Category: meta

Off-topic, but I am fascinated by those moments when you finally get around to asking the question, “what if I am wrong?” Or perhaps just “what if I am not the glowing carrier of the perfect truth about everything in the world?”

Here’s Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern“. Latour knows his rhetoric and may be playing slightly to the gallery, but let’s play along: Latour is of course a central person in science studies and champion of his own version of the viewpoint that truths and facts are (or should be studied as) constructions, results of power structures, scientific practices, and so on. This point of view is subject to discussion, but let that rest.
However, Latour is all surprised that this kind of general critical attitude towards science can also be used to doubt the existence of global warming. Wow, quelle surprise.

Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we meant? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good?

And this completely blows my mind. Latour has been working in the field for more than twenty years and apparently it has never crossed his mind that the scepticism towards science he has championed can not only be used for dismissing things he doesn’t believe but also … for dismissing things he does believe. How is it possible for him not to have considered this before? How can this happen?
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From this we can also infer something else about Latour’s self-image: He must always have thought that his theories would inevitably lead to good in some sense. That they can be used for good and bad has taken him aback. What a surprise. Hello?
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The bigger question is then this: How do you keep yourself sharp? How do you prevent yourself from falling into some kind of dogmatic hole?

Wondering about media effects:

According to the Swedish tabloid Expressen, the presumed killer of Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh has as a favorite book: Albert Camus’ The Stranger.

The journalist half-heartedly tries to make a case for a connection between Camus and the murder (my translation):

The explanation [for the murder] can possibly be found on the book shelf of the 35-year old.
-His favorite book is “The Stranger”, a friend tells us.
The book is about an ice-cold killer who attacks a person on a beach. After the murder, the man is put to trial. When the verdict is announced, it is declared that he is punished harder since he has not shown any emotions. In the book, the main character also has a very complicated relationship to his mother.

I am not sure the description of The Stranger would receive a passing grade as a book essay in high school, but it is certainly unusual to blame high-brow literature for the evils of the world.

I suppose the general assumption has been that low-brow culture (like Grand Theft Auto) is bad for you, whereas high-brow culture (Camus, Rilke, Bartok) generally purifies your spirit and makes your personality all nice and angelic.
I doubt I ever believed the first part, that rock music, jazz, techno, cartoons, video games, or anything else demonized lately could cause you to commit a violent act, but up to a point I really did romantically believe that art was good for you.
I ceased to entertain that notion in 1994 when a fellow student at Nordic Literature at the University of Aarhus shot two people in the cafeteria. Here was a guy whom I assume must have read all the canonical novels and poems of Danish literature, and yet it had not inoculated him against committing a violent, stupid, and despicable act against other human beings. Art can’t save your soul.

By strange coincidence, this happened on the first day I had taken leave from my studies to work with computers instead – it was beginning to look like a very good idea.

At the Digital Genres conference:
On an anthropological note, one of the interesting things about being in the U.S. is the fact that the academics I meet are completely different from what intellectual people in the rest of the world assume. Just about everybody I’ve talked to here is oppposed to the Bush administration, war on Iraq etc… and feels completely frustrated and powerless about it. Following Laura Trippi’s presentation, a long discussion on how to form a resistance against the current administration (in words). In case you weren’t aware, there is some disagreement over whether the U.S. administration is heavily inspired by Leo Strauss or not. Under that assumption that it is, it was suggested that the basic danger is that Leo Strauss was a neo-Platonist thinker (meaning: “the truth is out there”, I guess).
And this is the other interesting thing – a lot of people here seem to assume that being a poststructuralist (too broad a category!) is “progressive”, “political”, or at least makes the world a better place to be in. For my part, I really can’t ignore that at least philosophical & literary deconstruction was an apolitical reaction to the politicized 1970’s – it really was a shift from politics to culture and aesthetics, though this has somehow been lost in time. I completely agree that if we can make the world a better place by, for example, reconfiguring our notion of truth to be more localized and context-dependent, there is no reason to hesitate. But why is everybody so sure that it works? Isn’t this heaven-sent for anybody who wants to deny that some crime of humanity ever happened? What if it is just used by incompetent leaders as a reason not to take AIDS seriously? If we in a classical critical fashion assume for a moment that we should be wary of ways of thinking that have been used in problematic ways, how can we possibly not take this as a warning that poststructuralism isn’t everything it’s been cracked up to be? So why is most everybody here so damn sure that poststructuralism can save the world?