Author: Ophelia Benson

Oh, man, I have the most terrible case of post-partum depression. Or perhaps that’s not the right word, perhaps I mean empty-nest syndrome. Or separation anxiety. One of those, anyway, or possibly all of them. The book is gone! It’s finished! It’s over! It’s history. It’s on its way out into the world, to sink or swim, to make it on its own or to crash in flames, to become something or to flop down on the nearest bench and vegetate for the rest of its pathetic aimless life.

I wasn’t ready. I had plans. I was going to teach it to make toffee, and drive a car, and read Braille. I was going to teach it principles, and wash all its clothes, and make sure it had enough cash for the trip. And then wallop! In a matter of about five minutes it was gone. There was I standing stupidly on the doorstep waving and gulping and calling advice after it, and it was just rocketing up the street without looking back as if it couldn’t wait to get away from me. Which it probably couldn’t. Stupid thing. After all that, and that’s the thanks I get. Wham, bam, bye I’ll phone in a year or two. Well thank you very much.

But I can’t help wondering if I did all I could. Maybe I shouldn’t have had that glass of wine the other evening. Maybe I should have given up coffee. (Yeah, right, like that’s really going to happen.) Maybe I should have spent more time with it, instead of always leaving it with that heroin addict down the street.

Oh who knows! It’s too late now. It’s over, it’s finished, it’s time to move on. Maybe somewhere out there, over the rainbow or behind a cloud or in the garbage can behind the taco place, there’s another book waiting to be hatched and taken home and cherished and nourished so that a few months later it can run away and embark on a life of crime. Who the hell knows. Not the Wizard, that’s for dang sure.

As you may have surmised, I’ve been busy. Very busy. Working flat-out on this dictionary. It’s nearly done now, and then I’ll have more time to write long windy inconsequential N&Cs again.

But one good thing about this dictionary caper is that I find a lot of stark staring nonsense while googling for just that purpose. We’re going to have a Nonsense File in a few months, when my colleague has a spare moment to program one. For now I’ll just present you with some links here.

This one for example is a really good (good in a special sense) bit of Lacanian literary criticism. I don’t see how you can fail to enjoy it. I’ll just give you a taste, shall I?

For Lacan, the gaze is always an act of desired appropriation…Seeing becomes desire — part of the scopic drive in which the eye functions as a phallus. The person who does the looking is the person with power, but there is power also in the ability to provoke a gaze. For Bishop, occupying a position of spectator in the phallic mode would not explain her recognition of the inability to grasp, understand or resolve the death portrayed in “First Death in Nova Scotia.” Larysa Mykyta’s discussion of the position of the feminine in Lacan’s analysis of the gaze finds woman in her position as other to be destructive to the illusion of reciprocity and one-ness that the process of seeing usually supports: “The female object does not look, nor does it have its own point of view; rather it is erected as an image of the phallus sustaining male desires”. If we accept this argument then Bishop’s gaze questions the possibility of successfully imagining, at least visually, the phallic drive to apprehend and conquer.

Got that? Splendid. Next there’s this, which will tell you what to think of Eurocentrism. Will you be surprised if I tell you the answer is, not much? No.

…the “Eurocentrism” of social science has been under attack, severe attack. The attack is of course fundamentally justified, and there is no question that, if social science is to make any progress in the twenty-first century, it must overcome the Eurocentric heritage which has distorted its analyses and its capacity to deal with the problems of the contemporary world. If, however, we are to do this, we must take a careful look at what constitutes Eurocentrism, for, as we shall see, it is a hydra-headed monster and has many avatars. It will not be easy to slaughter the dragon swiftly. Indeed, if we are not careful, in the guise of trying to fight it, we may in fact criticize Eurocentrism using Eurocentric premises and thereby reinforce its hold on the community of scholars.

Oh no, not that. That would be terrible. Then there’s this, which will tell you the same thing, and also tell you how to disapprove of science. Ambition is a good thing. All that in a few hundred words; it’s very impressive.

Eurocentrism in science is based on the assumption that because modern science arose and developed in Europe understanding the history of science…does not require us to take into account the philosophical and natural knowledge ideas that are to be found in cultures outside Europe. For example the views of Schrodinger were influenced by Hindu philosophy (as he himself notes), and both Bohr and Heisenberg considered that Taoist, Buddhist and Zen ideas had an affinity to the philosophical implications of the quantum theory (as they have been recorded to affirm), but these reflections are treated as aberrations on their part…This orientation, coupled with the easy facility with which ancient Greek philosophical ideas are connected to modern science, lends credibility to the charge that the philosophical interpretations of contemporary science are also Eurocentric in orientation.

And that must not be allowed so everyone had better cut it out right now or else.

Happy April Fool’s Day; enjoy some foolery.

I trust you saw this review of Alain de Botton’s latest scholarly work via News. If not, do have a look; it’s very funny. Very enraged, very impolite, and very funny. It starts well –

Alain de Botton is the kind of public intellectual our debased culture deserves. This prince of précis, this queen of quotation, pastes together entire books by citing and then restating in inferior prose the ideas of great writers from centuries gone by. Aping the forms of philosophical thought in tones of complacent condescension, he provides for his readers the comforting sensation of reading something profound at little cost of mental effort.

And it goes on well, too.

the second half of the book offers “Solutions” to our unhappiness, drawn from the five spheres of philosophy, art, politics, Christianity and bohemia. Each of these, apparently, can allow us to re-examine our priorities and re-engineer our status systems. The lessons from this half of the book are edifying. Buying a new car will not make us happy. Jesus was a holy man, and yet a humble carpenter. Some people have valued poetry more than money. Dropping out of the rat race and lounging around in the park with topless women might be fun. It makes you think, doesn’t it?…Sitting uneasily with this striving for gravitas is the fantastically irritating whimsy by which banal ideas are illustrated by pseudo-logical flowcharts, graphs and diagrams. The effect of one of these is, surprisingly, to imply that God manifests Himself in the shape of a giant pepper-pot.

Very funny, but of course irritating too. Silly books sell jillions and good books sell two. Why do people insist on wanting to read silly books instead of good ones? Perhaps I’ll write a cliché-filled rant on the subject and send it to Norm for his contest.

Speaking of that, there was an article by Terry Eagleton in the Guardian the other day that I meant to say something about. It’s all right, I like its basic point, but I did notice one thing that got up my nose –

For later modern thinkers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud, we could act effectively only by repressing true knowledge. True knowledge would drive us mad. We could not act, and reflect on our actions, at the same time, any more than some dim American presidents could simultaneously chew gum and walk.

When, I’m always wondering, did Freud become a “thinker”? And why, and how, and under whose auspices? What is a thinker, anyway? A gifted amateur? An inept professional? What?

Because the trouble is Freud didn’t think of himself as a thinker, he thought of himself as a scientist. But word has got out that he wasn’t that, because he had such a very peculiar way with evidence. But people in certain bits of the humanities don’t want to give him up and don’t want to admit that he was just wrong about psychology, and move on. So they’ve changed the terminology. Now he’s not anything one can pin down and say ‘Nope, he got that wrong,’ he’s a Thinker. Not a philosopher, but a Thinker. That might be an acceptable word for some people, but in the case of Freud I think it’s just a weasel word, a way of saving appearances.

But to end on an optimistic note, there is this new group blog The Panda’s Thumb. One of its members, P Z Myers has the blog Pharyngula and I think has commented here at least once, and I think Timothy Sandefur has talked to us too at some point. Anyway, The Panda’s Thumb looks set to be another excellent place (along with for instance Chris Mooney’s blog and Carl Zimmer’s) to get scientific news and discussion and analysis.