More on Fashionable Nonsense

Its interesting to note that 'debunker' type writers tend to grossly abuse the term 'meaningless'. How does one proceed when one's interlocutor is working with a meaningless definition of 'meaningless'?

For example, according to Sokal, the following definition is 'meaningless'

'a limit is defined as that which is greater than one point and less than another but in no case equal to the point of departure, to sketch it for you quickly.'

This is clearly meaningful, in fact I can hazard to say I know damn well what he means by this.

'Let us call a limit any point such x that if Y (the 'point of departure') is a specified unique set X is not an element of Y and X is not the empty set.' He may wish to say something else (if he is trying to talk about limit points in topology, he must clarify a good deal more. This could be the case, if what he means by 'point of departure' and 'point of arrival' is the boundary of the relevant open set. He would then have imprecisely restated the correct definition, which is here. Greater than one point and less than another but in no case equal to the point of departure or the point of arrival is an awkward way of saying that it is 'in the middle' - a limit point is a point x in a Subset S of topological space X such that - to simplify- if you draw a small circle around x that doesn't contain anything outside of S it will always contain a point of S other than itself ), and his formulation may not be precise, but I maintain that i have come up with an unambiguous and meaningful re-statement of Lacan's text.

Not too tough, is it? I came up with the re-statement in about five seconds, and found all the relevant information about topology on wikipedia within the space of a few minutes. Given the (alluded to) time constraints of this kind of seminar and the fact that Lacan was, if nothing else, a pretty bright MD who forgot more formal training in math than I've ever had , I think its probably better to go with one of the two more charitable readings. The seminar may not be one of the brightest moments in the history of the pedagogy of Mathematics (Lacan was not much of a teacher), but the particular passage is either well-formed but unrelated to topology or poorly formed and correct. In any case, this example of Lacanian prose is clearly not schizophasiac (for example, his terms retain their meaning over time), which is what we usually mean by 'gibberish'. So we now wonder what exactly does Sokal mean when he calls something 'meaningless' or 'gibberish'. We can start by examining a case where he clearly believes that posited terms are meaningful. When Sokal wishes to define his own terms, he guarantees their meaning first by asserting that they are meaningful (and they indeed are), then by pointing out that they rely on a long chain of relations to already clearly and specifically defined terms.

Of course, one COULD be led to wonder how this meaning is ultimately guaranteed (indeed, at first blush this seems to lead to vicious regress), but, like good Saussureans, we know that a universe of discourse is a given. Sokal's S's (sound-images) corresponds to his s's (concepts) relationally - so 'compactness 'is 'meaningful' because it fails to be any other (synchronically or diachronically) substitutable S/s relation. So we may not know what Sokal means by meaning, but we at the very least know how he manages to mean it. As an added bonus, we have also explained (should Alan Sokal read this blog, which is unlikely) what another 'meaningless' Lacanian formula (S/s) means. Remember kids, Lacan helps you read Sokal on Lacan.

When it isn't enough to be controversial

Abortion as Art form at Yale Quote: Art major Aliza Shvarts '08 wants to make a statement. Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process. [...] The "fabricators," or donors, of the sperm were not paid for their services, but Shvarts required them to periodically take tests for sexually transmitted diseases. She said she was not concerned about any medical effects the forced miscarriages may have had on her body. The abortifacient drugs she took were legal and herbal, she said, and she did not feel the need to consult a doctor about her repeated miscarriages. Shvarts declined to specify the number of sperm donors she used, as well as the number of times she inseminated herself. Art major Juan Castillo '08 said that although he was intrigued by the creativity and beauty of her senior project, not everyone was as thrilled as he was by the concept and the means by which she attained the result. "I really loved the idea of this project, but a lot other people didn't," Castillo said. [...] The display of Schvarts' project will feature a large cube suspended from the ceiling of a room in the gallery of Green Hall. Schvarts will wrap hundreds of feet of plastic sheeting around this cube; lined between layers of the sheeting will be the blood from Schvarts' self-induced miscarriages mixed with Vaseline in order to prevent the blood from drying and to extend the blood throughout the plastic sheeting. Since the function of (static-Visual) Art has now been divorced more or less completely from its product, and both from its craft, what is left for Art to do? Political art is a joke - antisystemic actors and the world-system elite share a complete disregard for it. Of course, artists can still *piss people off*, and that seems to be about all that (at least most of them) do. Ms. Schvarts probably thinks she is making some sort of political statement here, something about choice, or a Woman's Body, (pick a liberal feminist hobby horse and run). What she is actually doing is using the resources of a kind of superexploitation that is only beginning to be adumbrated (the US relative to its economic hosts) in order to re-present her own blood (in a double sense - actual blood and her aborted progeny) in its commodity form. I wonder if, as a man, I am entitled to, uh, risk daring hypothesis*: despite its feminist pretensions, Schvarts' work is actually the latest word in misogyny. What we are treated to is a glimpse at the brutal inner kernel of the liberal feminist ego ideal - a bloody, masochistic 'death Mother' whose function is to convert anonymous sperm into defective, non-functional children. This is why, pace the claims of what passes for a left in this country liberal feminism cannot be safely quarantined from the rest of Enlightenment poisons. Just as populist democracy takes the malformed images of the peasantry developed by the old feudal elites and says "wow, I want to BE that", so does liberal feminism identify wholly with fundamentally misogynist libidinal structures. The thesis is that all women ARE mothers or whores, with the proviso that whores are awesome. *Zizek said this, in these words, in the Pervert's Guide to Cinema. I aped him because I think its funny.

Wow

Sometimes its hard to blog, knowing that no matter what you blog you will be thoroughly outblogged by another. Sometimes the Other is Turkish. This is the best blog I've seen in a while, and if you have any interest in post-Heideggerean C.Phil you'll think so too.

Presumed Idiotic

The SF gate ran a review of Fashionable Nonsense a while back that, on a second read, yields a true inanity in the midst of otherwise expected mediocre journalistic pap.

"Perhaps only a mathematical genius could propose these insights? Don't buy into the con, Sokal and Bricmont advise. When he tosses tori and square roots in with penises and neuroses, Lacan is betting that a math-induced brain freeze will suspend the critical faculties of his audience. Not so readily bamboozled, the authors of ``Fashionable Nonsense'' expose Lacan's mathematical antics as ``showing off a superficial erudition and manipulating meaningless sentences.''

That sounds pretty right on. After all, Lacan's audience was made up primarily of dim bulbs like this fella. Are we expected to believe that not only did Lacan completely make up all of his reference to higher Maths, but that he put such nonsense over on a gentleman who studied under Husserl and David Hilbert? Weird.

And More

http://www.wz.nrw.de/Neuro2005/Dokumentationen/TURNBULL%20FORMATIERT.pdf

Dreams
A final, rather striking, example of the re-discovered role of emotion is in the field
of sleep and dream research. When REM sleep and its near-perfect correlation with
dreaming were discovered in the 1950s, and the related brain-stem mechanism
discovered in the 1970s (Hobson and McCarley, 1977), Freud’s (1900) dream theory
appeared to lose all scientific credibility. However, more recent research has revealed
that dreaming and REM sleep are doubly dissociable states, controlled by distinct (but
interactive) brain mechanisms (Solms, 1997). Dreaming turns out to be generated by a
network of forebrain structures centered principally around ascending dopamine
systems (see Solms 1997, 2000 for review).

Importantly, dreaming stops completely when fibers in the ventromesial frontal lobes
are severed, after lesion to exactly the same brain region as that targetted in pre-frontal
leucotomy. This is, of course, the same system that mediates powerful positive
emotions (Panksepp, 1998), and is also centrally implicated in hallucinations and
delusions that share many formal features with dreams (Silbersweig et al, 1995). The
landscape of dreaming research, especially as regards emotion, has radically changed,
and it would appear, based on modern findings, that Freud’s classical has much to
recommend it.

This opens the fascinating possibility that emotion may play a generative role in all
classes of false belief states: from dreaming in the neurologically-healthy, to changes
seen after focal brain lesions, and also encompassing the pharmacologically-sensitive
disorders that are central to the several psychiatric states with delusional features. The
empirical foundation for such a grand claim remains limited, but it offers the prospect
of a tempting unification of findings across wide domains.

Ask and it Shall be Given

Critics of psychoanalysis often ask for one, just one prediction made by Freud that has received confirming empirical evidence.

B13 1992: There is a parallel of the CCRTs about the therapist with the CCRTs about other people.

A necessary and expected parallel is based on Freud's (1912) central clinical observation about the transference template: the patterns that become expressed to the therapist have parallels with the pattern that is expressed to other people. Now, for the very first time, this parallel has been empirically shown for 35 patients from the Penn Psychotherapy Project between the CCRT for relationships with others and the CCRT for relationships with the therapist (Fried, Crits-Christoph, & Luborsky (1992).

The broader issue of the consistency of themes across different types of people, such as father versus mother, has been examined by Frevert et al (1995). This broader topic is basic to the CCRT because of the partly research-supported clinical expectation that narratives about different types of people will show some common themes across the different types of people.

They can feel free to thank me (and google, which actually turns this piece up on the first page for a search of empirical + transference) later.

Nepalese Maoists

I've been keeping track of these guys for a while. Now I note that, unlike their main rivals in global antisystemic activity (international mujihideen), the RIM has actually managed to get themselves firmly entrenched in government, and do so without either A) compromising with the prerevolutionary government or B) seizing power by force of arms. Contemporary Maoism is a strange beast indeed. It is adopted by erudite French philosophers and practiced by guerrilla insurgents. The Maoists of Southeast Asia are what this blog is about. They have simply not been informed that Marxism is dead, that Mao was a psychopathic killer (and in any case incoherent and barely Marxist), and that the parameters of global geopolitics are now such that the only possible site of conflict is within the clash of civilizations between Islam and The West. Rather, through practical philosophizing in the best Maoist tradition, they have arrived at similar conclusions about 'post-ideological' geopolitics as one the first world's foremost minds. With regard to the power elite, they are what Rumsfeld would call one of the things 'you don't know you don't know.' They succeed using methods that have been conclusively demonstrated to produce failure. They are beneath notice, but are now causing serious tremors in a region that is crucial to the continued success of global Capitalism. They have the potential to shift the situation of Southeast Asia into a site with true revolutionary possibilities.