bm3719 (u/bm3719) - Readit News

bm3719 commented on How to declutter, quiet down, and take the AI out of Windows 11 25H2 arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/mariuz

bm3719 · a month ago

Why bother? If you run updates, it'll randomly crap on all your custom settings anyway.

You win, MS. I thought I could keep a Windows box around for the occasional game and as an emergency backup for when I need random peripherals to "just work". I give up. The current Windows box (which I barely use anyway) is my last one.

bm3719 commented on Why aren't smart people happier? theseedsofscience.pub/p/w... · Posted by u/zdw

bm3719 · a month ago

Because we're intersubjective beings. Difference in intelligence level alienates one from the other. Past two standard deviations, anything like a "meeting of minds" becomes impossible. The only mutual interactions past that delta are economic ones (money exchanged for goods/services).

Hegel declared the Cartesian cognito can't exist in the singular. Lacan, Deleuze, Husserl, and many others said the same, that the subject is a function of its dialectic with the other. Dasein is Mitsein. There is no complete subject, floating in space by himself. Without an other, the subject cannot exist, at best becoming an object, at worst psychotic. Either way, isolation is a process towards annihilation.

If you're smart, find other smart people for authentic interaction. Likewise if you're not smart, though the problem there is easier for statistical reasons. Find them, turn off your parasocial pacifiers, and talk. You'll know it when you've found someone compatible, because you'll be able to emulate their mind, and they yours. It's not just a nice to have, but a need, a necessary component for survival. Without it, the sane you will cease to be, replaced by a zombie or a madman.

bm3719 commented on Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair thebaffler.com/salvos/bel... · Posted by u/Hooke

astrange · 2 months ago

Lacan was also abusive to his students and clients, charged them incredible amounts of money, and eventually his psychiatry sessions devolved into being about five minutes long.

He was basically a cult leader. There seemed to be something going on where people are infinitely forgiving of French intellectuals (and other continental philosophers) because they are the most skilled people in the world at having infinitely complicated writing styles.

Other episodes in this series include "Althusser kills his wife and communists keep admiringly quoting him", "every 70s French intellectual signs an open letter endorsing pedophilia", and "every department at Cambridge endorses giving Derrida an honorary philosophy degree /except/ the philosophers".

bm3719 · 2 months ago

This stuff is all true. Lacan also had a habit of permanently "borrowing" people's collectible books, charging Felix Guattari to drive Lacan home, sleeping with his female clients, and many, many other despicable things. He was, by all accounts, a complete scumbag.

I still read him because his ideas are brilliant and helped me in innumerable ways. He's dead now and his books can't hurt me. They're not even ideological, so you can't make the same case as you could for avoiding, say, a certain Austrian political theorist. However, if we somehow resurrect Lacan, I won't be lending him any first editions from my collection.

bm3719 commented on Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair thebaffler.com/salvos/bel... · Posted by u/Hooke

aspenmayer · 2 months ago

I don’t read German, or French very well for that matter, so going to the sources is a bit of a linguistic barrier to my own self-directed learning, but that’s no excuse not to learn. I also have found both Lacan and Hegel to be a rich source of food for thought, so I appreciate others who have been steeped in their ideas, as you have, so that their knowledge graph can adjoin my own, at least in small ways.

I appreciate the mention of Bruce Fink, as his name is new to me. Any works of his or others you might recommend to me would be duly noted.

bm3719 · 2 months ago

I'm not fluent in French or German either, only enough for light reading in both, and certainly not enough for anything complex/dense. For Lacan, Hegel, and other continental thinkers, I read the same translations that most English-speaking readers do. Am I missing something of these text's core essence? Probably. But, it's also not my job and I need that linguistic brain space for programming languages, so I'm okay with getting 90% of it.

Here was my early Lacan workflow: Lots of Freud essays (you need to know Freud's major ideas cold), The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Lacan by McGowan, The Lacanian Subject by Fink, Seminar VII, Seminar XI.

I've read a lot of other stuff since then, but this path into Lacan worked for me. By the time you've read these, you'll know where to go next on your own. You'll also know pretty early in it whether Lacan is for you. Also, if you don't like Freud (and I don't mean disagree with him, but dislike the overall approach), you can safely stop there.

bm3719 commented on Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair thebaffler.com/salvos/bel... · Posted by u/Hooke

pas · 2 months ago

Can you explain a bit what's the reactionary political thing and which parts show that that the author got sucked into it? Thanks!

bm3719 · 2 months ago

Say you wanted to teach cultural studies. That necessarily includes politics, so you should talk about it. However, you can teach politics (or even theorize about politics), or you can do politics. I assert you can't do both, at least not in an academic setting.

Note how the author can't help but take sides on every political signifier he references. He supposedly wanted to write about the Sokal affair from his side, but the essay ends up being a polemic deeply in the now, to the degree that the documentary effort is substantively diminished. That's what papers in his field read like in the 1990s, and still do to this day.

bm3719 commented on Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair thebaffler.com/salvos/bel... · Posted by u/Hooke

aspenmayer · 2 months ago

I am by no means an expert, or even especially well-read, but I’ve found Zizek’s percolation of Lacan to be much more accessible to myself as a non-domain expert, and I appreciate how Zizek engages with the audience where they are. Lacan, to my intellect, is hard to grok, as I haven’t put in the time and effort to lay hold of his ideas directly. At times, it feels like with Lacan specifically, and with postmodernism generally, that the obscurantism is the point, which smacks of gatekeeping, but I don’t mind. If I don’t get it, I at least know enough about my own understanding or lack thereof to ask questions of my intellectual betters, which is its own reward.

bm3719 · 2 months ago

I think Lacan's obscurantism, if you want to call it that, can be thought of one of two ways:

1. He claims to not to want to be understood too quickly. If you believe that, you might say he's forcing the reader (or emerging psychoanalyst) to not just take his ideas as a simple list of facts to be memorized. He often rants about other fields being reductive in the face of necessary nuance. You might also justify this by saying precisely that perspective is necessary in psychoanalysis, with the human mind (particularly the suffering one) in all its unexplored complexity being its target. I'm of two minds on this: I see his point, but there are certainly times when such is an obstacle. Of course, that's if you believe him in the first place. He also said he was something of the master, and his audience the acolytes. He was trying to build a new school under his system, after all.

2. Lacan's ideas are indeed complex and extremely tightly interconnected (or polyvalent, as he likes to say). The graph of Lacanian thought has a lot of nodes (ideas), and an extremely high number of edges (relationships between ideas) per node, and thus very high graph density. If you think about it from that perspective, how does one present such a oeuvre in the linear form like essays or speeches? Further complexifying things is that he was building this in situ, his Seminars being akin to live-blogging that development. He often asks his audience if there's an expert on a particular topic and if so, to let him know about some detail. He never wrote a comprehensive final form of Lacanian thought, so any secondary texts you read will be that author's interpretation. All this creates quite the conundrum for anyone getting started.

If you want condensed info and clarity, go for a secondary source (Bruce Fink being my favorite), while noting the above. I'd also say that, like Hegel, Lacan has something of a language of his own, one you can learn. If you find his ideas compelling (I do, and have benefited from them in my personal life greatly) you should still read him as a primary source. Even if you do the actual learning via other sources, I'd assert that Lacan is one of the last of the true Renaissance men, pulling in ideas from everywhere and everywhen, and I also find reading him an expanding experience just from that perspective.

bm3719 commented on Belittled Magazine: Thirty years after the Sokal affair thebaffler.com/salvos/bel... · Posted by u/Hooke

bm3719 · 2 months ago

Sokal was right, of course. He deservedly made fools of a bunch of naked emperors. However, he also influenced a lot of people (myself included) to eschew a whole genre of thinkers for which there was a lot of truly brilliant ideas.

For example, Lacan is given a good spanking by Sokal both in his paper Transgressing the Boundaries and an entire chapter is dedicated to him in Intellectual Impostures. Lacan looks like a complete fool if this is your only exposure to his thought. Again, Sokal is not wrong on his criticisms in these excerpts. Lacan definitely uses mathematical terms incorrectly. He was making an attempt to formalize his field (psychoanalysis) by skimming textbooks/papers on topology, knot theory, and other mathematical subfields and, from the perspective of someone who uses those terms for precise things, rather haphazardly putting them together. His "mathemes" go through many updates throughout his career, getting ever more complex. Later, Lacan almost certainly was suffering from senility (as most of us will by age 80), and got rather obsessed with the fake math side of his own work.

However, if you actually read Lacan, this is a miniscule and often completely ignored side of his work. No Lacanian psychoanalyst is filling their notebooks with fake math formulas and computing what's wrong with your relationship with the objet petit a. They're metaphors, shorthand, or diagrammatic expressions of what he's really saying in the ~10k pages of his massive corpus. Many of us use compsci terms all the time to express things metaphorically (e.g., being out of bandwidth or disk space when we really mean real world time and mental memory). Think about it this way, and Lacan becomes a source of manifest brilliance, as I discovered only way later in life.

All that said, the critical theory and cultural studies space of the 90s was indeed a cesspool, living in the shadow of former intellectual greats. The great flood of mediocre intellects was starting to bear its rotten fruit, but the truly fatal problem was the politicization. Sokal only addressed this some, making surface-level wrongness his focus in some kind of defense of his own field's purity. Politics poisoned critical theory just like it did wherever else a field became subservient to the street-level goals of a political monoculture. Mindless foot soldiers, bleating about race and gender, capable of only bumper-sticker-length thoughts, make poor philosophers, it turns out. That should've been the core of his point, and could've been helpful framing for a countercurrent against it. Leftist intellectuals, or what was left of them, could've cleaned up their own space, and put the people like this article's author in a quiet corner where they belong. (Note how even here, he can't help but get sucked into the immediacy of the left-reactionary political zeitgeist; the spittle being anything but subtextual.) Instead it came to its inevitable, expensive conclusion of having the decolonization of the university from political imperialists done for them by their equally unthinking opponents.