Zizek and Badiou, Where are You

the set theory thing is already getting played out. I encourage forward-thinking english grad students to start applying algebraic topology to everything.

I cry Sokal!

The popularity of Slavoj Žižek is truly disconcerting. Lacan, for all the nonsense he produced (and nonsense it was), was at least a man of intelligence. I suspect Derrida had some talent, too, as probably do many of the Frenchified intellectuals currently en vogue. Žižek, by contrast, is just plain dumb. Consider, for instance, the opening paragraph of his recent New Left Review essay, ‘Against Human Rights‘:

Contemporary appeals to human rights within our liberal-capitalist societies generally rest upon three assumptions. First, that such appeals function in opposition to modes of fundamentalism that would naturalize or essentialize contingent, historically conditioned traits. Second, that the two most basic rights are freedom of choice, and the right to dedicate one’s life to the pursuit of pleasure (rather than to sacrifice it for some higher ideological cause). And third, that an appeal to human rights may form the basis for a defence against the ‘excess of power’.

How can some of Kieran Healy’s friends find this rubbish enjoyable is to me a genuine sociological mystery. Thoughts, anyone?

I’m an undergraduate philosophy major who actually studies what this blog seems to dismiss without too much serious thought, and I’m seriously disconcerted by the utter lack of rigor that has gone into the above commentary on Zizek and Badiou.

The bizarre dismissal of Zizek as dumb based on a short paragraph from one article is precisely the kind of specious logic that so many “hard-headed” analytic philosophers criticize in high theory. Moreover, I wonder how familiar the commentators actually are with Zizek and Lacan. Anyone who has spent a bit of time studying Zizek will realize that it’s the Lacanian nonesense that Zizek cuts through, preferring to focus instead on the logic that underlies Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Finally, the (to me) humorous appeal to Sokal is demonstrative of the kind of idiocy that still plagues the conversation surrounding theory. Sokal’s hoax is much more complex than a simple “He really got them with that one!” Spend some time actually looking into things instead of writing them off as bullshit without so much as a thought. Shame.

I just love Zizek; dialectics is extremely, extremely cool, bullshit or not. “Interpenetration of opposites” rules, man. If you like Orwell’s “1984”, you’ll enjoy Zizek too:

Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short, the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite. My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short, that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capitalist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe distance from others. The same goes for the emergent logic of humanitarian or pacifist militarism. War is acceptable insofar as it seeks to bring about peace, or democracy, or the conditions for distributing humanitarian aid. And does the same not hold even more for democracy and human rights themselves? Human rights are ok if they are ‘rethought’ to include torture and a permanent emergency state. Democracy is ok if it is cleansed of its populist excesses and limited to those mature enough to practise it.

Badiou’s point seems valid (if florid), in that if you look at mainstream news reports or political discussions, they seem to use a vocabulary of about 20 words.

War, democracy, terrorism, human rights, torture, genocide, dictatorship, sanctions, a few others.

A 6 year old who used a vocabulary that size to talk about the most important things in their world would probably be spotted by the educational psychologists and sent to special measures class.

Problem is, of course, when you move outside the mainstream, you run into people using a 4000 word vocabulary, except that have very little idea what about 3980 of the words they use mean.

Godel’s theorem is cool, man. It rocks. Along with the dialectics, freakin interpenetration of the opposites.

Fuzzy logic – I dunno.

Godel’s theorem is cool, man. It rocks

Yes, but do you actually know what is says? Or that there are two Theorems under the title of “Godel’s Theorem”? Do you know if it applies to First Order logical systems, to Second Order systems, or to both? Do you know why this might be important if you’re trying to apply it outside of mathematical logic? Does Godel’s Theorem apply to the real numbers, for example?

I mean, Wiki will answer these questions for you, but it’s amazing how much Godel is misused, even by mathematicians (I have been guilty here, although I was swiftly corrected by some colleagues would are logicians). I am utterly with Danny Yee: Godel belongs in maths and philosophy, and not in sociology or politics…

In Žižek’s defence it has to be admitted that he can actually write a line of coherent balanced prose when the mood takes him, although sometimes he chooses not to in order to impress the clever boys without girlfriends (aged 18-27). Whereas Lacan demonstrated on many occasions that this feat was simply beyond him.

Incidentally, who or what is a ‘Badiou’? Can anyone explain to me in two sentences or under why I should care?

Sorry, that’s “does not” for “do not”. I cannot type when angry.

Thank god for Bourdieu!

C’mon, Doormat, don’t be angry. Technical ideas do find their way into popular culture, there’s nothing wrong with that. Often they’re used merely for a methaphor. What’s the big deal?

Abb1, Because they are *not* *just* used as metaphor. It would be great if they were: we all borrow ideas of this form from each other, and that’s brilliant. I’d fully support scientists trying to make their ideas more accessible (and of sociologists, literary theorists etc.: possibly more so, as I’m afraid I have little idea what literary theorists do). However, I’ve read pieces which go far, far beyond metaphor, and that’s where it becomes a problem. I know the Sokal affair was an extreme, but it illustrates the problem very well.

And chunks of the book are studded with equations and theorems that may frighten off the scholar who fled to the humanities to escape mathematics.

That does not sound like mathematical ideas being used as metaphor. It sounds like mathematical ideas being used as maths, and I would bet, badly mis-used. Godel’s Theorem as metaphor is great, and opens your mind to some pretty strange ideas. It’s when people try to “use” it, instead of just be influenced by it, that I get annoyed.

Similalry, as a mathematician, I might even write (and certainly think) about, say, numbers behaving in a “sociological manner” (there’s a chapter of a book by Diestel entitled “mathematical sociology”) Some numbers are “friendly” say. However, as soon as I need to prove something, I drop the metaphors and made sure I’m using logic…

“But oh, the deeply-grooved tracks of habitual irony soldier on.” Clearly Matt should be appointed deeply-groovier-than-thou habitual irony czar. Until then, the world will not be safe.

Doormat — I think you are making two fundamental mistakes. First, using actual equations is not necessarily incompatible with using them as a device to convey a metaphor. I imagine that your idea is that equations could only be useful in a formal proof, and thus any use of mathematical equations for non-technical problem is necessarily mendacious. This isn’t quite right. E.g., many people interpret the use of equations in “The Social Contract” as a metaphor, rather than as a precise mathematical claim.

Second, it is not necessarily the case that the only legitimate way to use math is in mathematics itself. E.g., my understanding is that Cantor’s Diagonalization Theorem, Goedel’s Theorem, and Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem are all applications of the same mathematical idea. (As a disclaimer, I only completely understand the Diag. Theorem.) So, to use sloppy language, we could say “The Impossibility Theorem is Goedel’s Theorem as applied to public choice theory.” If that is the case, there might be misuses of that logic, but it would never be prima facie *stupid* to apply [the idea behind] Goedel’s Theorem to some apparently unrelated topic.

Likewise, if someone told me that they had applied some esoteric bit of math to public choice theory — Zorn’s Lemma, say — I would have no idea what that could possibly *mean*, but I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

Kieran, if you had read the comments closely, you would see that I was referring to the fifth comment, which, as a matter of fact, calls Zizek “just plain dumb.”

but I wouldn’t dismiss it out of hand.

Well, I did say that I agreed with Danny! He said that, basically, life’s too short to check every single case, but that his bullshit detector would go off immediately. I’d certainly have a hard time understanding how Zorn’s Lemma could apply to choice theory, but yes, maybe it’s possible. If someone was using Zorn’s Lemma in lit. crit. and I was deciding on a book to read for fun, then I think my bullshit detector would tell me to find a better book…

Arrow’s theorem is a good example actually: it *is* a mathematical statement, and it has clear applications. However, it does not mean that “no voting can ever be fair”, for example. And, while the (very) basic ideas may be similar to Cantor’s argument, or Godel’s argument, I think I’d call you if you said “The Impossibility Theorem is Goedel’s Theorem as applied to public choice theory.” If one were correct, then you’d probably be re-proving Arrow’s theorem via Godel (no doubt that’s possible). It’d be more likely that one was actually quite confused (as why not use Arrow?)

Hellblzer: Diestel is trying to quickly explain Ramsey Theory, and uses definitions like “Set A ‘accepts’ set B if…” It’s a (typical Diestel) joke, but the words help one to quickly understand some rather definition-heavy mathematics. To me, that’s a great example of metaphore working.

jt: You are correct to link Cantor and Goedel. I don’t know if the Arrow proof also fits this framework. Indeed, mathematician Saunders Mac Lane developed a neat category-theoretic model of the common diagonalization process in these proofs.

What is odd about the debate here is that some people seem to be objecting to the use of metaphors from mathematics in other disciplines. But mathematicians do this all the time. They use metaphors from other parts of mathematics and indeed from other disciplines, both as high-level inspiration and as low-level detail. I don’t see mathematicians becoming corrupted by the errant use and mis-use of metaphor, so why should anyone else be corrupted by doing the same. If this was really a problem, large numbers of string theorists would have to locked away, given the extent to which they now make use of category-theoretic metaphors to generate ideas and concepts, and to create mathematical structures which may only later be assessed for compliance with reality.

And if people confuse the metaphorical idea with the reality, of, say, an equation, so what? This just shows the power of the metaphor to speak to the audience. Mathematicians should be grateful that ANYONE is quoting their equations, given just how arcane most math is.

The quote is from Against Human Rights, linked in #5

I actually like Zizek but I am not going to write anything about him soon because it would just join the back of a long queue of unfulfilled promises to write various things.

I completely disagree that Godel’s Theorem can be quarantined in maths and philosophy. There are a whole load of things in politics, sociology and economics where people get completely tangled up about the concept of a rule and make mistakes that they wouldn’t make if they understood Godelian arguments.

Let’s see…

Preemptive dismissal of an entire body of work made without having read much of said work? Check.

Reference to Sokal hoax without further explication or qualification? Check.

Post demanding that thinker’s ideas be explained in “two sentences or less.” Check.

Yep. It’s 1997 again. Thanks for raising our intellectual standards CR!

I think as simplifications of Goedel’s theorems go, abb1’s is okay. jt’s “The Impossibility Theorem is Goedel’s Theorem as applied to public choice theory”, on the other hand, causes my head to spin completely around, Exorcist-style.

ben scacht: The various comments about metaphor miss the point entirely and draw a sharp distinction between metaphorical language and conceptual language. This distinction is flawed.

It may perhaps surprise you to know that I have some (uncertain) agreement with this point of view. However, that distinction was *not* the one I was trying to draw. I was trying to emphasise the differences between arguing by rhetorical manipulation of metaphor, and argument by Euclid-style proof. It is the latter I happen to have studied more, developed a basic competence in, and feel is worth defending.

BTW, I sympathise with any frustration you feel at the misuse of the term deconstructionism, and have always suspected that similar jermeiads against post-modernism are also ill-informed. Surely this is an argument for all sides to be more precise, rather than sinking down to the level of the most lazy commentaries?

The thorny question of mathematics and physics is why our metaphors allow us to predict quite accurately how the transistors in this computer combine to enable me to transmit all this verbiage. It seems empirically that some metaphors are better than others for these purposes. That’s all I’m saying.

Hellblazer — Apologies, I typed “Saunders Mac Lane”, but I meant “Bill Lawvere” (perhaps all great categorists are isomorphic in the appropriate category!). The reference is:

@INCOLLECTION{lawvere:diagonal69,
author = “F. William Lawvere”,
title = “Diagonal arguments and cartesian closed categories”,
PAGES = “134–145”,
Booktitle = “Category Theory, Homology Theory and their Applications {II}”,
publisher = “Springer”,
SERIES = “Lecture Notes in Mathematics 92”,
year = “1969”,
address = “Berlin, Germany”}

That paper is rather inaccessible. There’s a more recent treatment by Noson Yanofsky, available from arXiv:

@MISC{yanofsky:diagonal03,
author = “Noson S. Yanofsky”,
title = “A universal approach to self-referential paradoxes, incompleteness and fixed points”,
howpublished = “ar{X}iv:math.LO”,
year = “2003”,
month = “19 May”,
note = “Number 0305282”}

jt: er, no, your first paragraph doesn’t represent my views. Couldn’t you have laid off the irony a touch?

My feeling is more that precision is important in argument. I apologise if I’ve given the impression that I have some kind of formal-proof fetish (Bourbakism, since the thread seems to be entering a name-dropping phase). If you go back to your first posting, all I said was that implying Arrow’s theorem is synonymous with Goedel’s Incompleteness/Inconsistency Theorems, rather than saying that the two have a common mathematical underpinning, is sloppy and misleading. It opens up the way for attempts to attack one by attacking the other, for a start.

People commit these sorts of errors all the time, although questionable statistics probably mislead far more people than mathematical metaphors. But the baggage of mathematics does not mean that it needs to be banished from all non-mathematical work; instead, work that is erroneous or misleading should be criticized as such.

I agree largely. I’m not saying banish mathematical motifs from non-mathematical work: I would simply prefer it if they weren’t misused. In the same way I get annoyed at scientists flinging around inaccurate terminology to have a go at non-scientists (or, as I believe some of the CT crew have picked up on, believing that knowledge of some physics automatically trumps the existing knowledge and work in economics or sociology).

I’m not saying “they’re wrong to use metaphors from maths”. *I am claiming – rightly or wrongly – that sometimes the use of metaphor is a bad one.* And can someone please answer my question – which was asked in good faith – about what “parallax” means in a cultural-theory context?

Lem applies Goedel and much else to sociological and historical problems. Is he too an imposture intellectuel?

Apologies jt: have reread your original post and I see I misremembered it. I think we largely agree, but started off with slight misreadings of the other’s stance.

peter: indeed. It’s the attempt to argue from authority that I’m against – and within maths itself, as in any discourse, one can get the same problem

jonathan: I’d have to read the relevant stories or essays to find out, wouldn’t I? My prior belief is that Lem ought to know what he’s doing, and could actually write well. My posterior will have to depend on me actually reading his work (which, come to think of it, must be online in some form – pointers anyone?).

It was I who said that it was sloppy to say “The Impossibility Theorem is Goedel’s Theorem as applied to public choice theory” — and by the way, that is not the same as saying the two theorems are synonymous. (Synonymous, as I understand it, implies that two things mean the same thing.) I don’t think it is misleading, though, just sloppy; I don’t think your proposed explanation (shared underpinnings)is substantially more precise.

If you are just arguing that “sometimes the use of a metaphor is a bad one”, then I don’t think that anyone would disagree. It seems, though, that you think there is a whole class of metaphor that is not appropriate; namely, mathematical metaphors.

As for parallax… I assume you had something in mind out of astronomy, but the actual definition of parallax is “An apparent change in the direction of an object, caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight.” (Thank you, dictionary.com.) Doesn’t that seem to be a reasonable subject for cultural studies?

thanks Jonathan, will go hunt them down.

“parasite”… hmm, I like the sound of that as an online ID ;-)

jt: fair enough. I don’t think certain metaphors should be forbidden, I just think they make certain arguments opaque. But as you say that’s a low-content observation by anyone’s standards, so your point stands.

Interestingly, the definition you give of parallax makes the utility of the metaphor clear – you’re right, I had a more restrictive definition in mind (inaccuracy in measurement owing to line of sight)

I actually like Zizek but I am not going to write anything about him soon because it would just join the back of a long queue of unfulfilled promises to write various things.

Still busy interviewing Vietnamese railway conductors? Take your time, take your time…

I don’t know, but he can’t be like that all the time. Otherwise discussions about whose turn it is to get the shopping done must be pretty horrific chez Dawkins…

Ta for the link, Peter. I think I’ve actually “read” the original Lawvere paper — in the loose sense, not the mathematician’s one :) — but I’m definitely going to check out the Yanosfky one in a moment.

Incidentally, I’d argue, and have in a few talks, that Godel’s First, Tarski’s Undefinability of Truth, |P(X)| > |X| (via Cantor diagonalization), the existence of noncomputable sets (in particular that c.e. sets != computable sets) and the Russell Paradox are all manifestations of the same basic motif. I haven’t, however, included Arrow’s Theorem on that list since while it’s a proof by contradiction, I don’t really see it as being a diagonal proof by contradiction in the same way as the preceding list. That said, it’s been yonks since I’ve look at Arrow’s theorem, so could those who do view this as the same offer their reasons for it?

This comment thread is a good example of how comment threads like this tend to go.

I agree with anarch. Arrow’s proof is just a generalization of the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_paradox]]; it doesn’t have anything much in common with the other examples.

On the general point, life really is too short. I’ve been dealing with bogus arguments from Godel’s theorem, quantum physics and so on for 30+ years now, (not to mention “kinder, gentler, compassionate” conservatives!). They’ve exhausted the benefit of the doubt as far as I’m concerned. When some Zizek-style hotshot wins the Fields medal, I’ll start paying attention. Otherwise, like Danny and doormat, I’ll leave my bullshit detector set to maximum on this stuff.

John,
I take it economists and mathematicians are the only people we ought to be paying attention to? Wait, sorry, we should only be paying attention to those — what? — thirty or so mathematicians who have won the Fields medal, right? Come on, that’s ridiculous. How many of them are even living?

I’m actually not even sure who we’re talking about in this thread anymore, because as far as I’m able to tell neither Zizek nor Badiou have appropriated Godel or quantum physics. Who are these people who have “exhausted the benefit of the doubt” as far as you’re concerned? Please, name names.

Actually, Badiou — as Adam Kotsko will no doubt tell you — was a mathematician before he came to philosophy, and although I’m not qualified to judge his work in this respect, I’m willing at least to read it in good faith if I were ever so inclined — something that your bullshit-detector approved lifestyle apparently precludes.

As Adam also (rightly) notes, this thread is almost depressingly predictable, which is to say, there’s a lot of people pumping out their chests and denigrating or defending Person X or Y based on little to no evidence or textual support. Let me put it this way: here’s another discussion on Badiou: http://www.dissensus.com/showthread.php?t=456

Now, what’s the difference between that thread and this one? As you’ll see, there are those on the dissensus forum who have their doubts about Badiou, those who don’t understand the math stuff, those who do, and those who disagree about the math stuff — in other words, very much like this thread in terms of sympathy towards Badiou. The difference then seems to lie in the fact that those in the dissensus forum are at least willing to read Badiou’s work, whereas here all we have are various groups of people digging into their narrowly prescribed disciplinary bunkers and yelling “fashionable nonsense” at the top of their lungs.

Commenter, most of the misapplications of Godel’s theorem and similar I’ve seen have been to economics. The most common (not the only) is that the idea of equilibrium in economics is invalid because of Godel’s theorem.

Here’s a fairly typical example.

Not that I’m a believer in Pareto-optimal equilibrium, but I think the problems with the neoclassical model are empirical, not logical.

If someone can explain, or even give me a hint about, why applications of Godel’s theorem in other fields are likely to be less silly, I’m happy to listen, but in my experience this is never done. All I get is suggestions that I shouldn’t condemn what I haven’t read, which, given the brevity of life, does not seem very helprul.

Not that Adam’s point is invalidated by this but Badiou was a philosopher only. He never did math as a mathematician. However, his theory is supposed to go beyond what Quine did, so, in that regard it is ‘new’.

Would Sokal be known for anything if he hadn’t written a book giving non-scientists (and mediocre scientists) reasons to not read European thinkers and American cultural studies folks? Did he do anything in the field of science I should care about?

Adam: The reason these threads all go the same way is pure tribalism. Why do Kieran and John Quiggin dismiss Zizek? Because of Zizek’s hatred for them and everything they stand for. As far as I can tell, how people who are moderately center-left are the embodiment of evil is practically Zizek’s main subject matter. In a different era, moderates used to put up with being attacked from the postmodern left, but Sokal set off a backlash. As closed-minded as Kieran and John may be on other subjects, they are particularly closed-minded about someone who jokes that they should be liquidated.

John: I disagree with you about general equilibrium and Goedel’s theorem. If GE exists in principle, but is unknowable, then that says something significant about GE. (Though maybe we disagree because I think GE is important, and you don’t.) I agree with you about misuses of Goedel’s theorem in general, though.

Walt,

“As far as you can tell” is apparently not very far at all. He’s written a whole lot of books — it’d be hard to come up with that many ways to say, “Death to the DLC!!!”

Life’s too short to do a manual trackback through Haloscan, but I encourage everyone to join in the rousing discussion at my blog — this would be particularly helpful if you suspected that I was a bad person, but you didn’t have any hard evidence as of yet.

Yes, Sokal was actually promoted to full professor in the NYU physics department based on his teaching work with the Sandinstas and the Lingua Franca piece. The articles on statistical mechanics, etc. are just a hobby.

No. Not “all,” surely. Probably not.

Medium-sized, rather. Your original question, “did he do anything I should care about,” doesn’t seem to recognize that no one without training is capable of evaluating the work of a scientist in this era of hyperspecialization.

“but this is no more relevant to GE than the other cases.”

Would you really worry about GIT when building a bridge because of what GIT says about arithmetic?

Let’s see: law and economics types never tire of applying rational choice theory or game theory to every aspect of life; economics professors never tire of suggesting that their “laws” enjoy the same status as natural scientists’ laws of nature; mathematicians and physicists never tire of trying to figure out if they’re actually figuring out how the universe runs and draw freely on work from outside their fields; biologists draw on very gendered narratives to describe eggs and sperm and their interactions; but the one immutable law of academia is that no humanist can legitimately draw on theories from outside the humanities?! This is how I read the conventional wisdom commentary on Kieran’s little joke post. Glad to see some people questioning it here. You’d think the success of people like Patricia Williams and Malcolm Gladwell to reach non-academic audiences or the wide interest in quality science writing (Jared Diamond, Steven Levitt, William McNeill, etc.) would have garbled this little “two-cultures” shibboleth by now.

Technical ideas do find their way into popular culture, there’s nothing wrong with that. Often they’re used merely for a methaphor.

I agree with you that there’s nothing wrong with this per se. However, the worse the popular understanding of the underlying concepts, the less useful they are as metaphors.

Of course that’s assuming the goal is to convey insight or understanding into some other area — if the use of mathematical and scientific terms is purely decorative then that’s obviously not an issue. But many people really do seem to think they can create *substance* by waving mathematical words around.

(Impressed by Indian historian K.N. Chauduri’s Trade and Civilisation in the Indian Ocean, I checked out his Asia Before Europe, only to find he’d been to a philosophy conference and was now waxing on about the Axiom of Choice and suchlike… There was still some useful material in the book, but when his broader ideas rested in part on how nicely they could be linked to totally irrelevant bits of set theory, it became hard to trust his weighing of the evidence.)

Shouldn’t we at least read his work before dismissing it?

Have you read L. Ron Hubbard’s work and if not on what basis would you dismiss it? There really isn’t time to read everything, or even to sample everything.

“Have you read L. Ron Hubbard’s work and if not on what basis would you dismiss it? There really isn’t time to read everything, or even to sample everything.”

I’m confused, did someone waste their time asking if it would be a waste of time to read L. Ron Hubbard? Was he at all included in this conversation? How does it follow that, given that L. Ron Hubbard isn’t worth the time to read, since, it is given that there is too little time to read everything, then Zizek and Badiou aren’t worth the time to read? That’s insanse. Simply and clearly insane.

Could all further discussions on these matters be headed by the rubric ‘fuck-the-world-I’m-a-theorist’?

Alternatively, if anyone wants to set up a political party with that title, can I join? I know a bit of French.

Of course, that should say an op-ed.

Set theory as ontology: let them eat membership , Mssr. Badiou?

Viva Nominalisme

The Zizek editorial confirms my point that he is entirely capable of writing clear coherent prose with a understandable logical argument behind it, although he sometimes chooses not to to impress the spotty boys.

1) The idea that to be persuasive an author needs to change her or his way of communicating to suit the audience being addressed is as ancient as the field of rhetoric. We should stop behaving as if successfully doing so is evidence of duplicity.

2) Let’s also recognize that calls to explain complex ideas in “two or three sentences” and complaints about difficulty are canny rhetorical moves and are not merely disinterested assertions regarding clarity and prose style. From the introduction to Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena (edited by Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb):

The claim not to understand might seem an innocent posture that people would seldom adopt willingly, but in fact it is one of considerable power, in which authorities often entrench themeselves. Eve Sedgwick has described the “epistemologoical privilege of unknowing,” whereby “obtuseness arms the powerful against their enemies,” as when a bilingual diplomat must negotiate in the language of his monolingual counterpart from another country. Something of that structure underlies charges of excess difficulty. The claim not to understand carries a presumption that the writer ought to communicate in terms familiar to the reader, who thus comes to have an interest in not understanding, since that is what strenghthens his or her position. The person who does not understand or declines to understand, the interlocutor who has or pretends to have the less broadly knowledgeable understanding, gets to determine the terms of the encounter (3).

On this “not enough time in the world” point, I would simply add that, yes, of course there’s not enough time in the world to read everything. Nevertheless, if one is going to comment on the general worth of certain thinkers, whether it be in a formal paper or off the cuff in a blog post, then, sorry, I think you need to make the time to read at least a little of these thinkers’ work — in the very least, you could read an article on these thinkers’ ideas and then comment on why these ideas seem untenable to you. Devote, say, 10 minutes to looking these thinkers/ideas up on wikipedia, getting a general sense of the terrain, etc. Otherwise, it’s perfectly justifiable for someone like me to call bullshit on your own calls of bullshit.

Apologies all around.

Kieran: I’m sorry, I should have said “People like Kieran”, not “Kieran”. I ordered some Kieran-mind-reading equipment off eBay, but I’m still waiting for delivery. Your objection to Zizek is just that he writes obscurely, not his encomiums to Stalin?

John (Quiggin): I’m sorry, I just glanced at your link. If that’s what it says, then it really is as stupid as you say. But aren’t there results of the form that if you include expectations, the general equilibria of economies become uncomputable?

Adam: Sorry, I shouldn’t have said what Zizek’s main subject was, since I don’t know. I should have said something about his product differentiation in the marketplace of ideas, since this is what seems to get him noticed.

Anyway, what I am an expert on is Zizek threads, which is the point I was trying to address. The center-left doesn’t like Zizek because Zizek doesn’t like them.

Kenny: “Human rights” is kind of the mealy-mouthed centrist thinking that stands in the way of the revolution.

commenter: I have spent at least 10 minutes reading Zizek. Does that really entitle me to call him worthless? Or does the standard for me become 11 minutes?

OK, yes, Walt I was being a tad facetious — it’s probably more like 15 minutes if you don’t know your Hegel and Lacan. But it does raise an interesting question, right? I mean, how much time do we need to devote to a thinker before dismissing him or her? A couple people on this thread have claimed to somehow intuit that Zizek is full of shit, a stance that sends my bullshit-detector straight to red. But then again, should we expect everyone who wants to weigh in on Zizek to read all of the major works? Are his popular essays even enough? Where do we draw the line?

One doesn’t have to know much about Hegel ( anyways, should one have to know much about errors?) to appreciate the more reasonable of Zizek’s writings, just as one might appreciate the opening of Marx’s German Ideology without subscribing to his economics in toto. And Zizek often seems more akin to historical materialism then postmodernism. There is a certain logic to historical materialism which postmodernists often seem to overlook or downplay (and there is dogmatic hist. materialism, and that is to be avoided).

I think the main issue is not what the standard is for deciding if a thinker isn’t worth your time, it’s knowing to keep your mouth shut when you decide you aren’t going to engage them. Like The Troll of Sorrow pretending he knows Badiou’s work.

Far worse, tho, than the “troll of sorrow’s” trashing of Comrade Badiou is a putative Xtian who thinks that Badiou’s Maoist-Hegelian-Set theory as ontology is like some PC ideology. The deluded, sentimental xtian-leftist gets on board Der GulagZug willingly.

What about Zizek’s views on human rights strikes you as worthless, Walt?

And by the way Zizek has an oped in the Times today; it’s harmless decent liberalism.

Walt, no one’s going to win when there’s no common ground to fight for. What exactly is the argument the Zizekians ought to engage with? That Zizek is a crank who isn’t worth reading? OK, if that’s it, then I submit Tarrying With the Negative as exhibit A. There you’ll find a work that argues for the importance of the German Idealist tradition in thinking through contemporary events. I disagree with Zizek something like 90% of the time, so I’m no Zizekian, but at least he’s interesting to read.

Hubbard was a nut because he invented a religion out of thin air probably after being egged on by Robert Anton Wilson. There’s undoubtedly a playful/trickster element in Zizek that, as Kieran noted, is there mostly to piss off his critics and woo the ABDs. But in the very least Zizek is engaging with the world at large in a critical and often self-critical capacity and not chalking everything up to, say, alien ghosts. Maybe Lacan and Hegel are equivalent to alien ghosts for you, but I’d be willing to debate that point further.

What I find vaguely amazing in these threads is that I always get suckered into defending a thinker who I’m not particularly keen on defending in the first place. Seriously, I think Lacan has some major problems, and Zizek as a more or less orthodox Lacanian would seem to inherit these problems in toto. But when the discussion never gets out of first gear–that is, out of arguing about whether or not it’s a waste of time to even debate about Zizek–then it’s hard to get anything else done.

I dunno, I read some Zizek’s current-events pieces, they were interesting to read and easy to understand. Typical Leninism, consistent, simple and logical. In contrast, I could never understand any of the stuff written by William Buckley Jr. Weird.

That’s not so much Lacan or liberal–closer to Marx in The German Ideology, and classic historical materialism. It’s the PC types defending muslims at any cost, and theology as a whole, who are the cocktail liberals.

Coming back to the question of dismissing writers before you’ve read them, isn’t there some sort of lifetime bonus available? I read most of Sartre 30+ years ago (at least, Being and Nothingness, Nausea and quite a lot more) and came to the conclusion that he had very little of value to say, along with an obscure and portentous way of saying it. I had a reasonable go at Althusser (much worse), and steadily more limited attempts these guat later writers. It doesn’t seem to me that I was wrong – not many people today seem to think that reading Sartre or Althusser would be a good use of their time.

And, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve waded through innumerable misapplications of Godel’s theorem, quantum physics and so on, and have good reason to think that they are unlikely to have relevant applications in most of the fields in which I’m interested.

Now, as I say, life is too short for much more of this. What is wrong with the request, made repeatedly in this thread, for some indication of the main arguments Zizek and Badiou are making? It doesn’t have to be “two sentences”. Ten pages would be fine by me. And equations are no problem – the more the better.

Tony Gump smitts–

There are no contexts more Worthless than that of ad hominem spewing, wannabe-maoist Xtians from Skokie who couldn’t tell the difference between Cantor and canadian bacon–well, your culinary experience probably would help out there.

John: I am a mathematician, so I understand the meaning of Goedel’s theorem. It doesn’t undermine my faith in standard mathematics. I meant that if someone proved a theorem of the sort “Every diophantine equation can be represented as a general equilibrium economy, in such a way as the solutions to the diophantine equation are the equilibria of the economy and vice versa”, then that would be an example of Goedel’s theorem applying in economics.

I think we’re in agreement here Walt. Presumably, such a result would lead to the conclusion that no formal procedure could generate all economies for which the equilibria could be solved. This would be mildly interesting, but much weaker than the claims that are commonly made.

Jake: Goedel’s theorem (or rather, it’s proof) shows that if you try to ban self-referentiality, that as long as you can axiomitize arithmetic you can sneak it back in. In terms of computing, you can regard Goedel’s result as a straightforward consequence of the unsolvability of the Halting Problem.

I enjoy reading Zizek because he’s discursive. Writers that reason in straight lines between unambiguous meanings tend to produce explanations that to me seem concocted or geeky. The way Zizek ranges all over the map to relate the production of subjects and meanings (e.g. human rights) seems to produce results that have more sweep and mystery and real life about them. That’s supposed to make him a crank? Compared to whom– Nozick? Come on.

The blogger chitchat concering paradox often seems to suggest that within any axiomatic system there are unprovable truths; but then occasionally it’s only arithmetic. Does Goedel’s 1st incompleteness theorem (or the Halting problem) suggest that within any axiomatic system there are unprovable truths, or rather only in arithmetic? Chess for instance is a system with axioms (rules for piece movement); where are the unprovable truths? They might not be easily calculated, but that does not = not able to be calculated; or rather how do we know that truths (the best move) within that well-defined system are not computable in advance?

The halting problem is a bit different. There may be uncomputable arguments /conclusions within certain systems, but that doesn’t mean that systems cannot be complete, does it.

axiom system:

* @ &

if @, then *

if *, then &

if &, then *

thus,

if @ then &,

and if @ then *

where is the uncomputability ?

“the one immutable law of academia is that no humanist can legitimately draw on theories from outside the humanities”

The problem is that their use of science concepts as metaphors is usually subtly wrong. Zizek’s use of parallax as a metaphor, for example (from the small bits and pieces I’ve read) breaks down if you know much about parallax. Parallax is the shift in the apparent position of an object against a background caused by a change in point of view (dictionary.com’s use of “direction” is not really inspired, I’d say) and it’s a very familiar process — whenever you look at something with two eyes, your brain uses parallax as one of the ways of judging its distance. Zizek’s emphasis on parallax as metaphor of separation just doesn’t work; the object seen looks the same in either case, and all you have to do to see if against its background differently is change your location a bit.

In Zizek’s case, though, I think that he’s doing this on purpose. He has previously made arguments that were intended to be seen through in order to mock his enthusiasts. I’d guess that he finds the idea of people earnestly looking up parallax and their inner worries about whether they’ve gotten him right pretty funny.

“Well in that case, one need only look, and the world of blogs outside of Crooked Timber may provide.”

Now you’re just teasing! OK, despite things I’ve said above, I’ve read enough of Zizek to satisfy myself I don’t really want to read any more. But neither Google nor Technorati produces anything obviously useful on Badiou – how about a link?

Kotsko’s Second Law:

“As the length of a thread involving the Troll of Sorrow extends, the probability that the Halting Problem will be mentioned approaches one.”

The fact that it wasn’t The Troll of Sorrow himself who brought up the Halting Problem in this case seems to strengthen this claim.

(Kotsko’s First Law is that bloggers don’t keep their promises.)

John, I suppose you might try here, or here…or here, or à Gauche, or The Weblog’s ongoing reading group if you need help to finish quenching that.