bad science/bad postmodernism

[jbor at bigpond.com]

On 12/10/2005, at 11:10 AM, Sean Mannion wrote:

> When i say horseshit i'm generally thinking about Lyotard's clumsy 
> appropriation of Wittgensteinian Language-Games and/or Lacan on 
> voyeurism and the male gaze -- when asked to imagine a male voyeur 
> looking at a woman taking a shit, i'm far more likely to be wondering 
> whether he pays by cash or american express than registering the 
> 'symbolic exchange' or 'unconscious manifestation of the desire to see 
> a woman with a prick'.

There's no question that some of what comes out of Critical Theory is 
as wrongheaded, irrelevant or just plain indigestible as some of what 
gets pumped out of The Lab. Let alone the misappropriations ... But 
wouldn't it be just as easy to reduce "Science" to ol' B.F. Skinner 
shoving his infant daughter into a sensory deprivation box day in day 
out or bloodied gangs of scalpel-wielding neurobiologists seeking to 
isolate the brain's sarcasm receptor? Neither Lyotard nor Lacan -- 
especially Lacan -- are so easily dispensed with. Nor, either, is 
"Science" in its totality, but that's never been the argument.

And I'll keep coming back to Pynchon -- Brigadier Pudding's coprophilia 
scene resonates far more with Lacanian psychoanalysis than with ... 
what, the materialist theory of porn? And what about Kekulé in GR -- 
another example of Pynchon jabbing pins into the bubble of Science's 
grand metanarrative.

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." 
(1941)

best