c_man posted:

i dont think that sokal necessarily has a "dishonesty" towards theory in general. he identifies as a marxist and as far as i can tell has two mostly independent bones to pick: obscurantism and appropriation of scientific concepts by people who don't know anything about them. as far as charges of obscurantism goes, i at least don't think its dishonest or even controversial to note that people like derrida and deleuze would err on the side of more flowery or technical language, and i've heard a bit about how the intellectual climate at the time promoted this sort of thing. i agree that calling people imposters over it is dumb but whatever. as far as people talking about science who don't know anything about it, this definitely happens and i don't have a problem with calling people out over this stuff. when bruno latour gives a lecture to a bunch of english students and tells them that evidence based medicine is Pure Ideology this is more damaging to materialism of any kind (let alone dialectical materialism) than a guy making Theory look bad, because latour is selling one way tickets to Nick Land. he even let's post-structuralism off relatively easy. redkahina, in her zizek spiel, wrote the whole business off as fascism.

I'm not altogether up on Latour's views, but where did Latour say this? I think Sokal's complaint about the strong programme generally is that they ditch the correctness of a theory in deciding its acceptance, correctness here being how closely it gets to describing the supposed real laws of nature. But Sokal's problem with them is philosophical. His common sense realism isn't scientific. Materialism isn't scientific. It's a habit of alienated thought to treat scientific concept formation as beyond social practice, as if humans themselves weren't rational beings, but instructed by and answerable to a rationality in nature. I don't see anything dangerous in encouraging openness and debate of different views-- dogmatism in science (and politics) is the more dangerous option in class society.

Crow posted:

cars posted:

otoh i agree that yalie bankers don't read fanon and usually regard leftism as stupid and weird but thats kind of beneath pointing out, right? it kind of involves inventing this type of person who has never posted here and then attacking that imaginary person and turning to everyone else and telling them theyre owned.

most bankers dont read fanon because what the fuck do they need it for. Development, state department grantees read fanon though and provide logistics for empire and wrecking economies. i see it with my own two eyes, since apparently we are relying on peoples gut instinct about the way the world works, and not actual concrete historical processes and events, let alone class analysis.

so i'd like to ask the omniscient brain trust that bravely sees through all the leftist conspiratorializing with their powerful, beautiful guts what's the difference between the petty bourgeoisie useful fools and the bourgeoisie, as classes? it must be edifying to feel superior not only to shameful goons, but to every single cunning servant, scholar, strategist that are culminating their influence for personal gain and establishing their own little prosperous corners. maybe you're rich yourself! it shouldn't be so hard to amass this fortune working these smalltime morons over. their radical opponents must've just been egotistic fools to fail to vanquish such small men. maybe human nature was just stacked against them

and dont tell me that somehow you're "above" this fray. you want to make a rape dollar yourself, dont lie. why wouldnt you, nothing in this world has anything but a completely happenstance consequence! ISIS was created because, er, they just mistakenly appeared out of the ether. wait. no! ISIS was created because someone opportunistically took advantage of the situation and pulled a 2005 plan C away from the backburner. but, erm, i guess that's not much of a complete accident, is it? the mind reels. regardless, get to putting that brilliant mind to amassing some prosperity, young turk you have a whole world to conquer away from these small men. D o not pursue lu bu u peace of shit.

c_man posted:

swirlsofhistory posted:

I'm not altogether up on Latour's views, but where did Latour say this? I think Sokal's complaint about the strong programme generally is that they ditch the correctness of a theory in deciding its acceptance, correctness here being how closely it gets to describing the supposed real laws of nature. But Sokal's problem with them is philosophical. His common sense realism isn't scientific. Materialism isn't scientific. It's a habit of alienated thought to treat scientific concept formation as beyond social practice, as if humans themselves weren't rational beings, but instructed by and answerable to a rationality in nature. I don't see anything dangerous in encouraging openness and debate of different views-- dogmatism in science (and politics) is the more dangerous option in class society.

i'm not an expert myself, but it sort of depends on when you're talking about. at least as far as i can tell "reassembling the social"-latour proposes an framework wherein, as far as i can tell, the difference between a sugar pill and penicillin is consigned to some ontological limbo he calls the "plasma" of things just happening and You Cant Explain That. it's really not that hard to find "latourians" falling over themselves to congratulate each other on their "scientific pluralism" when they go to rei-ki sessions and take homeopathic remedies

as far as sokal himself, he's a physicist and not a philosopher, so as far as his "common sense realism" (i assume you mean the practical belief in the capacity of anything at all to exist or occur independent of Ideology) goes, he doesn't have a philosophical program. he's a scientist who got fed up with people who had no conception of how science happens taking their degree in social studies or comparative literature and deciding that they're qualified to elucidate the "mysteries" of medicine, quantum mechanics, relativity, whatever cool sounding phenomena they hear about in their pop sci books. (in all fairness, it's certainly not only post-modern/post-structualists who are guilty here. i started reading something by thomas nagel about consciousness and got as far as the intro where he stated that all of his knowledge of the brain came from pop-sci books and i couldn't go on) he played a practical joke, explained why he did it, and then co-wrote a book taking potshots at people he thought were exacerbating the problem or making factually incorrect statements.

i understand fully the need to make sure that people remember that science is a social activity, but that doesn't make well tested predictions just as good as what the palm reader down the street tells you, prayer is not as effective a treatment for bacterial infection as penicillin, and you're probably not going to be able to see into the future no matter how hard you try. this is a very important point that i see a lot of people bandying latour around missing.

taking a famous example, if you are so inclined you can try to understand E=mc^2 as a "sexed" equation, privileging one quantitative "speed" over others. or you can, as is most often done in the actual practice, remember that the actual quantitative value of the speed is not physically meaningful (every physicist and most engineers are very aware of the physically arbitrary social choices that get frozen into the expression of a theory) until an actual measurement needs to be done and ignore it entirely, describing the situation of a relativistically moving body qualitatively until a calculation is complete. at that point E=mc^2 is a trivial quantitative consequence to a highly qualitative theory, brought out when quantitative comparison is necessary. again, i'm not an expert in irigaray so i dunno what would be sufficient to describe a non-sexed equation (or even if she would consider this possible) but understanding how these theories are actually understood by their practitioners greatly complicates the picture of "ideology -> science 'facts'" where agreement with experiment plays a subsidiary role at best.

scientific theories are constantly changing, sometimes in the actual predictions made by the theories as new evidence becomes apparent, previous research turns out to have been wrong (or "wrong", since it's all Pure Ideology anyway blah blah), or new patterns are found. these are all definitely social processes but that doesn't stop some theories from being measurably correct.

the problem then, if you are worried about "sexed" equations or whatever Ideology you're interested in then work towards a new description of the phenomena rather than throwing out the whole enterprise. that is, agreement with experimental evidence is to a large extent a precondition of the acceptance of a theory, and coming up with new theories that describe the same phenomena correctly is Really Hard so when something shows up and it works people run with it. it is in this sense that someone who promotes a scientific theory can be an Author in an almost Foucaultian way. this happens most clearly in physics where "theorist" is a job description that makes sense and there is a lot of formal structure to the theories. in biology it's a bit less explicit and centers more around which types of concepts are considered to be important, and how to deal with them. this is, in my opinion, the correct site for intervention into the embedded social structures in theory.

as far as stuff like "scientific" racism/sexism goes (which i suspect is the main target for a lot of Strong Program people, or at least i hope it is), that's not even really on the radar here because it's already bad science for reasons immediately apparent: social sciences need to be much more carefully controlled than physical sciences, as well as having the additional handicap of not having to rely on first principles that are much less precise than those available in the physical sciences, and "scientific" racism/sexism is already regarded by the social science mainstream as uncontrolled garbage as far as i know.

Latour posted:

What has critique become when a French general, no, a marshal of critique, namely, Jean Baudrillard, claims in a published book that the Twin Towers destroyed themselves under their own weight, so to speak, undermined by the utter nihilism inherent in capitalism itself—as if the terrorist planes were pulled to suicide by the powerful attraction of this black hole of nothingness? What has become of critique when a book that claims that no plane ever crashed into the Pentagon can be a bestseller? I am ashamed to say that the author was French, too.. What has become of critique when my neighbor in the little Bourbonnais village where I live looks down on me as someone hopelessly naïve because I believe that the United States had been attacked by terrorists? Remember the good old days when university professors could look down on unsophisticated folks because those hillbillies naïvely believed in church, motherhood, and apple pie? Things have changed a lot, at least in my village. I am now the one who naïvely believes in some facts because I am educated, while the other guys are too unsophisticated to be gullible: “Where have you been? Don’t you know that the Mossad and the CIA did it?”... What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn’t I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge‐slash‐power been co‐opted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge?

Let me be mean for a second. What’s the real difference between conspiracists and a popularized, that is a teachable version of social critique inspired by a too quick reading of, let’s say, a sociologist as eminent as Pierre Bourdieu (to be polite I will stick with the French field commanders)? In both cases, you have to learn to become suspicious of everything people say because of course we all know that they live in the thralls of a complete illusio of their real motives. Then, after disbelief has struck and an explanation is requested for what is really going on, in both cases again it is the same appeal to powerful agents hidden in the dark acting always consistently, continuously, relentlessly. Of course, we in the academy like to use more elevated causes—society, discourse, knowledge‐slash‐power, fields of forces, empires, capitalism—while conspiracists like to portray a miserable bunch of greedy people with dark intents, but I find something troublingly similar in the structure of the explanation, in the first movement of disbelief and, then, in the wheeling of causal explanations coming out of the deep dark below. What if explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness and deteriorated to the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique...

In spite of my tone, I am not trying to reverse course, to become reactionary, to regret what I have done, to swear that I will never be a constructivist any more. I simply want to do what every good military officer, at regular periods, would do: retest the linkages between the new threats he or she has to face and the equipment and training he or she should have in order to meet them—and, if necessary, to revise from scratch the whole paraphernalia. This does not mean for us any more than it does for the officer that we were wrong, but simply that history changes quickly and that there is no greater intellectual crime than to address with the equipment of an older period the challenges of the present one. Whatever the case, our critical equipment deserves as much critical scrutiny as the Pentagon budget.

My argument is that a certain form of critical spirit has sent us down the wrong path, encouraging us to fight the wrong enemies and, worst of all, to be considered as friends by the wrong sort of allies because of a little mistake in the definition of its main target. The question was never to get away from facts but closer to them, not fighting empiricism but, on the contrary, renewing empiricism.

What I am going to argue is that the critical mind, if it is to renew itself and be relevant again, is to be found in the cultivation of a stubbornly realist attitude—to speak like William James—but a realism dealing with what I will call matters of concern, not matters of fact. The mistake we made, the mistake I made, was to believe that there was no efficient way to criticize matters of fact except by moving away from them and directing one’s attention toward the conditions that made them possible. But this meant accepting much too uncritically what matters of fact were. This was remaining too faithful to the unfortunate solution inherited from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Critique has not been critical enough in spite of all its sore‐scratching. Reality is not defined by matters of fact. Matters of fact are not all that is given in experience. Matters of fact are only very partial and, I would argue, very polemical, very political renderings of matters of concern and only a subset of what could also be called states of affairs. It is this second empiricism, this return to the realist attitude, that I’d like to offer as the next task for the critically minded.

To indicate the direction of the argument, I want to show that while the Enlightenment profited largely from the disposition of a very powerful descriptive tool, that of matters of fact, which were excellent for debunking quite a lot of beliefs, powers, and illusions, it found itself totally disarmed once matters of fact, in turn, were eaten up by the same debunking impetus. After that, the lights of the Enlightenment were slowly turned off, and some sort of darkness appears to have fallen on campuses. My question is thus: Can we devise another powerful descriptive tool that deals this time with matters of concern and whose import then will no longer be to debunk but to protect and to care, as Donna Haraway would put it?

.
This was published in 2004 - hopefully we can forgive the long shadow cast over this text by the most excellent events of 9/11 (death to america). In fact, a lot of it reads like he must have been winking so hard he had a stroke as he was writing it. Still, it's perfectly possible to come to a good conclusion for the wrong reasons.

I suggest that conspiracy theory is not the enemy in some intellectual war, but rather the manifestation of a useful urge to understand a political landscape so grotesque it is transparently unreal. The problem is that it is indeed too easy to pursue debunking of political myths as an end in itself. This is the project of liberal commentary in its entirety - presenting a series of facts as a counterpoint to a position of the right, as though pouring water on the wicked witch of the west. Experience should have taught by now that this does not achieve significant results even in cases where serious corruption is exposed.

I therefore propose strapping the proletariat down and forcing it to watch They Live repeatedly.

c_man posted:

as far as sokal himself, he's a physicist and not a philosopher, so as far as his "common sense realism" (i assume you mean the practical belief in the capacity of anything at all to exist or occur independent of Ideology) goes, he doesn't have a philosophical program. he's a scientist who got fed up with people who had no conception of how science happens taking their degree in social studies or comparative literature and deciding that they're qualified to elucidate the "mysteries" of medicine, quantum mechanics, relativity, whatever cool sounding phenomena they hear about in their pop sci books. (in all fairness, it's certainly not only post-modern/post-structualists who are guilty here. i started reading something by thomas nagel about consciousness and got as far as the intro where he stated that all of his knowledge of the brain came from pop-sci books and i couldn't go on) he played a practical joke, explained why he did it, and then co-wrote a book taking potshots at people he thought were exacerbating the problem or making factually incorrect statements.

i understand fully the need to make sure that people remember that science is a social activity, but that doesn't make well tested predictions just as good as what the palm reader down the street tells you, prayer is not as effective a treatment for bacterial infection as penicillin, and you're probably not going to be able to see into the future no matter how hard you try. this is a very important point that i see a lot of people bandying latour around missing.

taking a famous example, if you are so inclined you can try to understand E=mc^2 as a "sexed" equation, privileging one quantitative "speed" over others. or you can, as is most often done in the actual practice, remember that the actual quantitative value of the speed is not physically meaningful (every physicist and most engineers are very aware of the physically arbitrary social choices that get frozen into the expression of a theory) until an actual measurement needs to be done and ignore it entirely, describing the situation of a relativistically moving body qualitatively until a calculation is complete. at that point E=mc^2 is a trivial quantitative consequence to a highly qualitative theory, brought out when quantitative comparison is necessary. again, i'm not an expert in irigaray so i dunno what would be sufficient to describe a non-sexed equation (or even if she would consider this possible) but understanding how these theories are actually understood by their practitioners greatly complicates the picture of "ideology -> science 'facts'" where agreement with experiment plays a subsidiary role at best.

scientific theories are constantly changing, sometimes in the actual predictions made by the theories as new evidence becomes apparent, previous research turns out to have been wrong (or "wrong", since it's all Pure Ideology anyway blah blah), or new patterns are found. these are all definitely social processes but that doesn't stop some theories from being measurably correct.

the problem then, if you are worried about "sexed" equations or whatever Ideology you're interested in then work towards a new description of the phenomena rather than throwing out the whole enterprise. that is, agreement with experimental evidence is to a large extent a precondition of the acceptance of a theory, and coming up with new theories that describe the same phenomena correctly is Really Hard so when something shows up and it works people run with it. it is in this sense that someone who promotes a scientific theory can be an Author in an almost Foucaultian way. this happens most clearly in physics where "theorist" is a job description that makes sense and there is a lot of formal structure to the theories. in biology it's a bit less explicit and centers more around which types of concepts are considered to be important, and how to deal with them. this is, in my opinion, the correct site for intervention into the embedded social structures in theory.

as far as stuff like "scientific" racism/sexism goes (which i suspect is the main target for a lot of Strong Program people, or at least i hope it is), that's not even really on the radar here because it's already bad science for reasons immediately apparent: social sciences need to be much more carefully controlled than physical sciences, as well as having the additional handicap of not having to rely on first principles that are much less precise than those available in the physical sciences, and "scientific" racism/sexism is already regarded by the social science mainstream as uncontrolled garbage as far as i know.

the problem is that sokal most certainly does have a philosophical agenda, one that seems to favor positivism & scientism in the social sciences. he's firmly in the dawkins camp in the so-called "science wars" (a tendentious dichotomy between science and social science that shouldn't be strongly delineated, but established by people like sokal, dawkins, and the media).

the biggest issue is that sokal, in attempting to criticize philosophy for misusing science, falls into the same mistake he accuses the philosophers of making: he analyzes philosophy without being an expert, or even well-read, in the field. which means he misunderstands the argument being made, the language used, or at best interprets it extremely uncharitably.

for some reason it's sacrilegious for a philosopher to take his social science degree and discuss science, but perfectly acceptable for a scientist to take his degree and "decide that they're qualified to elucidate the 'mysteries'" of psychology, ideology, feminism, sociology, etc.

sokal wrote an entire book attempting to tear down postmodern philosophers as frauds, "fashionable nonsense". a cursory review of the examples they pick, and sometimes very willful and uncharitable ways they interpret those examples, blatantly reveals their agenda.

there's a great article by a mathematician named michael harris that does a superb job in elucidating the flaws in sokal- https://www.imj-prg.fr/~michael.harris/Iknow.pdf

take for example their issue with deleuze. this excerpt does a good job of getting at what i mean:

The case of Deleuze is crucial for Sokal and Bricmont. His quotations in FN,
alone and with Guattari, are particularly extensive, and he comes across as the most apparently consistent abuser of mathematics after Lacan. Let me say at the outset that I haven’t read Deleuze closely and don’t pretend to understand the overall purpose of his books — a necessary starting point, one would think, for understanding the importance of the details. But at least some of the passages quoted in FN are not meaningless abuses of science. Salanskis argues in IS that the chapter “Synthèse idéelle de la diffèrence” in Deleuze’s Différence et Répétition, the source of the quotations on pp. 163-164 of FN, is concerned with how the Platonic idea, in its Kantian reinterpretation, “should and must be reinterpreted as a game of the difference with itself in the virtual, from which all
individual things are supposed to arise” (p. 171). This kind of philosophy is not in favor in English-speaking countries, but one can recognize its affinity with stages in the Western tradition; Deleuze is particularly close to Spinoza and Leibniz, who are still taught in universities, even in the United States. Once the question of difference is introduced, it seems to me perfectly natural to consider the philosophical bases of the mathematical treatment of difference, not least because Leibniz was a philosopher as well as developer of differential calculus, and Salanskis develops this theme with regard to Deleuze’s entire chapter.24 But one doesn’t have to be a philosopher to spot an inexcusable omission in FN. The first quotation on p. 163 of FN contains an ellipsis. If you go to the source you will find that Deleuze writes “…in the old interpretations of differential calculus, called barbarian or prescientific, there is a treasure that needs to be released from its infinitesimal straitjacket.” He then refers to three texts from the 18th and
early 19th centuries — one by Hoëné Wronski, whose name should be familiar to readers — which draw philosophical conclusions from calculus, and the ellipsis concludes “Many philosophical riches, here, should not be sacrified to modern scientific technique: a Leibniz, a Kant, a Plato of the calculus.”25 This omission is already enough to disqualify Sokal and Bricmont as intellectual historians. I interpret this to mean that the philosophical questions raised by these texts are
of interest independently of the subsequent development of the calculus. If this
interpretation is correct, the comment in FN that "It is hard to see why a philosopher would choose to ignore ," 26 is completely irrelevant. Besides, Deleuze makes it clear on p. 229 that he knows the modern definition of limits, and says explicitly that “When one speaks of the ‘metaphysics’ of calculus, it is precisely this alternative between the infinite representation and the finite representation.” Here infinite presumably refers to Leibniz and finite refers to
the modern definition using limits. The IS authors are particularly sensitive to this kind of weakness in FN; J.-L. Gautero makes the point about Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz quite clearly in IS (p. 61). But take another look at these remarks. How can Sokal and Bricmont claim that Cauchy's theory of limits placed the definition of the derivative on firm foundations when an acceptable definition of real numbers -- the set to which the limit belongs -- was not proposed until 50 years later? The two physicists seem to be more "realist" about real numbers than most mathematicians.

Salanskis also points out a blunder in FN’s reading of Deleuze. Sokal and
Bricmont give the “correct” translation of Deleuze’s phrase “La limite est la puissance du continu” as “the limit is the power of the continuum”, and call this “exceedingly confused.” Salanskis argues, plausibly, that “puissance” here is the (standard) translation of Aristotle’s δυναµισ, and that the whole phrase says something like “individuals are generated in the continuous by specification of their borders”. An alternative reading might be that “the concept of the continuous is actualized in the concept of the limit.”

okay and besides all the issues with the very specific examples they choose, where either science was mis-used or used as metaphor in a way they deem inappropriate, the big problem is that

"In what is perhaps the most cogent observation in IS, Dahan-Dalmedico and Pestre point out that, while they are prepared to laugh along with Sokal and Bricmont at the “extraordinary scientistic mimicry that overcame most intellectuals in France in the 1960’s,” the two physicists’ reading of the French authors concentrates on “what is badly expressed or ridiculous — while never asking what is at stake intellectually, never speaking of the manner in which these authors…work and propose to think the world.”

it seems enough for sokal to dismiss these philosophers simply because of problematic readings of mathematical concepts.

Perhaps the biggest scandal is that the answers to the questions Sokal and
Bricmont neglected to ask are probably not that hard to find. From Oulipo to Althusser, postwar France was obsessed with the search for scientific regularity, preferably mathematical, of the Bourbaki variety.72 Dahan-Dalmedico and Pestre assert that this “scientism” was “desired and sustained by the scientists themselves73” Unfortunately, the examples they cite are too special, and much more historical work needs to be done to reconstruct all the interactions between philosophers and scientists of the “post May ‘68” generation.74

What’s certain is that some of the variables hidden from Sokal and Bricmont can be found literally around the corner from the offices of Odile Jacob, at the Ecole Normale Superieure, where scientists in good standing were among those attending Lacan's and Althusser's seminars. Some credentialed mathematicians talked topology with Lacan; others worked with Althusserian philosophers on some of the same texts of Leibniz and Hegel discussed by Deleuze75; still others tried to develop mathematics adequate to structuralism and post-structuralism. Salanskis refers to his own experience as well as that of Gilles Châtelet and Jean Petitot, both of whom found inspiration in Deleuze’s Différence et Répétition..76 Sokal and Bricmont replace this history by an H.C. Andersen fairy tale.

now i'm not really interested in defending some of the sillier pronouncements like the "famous" Luce Irigaray example about e=mc2. although it's probably worth noting that i don't think the article in which she said that has ever been translated in english (except for the excerpt sokal/bricmont translated themselves), and it'd be interesting to read the full context.

but are philosophers Great Men who are never wrong, never write stupid shit, never misuse scientific concepts? of course not, but the problem is people like sokal use a hitlist of names to paint entire movements as being dedicated to nonsense and obscurantism when often the examples they use are simply misinterpreted or extremely uncharitable to the thinkers. their feud goes beyond simply advocating philosophers be more careful when using scientific concepts, but to propose their incapability of doing so & ignoring the value of any thoughts, concepts, or theories that might arise from a responsible combination of disciplines that apparently they desire to keep apart.

eccentricdeathmongrel posted:

I dreamt last night that Crow was engaged in a board debate regarding the revolutionary currency of Electronic music as a genre; he on the side of total dismissal of all electronic music as simplistic, inchoate, "globular" Garbage; rest of the board generally opposed to his view(s). I am usually highly sympathetic to the polemics of this boarder, Crow, yet this was a different case indeed... This time, he crossed a Rubicon into the Underworld, in my opinion. He didn't even respect John Oswald's legendary plunderphonics work "Plexure", for Chrissake! I Mean, whom Is this guy?

Thanks for reading.

[Disembodied European voice envelops your body] I love house music

c_man posted:

the problem then, if you are worried about "sexed" equations or whatever Ideology you're interested in then work towards a new description of the phenomena rather than throwing out the whole enterprise.

you make a series of completely false & wrongheaded assumptions here. irigaray's statement makes absolutely no judgement on the validity of mass-energy equivalence in particular or the scientific method in general. while i do not believe the article sokal quoted is available in translation, that conclusions you and presumably sokal reach based on this out of context quote are problematized by having even the most basic grasp of irigaray's philosophy. like first of all for irigaray, "sexed" is not equitable to "sexist", she doesn't even see gendered difference as a flaw. it's ridiculous to assume that as irigaray is a feminist she necessarily subscribes to beauvoirian notions of eliminating sexual difference and consequently her describing something as "sexed" is an assertion that it needs to be discarded

her whole point is that language and conceptual frameworks and discourse exist on a gender stratified field that is reproduced at the most basic levels of physical experience. the development and reception of scientific ideas exist in such a field. speed and the concrete are coded socially as masculine while fluidity and ephemerality are coded as feminine. that says absolutely nothing about the validity of the scientific method, the conclusions based on that method or even the superiority of any particular approach. a "sexless" equation is not only not likely to be possible but i don't think irigaray would even assert it as desirable, her point is just that scientific research and development could be capable of representing a masculinist field by focusing on concepts and articulations coded as masculine at the expense of those coded as feminine, which i don't think is a radical or objectionable idea in the slightest

blinkandwheeze posted:

the latter

oh. tell her shes wrong. *flies away on the stolen Philip K. Dick robot at 99.9% the speed of gender*

roseweird posted:

maybe don't use writers you don't undersatnd as expedient examples just
because you heard about them from a hostile media-academic clown?

so do you think nonscientists should just not use science concepts they dont understand just because they heard them from a friendly media-academic clown?