into epistemology than to the world and human beings and why they do the things they do.

And I hate it when people defend the Post Structuralists by saying they were 'demonstrating' their problems with 'language'. Firstly, demonstrating your inability to express something is one of the strangest arguments taken seriously by intelligent people - you have to pretend that the best way to learn something is to learn it as a subtext to a torturous and stultifying reading experience? You have to value aggressive verbosity over clarity and insight? Also, 'language', the continentals didn't know a fucking thing about Linguistics. They took the linguistics of De Saussure as an appropriate representative of that science... writing in the 1960s? And then they didn't even understand what he was saying (the beginning of 'Of Grammatology' is bizarre to anyone who has read a non-PM account of Saussure).

From my point of view, all of them had the same interest in language as an artist does in, say, a beautiful landscape. They are fascinated by it but in a way that reacts hostile to any notion of dissecting their first heady impressions. Only a better art analogy would be to modern art. The cult brought the wilful ignorance of the romantics with the moderns distain for anything deemed 'quaint' and 'unchallenging'. I just feel most sorry for poor Literature undergrads who dutifully pepper their essays with jargon and halfalutin mediocrities like Barthes and hand it in to an academic who can find any fault they like with their 'theorising' from the jumbled, contradictory holy texts of Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Eco, Foucault, Jameson, whoever.

[jutl]

And I hate it when people defend the Post Structuralists by saying they were 'demonstrating' their problems with 'language'. Firstly, demonstrating your inability to express something is one of the strangest arguments taken seriously by intelligent people - you have to pretend that the best way to learn something is to learn it as a subtext to a torturous and stultifying reading experience? You have to value aggressive verbosity over clarity and insight?

If you are starting from the position that expressing insight in language is unproblematic then I can see why you would object. I don't think that many PMs would agree with you though. I think you're right to say that PMs are essentially expressing an aesthetic mistrust of the purported simplicity of language. It's a similar reaction to the Lovecraftian suspicion of cosmology.

[Retinend]

Thanks. I wouldn't say I think expressing insight in language is unproblematic, but if you want to know the types of actually demonstrable limitations of language[nb]I recommend 'Metaphors We Live By', which is mindbending and is very readable for the laylinguist[/nb] then you can investigate it, using the work of linguists, and have a better understanding of it. You see the ways in which people conflate and logically muddle their way through everyday conversation, yourself included. You also see the miraculous ways in which we draw interpretations from the smallest alterations in the speech sounds produced, and how acutely developed our methods of communication are. The PMs aren't interested in this sort of study of language, though, they actually mean that academic writing is unable to communicate. They saw the ideas of 'signifer' and 'signified' as a key to unwravelling the last barrier to complete relativity - our ability to share thoughts and communicate meaningfully and cooperatively.

[jutl]

Thank you for your gracious explanation.

[Petey Pate]

I just feel most sorry for poor Literature undergrads who dutifully pepper their essays with jargon and halfalutin mediocrities like Barthes and hand it in to an academic who can find any fault they like with their 'theorising' from the jumbled, contradictory holy texts of Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Eco, Foucault, Jameson, whoever.

Have you ever heard of the Post-Modernism Generator? It's a computer programme that randomly generates essays with completely meaningless arguments using all of the appropriate jargon as used by the theorists you've listed.  There's a online version of it here.

Of similar note is a hoax successfully pulled off by a Physics professor, Alan Sokal, in which an academic cultural studies journal published an entirely nonsensical article on quantum physics that he had written, without any kind of peer review. He later co-wrote a book (which I haven't read) called Impostures Intellectuelles/Fashionable Nonsense.

On topic to this thread, one example that came to mind was Simon Munnery's League Against Tedium character.  I believed that he was mainly based on Nietzsche, though I'm not well read enough to draw any specific comparisons. 

[Lollypopthecat]

I'd just like to say Candide by Voltaire.

Also...
"Though sadly I couldn't find the Cleese/Miller version"

I'm surprised at that, seeing as you can get on the Secret Policeman's DVD Pleasure at... and Mermaid Frolics double, and it's in nearly every charity shop I go into. If that's the one you're thinking of.

[Petey Pate]

I'd just like to say Candide by Voltaire.

Yes, someone really should have mentioned that earlier.  I read it for the first time recently and it's amazing how after 250 years its still actually pretty funny, more so than say, any Shakespeare comedy. 

[Jemble Fred]

I'm surprised at that, seeing as you can get on the Secret Policeman's DVD Pleasure at... and Mermaid Frolics double, and it's in nearly every charity shop I go into. If that's the one you're thinking of.

I meant an online clip.

[garbed_attic]

As a chap who took a literature and film undergraduate degree and then a film and literature MA, I feel downright conflicted about post-modernist critics. Certainly, a belief that language is slippery and that arguments based on moral or even aesthetic dichotomies will tend to contain a chink or flaw, enabling the argument to be unravelled, seems reasonable.

Also, Sokal's experiment strikes me as being similar to Rosenhan's 'On Being Insane in Insane Places', in which Rosenhan sought to the institution of psychiatry through proving that psychiatrists would read madness into non-existent symptoms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosenhan_experiment

To my mind, the experiment proves that those institutions and their staff who admitted the patients and were then unable to later recognise them as being sane, were over-zealous and lacked rigour in their diagnostic criteria, but the experiment fails to devalue psychiatry as a whole. What about those who had been successfully diagnosed and treated? Maybe, Rosenhan picked a bad bunch of institutions and staff?

Similarly, Sokal's experiment proves that one academic journal was duped and that a rigorous peer-review system is essential to maintain standards of excellence. However, the failings of one academic journal hardly speak for the failings of every academic journal. His Fashionable Nonsense, from what I have read of it (googlebooks lets you read some from free) illustrates convincingly that a number of post-modern academics use scientific terminology, ideas and equations without actually understanding the concepts which they are dealing with.

Now, I haven't read all the academics that Sokal criticises - not by any means, but I have read some, Baudrillard in particular. Baudrillard's The System of Objects, for example, has moments of absolute lucid brilliance and then moments of law dropping Claim Making, in which arguments are disputed with no proof and spurious (or simply non-existence) evidence.

For example, I was impressed by his discussion of antiques as second-order signifiers that are merely symbols of their own antiquity. It's a good explanation for why something that seemingly has no aesthetic or sentimental value whatsoever can still reach prices of thoughs on The Antiques Roadshow. He later goes on to talk about gadgets and how ergonomics can become distorted to such a degree that a 'hyper-functional' cheese-grater with a nylon knuckle-moulded handle and a adjustable-angled slicing mechanism, actually becomes much more difficult to use than a basic, bog-standard cheese grater. Function becomes an aestheticised sub-set of style. The word 'functional' in such advertising rhetoric no longer bares any resemblance to making something more user-friendly. It coems a second-order signifier. OK, not revolutionary arguments, but useful and compelling ones back from the 60s when advertising and design were becoming increasingly lucrative industries and needed to be deflated a little.

However, The System of Objects was also Baudrillard's doctoral thesis and his supervisor was Jacques Lacan. So, seemingly to appease his supervisor, there's a part of the work where he discredits Melanie Klein (psycho-therapist who had a spat with Freud's daughter and was one of the first to psycho-analyse children) with no argument whatsoever. Now, Lacan propounded the notion of a 'return to Freud' and felt that object-relations theorists had distorted Freud's work and should be discredited. Thus, because Lacan says that Klein should be discredited, Baudrillard (wanting a good mark off Lacan) discredits Klein. No argument.

The problem is of course, that while Freud liked to see himself as a scientist and anthropologist, there's massive speculative in his work and whole theories drawn from single case studies (ironically, like Sokal only submitting his paper to one journal and drawing a conclusion that all post-modern academia is rubbish!) However, Lacan holds Freud up to be a holy cow. In turn, Baudrillard holds Lacan up, holds Frued up to be a holy cow etc.

Basically, you can read these people and take away some interesting and convincing arguments, but you always have to read through wanton claim-making and the rash, ill-thought-through use of scientific ideas which haven't been understood. It's sometimes hard to take a critic seriously when you know they have a propensity for wild, groundless rhetoric.

[Petey Pate]

As a chap who took a literature and film undergraduate degree and then a film and literature MA, I feel downright conflicted about post-modernist critics.

Funnily enough I'm an undergraduate in the same subject, though I've dropped film for my second year for a number of reasons, mainly due to dissatisfaction with the course.

Basically, you can read these people and take away some interesting and convincing arguments, but you always have to read through wanton claim-making and the rash, ill-thought-through use of scientific ideas which haven't been understood. It's sometimes hard to take a critic seriously when you know they have a propensity for wild, groundless rhetoric.

Well put. I wouldn't argue that there's no merit at all in post-modernist philosophy, but it's certainly inaccessible and difficult to read.

The Rosenhan experiment sounds pretty interesting as well, will read into it. Thanks for bringing it up.

[Famous Mortimer]

Similarly, Sokal's experiment proves that one academic journal was duped and that a rigorous peer-review system is essential to maintain standards of excellence. However, the failings of one academic journal hardly speak for the failings of every academic journal. His Fashionable Nonsense, from what I have read of it (googlebooks lets you read some from free) illustrates convincingly that a number of post-modern academics use scientific terminology, ideas and equations without actually understanding the concepts which they are dealing with.

Sokal's a bit smarter than that. I've read the whole thing, as well as a bunch of other books around the subject, and he shows how, for instance, the PoMos pepper their pieces with scientific language which they neither understand or use correctly, and it's one of many instances of their arguments being so much hot air. Analyse language all you like, but so much of it seems like an attempt to move further away from understanding.

Re: your psychiatry comparison, I'd see the whole PM thing as akin to Scientology, presenting a whole alternate way of judging and healing mental illness which is a bit crap.

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

When I said that Foucault was relevant to the Anglophone debate, I only meant that he was touching on similar issues as the ones around Kuhn and Feyerabend, which were certainly a big topic in philosophy of science since the early 60s. JohnSearle and others have also engaged with Foucault's writings. But I don't mean he ever had the position of influence that he seems to have with the "cultural studies" lot.

I don't think there's anything in Archaeology Of Knowledge that wasn't discussed in the analytic world in the same period, though in a different terminology. Which is a problem for all the smug postmodern gits (and Theology graduates) who dismiss analytic philosophy based on a vague idea about "positivism", which is about 70 years out of date.

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

I think Lyotard was a bullshitter, though I can see that the Lacanians would claim that their approach to science was to take the terminology psychoanalytically, and as such they don't need to get the details right about what tensors and vectors are supposed to be, they are concerned with the imagery around the discourse. I think that's still bullshit, because psychoanalysis is bullshit, but there is a sense in which it's beside the point to say they don't get the details right.

[Zetetic]

Of similar note is a hoax successfully pulled off by a Physics professor, Alan Sokal, in which an academic cultural studies journal published an entirely nonsensical article on quantum physics that he had written, without any kind of peer review. He later co-wrote a book (which I haven't read) called Impostures Intellectuelles/Fashionable Nonsense.

It should be noted that this kind of performance is far from limited to 'cultural studies'. Similar scandals, from Wikipedia.

Sokal's a bit smarter than that. I've read the whole thing, as well as a bunch of other books around the subject, and he shows how, for instance, the PoMos pepper their pieces with scientific language which they neither understand or use correctly, and it's one of many instances of their arguments being so much hot air.

I find this description very interesting. They certainly do know how to use the 'scientific language' correctly, but only within the confines of their art. They can't use it correctly in conversation with a physicist or submitting to a physics journal. Of course, to pick on a (possible?) Sokal analogue - the Bogdanov affair - just because you can use scientific terms correctly (in so far as the papers seemed to be as legitimate as any other) in the context of getting a paper published in a theoretical physics journal still allows for you not understanding the words.

Which, to try to bring this back to comedy, is quite a common comic device - mimicking jargon, be it that of the post-modernist, or the theoretical physicist or (as it comes to my mind) the MIT mathematician, but then also making it actually understandable enough to make it apparently meaningless drivel.

Analyse language all you like, but so much of it seems like an attempt to move further away from understanding.

Hmm.

[Famous Mortimer]

Apologies, I've tried to write this sentence a bunch of times to find the best way to put it...I don't think we disagree, but I don't think they used "science" and the associated language for artistic purposes, and feel that this defence only started to be used after they were exposed (that a small number of legit scientists also don't understand the words is neither here nor there, I think).

It's not designed to get closer to understanding, I think...but then I'm raking over the same coals, and I'm not that widely read on this subject so I'll shut up. Good subject for comedy, though. Or a comic strip. "Patrick the PoMo Professor".

[Zetetic]

More apologies from me!
I don't mean as it a defence, I think. I will try to be clearer:

What is it for the kind of person who normally publishes in journals like Social Text to use a phrase like 'quantum gravity' correctly? (Let's call him 'Steve'.) Steve's practical linguistic community has quite different requirements on the use of the word, on the kind of things that are met with "That doesn't make any sense." and the things that aren't, than the linguistic community of a physicist ('Alan').

If we kill Alan and every other physicist, does that make Steve's use of 'quantum gravity' correct? I don't know.

Ok. Actually I do know. No, it wouldn't be correct, but I'm not entirely sure why.
I want to say it's because they don't know what quantum gravity really is (or would be, if there's nothing actually meeting that description) but I fear that's just me saying that "they don't know how to use 'quantum gravity' correctly" and judging by the use of a community that, frankly, they couldn't care about.

Along those lines, I'm always worried about the idea of an individual knowing about what concept or thing, seemingly referred to by a phrase or word, really is. I don't think that 'small minority of legit scientists' don't understand certain words, I wonder if a great many of them don't or even how they could be said to. What is it to understand what "Z boson" means (what a Z boson is) in the same way as understanding what a "a cup of tea" means (a cup of tea is)? The kinds of interaction that a physicist has with anything that he calls a 'Z boson' are terribly limited compared to how often he might have to use the term in conversation or publication. For the vast majority of his relevant time, to understand what a Z boson is, is simply to talk about it competently. I might say that learning to talk about a Z boson is learning what one is.

Of course, the same is probably true of a cup of tea. But there's a difference in that a cup of tea is actually present, more often than for the Z boson at least, for many more of kind utterances one would have to be able to produce and react to competently to be said to be able to talk about cups of tea.

I've rather failed at the making myself clear. (No breakfast not enough coffee.) So instead, I'll try to be brief: I do think that those that abuse scientific terminology are doing something that deserves to be shown as lacking in (a certain kind of, at least) meaning, certainly in utility. However it does make me wonder how much of understanding what something is, is the same as learning to talk about it. And where this leaves people in their own linguistic ghettos.

(At this point, this is a good sign that I've spent a number of years writing about things I don't understand on a moderately tight schedule, and where those things are actually about the world, writing them from other people's studies rather than any personal experience.)

(More rubbish:
Transcendent. That's a hard word to learn. Is learning what 'transcendent' means the same as learning to use it? (Since you can't show anyone the kind of thing that either demonstrates transcendence etc.). One the best courses I was ever taught concerned itself largely with attempting to understand when, if ever, humans consistently understood transcendence, and it worried me then, and worries me now, what that meant - really and for psychologists in this area - other than to be able to talk consistently about a hypothetical transcendent entity. )

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

I want to say it's because they don't know what quantum gravity really is (or would be, if there's nothing actually meeting that description) but I fear that's just me saying that "they don't know how to use 'quantum gravity' correctly" and judging by the use of a community that, frankly, they couldn't care about.

What's wrong with you saying that?

Your post is raising issues about understanding, the role of community acceptance, etc. which are the main business of philosophy of language in Anglo-American philosophy departments since the 60s. Which weren't "postmodernist" in any sense, and generally didn't take much notice of what Derrida and Lacan were on about.

I think what worries you here is that, according to traditional, naive empiricist theory, concepts correspond to "ideas in the mind", which are implicitly mental images. And so there is no problem with household things like cups of tea, but it's harder to account to things which we have no image for, such as bosons, or concepts like "unobserved object". Thus begins Berkeley's idealism. The antidote to which is to reject the picture-meaning theory.

The big idea with semantic externalists like Hilary Putnam and others is that what fixes mental content is the state of the environment, not any distinct mental element, and so the role of the scientific community is what mediates references from talk-about-bosons, to bosons, via the practices around it.

I think the point of journals like "Social Text" is that they approach the topic of "quantum gravity" anthropologically, as a part of a dialect that they try to assimilate to their own grand theory based in psychoanalysis, which is entirely detached from whether QG is a correct or incorrect physical theory. You can say that's bullshit, and I think it is, but there's a sense in which criticising them for "not understanding" is somewhat irrelevant. They're not trying to understand physicists in the physicist's own terms, anymore than a sceptical view of astrology takes it on the astrologer's terms. Incidentally, I don't think physics is no better than astrology. You won't find many philosophers who do think that, though you might have better luck in the sociology department.

[Zetetic]

I don't believe that my problem really is with rejecting meanings being in the head (although, granted, the cup of tea hints at that and the bits about 'understanding' a concept). It's probably a bit closer to a belief that some times baptism rights (or what have you.) are important, particularly if there's an apparent implicit pretence that you are using a term correctly with respect to a wider/different community.

And that this is probably all the more important when it comes to 'quantum gravity' or 'Z boson' where there simply isn't the trivial demonstration available (as there is with 'cup of tea', once you're a competent user of the bit and bobs required for 'demonstration'). I don't think you have to embrace mental images as a theory of meaning to accept that images really are a bloody useful tool in establishing meaning.

Broadly, I suppose I wanted to clarify why the Social Text writer should be compelled to deal with the physicist when using terms that derive from his art, that is precisely why we can say that it's bullshit.

If there is a sense in which not understanding what 'quantum gravity' means to the physicist is irrelevant (which I think I brought out by considering the limited linguistic community of the Social Text writer), then that's clearly a sense which is utterly deficient - we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the Sokal paper is bullshit.

P.S. Perhaps my concerns about there being a gap between understanding/grokking  a term and being a competent user of it can simply be turned away by accepting that there's a difference between being a really competent user and a competent user.

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

Broadly, I suppose I wanted to clarify why the Social Text writer should be compelled to deal with the physicist when using terms that derive from his art, that is precisely why we can say that it's bullshit.

I don't agree. I think we can say the Social Text project is bullshit on other grounds (about the coherence of the Lacanian approach) rather than whether it gets the details of physics right. On the latter point, SocText always has the disclaimer that they are not concerned with how the physics community understands its own language, as they are analysing that usage in their own theory, from outside.

Remember that's actually how "skeptics" approach homeopathy and astrology and other pseudo-disciplines. At least, the usual retort of convinced homeopaths etc. is that it is "judging by outside standards" and "don't understand the experience" etc. - in other words, that the subject isn't engaged on its own terms. And as long as the "skeptic" just says: "homeopathy is rubbish just because it isn't explained by current physics", then that would be a reasonable answer. However, when the skeptic points out that homeopathy doesn't actually help anyone medically, as it is claimed to, unless we tacitly accept the triviality of the whole business, then the skeptical criticism can't be answered.

We don't need to do the full training on astrology to judge if its any good, if there is a crucial argument or evidence that undermines it. With the postmodernists, the meta-argument about science goes roughly like this:

1. Underdetermination of theory by data means that no scientific theory is ever rationally justified.
2. Therefore the acceptance and development of any ST must be guided by non-rational causes: social pressures, psychological tendencies, ideology, etc.
3. Analysis of the use of scientific language brings to the surface the hidden structures.

Issues with this:
(a) 1 is just traditional scepticism (not "skepticism") as we've known it since Descartes and even earlier. There is nothing distinctively "postmodern" about it.
(b) If scepticism about science can't be answered, then it equally undermines psychoanalysis, which was originally presented by Freud as a discovery about the hidden structure of the mind.
(c) In fact the whole business about discovering hidden structures implicitly assumes the possibility of rational inquiry. So if 1 stands then 3 can't work.

So the postmodern critique of science don't work as well as the skeptical critique of pseudoscience.

[Famous Mortimer]

SocText always has the disclaimer that they are not concerned with how the physics community understands its own language, as they are analysing that usage in their own theory, from outside.

They're analysing how physicists use language? Rather than what they learn? Aaaaarrrrrggghhhhhhhh

[Zetetic]

I've also tried to read that sentence over and over again and I'm still not sure what it's driving at.

SocText are not concerned with how physicists use terms (of physics), but are concerned with analysing how physicists use language?

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

On their own terms, yeah. That's how it then goes on into psychoanalytic readings, the associations of terms and the imagery.

The working assumption of people like Bruno Latour is: no scientific theories are rationally justified, they are not accepted for on rational grounds, we can only study the social and psychological factors in the acceptance of theories. Which is how he ended up claiming that it's anachronistic to say Tutankhamun died of TB.

I'm not defending this stuff. Just trying to say what the position is, as far as I've ever been able to make it out.

[Mark Steels Stockbroker]

What we really need on this thread is an actual postmodernist, someone with a Cultural Studies degree, to wade in talk to Zetetic. Because I'm not really helping here, trying to say what I think it's about and also mixing in why I think it's wrong, in the process running across a range of different people who might not be saying the same things.

However, I think I'm correct in saying that Bruno Latour treats science in the same way that Skeptics treat fans of homeopathy or Tarot: it is assumed the ideas are unjustified, and the inquiry is then into the psychology of how belief in them arises. I'm not sure that is the position of Social Text, but here's their website.

Social Text covers a broad spectrum of social and cultural phenomena, applying the latest interpretive methods to the world at large. A daring and controversial leader in the field of cultural studies, the journal consistently focuses attention on questions of gender, sexuality, race, and the environment, publishing key works by the most influential social and cultural theorists. As a journal at the forefront of cultural theory, Social Text seeks provocative interviews and challenging articles from emerging critical voices. Each issue breaks new ground in the debates about postcolonialism, postmodernism, and popular culture.