Text Transcriptions for Postmodernism Isn't Brainwashing You

As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the American journal Social Texta paper called ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.’ From start to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross and Normal Levitt’s Higher Superstition: the academic left and its quarrels with science (Johns Hopkins, 1994), an important book which deserves to become as well known in Britain as it already is in America. Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal followed up the references to postmodern literature, and found that Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about it.

The current concern with the possibility of an enhanced and deleterious “greenhouse effect” is not just superstitious alarmism. It is only the public language and political style emerging with the concern that are dangerous. There is an atmospheric greenhouse. It has been there throughout the history of life on this planet, much as that may come as a surprise to some. Its temperature set-point is determined by physical and chemical variables, exactly as the temperature held by a thermostated heating plant is determined by the output of the furnace, the external temperature, and the rate of cooling of the building. Without a greenhouse atmosphere, the planet would be, like its neighbors in the solar system, sterile. Earth’s atmospheric greenhouse is the regulated heating plant that has turned its thin, wet skin into an incubator for life.17

It is distinctly possible that human activities, intensified as population grows and fuel-hungry technology becomes ubiquitous, could change the set point. Natural geological and astronomical phenomena, operative now as in the past, have, certainly, done that—during successive ice ages, for example, and perhaps as a consequence of the cyclic repositioning of Earth relative to our star and the sun’s to the center of the galaxy. Of course they will continue to do so in the future. There will be global warming and cooling, whether we are here or not. Volcanoes alone will see to it.18 The question—and we emphasize that it remains a question—of the effect upon this set point of increasing emissions of carbon dioxide, methane, and other “greenhouse” gases, byproducts of technology and agriculture, is of the highest importance. It deserves the most comprehensive and scrupulous investigation.

So does, however, the question of the climatic consequences, a quite different and even more difficult question, about which there remain deep disagreements among atmospheric scientists. The depth and seriousness of these disagreements is visible to every reader of such general professional journals as Nature and Science.19 The proposals of some (but certainly not all) atmospheric physicists that action to reduce greenhouse emissions should not be deferred pending the outcome of this investigation have to be weighed seriously. There is only one Earth, and nobody in his right mind wants to use it as a crash-test dummy. But recommendations have to be weighed. Such proposals do not justify panic; nor do they call for anything like an immediate restructuring of society, along lines sketched by somebody’s derivative, post-Marxist, poststructuralist utopianism.

I duly respect Freud, for what he represents; he was incredibly creative. His strokes of both genius and folly were rejected as he remained marginalized, kept at the peripheries of the scientific and medical arenas, over a rather long period of his life, and it was during this period of marginalization that he managed to draw attention to subjective facts which had been, until then, totally mistaken. His successors, however, in particular those of the Lacanian structuralist strain, have transformed psychoanalysis into a cult, turning psychoanalytic theory into a kind of theology celebrated by affected and pretentious sects which are still proliferating.

As Deleuze and myself are concerned, one must recall that we were rebelling against the attempt to reconstruct a particular form of analysis, namely, the Lacanian pretension of erecting a universal logic of the signifier that would account for not only the economy of subjectivity and of the affects but also of all the other discursive forms relating to art, knowledge, and power.

For one thing, the psychoanalytic tendency, which has declined markedly in France, is, up to a certain point, equally responsible for the divestment of young psychiatrists with regard to institutional life. In particular, psychoanalysis of the Lacanian stamp with its esoteric, pretentious character, cut off from all apprehension of the terrain of psychopathology, entertains the idea that only an individual treatment allows access to the “symbolic order” by transcendent routes of interpretation and transference. The truth is completely different and access to neurosis, psychosis, and perversion requires other routes than this type of dual relation. I think that in a few years the “Lacanian pretension” will appear to be exactly what it is: simply ridiculous. The psyche, in essence, is the resultant of multiple and heterogeneous components. It engages, assuredly, the register of language, but also nonverbal means of communication, relations of architectural space, ethological behaviors, economic status, social relations at all levels, and, still more fundamentally, ethical and aesthetic aspirations.

A long time ago I renounced the Conscious-Unconscious dualism of the Freudian topoi and all the Manichean oppositions correlative to Oedipal triangulation and to the castration complex. I opted for an Unconscious superposing multiple strata of subjectivation, heterogeneous strata of variable extension and consistency. Thus a more “schizo” Unconscious, one liberated from familial shackles, turned more towards actual praxis rather than towards fixations on, and regressions to, the past. An unconscious of Flux and of abstract machines rather than an unconscious of structure and language. I don’t, however, conider my “schizoanalytic cartographies” to be scientific theories. Just as an artist borrows from his precursors and contemporaries the traits which suit him, I invite those who read me to take or reject my concepts freely.

It is therefore understood that we leave one pole of Oedipus only to pass on to the other. No way of getting out, neurosis or normality. The society of brothers rediscovers nothing of production and desiring machines; on the contrary, it spreads the veil of latency. As to those who refuse to be oedipalized in one form or another, at one end or the other in the treatment, the psychoanalyst is there to call the asylum or the police for help. The police on our side!—never did psychoanalysis better display its taste for supporting the movement of social repression, and for participating in it with enthusiasm. Let it not be thought that we are alluding to the folkloric aspects of psychoanalysis. The fact that there are some, around Lacan, who are developing another conception of psychoanalysis, does not mean that we should take no notice of the dominant tone in the most respected associations: consider Dr. Mendel and the Drs. Stephane, the state of fury that is theirs, and their literally police-like appeal at the thought that someone might claim to escape the Oedipal dragnet. Oedipus is one of those things that becomes all the more dangerous the less people believe in it; then the cops are there to replace the high priests. The first profound example of an analysis of double bind, in this sense, can be found in Marx’s On the Jewish Question: between the family and the State—the Oedipus of familial authority and the Oedipus of social authority.

Genetic rescue is a management tool used to decrease genetic load and increase fitness. The technique relies on the addition of unique genomes into a population’s gene pool, but when no living candidates are available for translocation, preserved genetic resources may be an option. Biobanks are a source of cryopreserved material, including fibroblasts which have the potential to be used as source genetic material, but would require the use of cloning to create a living individual with the desired genome. An ethical analysis of this emerging technology in conservation is necessary to help determine when cloning is justified and to identify issues that need to be addressed in order that the management action is approached responsibly. We provide a framework for ethical analysis of conservation cloning for genetic rescue by considering the goals, means and desirability of conservation cloning. We then conduct a preliminary analysis of the use of conservation cloning for the genetic rescue of an endangered species, the black-footed ferret (Mustela nigripes), as a case study. The analysis generates several recommendations for moving toward ethically responsible introduction of cloning into black-footed ferret recovery efforts.

Thanks so much for your message. Vichy did not have a eugenics policy as robust at the Third Reich but it certainly did not go out of its way to help the mentally or physically disabled survive the war.

The best book on this is this: https://www.amazon.com/LH%C3%A9catombe-fous-h%C3%B4pitaux-psychiatiques-lOccupation-ebook/dp/B01DUCSFB0?ref_=ast_author_mpb but it’s unfortunately only in French!

I’ll check out your YouTube channel when I have a moment!

It is at the intersection of heterogeneous machinic Universes, of different dimensions and with unfamiliar ontological textures, radical innovations and once forgotten, then reactivated, ancestral machinic lines, that the movement of history singularises itself. Among other components, the Neolithic machine associates the machine of spoken language, machines of hewn stone, agrarian machines based on the selection of grains and a village proto-economy. The writing machine will only emerge with the birth of urban megamachines (Lewis Mumford) correlative to the spread of archaic empires. Parallel to this, the great nomadic machines constituted themselves out of the collusion between the metallurgic machine and new war machines. As for the great capitalistic machines, their foundational machinisms were prolific: urban State machines, then royal machines, commercial and banking machines, navigation machines, monotheist religious machines, deterritorialised musical and plastic machines, scientific and technical machines, etc.

When it works I have a ton to spare, I don’t give a shit, I lose it as fast as it comes, and I get more. Active forgetting! What matters is interceding when it doesn’t work, when it spins off course, and the sentences are fucked up, and the words disintegrate, and the spelling is total mayhem. Strange feeling, when I was small, with some words. Their meaning would disappear all of a sudden. Panic. And I have to make a text out of that mess and it has to hold up: that is my fundamental schizo-analytic project. Reconstruct myself in the artifice of the text. Among other things, escape the multiple incessant dependencies on images incarnating the “that’s how it goes!” Writing for nobody? Impossible. You fumble, you stop. I don’t even take the trouble of expressing myself so that when I reread myself I can understand whatever it was I was trying to say. Gilles will figure it out, he’ll work it through… I tell myself I can’t take the plunge and leave this shit for publication because that would inconvenience Gilles. But really, though? I just need to cross out the passages he’s directly involved in. I’m hiding behind this argument so that I can let myself go again and just fucking float along. Even though when it comes to writing” an article, I start over like twenty-five times!!

The bullshitter’s pronouncements can be crystal clear; it is just that he does not care about commitments that come with the language game of assertoric language use. Obscurantism, on the other hand, seems to apply, first and foremost, to the content of what is being asserted: although often presented with utmost seriousness and intellectual bravado, it is never quite clear what the obscurantist is getting at, even though he explicitly presents his nebulous discourse as serious and profound insights into some subject matter that, we are told, requires “indirect” approaches. The charge against the bullshitter is that he does not care about the epistemic status of what he says, whereas the charge against the obscurantist is that we do not have a clue about what he is talking about, and we suspect that he may be dazzling us on purpose. While the bullshitter seems indifferent to truth and to whether his claims are accepted by his audience, the obscurantist has a firm grip on how to tie his audience to his pronouncements. In this sense, the obscurantist is a more dangerous and pernicious character than the bullshitter.

Our case study of obscurantism concerns the reception of Lacanian psychoanalysis (Buekens, 2005, 2006), a cluster of doctrines and “insights” that had a profound influence on philosophy, literary criticism and cultural studies in the 1980s and 1990s. We explore a suite of apologetic arguments by followers of Lacan to the effect that the obscurity and multidimensionality of Lacanian theory reflects the very nature of the psychoanalytic unconscious and hence illustrates profound Lacanian insights.3 Such arguments can best be viewed as examples of epistemic defence mechanisms, which offer a theory-internal rationale for fending off criticism (as explored in Boudry and Braeckman, 2011).

The core of Lacan’s version of psychoanalysis revolves around a few central themes: the unconscious that is structured as a language, the primacy of the signifier, our inability to grasp meaning and comprehend each other, the fictional structure of truth, the ineluctable “lack” that is the result of our entering the domain of the Symbolic, the obscure object of desire, etc. Many critics of Lacan have taken issue with the conceptual incoherence of the different versions of his theory (Sokal and Bricmont, 1997; Buekens, 2006; Borch-Jacobsen, 1991). In a summary discussion in the infamous Livre noir de la psychanalyse (The Black Book of Psychoanalysis), published in 2005, philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen argued that psychoanalysis, in its many (often incompatible) versions, is an empty theory (“une théorie vide”): its key concepts, he argued, are “empty signifiers” that could be interpreted at will (similar conclusions were drawn by Cioffi, 1998). The vicissitudes of such central concepts like jouissance, the Other, the objet petit a or enigmatic claims such as that the unconscious is structured like a language or that The woman does not exist are such that no one really understands what they mean or what they have meant in the hands of their originator.

Lacanian theory suggests a straightforward intra-theoretical justification for these theoretical problems, which appeals to Lacan’s idiosyncratic version of Saussurian linguistics: Of course the concepts of the Other and the Real are difficult to explain coherently, we are told by the Lacanian theorist, because meaning can never be fully grasped, and as human beings we will always be trapped in a web of signifiers. Lacan teaches us that signifiers can only refer to other signifiers, and together they form a closed system from which we can never escape. When we speak, we are not aware of what we are saying. “ ‘I’ is spoken by a desire outside my consciousness that drives me” (Verhaeghe, 2004, p. 56), and thus we are being spoken (‘ça parle’)” (Lacan, 1966). According to Madan Sarup, the unconscious “becomes not only the subject matter but, in the grammatical sense, the subject, the speaker of the discourse. . . . Lacan believes that language speaks the subject, that the speaker is subjected to language rather than master of it” (Sarup, 1992, p. 80). Indeed, some Lacanians believe that the very nature of the subject matter of Lacanian theory escapes rational discourse and scientific evaluation (Leguil-Badal, 2006). As Lacan himself put it, “The real, one has to say, is without any law. The genuine real implies the absence of law. The real does not have any order” (Lacan, 2005, pp. 137–138).

Similarly, we are told that the many apparent paradoxes and contradictions in Lacan’s theory reflect the divisiveness and structural “lack” characterizing the human subject. According to Lacan, when the child is introduced into the Symbolic order, the psychic structure of the infant develops into “knots” that are irreducible to theoretical formulation and always escape comprehension. Lacan has designated this ineluctable lack as the locus of the objet petit a, a concept which, as Lacanian interpreter Bruce Fink himself acknowledges, “can take on many different guises” (Fink, 1997, p. 52). According to Lacan, the objet petit a is that aspect of the Real that cannot be represented, that forms a structural break in the chain of signifiers. “The [object] a is what remains irreducible in the advent of the subject at the locus of the other, and it is from this that it is going to take on its function” (Lacan, 2004, p. 189). The later Lacan coined the term “sinthome” for that which is beyond meaning and unanalysable in the so-called topology of the human mind. Other Lacanian concepts fulfil similar roles:

In the same vein, some Lacanians have tried to explain (and justify) the institutional crisis of psychoanalysis in theory-internal terms. Reflecting on the many theoretical schisms following the death of Lacan, and the feuds over his intellectual legacy, Nobus writes that knowledge is always “in a state of continuous dispossession”, and this has (of course) something to do with the mysterious Other: If psychoanalytic knowledge is by definition a knowledge in failure, isn’t the crisis legitimacy a necessary precondition for the discourse of the analyst to sustain itself? Perhaps the only agency that could ever be in the position of owning psychoanalysis is the (unconscious of the) analysand, the Other of psychoanalytic discourse . . . (Nobus, 2004a, p. 222)

It seems then that one can construe Lacanian arguments to the effect that the very idea of “questioning” the truth of Lacanian psychoanalysis is deeply misguided, because according to Lacan truth itself has a “fictional structure”. As Lacanian interpreter Bruce Fink wrote in relation to the question of the scientific value of Lacanian theory:

The fact remains that science is a discourse… it implies a dethroning of Science and a reassessment of science as one discourse among many… Lacan’s discourse theory suggests that there are as many different claims to rationality as there are different discourses. (Fink, 1995)

The distinction I am proposing between machine and structure is based solely on the way we use the words; we may consider that we are merely dealing with a ‘written device’ of the kind one has to invent for dealing with a mathematical problem, or with an axiom that may have to be reconsidered at a particular stage of development, or again with the kind of machine we shall be talking about here. I want therefore to make it clear that I am putting into parentheses the fact that, in reality, a machine is inseparable from its structural articulations and, conversely, that each contingent structure is dominated (and this is what I want to demonstrate) by a system of machines, or at the very least by one logic machine. It seems to me vital to start by establishing the distinction in order to make it easier to identify the peculiar positions of subjectivity in relation to events and to history. We may say of structure that it positions its elements by way of a system of references that relates each one to the others, in such a wav that it can itself be related as an element to other structures.

Abstract: Many of the philosophical doctrines purveyed by postmodernists have been roundly refuted, yet people continue to be taken in by the dishonest devices used in proselytizing for postmodernism. I exhibit, name and analyse five favourite rhetorical manoeuvres: Troll’s Truisms, Motte and Bailey Doctrines, Equivocating Fulcra, the Postmodernist Fox-trot and Rankly Relativising Fields. Anyone familiar with postmodernist writing will recognise their pervasive hold on the dialectic of postmodernism, and come to judge that dialectic as it ought to be judged.

Many of the philosophical doctrines purveyed by postmodernists have been roundlyrefuted, yet people continue to be taken in by a set of dishonest devices used inproselytizing for postmodernism. It is getting tiring to repeat refutations of the same type for each new appearance of these various manoeuvres. For this reason, then, rather than yet another set of specific refutations, I offer you instead my little museum of their rhetorical manoeuvres, each exhibit neatly labelled, each label inscribed with a name, each name adding to a vocabulary of dismissal.

Abstract: Obscurity of expression is considered a flaw. Not so, however, in the speech or writing of intellectual gurus. All too often, what readers do is judge profound what they have failed to grasp. Here I try to explain this “guru effect” by looking at the psychology of trust and interpretation, at the role of authority and argumentation, and at the effects of these dispositions and processes when they operate at a population level where, I argue, a runaway phenomenon of overappreciation may take place. Obscurity of expression is considered a flaw. Not so, however, in the speech or writing of intellectual gurus.1 It is not just that insufficiently competent readers refrain, as they should, from passing judgment on what they don’t understand. All too often, what readers do is judge profound what they have failed to grasp. Obscurity inspires awe, a fact I have been only too aware of, living as I have been in the Paris of Sartre, Lacan, Derrida and other famously hard to interpret maîtres à penser. Here I try to explain this “guru effect.”

There are two ways of holding beliefs in one’s mind. Holding a belief may be experienced—to the extent that it is experienced at all—as plain awareness of a fact, without awareness of reasons to take it to be a fact. So are held most of our ordinary beliefs. They are delivered by our spontaneous cognitive processes, the reliability of which we take for granted without examination. I believe that it is sunny because I see that it is; I believe that it rained yesterday because I remember that it did.

My interest here, however, is in honest rather than dishonest gurus. Honest gurus are not trying to deceive their audience. Nevertheless, they may produce arguments that will persuade most of their readers not by their logical force, but by their very difficulty. A recent illustration is provided by The Emperor’s New Mind by the eminent physicist Roger Penrose (1989). As summarized by the blurb of the book, Penrose “argues that there are facets of human thinking, of human imagination, that can never be emulated by a machine. Exploring a dazzling array of topics—complex numbers, black holes, entropy, quasicrystals, the structure of the brain, and the physical processes of consciousness—Penrose demonstrates that laws even more wondrously complex than those of quantum mechanics are essential for the operation of a mind” (my italics). Given the wealth of premises from different fields of knowledge and the complexity of the argument, I doubt that most readers are in a position to evaluate what, if anything, Penrose demonstrates. Still, coming from such an authoritative source, the very elaborateness of the argument is enough to suggest that it can withstand a level of scrutiny that most readers would be quite unable to provide, and that Penrose is offering a hard-to-grasp but plausible and highly relevant perspective on the relationship between fundamental physics and human psychology.

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