I organized this roundtable as an excuse to look at some of the E.C. Segar Popeye strips. I’d never read them, and many people love them, obviously, so I figured this was a good chance to catch up. After reading a couple of reviews, I tried the Plunder Island volume, often mentioned as the highpoint of the series.
And after reading through the Plunder Island strips, I can say with some assurance that, man, this is not for me. Though I enjoyed the energy of the drawing, and the Sea Hag and Goon provided some evocatively creepy moments early on, the limited range of the humor, and its empty-headedness, quickly becomes numbing. Wimpy is lazy, Wimpy eats a lot, Popeye is noble, defends the underdog, and always wins. It’s like Garfield meets Superman. And, you know, I don’t hate Garfield or Superman…but I’ve read enough of both to last me the rest of my life. Honestly, I couldn’t even finish the book. I got distracted by Kierkegaard, and then by Derrida — and when you’re procrastinating by reading Derrida, you know you really, really don’t want to be reading what you’re supposed to.
If I had read the whole book, I’d probably be really thoroughly irritated and be spitting piss and vinegar (that metaphor isn’t exactly right…but onward.) As it is, though, I don’t have much resentment built up. Popeye isn’t at all pretentious — punch, eat, mangled English, laff. I don’t find it that funny, but I can’t get mad at it either. As I said, I even appreciate the art in a generalized way (cute cows!) If people like this, I’ve got no beef (as it were.)
While I’m not that interested in the content of Popeye, the strip does raise some interesting issues. Specifically — well, as I said, this is a very unpretentious strip, which relies almost entirely on the most basic kind of repetitive gastronomic and pugnacious humor. Whatever the drawing’s charm, there’s none of the sweeping formal adventurousness of Little Nemo here. I guess you could compare it to Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplain…but it seems to have at least as much in common with sitcoms; the same zany characters performing the same zany routines week after week in a timeless round of entertaining tedium.
Comics is often compared to film and literature and visual art, but it’s much less frequently linked to television. There are certainly many parallels between TV and comicdom, whether in method of delivery (they’re both among the few contemporary art forms that are serialized as a matter of course), or in material for adaptation (Buffy in one direction, Smallville in the other), or in creator overlap (Brian K. Vaughn, Joss Whedon, Dave Johnson.) But nobody wants to make a big deal out of it since nobody but nobody wants to be linked to television, a medium which has gone more than half a century without ever attaining even a morsel of aesthetic credibility.
People do wax enthusiastic about individual shows, of course, whether it be the Wire or Mad Men or Battlestar Galactica. But that enthusiasm is perpetrated with an amazing lack of ambition or anxiety. When people say that Lost is awesome, they rarely do so by saying “Lost is awesome — and worthy to be compared to the achievement of the Coen Brothers!” People love Joss Whedon, but nobody says he’s Quentin Tarantino, much less Orson Welles. Similarly, there’s virtually no effort that I’ve ever seen to solidify television’s bona-fides through canon formation. I’m sure someone has made a list of the best 100 television shows (here’s one, for example) but such lists don’t get tons of press and tend to be presented as much as personal preference as “this is what all educated people must be familiar with.”
Even the criteria for creating such a canon seems almost completely untheorized. What are the aesthetics of great television? What would a great television show look like? What issues would it address? How would a canonical television show distinguish itself from film, or from video art? Could great television be video art? Could there be a gallery show of television video art, the way there are gallery shows of comic art? What would that be like? What would be chosen?
Of course, some people will probably argue that there couldn’t be such an exhibit because television is a wasteland and the whole medium should be dropped in a well or eaten by bears. (Domingos, I’m looking at you.) But…I don’t know. I look at Popeye, which has good visual aesthetics and competent jokes and has been firmly placed in the comics canon, and I think — television could do that.
The classic Sesame Street animations are brilliant and weird; I don’t see how they’re aesthetically any less accomplished than E. C. Segar’s drawings, and they’re certainly more conceptually adventurous. The Batman TV series is visually bizarre; those giant freeze cones, the slanted villain hideout with the girl in the cage in the background — it seems infinitely more inventive than many of the comic book sources, and the dialogue and plotting is so arch it’s a wonder everyone’s eyebrows don’t just fall off. The Abbott and Costello routine does nothing in particular with visuals, but the escalating insanity of the dialogue seems, at least to me, much more manic and witty than the Popeye strips.
My point here isn’t that these are all superior to Popeye and therefore deserve to be treated as canonical culture. Nor is it that television in general should be seen as a (potentially) serious art form. Rather, I’m just saying that what is and isn’t considered art is really arbitrary. Comics critics have spent a lot of energy for the past decades trying to get comics accepted as high art. They’ve had definite (if not unqualified) success, and now even frankly pulp, unpretentious works like Popeye can be put up in galleries, given lavish reissues, and hailed as canonical examples of the form. And, of course, the critical zeitgeist has created room for more explicitly highbrow work by everyone from Chris Ware to Lilli Carre.
At some point, you do wonder, though…what if comics had taken television’s route? No anxiety, no ambition, no real critical battles over whether it could be high art or whether that would be a good idea. Would that have been categorically worse? The anxiety is certainly a spur…but it can be a cage as well. In any case, I don’t think I do comics in general any harm by saying, you know, it doesn’t really matter that much whether Popeye is or is not great art.
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For a more enthusiastic take on (among other things) Popeye’s relation to artsy-fartsy comics, read Shaenon Garrity’s appreciation.
This is part of a roundtable on Popeye. All posts in the series can be read here.
Is tv criticism in a worse place than comics criticism? I wonder…
I can’t imagine a gallery show of television art. That’d be like have a gallery show of films. You might have a curated series (as they do with films), but it would involve some particular difficulties. Most (in my opinion) really great television episodes can’t be viewed out of context. They are part of a series/serial that builds up meaning, emotions, themes over time. Which is kind of the downfall of much tv, because a lot of shows are rarely given the time to build up such meaning or there isn’t enough of a central director (I saw director more generally, not in the specific context) to keep such going. And you can see the case for such in the more recent cable series that are shorter and more clearly run by a creator with a larger goal (The Wire, Deadwood, Mad Men, Breaking Bad).
Ummm… Popeye. I’m pretty “meah” about it.
TV criticism is just in a really different place, I think.
Video art is often screened in galleries; you could see a show of Sesame Street animations I think. Though, yeah, it could also look more like a film screening series or some such, depending on what shows/how the curating worked….
Noah: “and when you’re procrastinating by reading Derrida, you know you really, really don’t want to be reading what you’re supposed to.”
Arf arf! That’s a good one!…
Another sacred cow is debunked. # 11, no less! There’s hope…
Well, as I said, I’m happy enough for people to love Popeye. I’d rather Popeye be canonical than John Ashberry or Hemingway, anyway. But I’m just in general less exercised about canons than you are I think, Domingos….
A customer came into the comics store where I work and asked for something really great. I tried to suggest this or that and they finally were like, no I want the thing you think is the best in comics – no fantasy or anything – something truly great – he actually asked for “something like great art”. The only thing I decided I could promote like that is Barefoot Gen – everything else is just “comics” I think…
As I said ages ago talking about Asterix. I would be perfectly comfortable with the idea of Asterix or Popeye or whatever nicely done strip we can think of being liked if put in their proper place of harmless entertainment (or even not so harmless entertainment like Tintin and The Spirit). As Derik puts it above: they fit the “meah” category perfectly. That’s not what happens though: these are viewed as the best the art form has to offer and I simply can’t accept that.
I love Asterix! I wonder if it has to do with nostalgia, since I read that as a kid and not Popeye…. Or is the writing really better? It seems like the book length format really allows for an escalating level of goofiness…but perhaps I should go back and look at them again…
Come to think of it: it’s all in good natured fun and all that, but Asterix also has its quota of National stereotypes.
Goscinny was very good. Forget the albums after he died. My favorite album is _Asterix the Legionary_.
While there might not be a canon as such in TV studies, I think (and I mean I think, I’m not a tv studies person) this is because most people doing it usually take a cultural studies approach that largely rejects (or at least claims to reject) canon out-of-hand. It’s more often to hear a tv show discussed in terms of its cultural valence (Archie Bunker addresses sexual assault, MASH helps the nation cope with Vietnam, whatever) than with the formal elements that distinguish it. Not that this is absent from the conversation (see most discussions of Twin Peaks), but its secondary to what the text says about the messages and ideologies it perpetuates, articulates, reflects…
Whether this is a desirable approach to comics studies is up for debate.
Oh, yeah, there’s absolutely tons of cultural studies academic focus on television. There is that in most other art forms too; lots of cultural writing on film (less on comics, just because they’re not as popular so people don’t care about them). But it’s usually balanced by at least some sense that the art form in question is an art form. Television is almost like advertising in that; there’s just very little sense of it as an art form.
Part of the problem with TV is that different writers and directors work on different episodes, often changing the general quality from episode to episode — Twin Peaks being the clearest example. I’d put episodes (the first 16 and the finale) of that show up against just about anything, but when taken as a whole, not so much. Likewise, with Lost. But, on the other hand, Deadwood as a whole is one of the best westerns I’ve ever seen, up there with Anthony Mann (but the latter had better photography). Green Acres, one of the underrated masterpieces of pop culture, was written and directed by the same team for its duration and compares favorably to any comic strip people might name, including Popeye.
The fact that television is a collaborative venture does cause problems with canonization — but film got around this with the idea of the auteur function, while comics manages to point to particular “runs” (the fact that Barks didn’t do all the Donald Duck comics doesn’t stop people from pointing to the ones he did do as especially fine.) So these problems can be surmounted if anyone cares to; they just haven’t so much in regard to television.
I’ve never even heard of Green Acres. My ignorance is vast….
It’s on DVD, check it out. I think you might like it. Start with the 2nd season.
Seems to me that the difference in TV’s collaboration and film’s is that in the latter, you have the finished product. With serialized TV, the auteur (even if one takes a structuralist approach) often changes from chapter to chapter. True, there are showrunners, but they tend to keep the plot in order, and can only do so much to make up for different directing and writing abilities and sensibilities.
“So these problems can be surmounted if anyone cares to; they just haven’t so much in regard to television.”
Robert Thompson is an academic who I believe has done a bit of this, exploring television auteurs.
http://newhouse.syr.edu/Faculty_Staff/Bio/index.cfm?id=136
It might be an extremely small field, however.
Your post is very dismissive. After reading only a few strips, can you really speak so absolutely about its relative merits?
Anyone who told you to check out Popeye because it is ‘high art’ did you a disservice. But who are these people and why would you take them seriously? Has anyone with a passing awareness of Popeye had the slightest suspicion that an ongoing gag strip about a one-eyed sailor with a speech impediment would fit any of the circulating definitions of ‘high art’?
Popeye is great to those who think it is great because it is wildly surreal and cheerfully misanthropic and destructive. I don’t think it’s overreaching to say that the strip was not intended to be taken seriously in any way. I don’t take it seriously and enjoy it immensely.
The idea of canons should be rejected as offering little value. Canon-pushers and list-makers like Bloom, et al., have only demonstrated that the concept of a ‘canon’ serves primarily to enshrine a particular, subjective set of values that allows would-be elites to define themselves as superior to those who don’t buy into that set of values. Canonical lists differ depending on what group is powerful enough to declare their particular preferences authoritative. You read Derrida, don’t you?
I often draw comparisons with television when trying to persuade “civilian” friends that they shouldn’t dismiss comics out of hand.
I begin by acknowledging that 99% of comics are brainless mush, but then make the point that 99% of television is brainless mush as well. And yet television also produces the odd masterpiece – an intelligent, well-crafted, ambitious drama like The Wire, say. A witty, well-written, beautifully-performed comedy like Blackadder, or an incisive, brave and powerful documentary film like Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls.
You’ll have your own examples, but the point is that no-one uses the preponderance of crap on television to argue there is something inherently moronic about the medium as a whole. The best stuff often attracts a far smaller audience, but its very existence proves television is capable of producing work that stands up against the very best movies or books.
Same with comics. Most of them are infantile crap, yes – there’s no point in denying that – but that doesn’t mean the whole medium can be dismissed out of hand. Where television has The Wire, Blackadder and 4 Little Girls, comics can boast Jason Lute’s Berlin, Bob Fingerman’s Minimum Wage, Joe Sacco’s Palestine and a thousand other examples of indisputably excellent work.
This argument doesn’t always work, but I have found it far more effective than the usual comics v movies comparison. The fact that people are used to TV stories being played out over a long series of regular episodes helps them make the leap to comics’ similar episodic structure too.
Well, at last Domingos acknowledges that Goscinny is “very good”. About 5 years ago, on the Tcj board, Domingos dismissed Goscinny as a “hack”, which sparked a flame war of tremendous bitterness.
(OK, Noah, I’ll play nice from here on…)
My epiphany as to the validity of TV as an art form came in the 70s, with “I, Claudius”. That was an accomplishment that couldn’t have been replicated in any other medium or art form.
Goscinny was a very good hack? Imagine a yellow thingie here, please…
I liked _The Wire_ a lot (especially season 5), but *my* TV series is and always will be _Updown_. On the comical side, lets not forget the huge Monty Python.
As for the power of comics: I always feel incredibly powerful when I go to any ambassador’s reception and I say to all the royalty in there that I like Anke Feuchtenberger’s work a lot. They give me weapons of mass destruction, believe it or not!… You wait and see! My revenge will be huge, I tell you!…
What, do you mean E.P.Jacobs’ sublime ‘Marque Jaune’? I agree.
Oh, and by the way, Goscinny wasn’t a hack.
“…the point is that no-one uses the preponderance of crap on television to argue there is something inherently moronic about the medium as a whole…”
People have been making that exact argument pretty much since television was created.
I’m not trying to be antagonistic, but the world I experience is the exact opposite for me. Yesterday a drinking buddy told me I was an idiot because I didn’t get a Seinfeld reference. I can’t go through a day without someone discussing a TV show with me – but I almost never discuss comics off the internet. I’m pretty sure the amount of books and university courses that focus on tv shows far outweighs courses and books on comics.
I think Popeye is appreciated now because it was very popular, it’s very old, and the characters are still icons 75+ years later. Like Caleb I never heard of it being canonized though.
Personally, I love Popeye – compared to other daily strips I’d certainly list it as a favorite – but I don’t think it’s fair to compare it to non-daily comic strips either.
It’s too bad you didn’t enjoy it. If you ever do give it another shot maybe you could try reading a strip a day?
As Domingos said, Popeye was #11 on the TCJ list of all time; it was in the Masters of American Comics exhibition. Those are the two most prestigious and influential efforts at canon formation in comicdom I know of in recent years. So yeah, I think Popeye is pretty canonical.
Everybody talks about tv all the time. That’s different from saying it has aesthetic cache, though.
Yeah – but that’s just from inside comicdom – the minority of people who appreciate comics in the first place.
It sounded like you were saying that comics had more aesthetic cache than tv in general culture – which is what I disagree with.
Captcha phrase is killing me!!!
Anyway, I think we’re stretching the notion of canon when we use best of lists as an indicator. Entertainment Weekly and TV Guide regularly feature best of, greatest of all time, etc. lists, and while I hold TCJ in higher esteem than either of those two periodicals, I think most comics readers understand that its coming from a particular perspective. As for the master’s show, I think Nadel did a fine job showing that whatever gesture toward canon building it hoped to make, it was too clumsy and halfhearted to succeed (which is to my mind a good thing).
One issue that I haven’t seen brought up here, though I’m sure I’ve read it elsewhere, is that these older strips read far better in small chunks (a few strips at a time). I know that if I read too much Popeye in a sitting the repetition becomes oppressive. When I pull it off the shelf and read for five minutes, I’m usually compelled to linger over a strip or some element within it, or to giggle about a recalled strip later. This could also be the case for older tv series released on dvd. Twin Peaks, for example, was fun for me because I had a week to wonder what was up with the midget, to ruminate on details, etc.
I said: “…the point is that no-one uses the preponderance of crap on television to argue there is something inherently moronic about the medium as a whole…”
Derek Badman replied: “People have been making that exact argument pretty much since television was created.”
It’s true that a few snobs made that argument in TV’s early days, but it’s not one you hear much now. Outside our own little hipster ghetto, though, the overall view of comics is still that they’re capable of telling only the most simplistic and childish stories – and that’s the contrast I was trying to draw.
My favourite anecdote from the early days of anti-TV snobbery, by the way, is that of the British academic who announced no good could possibly come of this abomination because even the word television itself was half Latin and half Greek! What more proof could anyone need?
The thing is, credibility is kind of a function of hipster ghettoes. Most people don’t necessarily care that much whether things are art or not.
“Outside our own little hipster ghetto, though, the overall view of comics is still that they’re capable of telling only the most simplistic and childish stories”
I’m not sure that’s the case anymore, particular is your use of “comics” includes manga.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The fact that television is a collaborative venture does cause problems with canonization — but film got around this with the idea of the auteur function…
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…The auteur “function”? Auteurism is a particularly nonsensical theory; invented by those who wished to enshrine the director as the primary creative force in moviemaking, reality be damned.
Leaving out little details such as a director – especially in the “studio system” era it was created in – being a hired hand, who might regularly end up doing a certain type of film not because of the director’s awesome reality-altering powers – making mere screenwriters, producers, etc., puppets of his authorial will – but because the director was “typecast” by having been successful in certain types of movies, then being regularly assigned that kind of material.
To say that “film got around” its being a “collaborative venture” because of the auteur theory is like saying that the Earth has gotten around climate change because of “global warming denial”…
My skepticism about the actual value of “philosophizing” (other than creating jobs for academics) is only heightened when a commentary dropping names like Kierkegaard and Derrida features – sorry! – such muddled thinking…
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Caleb says:
Anyone who told you to check out Popeye because it is ‘high art’ did you a disservice. But who are these people and why would you take them seriously? Has anyone with a passing awareness of Popeye had the slightest suspicion that an ongoing gag strip about a one-eyed sailor with a speech impediment would fit any of the circulating definitions of ‘high art’?
Popeye is great to those who think it is great because it is wildly surreal and cheerfully misanthropic and destructive. I don’t think it’s overreaching to say that the strip was not intended to be taken seriously in any way. I don’t take it seriously and enjoy it immensely.
The idea of canons should be rejected as offering little value. Canon-pushers and list-makers like Bloom, et al., have only demonstrated that the concept of a ‘canon’ serves primarily to enshrine a particular, subjective set of values that allows would-be elites to define themselves as superior to those who don’t buy into that set of values. Canonical lists differ depending on what group is powerful enough to declare their particular preferences authoritative. You read Derrida, don’t you?
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Rather than the values which constitute “high art” being subjective, it’s more that the greater weight given certain aesthetic qualities is subjective.
It’s nonsense to say, as some have elsewhere, that art criticism is utterly subjective. That “Citizen Kane” being better than “Mansquito” is only a matter of personal opinion. There are qualities which, if a work of art possesses them, surely help add to its aesthetic worth:
– Originality
– Creative mastery
– Psychological/intellectual depth and complexity
– Imagination
– The effectiveness with which its creator’s intentions are communicated
…And so forth.
When perceptive, knowledgeable critics disagree, it’s not that art criticism is wholly subjective; but that, instead, one may particularly value an original approach, though the result is rough around the corners. Another may reject the powerful emotions expressed via Expressionistic art because they believe rendering should be Academically refined and masterful.
And yet another might – getting into comics here – dismiss the power, inventiveness, historic importance, narrative effectiveness of Jack Kirby’s oeuvre because the stories themselves were aimed at “children”; not “serious art” like the insipidly stodgy work of Adrian Tomine.
(As I’d written on another thread:
Likely many don’t go to Kirby comics expecting what one gets from a Ware or Gilberto. What made him great was his unprecedented inventiveness, historic importance and influence, his being a driving force in creating whole genres of comics, the unsurpassed power, strength, and clarity of his storytelling; that he virtually wrote the hyperdynamic “visual language” of superhero comics; his extraordinary visual imagination, only flagging in his final years.
With all those virtues, there’s much to enjoy. In the same way a luscious culinary concoction may not necessarily be nutritionally sound, yet still deserving to be devoured with relish…)
From the TCJ message board’s “Kim Thompson Greatest Hits (Happy birthday!)” thread, a comment by the other Fanta head honcho:
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The reason I haven’t yet risen to the defense of Hergé here is because re-reading Paul’s note I’m beginning to realize that we approach art from such radically different perspectives that I don’t know that we can find any common ground. Paul seems to have swallowed the whole sophomoric nonsense about narrative art being somehow “validated” only by the “realism” or “complexity” of the characters, whether or not the material addresses “significant issues,” and so on. By which standard, of course, the worst movie made by John Sayles, the most trivial “intimate character portrait” piece of piffle to come out of Sundance, is better than the best movie made by Howard Hawks — and any second-rate piece of modern “serious” fiction is better than a P.G. Wodehouse novel. And THREE FINGERS is better than POPEYE.
TINTIN’s characters are flat, yes. The adventures are often silly… But… so what? RIO BRAVO’s characters are all cowboy-movie clichés (played by a gallery of actors who are no one’s idea of thespian greatness: John Wayne, Walter Brennan, Dean Martin (!), Ricky Nelson (!!), Angie Dickinson), the story is so generic even I don’t remember it… and yet it’s one of the greatest westerns ever made.
Complexity and realism of characterization, significance of themes, and all that shit are all vastly overrated as indicators of artistic brilliance by self-anointed critics. There are many, many works, particularly in comics, that feature characters who are ciphers, plots that are silly and trivial, and mean nothing beyond their “adventure” or “comedy” that are among the greatest works ever created. Franquin’s GASTON LAGAFFE, several hundred pages’ worth of gags about a lazy office boy, is better and greater than any comic created anywhere in the world in the last 20 years — and yes, I include the entirety of Fantagraphics’ output.
TINTIN is rightly perceived as a masterpiece that can be read and enjoyed by anyone, and will be so pretty much forever. …
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Much more K. T. at http://tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?t=2868&start=0
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Nate says:
…One issue that I haven’t seen brought up here, though I’m sure I’ve read it elsewhere, is that these older strips read far better in small chunks (a few strips at a time)…
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Indeed, they were created to be read only one strip at a time!
Mike, canonization is a theoretical process. It’s not science. Therefore, a theoretical construct like the auteur (whatever it’s problems) was very successful in enshrining various films as canonical.
I didn’t say whether or not I subscribed to the theory. I don’t actually care that much about it one way or the other, to be honest.
Rejecting all theorists indiscriminately because someone somewhere mentioned some theorist and also said something you disagree with seems kind of silly. Surely lots of people who never mentioned Derrida have said things you disagree with too?
Hey Mike, your link to the message board thread is giving me an error; could you maybe check it, please? I could fix it if I could figure out what’s wrong but so far no luck…
Thanks for catching that; strange! I did a search for that original “Kim Thompson Greatest Hits (Happy birthday!)” thread, and found it here: http://archives.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?t=2868
(That earlier quotation and its now-nonworking link was from here: http://www.archives.tcj.com/messboard/viewtopic.php?p=100849&sid=69a95d75e367dbc17770faeafeebc142 )
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, canonization is a theoretical process. It’s not science. Therefore, a theoretical construct like the auteur (whatever it’s problems) was very successful in enshrining various films as canonical.
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From Dictionary.com, the relevant definitions:
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can·on
3. the body of rules, principles, or standards accepted as axiomatic and universally binding in a field of study or art: the neoclassical canon.
4. a fundamental principle or general rule: the canons of good behavior.
5. a standard; criterion: the canons of taste.
8. any comprehensive list of books within a field.
10. a catalog or list, as of the saints acknowledged by the Church.
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the·o·ry
1. a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein’s theory of relativity.
2. a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.
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Even with the less commonly used meanings of “theory,” I don’t see much overlap there. And that the auteur theory was used in “enshrining various films as canonical,’ doesn’t mean that items chosen for, say, Harold Bloom’s mind-bogglingly sweeping “Western Canon” ( http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/grtbloom.html ) got there because they fit some “proposed explanation of what constitutes literary quality whose status is still conjectural,” but because they’ve stood the test of time and innumerable critical assessments and valuations.
And, “the auteur…was very successful in enshrining various films as canonical”? The problem with nonscientific theorizing is that whatever fits the parameters of the construct is automatically valued, whatever its actual worth.
Thus, auteur-istes sing the praises of Jerry Lewis, Otto Preminger, and Roger Corman right along with undisputed cinematic greats such as Welles and Renoir.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Rejecting all theorists indiscriminately because someone somewhere mentioned some theorist and also said something you disagree with seems kind of silly.
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It would be, if I’d said such a thing.
I just was reading a really funny quote from Raymond Williams where he explained why using dictionary definitions is ridiculous when you’re talking about contested theoretical terms; I thought of you! (I don’t have the book with me, alas….)
Reading through all of this, I can’t help but think that Popeye would use a real cannon to “canonize” someone.
I tend to avoid the “are comics high art or not?” arguments, since my main concern is whether or not they work for me as comics.
And Segar’s Thimble Theater, for me, always works as a comic. Great characters, strong personalities, interesting storylines, sharp dialogue, strong compositions, and loads of punching.
Ah ha! Here it is:
“Some people, when they see a word, think the first thing to do is to define it. Dictionaries are produced, and, with a show of authority no less confident because it is usually so limited in place and time, what is called a proper meaning is attached. But while it may be possible to do this, more or less satisfactorily, with certain simple names of things and effects, it is not only impossible but irrelevant in the case of more complicated ideas. What matters in them is not he proper meaning but the history and complexity of meanings: the conscious changes, or consciously different uses, and just as often those changes and differences which, masked by a nominal continuity, come to express radically different and often a first unnoticed changes in experience and history.”
As I said, that’s Raymond Williams — an old British Marxist from the 60s and 70s. The book is *Culture and Materialism*, a collection of essays. It’s pretty dry going, mostly, but his discussion of advertising and of the concept of nature and social darwinism are both pretty interesting. (The above quote is from an essay called “Ideas of Nature.”
Great quote! We don’t need to go further than the word “comics.”
When terms are being stretched and distorted like Silly Putty in a discussion, dictionary definitions are useful for us “silly” folks who like to keep at least one figurative foot upon terra firma.
I see the guy who wrote that Dictionary-dissing quote was “an old British Marxist from the 60s and 70s.” Other than a G.W. Bush-acclaiming Neocon, who’d be better suited to mock that “irrelevant,” pesky reality thing, and those who reject living in Cloud Cuckoo-Land?
And, “We don’t need to go further than the word ‘comics'”? Sure, if you don’t mind the term being diluted beyond all usefulness or solidity. Note how “improved” the art world has become, now that anything – including some trash swept into the corner of a room, or (an actual example) a light switch being flipped on and off, is considered every bit as much a work of “art” as a “Guernica”…
Here’s one reason why it’s very important indeed to pay attention to those uptight “dictionary definitions”; to cry “foul!” when terms are wrongly applied:
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pa·tri·ot
1. a person who loves, supports, and defends his or her country and its interests with devotion.
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Nowadays, we see the Right acclaiming anyone who wraps themselves with the Flag, talks about how much they “love America” as a patriot. Even though in actual conduct, they’re wrecking and betraying the country and its ideals.
But those aware of the proper definition, and wish it strictly applied, would know the so-called “patriots” aren’t remotely deserving of the term.
Though those singing the praises of G.W. Bush as a great and inspiring patriot, could argue that strictly limiting the term “is not only impossible but irrelevant in the case of more complicated ideas. What matters…is not the proper meaning but the history and complexity of meanings: the conscious changes, or consciously different uses, and just as often those changes and differences which, masked by a nominal continuity, come to express radically different and often a first unnoticed changes in experience and history.”
Don’t forget to add: “And my kid could do that.”
Mike, Williams isn’t dismissing the dictionary, but a reliance on it as a rebuttal to the “consciously different uses” of words. Where quoting the literal meaning is of use is when someone is re-defining or -shaping the meaning for some purpose (typically ideological), and holding others responsible for the new meaning (as in your patriot example). But none of this applies to Noah’s claim here that “canonization is a theoretical process.” The ‘-ize’ makes it a process and surely it’s theoretical, even if the dictionary doesn’t explicitly state ‘theory’ when defining ‘canon’. I guess you might presume some theory of forms that makes it impossible for you to acknowledge that all those principles, standards, etc. of ‘canon’ are based on a theory, but even Plato had to make a lot of theoretical arguments to get you there.
I remember reading that hilarious book… You know? _Maus_, or something… As a matter of fact I laughed my guts out when I first read Hal Foster’s _Tarzan_.
Certainly, “the dictionary doesn’t explicitly state ‘theory’ when defining ‘canon’.” But, in what way is the process by which an artistic work becomes considered worthy to join the canon a theoretical one?
Saying “surely it’s theoretical” doesn’t make the process so. As mentioned earlier…
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the·o·ry
1. a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein’s theory of relativity.
2. a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.
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Even with the less commonly used meanings of “theory”…[it] doesn’t mean that items chosen for, say, Harold Bloom’s mind-bogglingly sweeping “Western Canon” …got there because they fit some “proposed explanation of what constitutes literary quality whose status is still conjectural,” but because they’ve stood the test of time and innumerable critical assessments and valuations.
If I’m missing something here, kindly explain…
And “Williams isn’t dismissing the dictionary”? Let’s look again at what he says…
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Dictionaries are produced, and, with a show of authority no less confident because it is usually so limited in place and time, what is called a proper meaning is attached. But while it may be possible to do this, more or less satisfactorily, with certain simple names of things and effects, it is not only impossible but irrelevant in the case of more complicated ideas.
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(Emphases added)
I said “Dictionary-dissing,” not “dismissing”; and while indeed Williams’ remarks don’t wholly consign dictionaries and those who use them to the rubbish-heap, they’re insultingly condescending.
———————-
Charles Reece says:
…I guess you might presume some theory of forms that makes it impossible for you to acknowledge that all those principles, standards, etc. of ‘canon’ are based on a theory, but even Plato had to make a lot of theoretical arguments to get you there.
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Urnh? I mentioned earlier that there are qualities which, if a work of art possesses them, surely help add to its aesthetic worth:
– Originality
– Creative mastery
– Psychological/intellectual depth and complexity
– Imagination
– The effectiveness with which its creator’s intentions are communicated
…And so forth.
If performance of “Hamlet” features psychological and intellectual depth and complexity in the starring role, and another empty, hambone bombast, do you need a “theory of forms” or “a lot of theoretical arguments” to make the case that the first is better?
(If there’s a way to cast aspersions upon others’ arguments without being rude to polite and doubtlessly perfectly fine folks, I’d also like to know that.
But then, the title of this thread is “Phooey From Me To You”…)
Aaaah, dictionary definitions are only valid to the extent that theorists impose a “reading” on them — right, Caro? Right, Noah?
Mike: Roger Corman, Otto Preminger, and Jerry Lewis have all three directed magnificent films (e.g. respectively ‘The Tomb of Ligea’, ‘Laura’, and ‘The Nutty Professor’) that very much are ‘auteur’ films.
You guys are getting derailed by the fact that dictionaries don’t define the precise senses of all possible combinations of words: the dictionary definition is giving you a starting point for what theory means, and then it gets modified by adjectives — atomic theory, economic theory, literary theory.
Modifiers modify the meanings of words, so a word plus a modifier means something slightly different than the word without the modifier.
Canonization of art and books obviously isn’t a process in atomic theory or economic theory, but it is a process within art/literary theory and in that context Noah’s usage makes complete sense. If you’re gonna ding him on something, ding him for not saying “art theory” but honestly, on this blog he needs to do that? Oy.
I’m not sure what the thing is that canonization’s supposed to be if NOT a process of building a theory…
But also, seriously? The phrase from dictionary.com “any comprehensive list of books within a field” pretty obviously does not apply to the canon in literature, since there isn’t any such thing as a comprehensive list, and it would be the antithesis of a canon if there were. The problem may stem from a plain-old-bad definition. Merriam-Webster gives “a sanctioned or accepted group of body of related works” and canonization is therefore the process by which those works become sanctioned or accepted.
Canon in the literary sense also derives from the religious use, so the recent scientific definitions of “theory” are specific in the wrong way. The first two definitions for theory in M-W are:
1 : the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another
2 : abstract thought : speculation
Either of which works fine for Noah’s point…
Mike,
If performance of “Hamlet” features psychological and intellectual depth and complexity in the starring role, and another empty, hambone bombast, do you need a “theory of forms” or “a lot of theoretical arguments” to make the case that the first is better?
Yes, you do, these qualities that you list (which are pretty good to my mind) aren’t nomological principles, like the laws of nature or whatnot. Some smartass punk might not accept the superiority of Hamlet over whatever reality show he likes, but that isn’t the same sort of subjectivism as a guy who jumps out of a window, refusing to believe in gravity. Furthermore, regarding the dictionary, official/literal meanings change over time (just look at one of Groth’s favorites ‘egregious’). I see Williams as being correct. As long as we’re upfront about the way we’re manipulating meanings, another’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge that ain’t playing fair — it’s disingenuous. That’s what he was dissing.
“there are qualities which, if a work of art possesses them, surely help add to its aesthetic worth:
– Originality
– Creative mastery
– Psychological/intellectual depth and complexity
– Imagination
– The effectiveness with which its creator’s intentions are communicated
…And so forth.”
this is a theoretical argument. even canons that make gestures towards some kind of objectivity have to be grounded on some sort of notions (however broad) about what art or greatness is. i don’t think even bloom would disagree with this.
Oh,come on, Caro. This was Noah’s rather belittling response to Mike’s dictionary quotes:
“Some people, when they see a word, think the first thing to do is to define it. Dictionaries are produced, and, with a show of authority no less confident because it is usually so limited in place and time, what is called a proper meaning is attached. But while it may be possible to do this, more or less satisfactorily, with certain simple names of things and effects, it is not only impossible but irrelevant in the case of more complicated ideas. What matters in them is not he proper meaning but the history and complexity of meanings: the conscious changes, or consciously different uses, and just as often those changes and differences which, masked by a nominal continuity, come to express radically different and often a first unnoticed changes in experience and history.”
— quoting Raymond Williams, in a tortuously badly written justification for lexical subjectivism.
Putting “literary theory” on the same level as “atomic theory” is a strange case of special pleading. The ghost of Sokal’s hoax roams!
Saying people don’t speak like a dictionary isn’t a “justification for lexical subjectivism.” Cognitive scientists would back him up on that.
Alex — I wasn’t referring to that, just to the post that originally prompted the dictionary definitions and Mike’s claim that “theory” was the wrong word.
Theory’s not the wrong word: it’s just a more specialized sense of theory than the definitions Mike sent. Anything else is willfully ignoring the existence of modifiers – which may in fact be a valid theoretical gambit, but I can’t figure out to what end…
Oh, and my response is also to “dictionary definitions only apply until theorists impose a reading on them,” because no, it’s just that dictionary definitions on their own are inadequate to account for the changes in meaning that result due to modifiers. They do not attempt to define every sense of a word in usage, only the most basic ones.
I also agree with Charles on every point he made. The world may now come to an end. ;)
I came in late, and I really don’t understand the argument here? Mike said the auteur business was a theory, and that the canon was subjective, and it looks like Noah countered by saying that theories are subjective — which is one of the differences between the heuristic theories that characterize the humanities and the empirical theories that characterize the sciences — and then all hell broke loose. Can somebody catch me up, please, with what the point we’re arguing about is so I can pick a side? This business of basically agreeing with everybody on at least something is no fun at all.
OK, I think the argument started here, maybe, when Mike said this?
And Noah responded by pointing out that canonization was theoretical, and then Mike countered with this:
And then Noah quoted Raymond Williams, right?
Mike, what do you make of the alternate definitions of theory from Merriam-Webster, particularly “speculation”? Speculation’s not entirely subjective, but neither is it as rigorous as the definitions you originally used. If “theoretical” was replaced by “speculative” in your question would you still need to ask it?
Do you also disagree that it’s speculative, and if so, what adjective would you substitute there?
I’m actually out of town and not able to come out swinging as usual — but I want to say I am pleased to see Caro and Charles agree, and also pleased to see that Mike dismissed Raymond Williams for being a Marxist, since I noted he was a Marxist precisely so that Mike could have the pleasure of so dismissing him.
Alex, I was poking Mike — but hopefully in a friendly fashion. Mike’s the first to make fun of his own habit of quoting the dictionary.
The point about literary theory is, just as Caro says, that it’s not scientific theory; it’s not exactly subjective, but not exactly empirical either. Mike seems to think that canon formation can be reduced to common sense objective measures. LIke Charles and Caro, I don’t think that’s true. Any statement of value about literary works relies on some sort of theoretical framework — even if that theoretical framework is entirely subjective (i.e., I like what I like, and that’s good enough.)
————–
Alex Buchet says:
…Mike: Roger Corman, Otto Preminger, and Jerry Lewis have all three directed magnificent films (e.g. respectively ‘The Tomb of Ligea’, ‘Laura’, and ‘The Nutty Professor’) that very much are ‘auteur’ films.
————–
Indeed they are; but (there’s always a “but”! So sayeth The Quibbler…) a few exceptions – or bodies of work, such as the Val Lewton-produced horror movies – among the hundreds of thousands of films that have been made don’t make the sweeping claims of the auteur theory (which bears damn little resemblance to the way commercial movies are actually made) valid.
————–
Caro says:
You guys are getting derailed by the fact that dictionaries don’t define the precise senses of all possible combinations of words…
————–
Certainly not; else it would be the equivalent of the ultra-accurate map in the Borges story, that was exactly as large as the terrain it delineated.
Yet, how can people discuss or argue about a subject without basic dictionary definitions serving to provide an agreed-upon meaning for the words being tossed about?
Domingos said earlier, “We don’t need to go further than the word ‘comics.'” Ho-kay; so when talking “comics,” we’re including the Lascaux cave paintings, the Stations of the Cross in churches, and that ancient tower with the sequential narrative images corkscrewing ’round it, right? No?
If any significant quantity disagrees – as many do – then an agreed-upon basic definition becomes all the more important.
—————
…I’m not sure what the thing is that canonization’s supposed to be if NOT a process of building a theory…
———————
If a “canon” is supposed to be a high-end version of those “ten best _______” lists, as indicated in Noah’s essay…
———————
…there’s virtually no effort that I’ve ever seen to solidify television’s bona-fides through canon formation. I’m sure someone has made a list of the best 100 television shows…
———————
…and Harold Bloom’s “Western Canon,” does that mean that first, we assemble the canon, then the theory about what goes in it follows? And whyinhell do we need theories about what constitutes artistic quality? Do gourmands or oenophiles need theoretical frameworks to tell what best stimulates the palate?
If it helps any in understanding where I’m coming from, science was my first love, and I came much later to appreciating art. (And ended up working as a commercial artist, where creativity is employed in a logically functional basis.) And have the attitude that aesthetic appreciation and evaluation need not be purely subjective, but can be systematized and rationally understood and quantified. (Not entirely, but for the most part.)
——————–
Noah Berlatsky says:
I’m actually out of town and not able to come out swinging as usual — but I want to say I am pleased to see Caro and Charles agree, and also pleased to see that Mike dismissed Raymond Williams for being a Marxist, since I noted he was a Marxist precisely so that Mike could have the pleasure of so dismissing him.
——————–
If someone is a “flat-Earther,” they may not necessarily be wrong about everything they say, but that certainly indicates a predisposition to ignore mere reality when it gets in the ways of their mental constructs.
For instance, from a great intellect like Aristotle we hear:
———————
Why have men more teeth then women?
By reason of the abundance of heat and blood which is more in men than in women.
———————
http://www.exclassics.com/arist/arist37.htm
Which Bertrand Russell zinged by saying, “Aristotle maintained that women have fewer teeth than men; although he was twice married, it never occurred to him to verify this statement by examining his wives’ mouths.”
(I’ve broken up my original post into several pieces, the better to get by CAPTCHA’s aversion to too many links in one post.)
———————
Alex, I was poking Mike — but hopefully in a friendly fashion. Mike’s the first to make fun of his own habit of quoting the dictionary.
———————
I’m pleased you can maintain your equanimity! Wish I could agree with you more often, but, oy, the things you say…!
———————-
The point about literary theory is, just as Caro says, that it’s not scientific theory; it’s not exactly subjective, but not exactly empirical either. Mike seems to think that canon formation can be reduced to common sense objective measures. LIke Charles and Caro, I don’t think that’s true. Any statement of value about literary works relies on some sort of theoretical framework — even if that theoretical framework is entirely subjective (i.e., I like what I like, and that’s good enough.)
———————-
In a section of “Understanding Comics,” Scott McCloud writes, “By direction alone, a line may go from passive and timeless…”
http://img101.imageshack.us/img101/4231/mccloudlines.jpg
…do we need theories to tell us that a jagged line has a harshly unsettling effect, a gently curving one is soothingly relaxing?
Check these out: http://img594.imageshack.us/img594/769/swastika2.jpg . Is it not clearly apparent that the second image, thanks to some Photoshopping, comes across as a “kinder, gentler” swastika? While the first is harsh, brutal?
Though there are cultural variations, human brains are programmed to react to stimuli in similar fashions. A spoonful of honey will universally be more pleasing than one of vinegar.
Sure, art is a more complex phenomenon. But though tastes and fashions may vary over time and cultures, when works become part of a canon, it’s because they’ve stood the test of time and innumerable critical assessments and valuations. And have achieved a “consensus agreement” about their worth.
As I’d mentioned in some TCJ message board post about art criticism, a work of art may be deficient in some areas, yet still compensate and achieve greatness by being outstanding in others. Damn little emotional depth in “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” yet it’s still brilliant.
I can see what Noah griped about in “Popeye,” yet isn’t repetitive humor, with “the same zany characters performing the same zany routines week after week in a timeless round of entertaining tedium” an integral part of great comic strips such as “Peanuts” and “Krazy Kat”?
The drawing may have “none of the sweeping formal adventurousness of Little Nemo,” but that’s like complaining that Schulz didn’t render like Hal Foster. The very scruffiness and grit of Segar’s art, the brisk and brusque vitality, the way Segar creates suspense and sets up gags which pay off again and again…
———————–
Noah Berlatsky says:
…after reading through the Plunder Island strips, I can say with some assurance that, man, this is not for me. Though I enjoyed the energy of the drawing, and the Sea Hag and Goon provided some evocatively creepy moments early on, the limited range of the humor, and its empty-headedness, quickly becomes numbing. Wimpy is lazy, Wimpy eats a lot, Popeye is noble, defends the underdog, and always wins. It’s like Garfield meets Superman.
———————–
As it turns out, I found this online; check it out for yourself and see if you’re of the same opinion:
———————–
“Popeye in Plunder Island”
All thirty-two episodes of what is generally considered the best of all of the Popeye adventures is now available online. These comic strips were produced for Hearst’s King Features Syndicate in 1933-1934. Plunder Island from E. C. Segar’s Thimble Theatre can be found here. [ http://www.threemagi.com/Popeye/Popeye.htm ]
———————–
Some highlights:
http://www.threemagi.com/Popeye/Popeye7.htm
http://www.threemagi.com/Popeye/Popeye10.htm
http://www.threemagi.com/Popeye/Popeye15.htm
Mike, on the map! Eco also has an essay about it that he says is an homage to the Borges you mention.
It’s also referenced on the first page of Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation — which is the fake book in the early part of The Matrix.
GRIN. I am happy to think of that this morning.
You say:
It’s just that, as the examples showed, the definitions you gave weren’t all the definitions: that “speculation” one, for example, is straight out of Merriam-Webster but there was no corrollary in the original defs. We can debate — theoretically! — how fluid the meanings of words actually are in practice, but even if we say they’re not fluid, they’re still more varied than the dictionary usually allows for.
When Sam Delany in his overall highly complimentary essay on Scott McCloud actually does get around to saying something critical, it’s on this very point about the limitations of definitions. And the fact remains that “theory” in the sense that it is used in the humanities, as a synonym for a systematic philosophical engagement about the terms of the discipline, simply does not mean what the dictionary.com definitions say it means. It means that older sense of analysis and speculation — which in fact is a legitimate dictionary definition, found in Merriam-Webster, but just an older one than the one that most people think of in our scientific age. Going to definitions may be essential for communication if people don’t understand the sense in which the other person is using the word, but it’s definitely a step back from the questions at hand.
And speaking of the questions at hand, I’m still not understanding this:
I would absolutely consider the process of coming up with a high-end version of those lists as involving the “analyzing and speculating” and thinking and negotiating that Noah rightly called theorizing, so I’m clearly just still not understanding what your objection is…
“Though there are cultural variations, human brains are programmed to react to stimuli in similar fashions. A spoonful of honey will universally be more pleasing than one of vinegar.”
This is theory, Mike. You make some statements about what is and is not natural, and then you relate them to a (poorly defended, largely bullshit, but still) generalized statement about how brains function. You’re basing your statements on an empiricist/pseudo-scientific basis — that’s theory. You just don’t recognize it as theory because it happens to be what you believe and (presumably) because it’s phrased in an empiricist, common-sense formulation that you see as value-neutral. But it’s not value-neutral, and it is a theory — which doesn’t, of course, make it wrong (though it is in fact wrong in this case, but that’s a separate argument.)
I think Mike’s probably correct that there are certain qualities to art that are biologically coded as pleasant. The problem is that aesthetic pleasure can’t be reduced to that without a theory in place. Making art for tweaking those qualities doesn’t necessarily make great art. For a counter-example, though most people still don’t accept it, musique concrète gives me immense pleasure. It takes theory to argue that it isn’t music. So, whatever biological basis there is to art appreciation, it most certainly applies to more rudimentary qualities than something like “psychological/intellectual depth and complexity” or “originality.” That stuff is theory-dependent.
—————–
Noah Berlatsky says:
“Though there are cultural variations, human brains are programmed to react to stimuli in similar fashions. A spoonful of honey will universally be more pleasing than one of vinegar.”
This is theory, Mike.
You make some statements about what is and is not natural, and then you relate them to a (poorly defended, largely bullshit, but still) generalized statement about how brains function. You’re basing your statements on an empiricist/pseudo-scientific basis — that’s theory.
You just don’t recognize it as theory because it happens to be what you believe and (presumably) because it’s phrased in an empiricist, common-sense formulation that you see as value-neutral. But it’s not value-neutral, and it is a theory…
—————–
No, that’s simple biological FACT. I guess you’d also reject the idea that humans universally find a luscious meal more enjoyable than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, unless it came with a theory to rationalize it all.
I’ll never forget some photos of a baby tasting sweets for the first time: confused for a moment, then grinning broadly, wanting more, more!!
—————–
…The human tongue can detect four basic flavors — salt, sour, bitter and sweet, but humans are naturally drawn to sweet because we are primates, animals that evolved eating fruit in the trees.
Monkeys and ape spend their days in the forest searching for ripe fruit. They have been selected to prefer sweet, ripe fruit over unripe, bitter fruit because it has higher sugar content and supplies more ready energy. Ripe fruit also has more water, which can be hard to find high in the canopy.
So it makes sense for primates, including us, to have a highly developed palate for sweet things. And we primates have extended that preference beyond mere fruit.
In the 1990s, William McGrew, now at Cambridge University, reported that chimpanzees used sticks to dip into beehives and extract honey.
And they suffer to get it. Chimps break into a hive with their fingers, ignoring the buzz of angry bees and the sting of those that bite, and get down to business like Winnie-the-Pooh with his hand in the honey jar…
—————–
http://www.livescience.com/history/080208-hn-sugar.html
BTW, I am hugely fascinated with, and – for a non-medical layman – pretty darn knowledgeable about how brains function. (Highly recommend the writings of Oliver Sacks for the fascinating insights to be gained when brains malfunction.)
Getting into the biologically-influenced qualities which most humans find beautiful in prospective mates, though there are occasionally some bizarre permutations (those African tribes which like stretched necks or saucerlike, distended lips on women), still…
——————-
There appear to be universal standards regarding attractiveness both within and across cultures and ethnic groups…
Women, on average, tend to be attracted to men who are slightly taller and who have a relatively narrow waist and broad shoulders. Men, overall, tend to be attracted by women who are slightly shorter, have a youthful appearance and exhibit features such as a symmetrical face, full breasts, full lips, and a low waist-hip ratio…
Studies have shown that ovulating heterosexual women and homosexual men prefer faces with masculine traits associated with increased testosterone, such as heavy brows, prominent chins, heavy jaws, and broad cheekbones. Women who are in the late luteal or early follicular phases of the menstrual cycle (or those taking hormonal contraception) do not prefer masculine male faces. These are suggested to be a reliable indication of good health, or, alternatively, that dominant- and masculine-looking males are more likely to achieve high status…
Also, females tend to prefer different facial traits in short-term and long-term partners…
Symmetrical faces and bodies may be signs of good inheritance to women of child-bearing age seeking to create healthy offspring. Some studies suggested that women at peak fertility were more likely to fantasize about men with greater symmetry. Studies suggest women are more attracted to men with symmetrical features, while this symmetry has also been shown to correlate with other variables typically associated with masculinity, such as greater height, broader shoulders, and smaller hip-to-waist ratios. Facial and body symmetry may indicate good health, which is a desirable feature.
…A near-universal sexually attractive feature of a man is a v-shaped torso: a relatively narrow waist offset with broad shoulders. While some cultures prefer their males huskier and others leaner, the rule of a v-shaped torso generally holds true. Consistently, men with a waist-to-shoulder ratio of 0.75 or lower are viewed as considerably more attractive than men with more even waists and shoulders…
…It has been shown that women prefer more masculine men during the fertile period of the menstrual cycle and more feminine men during other parts of the cycle. This distinction supports the sexy son hypothesis, which posits that it is evolutionarily advantageous for women to select potential fathers who are traditionally masculine rather than the best caregivers…According to one study, men with facial scars are more attractive to Western women seeking short-term relationships; this may be due to the perception that facial scars are a symbol of high testosterone and masculinity…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attractiveness
Which actually makes one understand why the Nazis found much of modern art (such as some featured in their “Degenerate Art” exhibit) repugnant. Bodily distortions such as featured in Expressionist art they correlated to physical disease, deformity: http://www.greatesttheft.com/rsrc/media/image/000010_degenerate.jpg .
You’re making analogy after analogy, insisting that they’re all based in biological fact, and end by justifying the ideological, flagrantly anti-Semitic theories of Nazis. I couldn’t have made my point better if I’d tried.
There may or may not be biological preferences in matters like taste and gender preferences — the evidence for those things is better than for biological ideas about aesthetics, in any case (the evidence isn’t iron-clad though; your skepticism utterly deserts you in anything with “science” even loosely attached to it, it seems like — even when dealing with Wikipedia articles!) But making analogies between that sort of biological theory (not fact, theory) and anything else requires a theoretical leap. Whether your want to admit it or not.
Oh, and Oliver Sachs is an incredibly crappy writer who generates a gigantic shitstorm of half-assed theories based on shaky biological foundations. I understand why he appeals to you…and not you alone, of course.
——————
Noah Berlatsky says:
You’re making analogy after analogy, insisting that they’re all based in biological fact, and end by justifying the ideological, flagrantly anti-Semitic theories of Nazis. I couldn’t have made my point better if I’d tried.
——————
Alas, and you couldn’t make the point better that someone can name-drop Kierkegaard and Derrida, and not be capable of figuring out nuance or meaning in a simple sentence.
I mentioned how humans are biologically programmed to find symmetrical features – which subliminally indicate health – appealing, and how this “makes one understand why the Nazis found [the bodily distortions in] much of modern art…repugnant,” and you take that to mean “justifying the ideological, flagrantly anti-Semitic theories of Nazis.”
Exactly the same tactic employed by right-wing politicos. When some point out how our country’s support of exploitative dictatorships feeds resentment and anti-Americanism, which leads to terrorism, the right-wingers puff up in outrage: “They’re defending the terrorists!!”
To explain why a group reacts in a particular fashion does not automatically translate to a defense, or even a justification, of those actions.
And I see you have me “justifying” the Nazis’ “flagrant” anti-Semitism. What, Jews are all asymmetrical?
———————
There may or may not be biological preferences in matters like taste and gender preferences — the evidence for those things is better than for biological ideas about aesthetics, in any case (the evidence isn’t iron-clad though; your skepticism utterly deserts you in anything with “science” even loosely attached to it…
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As opposed to the “iron-clad” facts that most philosophers deal in?
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….it seems like — even when dealing with Wikipedia articles!)
———————
Ah, the old “mock somebody for quoting Wikipedia” tactic. If it were an isolated article crafted up by Joe Schmo, it would make sense; yet the actual entry features almost 100 citations, from sources such as “The evolutionary psychology of physical attractiveness: Sexual selection and human morphology,” Ethology and Sociobiology, 16, 395-424; “Judging physical attractiveness: What body aspects do we use?” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 13, 19-33; “Darwinian Aesthetics: Sexual Selection and the Biology of Beauty,” Biological Reviews, 78(3), 385-407…
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But making analogies between that sort of biological theory (not fact, theory) and anything else requires a theoretical leap. Whether your want to admit it or not.
———————
More of a logical extrapolation…
Actually, I can understand how somebody in the mental space of fuzzy-minded philosophical meanderings (would Descartes say, “If I’m unconscious, I’m not thinking, therefore I am not“?), and where film directors are the sole “authors” of their movies, would feel threatened by and reject anything claiming to be factually “real.”
I guess, from past experience, you’ll interpret the preceding paragraph as “justifying” your attitude.
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Oh, and Oliver Sachs is an incredibly crappy writer who generates a gigantic shitstorm of half-assed theories based on shaky biological foundations…
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Actually, a very small portion of his writings feature theorizing. A taste of his works:
——————–
Sacks describes his cases with a wealth of narrative detail, concentrating on the experiences of the patient (in the case of his A Leg to Stand On, the patient was himself). The patients he describes are often able to adapt to their situation in different ways despite the fact that their neurological conditions are usually considered incurable…
In his other books, he describes cases of Tourette syndrome and various effects of Parkinson’s disease. The title article of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is about a man with visual agnosia…The title article of An Anthropologist on Mars, which won a Polk Award for magazine reporting, is about Temple Grandin, a professor with high-functioning autism. Seeing Voices, Sacks’s 1989 book, covers a variety of topics in deaf studies.
In his book The Island of the Colorblind Sacks describes the Chamorro people of Guam, who have a high incidence of a neurodegenerative disease known as Lytico-bodig (a devastating combination of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis ALS, dementia, and parkinsonism). Along with Paul Cox, Sacks has published papers suggesting a possible environmental cause for the cluster, namely the toxin beta-methylamino L-alanine (BMAA) from the cycad nut accumulating by biomagnification in the flying fox bat…
———————-
Before becoming a professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center…
——————–
Sacks began consulting at chronic care facility Beth Abraham Hospital (now Beth Abraham Health Services) in 1966. At Beth Abraham, Sacks worked with a group of survivors of the 1920s sleeping sickness, encephalitis lethargica, who had been unable to move on their own for decades. These patients and his treatment of them were the basis of Sacks’s book Awakenings.
Sacks served as an instructor and later clinical professor of neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from 1966 to 2007, and also held an appointment at New York University Medical School from 1999 to 2007. In July 2007, Sacks joined the faculty of Columbia University Medical Center as a professor of neurology and psychiatry…
Since 1966, Sacks has served as a neurological consultant to various nursing homes in New York City run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, and from 1966 to 1991, he was a consulting neurologist at Bronx State Hospital.
…Sacks remains a consultant neurologist to the Little Sisters of the Poor, and maintains a practice in New York City. He serves on the boards of the The Neurosciences Institute and the New York Botanical Garden.
———————
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Sacks
Though “Sacks has sometimes faced criticism in the medical and disability studies communities,” (but then you wouldn’t take this criticism seriously, since it’s reported in a Wikipedia article), would he hold such prestigious positions if he were a tinfoil-hat-wearing quack?
Sacks isn’t a quack; his writing and thinking just suck when he moves from neuroscience to pop psychology. And yes, I”ve read a fair amount of his writing (all in one unfortunate gob.)
Stephen Jay Gould is a much more sophisticated writer, I think, in terms of incorporating and analyzing scientific ideas and theories in a popular form.
I like Wikipedia (I’ve written for it even.) Using it to prove points (rather than for background info) is somewhat problematic.
“would feel threatened by and reject anything claiming to be factually “real.””
You’ve got a real streak of anti-intellectualism, yeah, which I think is unfortunate. I don’t reject the idea that anything can be a fact. 2+2=4 is a rigorous fact. The idea that contentious biological theories (and the theories you cite are all much, much less rigorous than algebra, to say the least) can be used to bolster even more contentious aesthetic theories — those things simply don’t add up to facts. Sneering at Derrida doesn’t make them add up to facts any more. Name-dropping Oliver Sachs and Wikipedia doesn’t help you make them add up to facts either.
The Nazis dislike of so-called decadent art had everything to do with the fact that the people who created it were by and large Jewish (and I believe gay.) When you say that instead the issue was the content of the art, you’re justifying anti-semitism — not in a horrible, world-coming-to-an-end, you should be shunned way, but in a maybe-you-should-think-a-little-harder-about-what-you’re-saying way.
Using biological theory to bolster other ideas — aesthetics, social, whatever — requires an analogy. Again, that’s a theoretical process: analogies aren’t facts, they’re metaphors. Stating that you are a common-sense empiricist doesn’t mean that you aren’t bound to a theory; it just means that you’re so bound to theory that you can’t tell theory from fact. acknowledging the importance of theory is actually a way to respect and see facts more clearly.
The strictest empiricist position is that everything except the actual scientific measurement or observation is a theory.
The fact that DNA is made of phosphate and sugar backbone with four nucleotides is an empirical observation. The process of DNA replication is a theory — it is well tested enough that it’s ok to call it a fact. But Watson and Crick followed a theoretical process to get there. Franklin didn’t. She followed an empirical process. And she contributed significantly — but she didn’t answer the question.
The way scientists solved the problem of the DNA structure and function was through non-empirical means. They did modeling before they did research. That’s theory in the same sense that Noah is using the word. It is a valuable, even invaluable, part of science. The entirety of modern molecular biology is based on exactly the same kind of theoretical intellectual effort that Noah is talking about.
It’s actually probably easier to see this in a field like neuroscience where the concepts are not yet proven: Injuries to the hippocampus impair the ability to create memories: that’s a fact. The explanations for the function of the hippocampus in memory creation, and thus the explanations and treatments and understanding of those effects, are all theories.
They are still “hypothetical theories” — for which science uses the shorthand term “hypothesis.” But none of them are empirical, yet. You are correct, Mike, that science uses the term theory for a concept supported by empirical evidence, but the existence of empirical evidence doesn’t somehow make the theory different in kind from what it was before you tested it. It just makes it less hypothetical.
In the humanities, all theories are always hypothetical, because there’s no way to empirically test something that is fundamentally heuristic, and there’s only limited universality. But that also doesn’t mean that the intellectual, theoretical effort that goes into creating them is somehow different from what scientists do to come up with their hypothetical theories. Erwin Schrodinger wrote two books in the early 1950s on exactly this point — “Nature and the Greeks” and “Science and Humanism” — in which he draws extensive parallels between philosophical and scientific thinking.
Almost all high-level scientific thinking is theoretical in the exact sense that Noah is using the term. Science wouldn’t be science without it.
I gotta say, I’m really completely disgusted at the way the scientific backlash against the religious backlash against science has been to denigrate theoretical thinking to the point that students of science aren’t trained to do it.
As an undergraduate, I studied physics with a professor who had worked in Crick’s lab at Cambridge while he was a graduate student, and he said that imagination and the ability to think philosophically are the single most valuable tools of the scientist in the 20th century – the machines will take care of the rest. That’s even more valuable advice today, and I think the reason science hasn’t had a DNA-level breakthrough in the last half century is because scientists are taught the opposite.
Gack, missed this. Mike, you say this…
…as an example of how Sacks’ doesn’t engage in theory but rather presents facts.
Sacks actually does theorize in that book — or at least in his articles related to it. Specifically, he postulates that the neurotoxin BBAA causes the cluster of neurodegenerative disorders found on Guam. It’s fascinating and is an excellent hypothetical theory but it has not been proven. It is very specifically not a biological fact. Even the wikipedia article on the disorder says so…
My husband’s graduate research, conducted after Sacks’ book was released, was on neurodegeneration, specifically demyelination, in Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis. (He was funded by the National MS Society.) Scientific facts about neurodegeneration are very very thin on the ground, especially facts in the big sense like we have in genetics, which is extremely well-established and tested.
We understand brain anatomy at the molecular level and some of the related chemistry very well, and we have tons of observational data, but the dots aren’t fully connected yet, especially in pathological situations. Neuroscience is not nearly as “factual” as genetics. There are many hypotheses, but even the methods for empirical testing of hypotheses (hypothetical theories!) about neurodegeneration are very difficult and complex and still highly contentious. Our understanding of neurodegeneration, its treatment, its causes, all of it, is very much still being theorized and tested.
So pretty much everything in Sacks’ books is still hypothetical theory except the empirical observations, and those don’t really add up to “scientific understanding.” That doesn’t make them bad — you and Noah can duke that out — but saying they deal only in “biological fact” just isn’t right…
“More of a logical extrapolation…
Actually, I can understand how somebody in the mental space of fuzzy-minded philosophical meanderings (would Descartes say, “If I’m unconscious, I’m not thinking, therefore I am not“?), and where film directors are the sole “authors” of their movies, would feel threatened by and reject anything claiming to be factually “real.” ”
I dunno- seems to be you are caught up- from the social psychology perspective- in cognitive biases.
Your Scott Mccloud example is an example of “priming”- you were presupposed by the context to react in a certain way to the evidence presented.
The canon is not formed by popular vote- so your theory that people are predisposed to react to it in a certain biological way seem odd. Cognitive bias: self fulfilling prophecy (teachers make people read a book, who grow up to become teachers who imitate their lessons and make people read the books, so that the book survives the test of time, people like you start claiming the book is scientifically wonderful, etc.)
Or maybe I’m wrong, but your speculative claim is either unscientific, or the term “science” is so abused as to be worthless.
Any good marketer knows that they can influence how people behave through their unconscious mind. This has been demonstrated in social psychology studies. People don’t react to a work of art in a biologically predetermined way- it is influenced by the social context.
As for those other studies you mentioned above, I’m guessing the original studies are very wrapped up in degrees of correlation and results based on specific methodological approaches.
You presented them as “facts” – which is, as Noah said, a metaphor.
Literary or other humanities theories are very, very different from hard-science theories, and the difference is crucial. The latter are falsifiable, in the Popperian sense, the latter are not.
Regarding a supposed evolutionary basis for aesthetics…this is persuasive, but it is a product of “natural evolution”, i.e. descent through modification via selection.
However, cultural evolution is just as powerful, and thousands of times faster. Cultural evolution does as much to shape our aesthetics as natural evolution, perhaps more.
And there is personal evolution– wherein the individual’s taste evolves through maturation and cultivation.
I’d say the Nazi’s rejection of “entartete Kunst” was ideologically-based. Just the title–‘Degenerate Art’– gives the game away. ‘Degeneracy’ is a pseudo-scientific notion that has no basis in biological fact (with the possible exception of small populations suffering from a too-small gene pool.)
AArgh, please read in the 1st paragraph: ‘…the former are not.’
It’s true– the brain really does go first…
Popper’s theories are actually really debatable for science as well; the actual way science gets done isn’t necessarily through falsifiability (Kuhn and Feyerabend as well as others would dispute Popper’s account, for example.)
But whether or not you accept Popper for science, Alex is clearly right that his take on science can’t be generalized to social sciences or aesthetics.
Kuhn and Feyerabend?! My God, you are scraping the bottom of the barrel re: epistemology.
Feyerabend, in particular, is worth nothing but the deepest scorn.
Feyerabend’s great! Certainly much more acute than Popper, IMO anyway.
I think that science, like any other social phenomena, is implicated in social networks and in power. The idea that scientists and science is somehow a pure endeavor just leads to the worship of technocracy…which is obviously problematic in a lot of ways.
Oh…and it also leads to folks like Mike rather desperately trying to use references to science to justify whatever it is they happen to be trying to justify at the moment….
Alex says:
That difference is precisely the one I said above: theories in the humanities are heuristics whereas theories in the sciences are subject to empirical testing. There is no requirement or even possibility in the Humanities that the theory conform to empirical evidence: only a loose requirement that it conform to textual or historical evidence, and even that requirement is loose. Because ultimately theory in the humanities is philosophy or art and theory in the sciences is, well, science.
But — and this is the crucial point, and the point of the Watson v. Franklin example — there is not a significant intellectual difference between the two.
Mike’s point is that because he doesn’t find humanities theories compelling — that’s the anti-intellectual anti-philosophizing bit — he is then justified in throwing out any use of the word “theory” except to apply to strict scientific theories. That’s just wrong.
The word applies to both because both endeavors share a common intellectual foundation in abstract speculative thinking. If you want to dispute that, take it up with the man who brought you quantum mechanics.
=====================
It doesn’t even take Kuhn and Feyerbend to dispute the Popperian character of modern science: two weeks in a molecular biology lab’ll take care of any illusions that it’s anything other than phosphorescent trial and error.
The use of the scientific term “evolution” to describe cultural change is also a metaphorical use: culture may follow processes analogous to scientific evolution in any given specific case, but it can also change via any number of processes completely unlike biological evolution. There is no such thing as an empirically proven always true scientific theory of “cultural evolution.”
I don’t necessarily think Alex was saying the opposite but it wasn’t clear to me so I thought I’d say it definitively.
That’s why it’s perfectly fine to have heuristics in the humanities: the point of the humanities is not to understand the process as if they were “scientific mechanisms,” it’s to understand the effects. The study of cultural processes as “scientific mechanisms” is social science…
My husband corrected me: it is cell biology that doesn’t really fall into Popperian models, not molecular biology (molecular biology being genetics, basically, which largely is falsifiable). Also cell-bio-related clinical research is non-Popperian.
In cell biology, someone will run an experiment on a certain cell type at a certain time point, say, showing a certain protein is expressed on the cell via an immuno-stain. Someone else runs the same experiment at the same time point using a different sample, and doesn’t see the protein expressed on the cell. Has anything been falsified? No. And especially not in the rigorous Popperian sense of the term. Why not? Partly because there’s no theory there to falsify. It’s just data. But also partly because there’s no imperative that observations in complex systems like cell biology be universal for all cells at all time. The odds are in fact that they won’t be. That’s why drugs work in animals sometimes and don’t work in people.
With clinical trials, you run several tests, one of them shows a benefit, one isn’t effective, and one’s inconclusive. Is the theory that the drug is effective falsified? No.
This type of empirical work does not test any accepted large-scale model because you’re looking at so many variables that all you can do is look to the evidence for a hint, as opposed to some sort of rigorous falsifiability.
Now, all of this data may eventually get put into some large-scale model that really explains something fundamental. But that large-scale model will require the kind of imaginative inference that characterizes philosophy too.
The number of people trying to come up with that theory are greatly dwarfed by the people trying to come up with small but useful pieces of insight that can lead to some treatment or new line of research. A lot of the data is contradictory, it’s accuracy can’t be verified, and the experiments that produced it can’t be falsified. Biology is no longer rigorously Popperian.
Most biology is looking for some sort of evidence to bolster an argument for or against using a drug or spending money to pursue a line of research. It’s like close reading; it’s not like philosophy. And close reading is not theory. It’s not like what Popper described, or what Alex and Mike claim for science in a broad sense.
And then there’s string theory…
None of this makes science bad. Much of it makes science good. But it ain’t always the best model for everything. It’s a human intellectual endeavor like everything else.
Caro:
“With clinical trials, you run several tests, one of them shows a benefit, one isn’t effective, and one’s inconclusive. Is the theory that the drug is effective falsified? No.”
Yes, actually. I think Caro is confusing two different usages of ‘falsified’. One meaning ‘demonstrated to be false’, and the other ‘tested by contrary evidence’.
In the second acceptance, we may consider the falsifications of Darwinian theory.
At the time of Darwin’s publication of his theory regarding the evolution of species, there was no understanding of radioactivity. This was a blow to Darwin for two reasons.
1) Darwin lacked an explanation for the frequency of mutations to be preserved or eliminated by natural selection.
2) Ignorance of radioactivity at Earth’s core caused the geologists of the day to estimate the Earth’s age as being, at maximum, 400 million years.Far too young to allow the evolutionary time line implied by Darwin’s theory.
Poor Darwin was tormented by this, and– to my surprise, and that of any modern reader — adopted Lamarckianism, the idea that acquired traits may be transmitted to one’s offspring.
Does this invalidate Darwin’s theory? No, because as subsequent scientific discovery proved, it remains valid despite these erroneous interpolations.
His theory survives the test of falsifiability.
Now, the test results Caro mentions certainly challenge the hypothesis of the drug’s efficacy. Much more testing would be needed to validate said hypothesis, but it remains falsifiable and (depending on the placebos, which Caro hasn’t mentioned) may or may not prove out.
As for the irreproducibility of experiments in cell biology, this doesn’t invalidate Popperian falsifiability. It merely indicates a greater reliance on “anecdotal” results.
Caro:
“Most biology is looking for some sort of evidence to bolster an argument for or against using a drug or spending money to pursue a line of research. ”
Jesus, about as cynical a piece of academic justification for selling out as I have read for a long time.
Basic research and applied science obviously overlap, but let’s not confuse the two.
String theory is very, very dubious stuff.
My whole tirade was set off by Noah and Caro equating literary/aesthetic theory with scientific theory.
Can’t be done…not without risk of severe humiliation.
Caro:
“The use of the scientific term “evolution” to describe cultural change is also a metaphorical use: culture may follow processes analogous to scientific evolution in any given specific case, but it can also change via any number of processes completely unlike biological evolution. There is no such thing as an empirically proven always true scientific theory of “cultural evolution.”
Never claimed there was.
However, “evolution” is not a term of art in science. It is used by scientists, true, but in the everyday vulgar sense.
‘Evolution’ implies progress. No biologists or zoologists accept the 17th century notion of evolving from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ forms.
Darwin himself rejected the term ‘evolution’. He called his theory ‘descent with modification’.
Therefore, ‘cultural evolution’ is not a metaphor mapped on ‘hard’ scientific usage.
And if you still want to quibble, take up your argument with the late Professor Stephen Gould.
Oh get real, Alex. You made the claim that “hard science theories” are “falsifiable, in the Popperian sense.” I gave you an example from hard science, pointed out how it is not falsifiable in the Popperian sense, and your response was first to claim that it is in fact falsifiable and then make a distinction between basic and applied research. That’s a weak gambit at this point in the discussion unless you mean to say that applied research is not hard science, which is just bogus and designed to cover up the fact that you were wrong.
But you were wrong. And you’re still wrong. You’re wrong that clinical research is not hard science, and you’re wrong that my example is falsifiable. Popperian falsifiability depends on the distinction, the “demarcation,” between verifiability and falsifiability. Here’s the relevant passage:
In fact, neither is the Popperian definition that I am using. The Popperian definition is this, from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
For strict Popperian falsifiability to apply, the experimental context has to involve a) a universal law and b) a situation where a SINGLE FALSE EVENT repudiates the entire hypothesis. There are very few cases in cell biology that fit that, and the one I describe is not. By your earlier statement, that would make it not hard science. Which is a load of bull. Cell biology is hard science, and it’s non-Popperian. It’s not about “universal laws.”
But my example also isn’t Popperian in the softer sense that Popper himself acknowledges. Again from Stanford, the Popperian parameters for when a theory is scientific are:
In the clinical case I describe, nothing is falsified, despite your claim that it is, because the second and third studies do not prohibit the first study from being true. They only complicate it. The experiments target no set of statements that qualify as potential falsifiers — and that’s just fine. In fact it’s a good thing. Popperian falsifiability is too strict a benchmark in most biological contexts.
You can look at applications of chemotherapy to recognize that even the very best drug works in some people and doesn’t work in others. Nobody can explain why; it’s trial and error. It is more important to find a range of drugs that work in some cases and then use trial and error to find one that works for a particular patient than it is to uncover the universal law, because you don’t want individual people who have cancer now to die while you try to formulate falsifiable statements about cancer.
Pointing that out is damn far from cynical. It has nothing to do with selling out. It has to do with valuing medical outcomes before some abstract philosophical principle.
So – I can’t see either empirical or Popperian logical grounds that let you claim that something is in fact falsified in my example of the clinical trial. You’re either not defining hard science as something falsifiable in the Popperian sense — in which case your original statement was wrong — or you are, in which case your understanding of hard science is wrong or at least so limited as to be worthless for anything other than as an ideological lead pipe.
None of the examples I have given qualifies as a “scientific theory” in the sense that Popper uses the term or that Mike used it originally; none of it fits these grandiose claims you and Mike make for science. And yet it’s still science and it’s still really good. It’s more empirical and less theoretical than the claims Mike originally made for science. And at the same time, there are scientific theories that are less empirical and more theoretical than the claims Mike originally made for science.
Your Darwin examples, for instance. At the time, they were less empirical and more theoretical. Over time evidence mounted and the theory was polished. Darwin is in fact a very good example of Noah’s use of the term “theory.” (The way you frame them vis-a-vis falsifiability is completely irrelevant, but you might want to rewrite them paying more rigorous attention to the vital Popperian distinction between verifiability and falsifiability.)
Most people think string theory is dubious — even some scientists who work on string theory. I suppose you think that you can wave your Popper at all the theoretical physicists and invalidate all their work just like you can Derrida? Just because it doesn’t fit your worldview?
Hm, doesn’t that prove my point? You have a narrow understanding of science that is not accurate for anything except the center subset, the best established scientific principles, and that completely fails to understand either the purpose or the method of actual work being done by actual scientists. And you use this narrow understanding, which you appear to have gotten primarily from the philosophy of science (which is a theory in the humanities) and pop scientific books like Gould (that lead you to say idiotic things like “evolution” has no hard scientific usage when it fact it even has mathematical theorems associated with it) to knock and devalue modes of thought that you don’t like, that are aesthetically or ideologically unappealing to you. You’re using science as a blunt instrument to beat up on philosophy and aesthetics, and you’re wrong about science and you’re wrong about philosophy.
I just want to reiterate that pointing out that real science doesn’t work according to your idealistic little principles is not cynical.
I didn’t claim science and the humanities were the same: What I claimed is that theorization in both science and the humanities is grounded in a closely related intellectual effort. Like I said, if you dispute that, take it up with Schroedinger. Or you can take it up with Einsten, who said:
Or, since you brought him up, you can take it up with Stephen Jay Gould himself, who concludes in his book “The Hedgehog, The Fox and the Magister’s Pox: Mending the Gap between Science and the Humanities” that the tendency toward dichotomization between the two is problematic and that there’s no point in being a purist. The book unfortunately isn’t on Google Books but you can read a decent summary with relation to these issues here.
The best scientific minds we’ve had understood and wrote about and advocated for exactly the point regarding the role of imaginative intuition in the sciences that you and Mike are saying isn’t true.
Anti-philosophical rants that claim their authority from the culture of science are just transparently bad and transparently ideological. It’s a kind of anti-intellectualism that uses science in a way that is highly dishonest and completely factually wrong. It’s bad for science and it’s bad for the humanities and it’s bad for human beings.
“Oh, get real, Alex”.
All right, Caro, I shall. I held back in the interests of courtesy, but since you insist on a vicious and dishonest response to my post, I see no reason to hold back.
You started off by lying. Bam! Right off the post!
You stated that Popperian strictures re: falsifiability do not apply to cell biology.
BRRRRRRRRRRRRINNNNNNNGGG!
NO.
You are REALLY stating that your husband REFUSES to apply falsifiability to his experiments.
BECAUSE HE CAN’T.
And why should he? His approach is NOT scientific, it is teleological. He’s trying to find knowledge useful to MEDICINE, not to SCIENCE.
Second point:
We were talking about falsifiability as applied to THEORY, not to particular EXPERIMENTS. I have to admire how you slyly confounded the two.
The fact that it is almost impossible to faithfully replicate many experiments in cell biology is not a problem of FALSIFICATION, it is a problem of VERIFICATION. Of course.
Lastly, I would like to see ‘heuristics’ reclaim its proper semantic Lebensraum.
I’m a little sick of the slicks who’re turning it into “I’m making this up as I go along”.
Noah:
“Feyerabend’s great! Certainly much more acute than Popper, IMO anyway.”
Oh, really? I thought better of you, Noah. Feyerabend is a charlatan.
“Science is much closer to myth than a scientific philosophy is prepared to admit. It is one of the many forms of thought that have been developed by man, and not necessarily the best. It is conspicuous, noisy, and impudent, but it is inherently superior only for those who have already decided in favour of a certain ideology, or who have accepted it without ever having examined its advantages and its limits. And as the accepting and rejecting of ideologies should be left to the individual it follows that the separation of state and church must be complemented by the separation of state and science, that most recent, most aggressive, and most dogmatic religious institution. Such a separation may be our only chance to achieve a humanity we are capable of, but have never fully realized.” (Feyerabend 1975, 295)
Yeah! Burn them mad scientists!
Feyerabend has also come out against scientific criticism of astrology and telepathy. Goddam Fascist ‘scientific method’.
He’s a liar and that’s all he is.
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/end_of_science
Alex, saying that modern medicine is not scientific is just nonsense. You’re going to hang your argument on that? Really?
If you honestly believe medicine is teleological rather than scientific, then…well, it’s not me who is at risk of humiliation.
I’d like for you, please, to explain how the mechanisms by which a cancer drug fights tumors is based in teleology rather than science. This will be entertaining.
If you want to call the radical empiricism that characterizes modern medical research “teleology” rather than “science”, well, go ahead, but you might want to take a look at the original point about definitions.
Also, we weren’t talking about theory rather than experiments. We were talking about the range of meanings of theory. I refer you back to Mike’s comment where he makes claims about “biological fact” — something which can only be established through experiment. My claim is and has always been that your range is too narrow.
For the record, my husband’s neuro cell bio research was classified as basic science. It was not applied medical research.
Yes, the problem of replicating an experiment is a problem of verification. But the issue goes deeper than that. There are real, non-ideological limitations regarding the applicability of falsification whenever you deal with complex systems. This is why there is an entire branch of science devoted to complex systems.
And they apply even when talking about theory and not experiments. An anomalous result in a complex system does not, will not and cannot falsify a theory about a standard pathway, because the statements themselves are not intended to be universal.
This does not make them teleological and it does not make the non-scientific. This simply makes them a different kind of scientific statement from the one Popper was talking about, a statement that explains or describes a limited set of empirical data rather than a universal set of empirical data.
That is why your definition of theory — one that now is even narrower and no longer includes experimentation — is just too narrow. Any definition of scientific theory that ends up in a place where modern medical treatments and clinical research is not scientific obviously has some real, real problems as a definition.
And Alex, if you want a source for falsifiability not applying in complex systems contexts (including a great deal of, yes, basic science research in cell bio), I suggest you check out Hayek’s Nobel lecture (boldface below my emphasis):
I’d expect Mike with his anti-Marxism at least to like Hayek, but feelings aside, that’s a pretty obvious statement. The logic of falsifiability applies to statements that involve a limited number of variables. It no longer obtains in models where there are large numbers of variables.
This does not lead to the conclusion that complex systems — like the ones that neuroscientists study or the ones studied by the people here — are not science.
It is exactly the same thing as saying that Newtonian mechanics does not apply in quantum states. That doesn’t make Newtonian mechanics wrong, or quantum mechanics wrong. Similarly, the fact that Popper doesn’t apply in most highly complex cell biology contexts doesn’t make Popper wrong and it doesn’t make cell bio less scientific. All it means is that you can’t make recourse to Popper, or to the nature of proof and theory in the physical sciences, as universal axioms that apply to all of science. In other words, your perspective is too narrow. (Which is what I’ve been saying all along.)
Alex, man…I love you, but I’d urge you to take a deep breath or two? When you start typing in all caps, it might be a sign that you could stand to turn it down a notch, possibly.
Calling Feyerabend a charlatan seems weird. What is he pretending to be that he isn’t? He’s speaking as a philosopher and arguing that science’s pretenses to absolute truth are problematic, and that the way science solidifies power within social systems are theoretical and political operations rather than empirical ones. You can argue about that in various ways, but I don’t really see how it’s a case of bad faith on his part.
Feyerabend also doesn’t claim to want to burn mad scientists. He is disturbed by the way that science is deployed as a cudgel to whack religion and philosophy in ways that he feels are simplistic and dangerous. I mean, do you deny that the excesses of science have caused real problems in our society? And…why exactly does it threaten science if, for example, some people decide they don’t want to believe in evolution? Or want to believe in astrology, for that matter.
In fact, I’d argue that science’s overcarbonated claims to authority actually cause trouble for science in important ways. People reject global warming in part because they expect a kind of scientific certainty — *which science can’t provide*. If science were chastened in its truth claims in some of the ways that Feyerabend suggests it should be, maybe people would have a better sense of what they can actually expect of science. I think that would be helpful for everybody.
Caro…I have to say, I’m not exactly sure at this point where Alex and Mike exactly agree and disagree…but there does seem to be at least a little air between them. My sense is that Mike wants to treat certain social theories as if they have the power of biological science, while Alex wants to draw a sharp line between science and social theories. You’re sort of in the middle, arguing that science is based on empirical data that does not apply to social theories, but pointing out that the actual intellectual process of theory formation is the same (not analogous, but actually the same) in both.
I basically agree with Caro, though I’m possibly more skeptical of science’s empirical claims than she is.
In any case, as Caro says, Popper’s theories seem to be more about what science should be ideally (according to Popper) rather than about how science actually works. I mean, it’s simply not true that a single errant “fact” falsifies a theory. On the contrary, there can be an infinite number of “incorrect” experiments in, say, a high school classroom, and you don’t throw out the theory — you mark the kids down. Of course, you then say, well, the kids don’t know what they’re doing, and that’s certainly true — but then the issue isn’t only falsifiability, but is also expertise. Which means science is not just about dispassionate evaluation of falsifiability vis theories, but is also about who has authority to speak and why.
That doesn’t make science bad or wrong. But it does suggest that creating scientific knowledge depends on social and power relationships, just like creating other kinds of knowledge.
I read this a long time ago, but Shapin and Schaeffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump is kind of a great showdown between history and science; the authors use historical details to examine the ideological underpinnings of empiricism at the inception of modern science (looking particularly at Robert Boyle, who along with his assistant was the only one who could get the air pump to work, if I remember correctly.)
If I have bludgeoned Mike incorrectly I apologize! All I really want to whack at in Mike’s original is the business about being skeptical of philosophy. That definitely doesn’t seem to apply to Alex, since Popper is a philosopher. But at the same time, Alex is using Popper to bludgeon the rest of philosophy in much the same way as Mike. I mostly agree with your summary, though.
Leviathan and the Air Pump is a really good book.
I’m really not an empiricist…but I’m not sure that the science studies critique of scientific epistemology really gets us very far in this context. Once people are convinced that the empirical episteme rules supreme in some way, the ideological critique of it usually doesn’t get through to them any more than ideological critiques ever get through to people fully interpellated into an ideology.
So on that I guess I would just say that, yes, the critique of Popper via Hayek is internal to the structure of power relationships that science studies works to articulate. I don’t intend to say that considering Hayek to adequately explain the limitations of Popper within empiricism amounts to contradicting, in any way, the claims people make about the functioning of science as ideology…it’s just specifying the way something inside that ideology works, on the ideology’s own terms.
Although that said, I absolutely agree that the misuse of scientific authority — including the representation of its methods as simpler than they are — to be a tool of that ideology. That’s why even though I’m not a strict empiricist, I think if someone’s gonna argue for science as an authority, they’d better get it exactly right.
Yeeowtch! An unable to get online for one day, and look how the discussion moves on! Trying to play catch-up here…
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Caro says:
Mike…you say:
Yet, how can people discuss or argue about a subject without basic dictionary definitions serving to provide an agreed-upon meaning for the words being tossed about?
It’s just that, as the examples showed, the definitions you gave weren’t all the definitions…
…the fact remains that “theory” in the sense that it is used in the humanities, as a synonym for a systematic philosophical engagement about the terms of the discipline, simply does not mean what the dictionary.com definitions say it means. It means that older sense of analysis and speculation — which in fact is a legitimate dictionary definition, found in Merriam-Webster, but just an older one than the one that most people think of in our scientific age…
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Most interesting, thanks for the info. (Though “systematic philosophical engagement” sounds awfully nebulous…)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Sacks isn’t a quack; his writing and thinking just suck when he moves from neuroscience to pop psychology. And yes, I”ve read a fair amount of his writing (all in one unfortunate gob.)
Stephen Jay Gould is a much more sophisticated writer, I think, in terms of incorporating and analyzing scientific ideas and theories in a popular form…
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Gould is great; I also love the work of Loren Eiseley, and in the medical field, Richard Selzer. I read these writers not because of their unsurpassed expertise, or that they’re the most cutting-edge researchers in their fields, but because of their ability to vividly communicate information. The superb John McPhee, who has no scientific credentials whatsoever, is another master of imparting knowledge about highly varied subjects.
Whatever “pop psychology” or less-substantiated speculation in those writers’ works I find irrelevant and uninteresting; reality is fascinatingly bizarre enough!
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You’ve got a real streak of anti-intellectualism, yeah, which I think is unfortunate.
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Does considering Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or the Holy Inquisition to be loathsome abominations mean one is “anti-Christianity”? Does considering it necessary to cut down on pollution equate desiring to “turn civilization back to the Stone Age”?
I have a tremendous respect for the intellect, yet am aware over-reliance upon it as the sole method of understanding and dealing with messy reality can lead to disastrous consequences, idiotic ideologies.
Rather telling that Aristotle never thought to put his ideas about why men supposedly have more teeth than women to the test; to him, “the abundance of heat and blood which is more in men than in women” was all that was needed.
I’ve more respect for those blunt-thinking philosophers, more focused on how to lead a good life and make moral decisions, than with the group doing the equivalent of pondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin…
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“The Unexpected Uselessness of Philosophy”
Is there a more prestigious job title than “philosopher”? Yet, in what other profession has more brainpower made less progress? In his last book, Nobel Laureate physicist Steven Weinberg pointedly titled two chapters “The Unexpected Usefulness of Mathematics” and “The Unexpected Uselessness of Philosophy.” Even the most esoteric math has helped him describe the cosmos. But the only value Weinberg ever found in reading philosophers was when they refuted other philosophers who had clouded his mind. While engineers or farmers or bartenders have all learned a trick or two over the years, philosophers mostly either rehash the same old mistakes or dream up new ones that are even more ridiculous.
To this day, most philosophers suffer from Plato’s disease: the assumption that reality fundamentally consists of abstract essences best described by words or geometry. (In truth, reality is largely a probabilistic affair best described by statistics.) Today’s postmodern philosophers deny the very existence of science, nature and truth, largely because their favourite verbal abstraction of “equality” is undermined by the brute statistical reality of human biological differences. The philosopher Richard Rorty recently informed us in Atlantic Monthly that ” ‘The homosexual,’ ‘the Negro,’ and ‘the female’ are best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as inventions that have done more harm than good.” Therefore, according to Rorty, many deconstructionists “go on to suggest that quarks and genes probably are [inventions] too.” You have to be as eminent a philosopher as Rorty to believe that the category of “the female” is a mere social convention. Deconstructionism is the result of philosophers being shocked to learn that reality is not Platonic (e.g., races are no more sharply defined than are extended families) and thus deciding to give up believing in reality rather than in Platonism.
Fortunately, one school of philosophy has actually taught us some valuable lessons over the centuries: the anti-abstract British tradition of Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon and David Hume, with its emphasis on realism, common sense and the scientific method. One of the last of this great line was the blunt-spoken Australian David Stove. Roger Kimball has collected the late philosopher’s often hilarious and always politically impious essays in a new anthology titled Against the Idols of the Age.
Stove simply shreds his fellow philosophers. He turns his flamethrower on those “absolutely effortless pseudo-discoveries that philosophers make, and on which their fame rests.” For instance, “Plato’s discovery of ‘universals’ went as follows: ‘It is possible for something to be a certain way and for something else to be the same way. So, there are universals!’ (Tumultuous applause, which lasts 2,400 years.)”
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More at http://www.isteve.com/philosophy.htm
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Noah Berlatsky says:
I don’t reject the idea that anything can be a fact. 2+2=4 is a rigorous fact. The idea that contentious biological theories (and the theories you cite are all much, much less rigorous than algebra, to say the least) can be used to bolster even more contentious aesthetic theories — those things simply don’t add up to facts…
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Compared to mathematics, most anything would be “much, much less rigorous.” I’ll need to gather up my thoughts on how our biological make-up creates telling correlations on the aesthetics of varied cultures sometime soon. Though I don’t feel the need to create a “theory” to Explain It All…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The Nazis dislike of so-called decadent art had everything to do with the fact that the people who created it were by and large Jewish (and I believe gay.)
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“Everything”? Would artworks which featured noble, healthy-looking Aryan workers and youths – fitting the Nazi ideology – have been as condemned?
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Hitler “saw Greek and Roman art as uncontaminated by Jewish influences. Modern art was [seen as] an act of aesthetic violence by the Jews against the German spirit. Such was true to Hitler even though only Liebermann, Meidner, Freundlich, and Marc Chagall, among those who made significant contributions to the German modernist movement, were Jewish. But Hitler […] took upon himself the responsibility of deciding who, in matters of culture, thought and acted like a Jew.”
The supposedly “Jewish” nature of all art that was indecipherable, distorted, or that represented “depraved” subject matter was explained through the concept of degeneracy, which held that distorted and corrupted art was a symptom of an inferior race. By propagating the theory of degeneracy, the Nazis combined their anti-Semitism with their drive to control the culture, thus consolidating public support for both campaigns.
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Emphasis added; from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degenerate_art
(In contrast, see the “Nazi Approved Art” at http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/arts/artReich.htm features propaganda posters, political cartoons, and “A reproduction of the antisemitic children’s book, Der Giftpilz (The Poisonous Mushroom).”)
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When you say that instead the issue was the content of the art, you’re justifying anti-semitism — not in a horrible, world-coming-to-an-end, you should be shunned way, but in a maybe-you-should-think-a-little-harder-about-what-you’re-saying way.
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Not every artist considered by the Nazis to be degenerate was included in the Entarte Kunst exhibit. One such artist was Käthe Kollwitz whose paintings, drawings, and sculptures were commentaries on social conditions. She was much loved by the German people, with streets and parks being named after her. Käthe Kollwitz became the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Art in Berlin. But because her work was critical of the Nazi regime, she became persona non grata, and she was expelled from the academy in 1933.
…The Nazis forbade her work to be displayed, and banished her work to the cellar of the Crown Prince Palace…
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Emphasis added; from http://fcit.usf.edu/HOLOCAUST/arts/artdegen.htm
From that same Wikipedia entry:
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Membership in the Nazi Party did not protect Emil Nolde – whose 1912 woodcut The Prophet is shown here – from being proscribed by Hitler. 1052 of Nolde’s paintings were removed from German museums, more than any other artist.
The Nazis viewed the culture of the Weimar period with disgust. Their response stemmed partly from a conservative aesthetic taste, and partly from their determination to use culture as a propaganda tool. On both counts, a painting such as Otto Dix’s War Cripples (1920) was anathema to them. It unsparingly depicts four badly disfigured veterans of the First World War, then a familiar sight on Berlin’s streets, rendered in caricatured style. Featured in the Degenerate Art exhibition, it would hang next to a label accusing Dix—himself a volunteer in World War I—of “an insult to the German heroes of the Great War”.
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How Karl Rove-ish of them!
“Today’s postmodern philosophers deny the very existence of science, nature and truth,”
No they don’t. They contest what those concepts mean or whether they are absolute, but they don’t deny their very existence.
Come on, Mike. You’re quoting this guy’s puff piece copy from his website. As such, you’re doing neither his argument nor yours any favors.
You’re right that saying Nazi art tastes had “everything” to do with anti-semitism was probably too much. They had other ideological axes to grind. But…that doesn’t mean that you can base those ideological axes in some kind of natural, biological reaction to art (which I think was your initial point.)
Welcome back, Mike!
Is the Rorty article online? I mean, quarks kind of are an invention, or at least a postulate, right? But in the case of genes, is he saying that genes are inventions, or is he just making a straightforward application of Saussure that the word gene and the concept it denotes exist in language rather than in matter? There’s a difference between saying “matter doesn’t exist” in any sense and saying that consciousness and language are a filter that interrupts our access and pure understanding of them…
I don’t think anybody in philosophy thinks they’re talking about “reality” in the sense that a scientist is. They think they’re talking about the way people understand reality.
I think the issue is one of discipline: philosophers are — by definition — concerned with ideas, with how ideas evolve, the logical and historical and political relationships among ideas, with how people think about things not things themselves. Their purpose is therefore to study abstract things, to provide thought-provoking heuristic explanations and connections, to scrutinize ideas as ideas. Even the philosophers you call “anti-abstract” focus on ideas rather than things.
So if you’re more interested in things than in ideas, I understand your saying “I’m uninterested in philosophy.” I’m completely uninterested in cognitive science (except in its computer applications). Nobody can be interested in everything. But you’re not really saying that. You’re saying that philosophy is worthless, period, in some kind of universal sense. That’s a really aggressive position, and that’s why it comes off as anti-intellectual: because it seems like you’re trying to shut down a way of thinking and talking that you don’t find interesting.
That’s a political project: if you want to eradicate philosophical thinking, philosophical arguments, and philosophical projects, that’s going to generate a lot more ire from people who like that stuff than just saying, “that crap bores the hell out of me.”
And it’s worth noting that philosophy is a pretty big field. I recommend my first and still best-loved philosophy professor’s book on quantum mechanics for those of you who like that sort of thing.
Dr Hughes is a logician and a philosopher of mathematics: he’s really virtually indistinguishable from a mathematician, except that he has the expertise to contextualize mathematical understanding in philosophical terms.
Mathematical logic is a much-underappreciated branch of philosophy. Most scientists aren’t even aware of it, let alone capable of working with it dextrously. And yet most philosophers have some grounding in it. To me, since that was my introduction to philosophy, Weinberg’s distinction between the two seems polemical in the worst way: emphasizing the distinctions for the purposes of those power dynamics that Noah talks about rather than emphasizing the similarities (or relative merits) for the betterment of intellectual endeavor overall.
This is why I can’t understand the motivation for anybody wanting to get rid of philosophy. If you prefer one branch to another, that’s fine. Say so. If you’re not interested enough to find interesting things in all of them, that’s normal. But what harm does you see philosophy actually doing? I don’t think philosophy is the reason why people don’t study math and science. Far more people would take the positions you take than would side with philosophers. And I think the notion that philosophers are the most prestigious academic discipline is really outdated — philosophers these days are the butt of jokes. I’m not sure we really grant prestige to anybody but moguls and actors. And within the academic scientists are certainly more prestigious, because they bring in so much funding from NGOs and the government.
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On your parenthetical, Mike: to no small extent, two things form the bookends of “systematic philosophical engagement”: logic and genealogy. How does the argument go, and where does the argument come from? Speculative philosophy generally doesn’t wear these elements on its sleeve, but there there, underneath.
It matters, because, for example: Derrida’s first book was indeed on Geometry. He is very, very much a logician and a grammarian: similar to Rig Hughes except that he turns his logic onto grammar rather than onto math, and ends up more in metaphysics and epistemology than the philosophy of math itself. Baudrillard is closer to the “denial of reality” that empiricists laugh at. Yet those two philosophers are often lumped together as “postmodern philosophy” and the distinctions between them overlooked. I happen to find interesting things in both of them, but far more in Derrida than Baudrillard, for the reason that Derrida is more systematic. So this:
is not really right: Derrida very much gives up believing in Platonism, as well as the “false reality” that’s built on it. His project is very specifically first pointing out the ways in which our understanding of reality is Platonic and then cracking open that Platonism through logic. The most essential readings in Derrida are his absolute decapitation of Plato’s Pharmakon. It’s just not strictly “mathematical” logic: his “negative term” comes, genealogically, through Hegel and is (really metaphorically here) more like “undefined” than it is like Zero.
Similarly, Lacan’s central metaphor derives from the “limit” in calculus…
There’s tremendous synthetic intellect on display in these philosophical writings, and yes, sometimes it’s really wacky. But I’m not sure what you think the downsides of having wacky philosophers running around giving people imaginative heuristic frameworks for understanding and thinking about art and language.
If you’re upset about their politics that’s another thing, but it seems like the level of their disciplinary affiliation and praxis is maybe not the most effective place to ding them on that…
As Rorty has pointed out, Weinberg is primarily interested in maintaining the intellectual pecking order where science gets the most respect and funding. I thought y’all might get a kick out of this sample of their dispute:
*****
SW: What I mean when I say that the laws of physics are real is that they are real in pretty much the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks in the fields, and not in the same sense (as implied by Fish) as the rules of baseball — we did not create the laws of physics or the rocks in the field, and we sometimes unhappily find that we have been wrong about them, as when we stub our toe on an unnoticed rock, or when we find we have made a mistake (as most physicists have) about some physical law. But the languages in which we describe rocks or in which we state physical laws are certainly created socially, so I am making an implicit assumption (which in everyday life we all make about rocks) that our statements about the laws of physics are in a one- to-one correspondence with aspects of objective reality. To put it another way, if we ever discover intelligent creatures on some distant planet and translate their scientific works, we will find that we and they have discovered the same laws.
[…] I have come to think that the laws of physics are real because my experience with the laws of physics does not seem to me to be very different in any fundamental way from my experience with rocks. For those who have not lived with the laws of physics, I can offer the obvious argument that the laws of physics as we know them work, and there is no other known way of looking at nature that works in anything like the same sense.
RR (p. 184, _Philosophy and Social Hope_): Compare Weinberg’s testimony to his experience with the laws of physics with a good old-fashioned moral theologian’s testimony to his experience with the Will of God. This Will, the theologian tells us, is much more like a great big rock than like the rules of baseball. We did not create the prohibitions against usury and sodomy, though of course we can misinterpret them — an experience that, he assures us, is much like stubbing one’s toe against a rock. Having lived with the moral law for a long time, and dealt with it on intimate terms, he is prepared to assure us that there is the same sort of one-to-one correspondence with objective reality in morals as there is in geology. [He then goes on to detail many of the troubling problems with a correspondence view of language.]
SW: I remarked in a recent article in _The New York Review of Books_ that for me as a physicist the laws of nature are real in the same sense (whatever that is) as the rocks on the ground. A few months after the publication of my article I was attacked for this remark by Richard Rorty. He accused me of thinking that as a physicist I can easily clear up questions about reality and truth that have engaged philosophers for millennia. But that is not my position. I know that it is terribly hard to say precisely what we mean when we use words like “real” and “true.” That is why, when I said that the laws of nature and the rocks on the ground are real in the same sense, I added in parentheses “whatever that is.”
*****
So, despite not knowing “whatever that is,” Weinberg’s just sure that it’s of no importance to establishing the correspondence between the whatever in our cognition and language and the whatever in reality. He just doesn’t get it, nor does he care to. His philosophy is a joke, even if he’s a great scientist. I wouldn’t trust his opinion on epistemology any more than I’d trust the editors of that infamous _Social Text_ issue on their views of science.
Caro:
“I don’t think anybody in philosophy thinks they’re talking about “reality” in the sense that a scientist is. They think they’re talking about the way people understand reality.
I think the issue is one of discipline: philosophers are — by definition — concerned with ideas, with how ideas evolve, the logical and historical and political relationships among ideas, with how people think about things not things themselves.”
Well, no. Philosophers are, in fact, obsessed with reality. There’s even a vast sub-discipline solely occupied with the nature of reality: ontology.
Caro:
“Mathematical logic is a much-underappreciated branch of philosophy. Most scientists aren’t even aware of it, let alone capable of working with it dextrously. And yet most philosophers have some grounding in it.”
All too much grounding, I would say. The dominance of philosophy in the Anglophone world by logical positivism, as elaborated by Whitehead and Russell, is slowly lifting, thank God.
Scientists’ approach both to mathematics and to logic is pragmatic (in the popular sense). They are useful tools. However, both logic and mathematics can lead– without factual, empirical imput — only to validity, not to truth. (Russell acknowledged this.)
Ontology is the philosophy of being and existence, yes, but it’s also a branch of metaphysics, not physics, so, given that context, its object is human being and human existence and human reality, not physical being, physical existence, and physical reality. Much of the philosophy that Mike is complaining about is explicitly concerned with the difference between the human and the physical understanding of ontology, and the ways in which consciousness and language get in the way of a simple map between the two.
So it’s a stretch to say that any ontology, even the most empirically positivist one, is a “competitor” in any way for something like Newtonian mechanics. And it absolutely gets you nowhere — except academic and intellectual politics — to treat someone like Derrida, who is an epistemologist, as are almost all of the postmodern philosophers of the “linguistic turn” who make claims that sound like what Mike descries as “denying reality,” as even trying to have an ontological conversation in any but epistemological terms.
Logic is not inherently positivist. Positivism is, however, inherently logical.
You’re using “truth” in a positivist sense, though, in your last paragraph. Derrida’s logic for example, leads to “truths” in the Hegelian sense. There are also mathematical truths which exist completely outside of empiricism and are simply manipulations of the symbolic system.
Again, it’s a question of the breadth of your definitions.
Charles, thanks for sending those quotes. They’re fascinating! Classic case of talking at cross purposes, but as is so often the case, the positivist position is significantly less capable of incorporating the less positivist, and the person who believes the positivist position is incapable — or more likely unwilling — to see the sense in which the other guy’s take is no threat to his own.
I don’t know what to do with people like Weinberg. Obviously they’re not idiots. But they are in a very significant way anti-intellectual. Very anti-intellectual. I wonder whether Weinberg’s mind is too inflexible to wrap around Rorty’s point, or whether he is too invested ideologically to be willing to see it. And if the latter, I wonder if he really does sees it and just won’t say so, because he thinks it would lend credibility to do anything other than reject it outright in very dismissive terms, or if the ideology causes an inflexibility of mind that prevents him from understanding.
I tend to think it’s the latter, which is basically Noah’s point, and it’s why scientific anti-intellectualism is so very dangerous and unhelpful. But I have no evidence in Weinberg’s specific case.
Are they still fighting about it?
“And if the latter, I wonder if he really does sees it and just won’t say so, because he thinks it would lend credibility to do anything other than reject it outright in very dismissive terms, or if the ideology causes an inflexibility of mind that prevents him from understanding.”
This is basically what Feyerabend is saying. He thinks that science as a philosophical system is extremely aggressive and essentially imperialistic, and that in its effort to stomp out (for example) religious systems it is essentially a way for progressive technocrats groups to crush other ways of thinking and living.
It’s a particularly contentious position in the U.S. since hard-core religious folks do still have some political power and influence, so when Feyerabend as an academic says “you know, it doesn’t really matter whether some people believe in creationism or even teach it in schools; in fact, that’s okay and even perhaps preferable to the monolithic compulsory triumph of science”, people see him as not just wrong but actually a Judas. (I’m not sure what Feyerabend would say about global warming, since that’s actually a debate within science, rather than one where there’s a religious position. He’d probably be at least somewhat skeptical of the sureness with which some of the predictions are made, though.)
Caro,
Weinberg won, I guess, Rorty’s dead. I prefer the science writing that comes from H. Allen Orr and Richard Lewontin.
Noah,
I think it’s important to reject Weinberg’s take, but not go the other direction with Feyerabend. He always struck me as a guy who wrote for undergrads, if you know what I mean. Grow out of it, man.
I don’t have a beef with Feyerabend when he criticises the dominant scientific paradigm from a socio-cultural point of view. A bit of skepticism would help avoid such ‘scientistic’horrors as institutionalised eugenics.
However, he seems to extend his critique to actual scientific models of reality. That’s a dangerous road to go down. It can lead to total subjectivism– “if it feels right, it’s true.”
Caro, when I spoke of ‘truth’ I meant statements mapping with reality. Logic alone is insufficient without data.
Consider the following:
All green unicorns are depressed.
John is a green unicorn.
Therefore, John is depressed.
Perfectly valid, but it doesn’t tell us anything about the world.
As for ontology: I think the only valid ontological model of the universe is solipsism. But that’s just one man’s opinion.
Charles, I didn’t read Feyerabend till grad school…so I fear no growing out of it for me!
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“Today’s postmodern philosophers deny the very existence of science, nature and truth,”
No they don’t. They contest what those concepts mean or whether they are absolute, but they don’t deny their very existence.
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Well, that sounds exceptionally reasonable! However, I recall some lamebrained exceptions. This site gives postmodernists credit where due (“At its best, contemporary postmodernism is a reaction against all the stupid people who pretend to have answers to everything (“meta-narratives”).”)
However, it also mentions how…
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Michel Foucault…denied being a postmodernist, but who typifies the mind-set, especially when he told Noam Chomsky that such ideas as responsibility, sensitivity, justice, and law are merely “tokens of ideology” that completely lacked legitimacy. His ideas about the nature of love (i.e., it is about dominance and sex) cost him his life. Foucault at his best focuses on now-historical sub-science (lots of GOOD examples from old-fashioned psychiatry) being misrepresented as knowledge by cliques seeking political advantage. Unfortunately, Foucault and his followers have generalized this to genuine (empirical, experimental) science.
Postmodernists complain that science is a cultural prejudice, and/or a tool invented by the current elite to maintain power, and/or only one “way of knowing” among many, with no special privilege. For postmodernists, science is “discourse”, one system among many, maintained by a closed community as a means of holding onto power, and ultimately referential only to itself.
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http://www.pathguy.com/postmod.htm
The site above also features links to:
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“How to Deconstruct Almost Anything” by Chip Morningstar. His joyful hoax, in which he delivered meaningless gibberish to a “cultural studies” audience and met with approval and agreement.
“How to Speak and Write Postmodern”. “At some point someone may actually ask you what you’re talking about. This risk faces all those who would speak postmodern and must be carefully avoided.”
Random Post-Modernist Essay Generator Writes postmodernist double-talk using a computer-algorithm. Compare its productions to the stuff at “Postmodern Culture”.
L’Isle de Gilligan — Parody
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Hadda quote some from the last:
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The hegemonic discourse of postmodernity valorizes modes of expressive and “aesthetic” praxis which preclude any dialogic articulation (in, of course, the Bakhtinian sense) of the antinomies of consumer capitalism. But some emergent forms of discourse inscribed in popular fictions contain, as a constitutive element, metanarratives wherein the characteristic tropes of consumer capitalism are subverted even as they are apparently affirmed. A paradigmatic text in this regard is the television series Gilligan’s Island, whose seventy-two episodes constitute a master-narrative of imprisonment, escape, and reimprisonment which eerily encodes a Lacanian construct of compulsive reenactment within a Foucaultian scenario of a panoptic social order in which resistance to power is merely one of the forms assumed by power itself.
The “island” of the title is a pastoral dystopia, but a dystopia with a difference-or, rather, a dystopia with a difference (in, of course, the Derridean sense), for this is
a dystopia characterized by the free play of signifier and signified…
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On another site’s ( http://www.spaceandmotion.com/Philosophy-Postmodernism.htm ) “Introduction / Summary of Postmodernism,” along with more reasonable claims such as “All truth is limited, approximate, and is constantly evolving (Nietzsche, Kuhn, Popper),” we also get malarkey such as “Physical reality is not deterministic (Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, Bohr),” and
“Science concepts are mental constructs (logical positivism, Mach, Carnap).”
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Come on, Mike. You’re quoting this guy’s puff piece copy from his website. As such, you’re doing neither his argument nor yours any favors.
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(???) If you’re saying what I think you are (it could be taken two ways; ah, the ultimately unknowable nature of reality!), the “puff piece copy” was in praise of “the blunt-spoken Australian [philosopher] David Stove,” not of the site’s author. And most of what I quoted was the acidic opposite of “puff piece” piffle:
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The philosopher Richard Rorty recently informed us in Atlantic Monthly that ” ‘The homosexual,’ ‘the Negro,’ and ‘the female’ are best seen not as inevitable classifications of human beings but rather as inventions that have done more harm than good.” Therefore, according to Rorty, many deconstructionists “go on to suggest that quarks and genes probably are [inventions] too.” You have to be as eminent a philosopher as Rorty to believe that the category of “the female” is a mere social convention…
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Hmm, but I could make a case for ‘homosexual’ and ‘Negro’ being social constructs. It’s odd that, for example, Barack Obama and Halle Berry are automatically considered Black when they had Caucasian mothers.
The ancient Greeks would probably not recognise ‘homosexual’ as a category– they saw sexuality as something that spanned borders.
Alex, you made up a syllogism to prove a point about the dangers of making things up? What if the context was a children’s book about mental illness featuring green unicorns?
Mike, you can’t use examples from websites by people who disagree with postmodernism to talk about it any more successfully than you can use websites by creationists to talk about evolution. All you end up learning about is the opposition to postmodernism, not postmodernism itself. It’s a really big field: Rorty and Derrida and Lyotard and Foucault are each in completely different subbranches, with their own different sets of suppositions and starting premises.
The quote I know from Foucault to Chomsky on this subject was this:
Chomsky doesn’t agree with him, obviously: he replies that there is an “absolute basis residing in fundamental human qualities.”
That debate is not about the “reality” of the concept of justice. It’s about the reality, as a possibility, of a “classless society” and two significantly competing notions of what that society would look like and how we’d get there. Since the classless society does not in fact presently exist, how could a philosopher be tied to strict realist notions of the right way to describe it? That’s the context in which the confrontation between Foucault’s post-structuralism and Chomsky’s pragmatism is so interesting: they’re sketching out a field for imagining social justice, not attempting to define social justice in the field we have now.
I don’t think charges of realism are germane at all there: so defined it’s a purely speculative project…
I don’t know nearly as much about Rorty as I do about Foucault, but I’m betting if you look at the source material closely the context will be well-defined there too.
(CAPTCHA hasn’t been letting me post follow-ups to my previous posting; let’s see if a brief remark will be “allowed”…)
For certain, there are ways in which physical realities – genetic material, sexual preferences for those of the same gender – can be interpreted or distorted as “social constructs.”
But it’s “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” to say Negroes and gays are nothing but “social constructs.”
I’m reminded of a chap who was regularly on TV some decades ago. Who argued that, because Russia’s Communist regime falsely labeled dissenters as mental patients, to have a humane-sounding excuse for keeping them incarcerated, therefore there was no such thing as insanity; the whole concept of “madness” was all an invention.
Mike, when you say “But it’s ‘throwing the baby out with the bathwater’ to say Negroes and gays are nothing but ‘social constructs'”, what’s the baby that you want to preserve?
That there are “aspects” to being black and gay – genetic material, biological causes for “affectional preferences” – which are not “social constructs.”
Consider those well-meaning, dumbass gay activists who called homosexuality a “choice.” Their thinking presumably being that it’s more “empowering” to choose, rather than merely follow one’s biological programming.
Yet, this plays into the hands of gay-haters. Who then think and argue that those nasty homos are willfully deciding to be unnatural perverts…
Caro,
Regarding that Chomsky-Foucault debate, it’s not too hard to read the latter as saying justice is a “token of ideology”:
MF: I don’t think that as far as the aim which the proletariat proposes for itself in leading a class struggle is concerned, it would be sufficient to say that it is in itself a greater justice. What the proletariat will achieve by expelling the class which is at present in power and by taking over power itself, is precisely the suppression of the power of class in general.
NC: Okay, but that’s the further justification.
MF: That is the justification, but one doesn’t speak in terms of justice but in terms of power.
NC: But it is in terms of justice; it’s because the end that will be achieved is claimed as a just one. […]
MF: If you like, I will be a little bit Nietzschean about this; in other words, it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power or as a weapon against that power. But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of justice itself functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the oppressed class and as justification for it.
******
It’s interesting to me that it’s the guy who believes in human nature who’s the least reductionistic of the two.
This discussion is way over my head and I haven’t read any of it, but Mike, I know that Chomsky is very skeptical of making assumptions about human behavior and institutions being functions of evolution or neurology. He always says that neurology isn’t advanced enough to figure out why a cockroach would turn left instead of right in a given situation. And I think the book Chomsky’s Politics quotes him as saying something about how the reasons for human aesthetic preferences might be too complicated for humans to ever understand.
Sorry, “haven’t read ALL of it.”
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Jack says:
…I know that Chomsky is very skeptical of making assumptions about human behavior and institutions being functions of evolution or neurology. He always says that neurology isn’t advanced enough to figure out why a cockroach would turn left instead of right in a given situation. And I think the book Chomsky’s Politics quotes him as saying something about how the reasons for human aesthetic preferences might be too complicated for humans to ever understand.
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Strange, considering that Chomsky’s non-political “rep” comes as a linguist, with rather interesting explanations for the phenomenon of language:
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…His approach to the study of language emphasizes “an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans” known as universal grammar…His naturalistic[ approach to the study of language has influenced the philosophy of language and mind…
Chomsky simply observed that while a human baby and a kitten are both capable of inductive reasoning, if they are exposed to the exact same linguistic data, the human child will always acquire the ability to understand and produce language, while the kitten will never acquire either ability. Chomsky labeled whatever the relevant capacity the human has which the cat lacks the “language acquisition device”…
[Chomsky’s] Principles and Parameters approach…makes strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world’s languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches…
Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness…
Chomsky sees science as a straightforward search for explanation, and rejects the views of it as a catalog of facts or mechanical explanations. In this light, the majority of his contributions to science have been frameworks and hypotheses, rather than “discoveries.”
As such, he considers certain so-called post-structuralist or postmodern critiques of logic and reason to be nonsensical:
I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as “science”, “rationality,” “logic,” and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me “transcend” these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I’m afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, “my eyes glaze over” when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don’t understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.
[Re Jack’s comment, though:]
Although Chomsky believes that a scientific background is important to teach proper reasoning, he holds that science in general is “inadequate” to understand complicated problems like human affairs:
Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can’t deal with them… But it’s a complicated matter: Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky
Oops, sorry about all the “bolding”! No “Preview” option here, alas…
Earlier:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
You’re right that saying Nazi art tastes had “everything” to do with anti-semitism was probably too much. They had other ideological axes to grind. But…that doesn’t mean that you can base those ideological axes in some kind of natural, biological reaction to art (which I think was your initial point.)
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It was; but consider some Nazi “good art” examples from http://www.goodart.org/artofnz.htm , where Soviet “Socialist Realism” appropriately (so similar are the aesthetics) follows the Swastika crowd:
“Farm Family from Kahlenberg”
“Water Sports” (No, not that kind of “water sports,” you pervs)
“Preparedness” (Actually reminds of Burne Hogarth’s renderings)
Mike,
Chomsky suggests that language is a spandrel.
I should add: granted, that’s a function of biology. He just rejects what Gould and others call “pan-adaptationism” (e.g., much of evolutionary psychology, cf. Pinker). What’s at stake here is determinism — something Chomsky doesn’t like (which, I believe, is at the heart of his disagreement with Foucault).
In contrast to the “uplifting” art favored by Nazis and Communist regimes, here are samples by the so-called “degenerate artists” (many of whom – particularly Munch and Beckmann – are great personal favorites):
“Street of Prague,” by Otto Dix
“The Night,” by Max Beckmann
“Madonna,” by Munch (I had a big ol’ poster of this print in my first apartment.)
(Sorry, CAPTCHA keeps blocking my repeated attempts at posting these with links…)
Now, is it “justifying anti-semitism” to say that the vast majority of people (aside from us decadent liberal-minded “intellectuals” here), not knowing its provenance, would find the Nazi (or Soviet)-approved art more appealing than the “degenerate art,” most of which is distorted, gloomy, psychologically tortured?
It takes more sophisticated tastes to be able to – or learn to – appreciate, say, clashingly dissonant music instead of a catchy Broadway ditty, Beckett over Neil Simon, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner over Norman Rockwell. As is the case with food:
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So, what is a gourmet today? We would argue that today’s gourmet is a broader-perspective fine food enthusiast who pursues the complex and sophisticated flavors in the major world cuisines; and that there is still a dividing line between what is accessible and enjoyable to many people, and what is more rarefied and of interest to those whose palates and noses seek higher levels of nuance and challenge (i.e., the gourmets).
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Emphasis added; from http://www.thenibble.com/nav2/letters/food.asp
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Arguments to the contrary, I’m not trying to install a “theory” here. But, as with the universal appreciation for the taste of sweets rather than, say, vinegar, there are varieties of art which the masses of humanity “naturally” appreciate.
Rereading the last part of this sentence prior to posting, a lightbulb fizzles on above my head: “Um, is that a ‘theory’?” Scrolling back to the definition I’d posted lo, these many words ago:
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the·o·ry
1. a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena: Einstein’s theory of relativity.
2. a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.
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…Dang! Hoist by my own dictionary-definition petard. OK, so call me “The Theory-Monger”!
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Charles Reece says:
Mike,
Chomsky suggests that language is a spandrel.
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Hmm, fascinating!
Well, he’s said that empathy and concern for others are fundamental human needs that will always be with us… Maybe he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to speculating about human nature. You know, “International solidarity movements spring forth naturally from the human brain, but war and competition are unnatural social constructs.” Or maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand him. Anyway, I’ll try to find that quote about aesthetics.
I know he called Foucault the most philosophically amoral person he ever met and said it was like debating someone from Mars.
Mike, I can fix the bold: you just want it to be plain text face?
Charles: I think of Foucault (and I’m not a Foucault specialist so correct me) as deterministic in very non-mechanical ways, linguistic determinism in the poststructuralist sense, cultural determinism in the social constructivist sense, Marxist determinism, etc. Is that consistent with what you’re getting at when you put determinism at the center of the F/C debate?
I tend to see Foucault and many of the other continental philosophers from that period, although not Derrida, as interested in the failures of revolutionary Marxism and the limits of revolutionary possibility — they tend to theorize absolute systems. Our system versus the system they’d like better. The systems are discrete and the structural logics they’re concerned with are constitutive, rather than functional.
This does make them less immediately useful for manipulating the society we’ve got. But I think it’s one of the reasons why they’re so interesting from the point of view of art theory and criticism, because where else can you imagine a different world as easily as in art?
So what seems to me to be at the heart of this debate, not just between F/C but here in comments and in general, is whether there’s any purpose at all in that type of idealistic thinking about cultures and society, utopian thinking versus pragmatic thinking, revolutionary thinking versus political thinking, etc…
You can be a realist about morality without believing it’s reducible to biology. Indeed, just because a behavior might be biologically derived, it doesn’t become justified by that fact (e.g., maybe there’s a gene for a murderous impulse, but we shouldn’t then accept murder as okay).
Caro: “Is that consistent with what you’re getting at when you put determinism at the center of the F/C debate?”
Yeah, exactly. (And I’m betting you know a good deal more about Foucault than I do.)
Caro:
“Alex, you made up a syllogism to prove a point about the dangers of making things up? What if the context was a children’s book about mental illness featuring green unicorns? ”
But that’s NOT the context. The context is my discussion of the congruence between logic and reality, as my post makes clear. Please don’t move the goalposts.
The post was not in the slightest about the “dangers of making things up”. It was about the worthlessness of logic alone as a means of making meaningful statements about the world. Bertrand Russell pointed this out long ago; his example was: “All gold mountains are gold mountains” — a statement that is syllogistically beyond reproach, but that tells us nothing about whether gold mountains exist or not.
It took centuries for reason and science to shake off the chill sterility of Aristotelian scholasticism, via the efforts of such empiricists as Francis Bacon. Caro, are you trying to turn the clock back?
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Caro says:
Mike, I can fix the bold: you just want it to be plain text face?
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Why, thank you, that’d be great…
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…what seems to me to be at the heart of this debate, not just between F/C but here in comments and in general, is whether there’s any purpose at all in that type of idealistic thinking about cultures and society, utopian thinking versus pragmatic thinking, revolutionary thinking versus political thinking, etc…
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It’s a huge mistake to think that perfect justice, perfect societies can be achieved. (Attempts usually involve killing lots of people.)
Where these can be useful is as an ideal to strive towards, but without expecting to truly be achieved. (As in, “the pursuit of happiness” being considered one of the “unalienable rights” of man, rather than happiness itself being guaranteed.)
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Jack says:
Well, [Chomsky’s] said that empathy and concern for others are fundamental human needs that will always be with us… Maybe he’s trying to have his cake and eat it too when it comes to speculating about human nature. You know, “International solidarity movements spring forth naturally from the human brain, but war and competition are unnatural social constructs.”
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Regrettably, both benevolence and aggressiveness come all too easily to humans to be dismissed as mere social constructs. But there is an evolutionary effect at work in societies as with maturing individuals, where compassion for others further from our immediate family or tribe gradually increases. (Even if it’s “two steps forward, one step back” process.)
Backtracking some more, to another argument i didn’t get to post ’cause of pesky CAPTCHA:
Why, for instance, do humans as different from Aztec warriors and refined aesthetes find flowers more beautiful than a heap of trash? An image of a healthy child more appealing than that of a rotting corpse? (Goth folks excepted in the last case…)
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There is ample evidence that the left prefrontal cortex is activated by stimuli that cause positive approach. If attractive stimuli can selectively activate a region of the brain, then logically the converse should hold, that selective activation of that region of the brain should cause a stimulus to be judged more positively. This was demonstrated for moderately attractive visual stimuli and replicated and extended to include negative stimuli.
…There are some theories arguing that cognitive activity—in the form of judgments, evaluations, or thoughts—is necessary for an emotion to occur. This, argued by Richard Lazarus, is necessary to capture the fact that emotions are about something or have intentionality. Such cognitive activity may be conscious or unconscious and may or may not take the form of conceptual processing.
…There are some theories on emotions arguing that cognitive activity in the form of judgements, evaluations, or thoughts is necessary in order for an emotion to occur…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion
Now, imagine the average male (whether Bushman, Tibetan, Norwegian or Cro-Magnon) seeing Otto Dix’s “Prostitute”: http://images.artnet.com/images_US/magazine/features/kuspit/kuspit12-13-11s.jpg and this “Varga girl”: http://blogs.phillymag.com/restaurant_club/files/2009/09/varga_jan_250.jpg .
Izzit such a stretch to assume Joe Average – and those Nazi “taste-makers” will be far more likely to approve of the vibrantly healthy-looking, cheerful pinup lass?
Indeed, the Nazis’ calling this Degenerate Art was an ideological move, as Alex mentioned. Though “Unappealing to the Masses Art,” if more accurate, lacks the forceful zing of the former…
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Caro says:
Mike’s point is that because he doesn’t find humanities theories compelling… he is then justified in throwing out any use of the word “theory” except to apply to strict scientific theories. That’s just wrong.
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OK, fair enough. I guess an equivalent would be like R.C. Harvey, whose definition of “comics” requires both imagery and prose, rejecting wordless examples as “not being comics.”
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…I’d expect Mike with his anti-Marxism at least to like Hayek, but…
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Now wait a minute; what’s not to like? ( http://de.trinixy.ru/pics/salma_hayek_30.jpg ) Hubba-hubba!
Wow; miss a day and you’re lost.
Mike, just quickly…the idea that human societies evolve is really, really not supported by evolutionary theory as I understand it. Social applications of biological theories are much loved and not supported by much evidence.
Also…not all humans like flowers better than skulls aesthetically. Lots don’t, in fact. Talk to some goths or metalheads. And when you do, maybe explain to them why their aesthetic preferences indicate they’re unnatural.
I really enjoyed that Chomsky/Foucault discussion. I think it’s pretty valuable to think about that exchange re: justice. I’d argue that historically the concept of justice has at times been used to promote liberation or equality and at times has been used exactly as Foucault says, to turn the screws on those who lack power and justify oppression. It seems to me that these questions are historical rather than absolute ones, and that dogmatism — whether in the service of utopias, or in the service of pragmatic solutions — can often lead to unfortunate results.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…Also…not all humans like flowers better than skulls aesthetically. Lots don’t, in fact. Talk to some goths or metalheads.
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Mmmmyeah; note how I said, “Goth folks excepted…” And actually, the décor of our home was pretty skull-laden for a few years there. I recall once wondering, “Honey, how many skulls do we have around the house?” (No real ones, unfortunately; those’re expensive!)
Sure, there are some people out there who prefer being made to crawl naked over broken glass than laying on a cushy bed. Yet shouldn’t be necessary to include legal-type caveats to statements such as “humans find the scent of flowers more appealing than that of raw sewage,” even if copro-minded folks are an exception.
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And when you do, maybe explain to them why their aesthetic preferences indicate they’re unnatural.
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Consider how, in a rejection of hippies’ “love and peace” and “living naturally” attitudes, punks aggressively affected an unnatural look: hair dyed green, shaved asymmetrically, clothing deliberately torn. (An animal-world equivalent of the last would be a dog tearing bald patches in its fur for the sake of “style.”)
Do animals and life-forms gravitate towards life, what sustains and enhances it, or towards death? Rarely was Freud more nonsensical than in his formulation of “the death drive (“Todestrieb”)…the drive towards death, self-destruction and the return to the inorganic.” In the vast majority of cases, humans and other animals will resist to the last their extinction, no matter how badly ill or injured they are. Will feed themselves, rather than starve themselves; bask in the sun, rather than go shiver in a meat-locker.
Cool as they are, skulls are symbols and reminders of the death of ourselves and all whom we love. While flowers (being reproductive organs to boot), are the embodiment of life and fruition.
Up until a few years ago the fashion industry decided to, in its all-devouring fashion, mass-market skulls as all-purpose decoration (so much for their badass cachet, when K-Mart ads feature kids in skull-bedecked T-shirts and tennis shoes*), they were the taste of those who rejected mainstream tastes, values and attitudes.
Whence comes this term, “mainstream,” anyway? Maybe ’cause that mass unquestioningly “goes with the flow” of societal attitudes, nature’s programming to breed (no matter their lack of interest or ability in parenting), etc.
*And glad I postponed getting a tattoo, now that every other styleless bourgeois schlump hauling a passel of whining brats through the Winn-Dixie shows blobs of ink on their doughy flesh.
“Yet shouldn’t be necessary to include legal-type caveats to statements such as “humans find the scent of flowers more appealing than that of raw sewage,” even if copro-minded folks are an exception.”
This isn’t legal type caveats, Mike. These are human beings. You’re claiming to decide what is natural and what is unnatural, and on that basis you’re saying that lots of people are aberrations. You’re even moving towards turning “mainstream” — a social term — into a natural truth.
You want to make aesthetics natural and related to brain function in a fairly straightforward way. To do that you end up trying to justify the Nazis’ aesthetic choices as based in normalcy and claiming that fairly large and popular subcultures are unnatural.
Nothing people do is unnatural, Mike. If someone prefers skulls to flowers (and lots and lots of people do — what about day of the dead?), that’s a human behavior you have to deal with, not bracket. If punks tried to look unnatural, that’s a natural decision, and you have to broaden your definition of “natural” to include deliberate rejections of nature. Your aesthetic theorizing is really limiting, and, I’d argue, ideologically repugnant — none the less so when you start talking about how you have somehow transcended your biological programming through education or whatnot and are thus qualified to sneer at the masses.
Okay, the line about aesthetics I was referring to is on page 190 of Chomsky’s Politics by Milan Rai, which quotes from Chomsky’s book Language and Politics: “Chomsky points out that ‘People have been trying to solve the problem of free will for thousands of years, and they’ve made zero progress. They don’t even have bad ideas about how to answer the question. My hunch—and it’s no more than a guess—is that the answer to the riddle of free will lies in the domain of potential science that the human mind can never master because of the limitations of its genetic structure.’ Similarly the aesthetic sense, and, according to Chomsky, all other human abilities. Another likely candidate for impenetrability is literary theory: ‘ever since the ancient Greeks people have been trying to find general principles on which to base literary criticism, but, while I’m far from being an authority in this field, I’m under the impression that no one has yet succeeded in establishing such principles. Very much as in other human sciences.’” Like I said, I don’t even understand much of the discussion here, but that quote seems pretty relevant anyway.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
“Yet shouldn’t be necessary to include legal-type caveats to statements such as “humans find the scent of flowers more appealing than that of raw sewage,” even if copro-minded folks are an exception.”
This isn’t legal type caveats, Mike. These are human beings….
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Did I say they weren’t? If one says, “the human race is biologically-programmed to procreate” or “Nazi Germany was a threat to world freedom,'” that isn’t stating that those (like my wife and myself) who find that breeding bizness utterly incomprehensible, self-destructive behavior aren’t human. Nor, in the second example, is there necessarily a denial that there were some citizens under Hitler’s rule who were pacifistic, and/or vehemently opposed his regime.
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You’re claiming to decide what is natural and what is unnatural…
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I’m not saying that someone who, say, likes to have their genitalia tortured for erotic pleasure is “unnatural” in the sense of actually being an artificial, mechanical device, or a supernatural magical entity.
Sure, these are all organic creations. But there are creatures and behaviors which are “unnatural” in another sense.
We recently saw a TV show focusing on various canine varieties. Re the French Bulldog, produced by selective breeding, it was explained how – due to the breed’s extremely narrow hips and top-heavy build, all must be produced by artificial insemination. “The dog named after the country of love cannot engage in canine coitus!” Also, because of their particularly large heads, surgical intervention via Caesarians is necessary to enable pups to be born..
This morning, read Kristian Williams’ critique of the first collection of the comic by Garth Ennis and Jacen Burrows:
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In Crossed, humanity is decimated by a world-wide plague that produces madness, unleashing the most sadistic impulses of its victims…
As one of the [unaffected by the virus] characters explains:
“It goes a lot further than some kind of grown-up Lord of the Flies. It’s more like what our brains naturally prevent us from doing — for the sake of self-preservation, even for the survival of the species. It’s primal. And that part of the brain just switches off. . . .”
The point, here, is that even though human beings obviously can behave like the crossed, it is, in a perfectly coherent sense, unnatural for them to do so. And this judgment is not just a matter of moral prejudice. In purely Darwinist terms, unrestrained violence is not a good evolutionary strategy. As Pyotr Kropotkin observed more than a century ago, cooperation is at least as important for survival as competition.
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http://www.tcj.com/review/garth-ennis-crossed-vol-one/
Much as it’s a baffling move for people to burden themselves – and women to ravage their bodies – popping out incessantly demanding, exceedingly expensive parasites, it’d be suicidal for the species if the masses were to “come to their senses” about the urge to procreate. And gay folks are great, but if everybody was gay… bye bye, Homo Sapiens! (And, good riddance!)
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and on that basis you’re saying that lots of people are aberrations.
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A term I’ve not used here. Dictionary,com says:
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ab·er·ra·tion
1. the act of departing from the right, normal, or usual course.
2. the act of deviating from the ordinary, usual, or normal type.
3. deviation from truth or moral rectitude.
4. mental irregularity or disorder, esp. of a minor or temporary nature; lapse from a sound mental state.
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Which contains definitions which involve moral condemnation, along with those which don’t.
I’m certainly an “aberration” – contrary to “ordinary, usual, or normal type” – in being a male who’s utterly indifferent to sports, devouring books with relish*, being scornful rather than admiring when some politician waves the Flag. (Don Adams voice: “And…loving it!”)
Interestingly, Kafka (who certainly explicitly identified with the “unnatural”) employed this theme in “The Hunger Artist” and “The Metamorphosis.” In both stories, after the ignominious demise and disposal of the neurotically messed-up, hapless main characters, we are treated to the spectacle of healthy specimens in their prime, unencumbered by excess intelligence, “feeling their oats” as a contrast:
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…And they buried the hunger artist along with the straw. But in his cage they put a young panther. Even for a person with the dullest mind it was clearly refreshing to see this wild animal prowling around in this cage, which had been dreary for such a long time. It lacked nothing. Without thinking about it for any length of time, the guards brought the animal food whose taste it enjoyed. It never seemed once to miss its freedom. This noble body, equipped with everything necessary, almost to the point of bursting, even appeared to carry freedom around with it. That seem to be located somewhere or other in its teeth, and its joy in living came with such strong passion from its throat that it was not easy for spectators to keep watching. But they controlled themselves, kept pressing around the cage, and had no desire at all to move on.
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https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/kafka/hungerartist.htm
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Then all three left the apartment together, something they had not done for months now, and took the electric tram into the open air outside the city. The car in which they were sitting by themselves was totally engulfed by the warm sun….it struck Mr. and Mrs. Samsa, almost at the same moment, as they looked at their daughter, who was getting more animated all the time, how she had blossomed recently, in spite of all the troubles which had made her cheeks pale, into a beautiful and voluptuous young woman. Growing more silent and almost unconsciously understanding each other in their glances, they thought that the time was now at hand to seek out a good honest man for her. And it was something of a confirmation of their new dreams and good intentions when at the end of their journey their daughter stood up first and stretched her young body.
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https://records.viu.ca/~Johnstoi/stories/kafka-E.htm
What a perfect choice it was to have Crumb to illustrate these! It doesn’t strain the memory to come up with countless Crumb drawings where he or his stand-ins were psychologically tortured, brainy shrimps, envying and detesting the universally-appreciated big, healthy, unthinking louts and she-louts all about them.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
You’re even moving towards turning “mainstream” — a social term — into a natural truth.
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Though not all is, there is much of mainstream behavior – statistically, it would – which follows the “lowest common denominator” biological programming dictated by nature. Heterosexuality, procreation; preferring pleasure to pain, nourishment to starvation…
Again, I’m not saying anorexics aren’t human; but to refuse food and turn oneself into an emaciated carcass, even dying as a result, goes against that “the survival of the species is paramount” rule which is the most basic “moral code” of nature.
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You want to make aesthetics natural and related to brain function in a fairly straightforward way. To do that you end up trying to justify the Nazis’ aesthetic choices as based in normalcy and claiming that fairly large and popular subcultures are unnatural.
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From Dictionary.com, the relevant definitions:
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nat·u·ral
1. existing in or formed by nature (opposed to artificial): a natural bridge.
2. based on the state of things in nature; constituted by nature: Growth is a natural process.
3. of or pertaining to nature or the universe: natural beauty.
5. in a state of nature; uncultivated, as land.
6. growing spontaneously, without being planted or tended by human hand, as vegetation.
8. having a real or physical existence, as opposed to one that is spiritual, intellectual, fictitious, etc.
9. of, pertaining to, or proper to the nature or essential constitution: natural ability.
11. free from affectation or constraint: a natural manner.
12. arising easily or spontaneously: a natural courtesy to strangers.
13. consonant with the nature or character of.
14. in accordance with the nature of things: It was natural that he should hit back.
15. based upon the innate moral feeling of humankind: natural justice.
16. in conformity with the ordinary course of nature; not unusual or exceptional.
17. happening in the ordinary or usual course of things, without the intervention of accident, violence, etc.
20. based on what is learned from nature rather than on revelation.
22. unenlightened or unregenerate: the natural man.
23. being such by nature; born such: a natural fool.
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Thus, there are tons of things – wearing clothes (not for nothing do many nudists call themselves “naturists”), living in cities, agriculture, employing mathematics – which are “unnatural,” with no negative connotations whatsoever.
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Nothing people do is unnatural, Mike.
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Again, in some sense it isn’t, in others, much is.
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If someone prefers skulls to flowers (and lots and lots of people do — what about day of the dead?)
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…The favorite holiday after Halloween in our eccentric household. But, who says you have to choose one over the other? I’ve got quite a few Day of the Dead books, critiqued some** in my stint as an illustrator/reviewer for “Morbid Curiosity” magazine, and flowers are intimately involved with that splendid holiday. Following Aztec custom, marigolds are the flowers for the Day of the Dead; and along with swirling motifs, flowers are the most common design used to decorate the sugar skulls for that festivity.
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…Your aesthetic theorizing is really limiting, and, I’d argue, ideologically repugnant —
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If I were appending moral condemnation to “unnatural behavior,” it would be; but since I’m not …whatever some might assume…
(The gavel slams down) “NOT GUILTY!!”
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none the less so when you start talking about how you have somehow transcended your biological programming through education or whatnot and are thus qualified to sneer at the masses.
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Definitely through “whatnot”; as John Taylor Gatto’s books*** make abundantly clear, our system of education was carefully wrought to produce well-behaved sheep and a docile workforce, not clear-eyed, status-quo-questioning freethinkers.
Considering the utterly imbecilic beliefs and behaviors the “masses” hold so dear (it’s like being trapped as a passenger in a bus speeding towards the edge of a cliff, with none but chimps allowed at the wheel), sneering at the masses is a perfectly understandable action.
* 1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
http://www.humorwriters.org/startlingstats.html
** Highly recommended: http://www.amazon.com/Skeleton-Feast-Day-Dead-Mexico/dp/0292776586
*** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Taylor_Gatto
Amusingly, the term which Raymond Williams was discussing when he said that dictionary definitions aren’t that helpful was “nature.”
It’s like nailing down a “whoosh” of water vapor!
Our debate reminds of this little altercation, which begins with a “Phooey From Me To You” gesture:
http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/430/popfight.jpg