I realized last night (about 8.30pm) just how impoverished my work was - just a superficial apologia for the Washington consensus manifesting itself as microeconometrics- following a brief but intense study of leading French philosophers. Some quotes below will help you understand my conversion to a more humanistic philosophy.
Jacques Lacan,
…human life could be defined as a calculus in which zero was irrational.. When I say “irrational”, I’m referring not to some unfathomable emotional state but precisely to what is called an imaginary number . The square root of minus one doesn’t correspond to anything real - in the mathematical sense of term- and yet, it must be conserved, along with its full function. (1959)
Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of jouissance [i.e. pleasure,joy], not in itself, or even the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image: that is why it is equivalent to √-1 of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restored by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1). (1977)
Julia Kristeva
It is therefore impossible to formalize poetic language using the existing logical (scientific) procedures without denaturing it. A literary semiotics has to be made starting from a poetic logic in which the concept of the power of the continuum, would encompass the interval from 0 to 2 , a continuum where 0 denoted and 1 is implicitly transgressed (1969)
Luce Irigaray
What is left uninterpreted in the economy of fluids – the resistances brought to bear upon solids, for example – is in the end given over to God. Overlooking the properties of real fluids – internal frictions, pressures, movements and so on, that is, their specific dynamics, leads to giving the real back to God, as only the idealizable characteristics of fluids are included in their mathematization. (1985)
Jacques Derrida
There’s so much I don’t know about astrophysics, I wish I’d read that book by that wheelchair guy. (2000)
Deleuze
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogenous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable but rather metastable , endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed…In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to an extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate …(1990)
Régis Debray
Ever since Gödel showed that there does not exist a proof of the consistency of Peano’s arithmetic that is formalizable within this theory, political scientists have had the means for understanding why it is necessary to mummify Lenin and display him to the “accidental” comrades in a mausoleum, at the Center of the National Community. (1980)
Jean Baudrillard
There is no better model of the way in which the computer screen and the mental screen of our brain are interwoven than Moebius’s topology with its peculiar contiguity of near and far, inside and outside, object and subject within the same spiral .(1993).
8 comments:
Actually I lied, one of the quotes is from Homer Simpson. A prize to whoever is first to guess the correct one.
There’s so much I don’t know about astrophysics, I wish I’d read that book by that wheelchair guy. (2000)
This must be the one by Homer Simpson!
Correct! I presume you identified it because it's the only quote that makes any sense.
It may be the most sensible quote, but I fact identified it by its lack of diplomacy!
Well since Homer and Stephen Hawking are drinking buddies & mutual admirers (e.g. "I like your idea of a donut shaped universe Homer") I wouldn't worry about any lack of diplomacy. My own view is that being deliberately obscure, on the other hand, is unforgivable.
i think the sokal book does a good job of examining what can go wrong at the excesses of a discipline when it gets taken in by some of its concepts. im sure we could identify some far more lucid writings in this tradition. as a counter-balancing exercise it would be interesting to examine some of the extremes that economists have gone to over the years to save the neo-classical assumptions. some of the ex-post rationalisations of clearly non-standard behaviour have been pythonesque. The last paragraph or so in the article below develops the "dead parrot analogy"
http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/richard.thaler/research/JEPV15N1.pdf
sorry, the comments dont allow long links - the article is the 2001 Risk Aversion article in the Winter Journal of Economic Perspectives.
I think the analogy with economics is false and I think you are going overboard in the "ah lets be fair to these guys, it can't be that bad, nobody's perfect etc". Firstly , what does it tell you about a discipline when some of its key figures talk nonsense some of the time including what is considered their key texts. It can hardly give you confidence in their work in general ? Secondly why be deliberately obscure if you have something genuine to say? Thirdly what does it say about a discipline that cannot recognize a spoof?
While there is undoubtedly some not very good economics I don't think those criticisms can be applied to economics & certainly to the leading names in the field. Theoretical arguments in economics can, at least, be checked for logical consistency and empirical arguments are testable.
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