Quantum quantumness
You did have a look at the work of Carolyn Guertin when I posted the link in News, right? Do rush to have a read if you haven’t – it’s – what shall I say – it’s quantum. That’s what it is, it’s quantum.
Quantum feminist works make no attempt to reconcile this dislocation between networked nodes and their gaps in space-time. Instead, they foreground and use this aspect, highlighting the disjunctures of the subject’s position as she is depicted and as she voyages through the text…In her essay “The Roots of Nonlinearity,” hypertextualist Christie Sheffield Sanford says that modern physics has erased the concept of absolutes in time and space and that this is evident in the texts of the new media as well. She uses indeterminacy theorist Werner Heisenberg to support her theories…
Well of course she does. Who doesn’t? Heisenberg, indeterminacy, quantum, absolutes in time and space and texts of new media; it’s all basically the same thing. Right? Right.
David Thompson comments here. And the author herself comments on this post at the Dawkins site (last comment on the page, number 50). She gives the predictable, and very irritating, defense.
Do I really need to point out that this was a dissertation written for specialists working in my field and not a work for general publication? If it were the latter, it would indeed be a different text and worthy of critique – although not this kind.
Nope. What you need to point out is what ‘quantum feminist works’ might be; what you need to point out is why you use the word ‘quantum’ to mean any old thing you feel like; what you need to point out is why you shelter behind your own specialisthood but don’t scruple to help yourself to the vocabulary of physics; what you need to point out is what is ‘specialist’ about misusing technical language for purposes of ornamenting some uninspiring observations about following hyperlinks.
Guertin has a Teaching Philosophy.
Cyberfeminisms writ large are what I call ‘quantum feminisms,’ lived as much in the scientific world as in the literary, personal as much as political. Quantum feminisms are situated knowledges interpolated by experience and embodied presence and, most importantly, are personal philosophies. As a potential pedagogical model, quantum feminisms allow me to use their own theoretical and scientific principles to produce a student-centred environment…
What she calls ‘quantum feminisms’ – why? Why not call them amyotrophic feminisms? Why not call them fermionic condensate feminisms? Why not call them Huey Dewey and Louie feminisms? Why quantum? Because – erm – it impresses the credulous? That’s my guess. My quantum guess.
I like the last remark she made on the Dawkins site:
“to have the website of the most celebrated research unit at the University of Toronto declared a hoax! That’s really funny.”
That’s quite a boast, considering UT can claim eight Nobel laureates, none of whom are from her unit.
-CM
Yeah, well, ‘celebrated’ – like quantum – can mean a lot of things; or nothing.
It’s really quite amusing to see these pomo types (who by the way have a very low opinion of science as knowledge) throwing scientific terms around as though they knew what they meant.
Apparently, some one braver than I actually read through the stuff and found her referring to such things as Hilbert spaces. I wonder what the learned scholar would say if someone cornered her in some grove of Academe one day and asked her to explain just what a “Hilbert space” was?
This stuff is all just a joke. The Intelligent Design people and the neocons are a lot more dangerous.
There is an episode of the Simpsons in which the aliens Kang and Kodos knock on the door. When Homer answers he says something like, “oh no, Mormons!”, to which one of the aliens replies that they are “Quantum Presbyterians”.
Seriously, things like “Within quantum mechanics, the science of the body in motion, the intricacies of the interiorities of mnemonic time – no longer an arrow – are being realized in the (traditionally) feminized shape of the body of the matrix” is exactly the sort of nonsense that Sokal punctured *so* long ago
Ahem.. I posted the last time a little prematurely. I meant to continue:
“as Thompson notes. So why are people reheating the intellectual equivalent last week’s gruel?”
It’s wall-to-wall cyberbollocks!
Does ANYONE actually take this stuff seriously any more?
If so, one can understand why “rednecks” in the US and Daily Mail readers in the UK decry all education.
It demeans us all.
How, though do you stop this nonsense?
It is difficult to remeber, now, how this got started, quite legitimately, because of the then overweening prejudice against women.
One only has to think of the treatment of Rosalind Franklin by the ghastly Wilkins, or the absurd prohibitions on female airline pilots in the 1950’s, to see where it came from …..
JonJ:
>I wonder what the learned scholar would say if someone cornered her in some grove of Academe one day and asked her to explain just what a “Hilbert space” was?< One of the comments at the end on the Dawkins page quotes Guertin: “I am not, however, a scientist and it is important to note that I do use these principles in metaphorical ways.” Perhaps Guertin will explain how “principles” of which she hasn’t a clue can sensibly be applied metaphorically. “I have read extensively in math and the sciences to find a discourse to speak about the new media.” Revealing! Guertin read widely in maths and the sciences so that she could drag mathematical and scientific concepts into her “discourse”. Now why would she do that? Surely not to *impress* her readers with her (supposed) erudition. Perish the thought.
Forget Hilbert spaces, I have found that if someone uses the word ‘postmodern’ in conversation, I can have great fun by interrupting them and asking in a confused voice “I’m sorry, what do you mean ‘postmmodern’?” They never, ever know – just like the rest of us.
G Tingey – “Daily Mail readers in the UK decry all education” – you are right – that paper is a very strange publication. It is so reactionary that I can only assume that its editorial board died some years ago.
Sigfpe at the Dawkins wegsite writes (comment no. 42):
>Come on. It makes perfect sense. You just need to recontextualise. Like quantum transitions in energy levels there is a gap between the alternating ends of a hyperlink and its target. This gap surrounds a type of core with inner and outer layers that are quasi-indeterminate. This is true whether we are speaking topologically or planarise to the Other with Euclidean geometry. Either way, we’re forced to reconsider our textual roots as we elide the relationship between hyperlink/target anti-hyperlink/anti-target. I’m sure everyone (at least everyone who has reached this far) has experienced this directly, despite the ephemerality of the present for its intercontextual aetiology. The feminist link is now clear – the gap cancels the phallogocentric tendencies inherent in any Weltanschauung. It’s all explained rather well in the original text and I can’t see why any reader would have difficulties with it.< Carolyn Guertin (comment no. 50) writes “My thanks to those of you who were willing to look deeper”. Given that all the comments bar one derided her work, could it be that she took Sigfpe’s Sokal-style contribution as a serious attempt to understand her text?
Since no one has yet posted the obligatory Pratchett reference,
“…And then there’s Quantum. There’s always bloody Quantum.”
Following on from Tingey on women, there’s a very sad bit in the piece in “The Scientist” (though I saw it at Dawkins) on Beatrix Potter’s forgotten career as a botanist.
“In April 1897, after painstaking preparation, Potter was ready to present her first and only paper, ‘Germination of the spores of the Agaricineae,’ to the Linnean Society of London… However, women were not allowed to attend official Society meetings. Potter’s paper was offered instead through a botanist at Kew Gardens, George Massee, a member of the Society.”
Only 110 years ago and quite unremarkable for the time, yet still far freer than what women in Islamic societies endure today.
I suppose one might be able to take the whole thing a little bit more seriously of somekind of translation were available to us “untermenschen” – preferably one of those “side by side” translations where you can actually see what translates to what- with footnotes – sorry! only jok… whoops ..being postmodern!
The question that should be posed after such a jargon-junk is launched is “can you please express it in simpler form?” One can easily get carried away with a good idea and over-express it, but that’s not what’s happening here. There is no central idea that can be simplified, because the central idea is to write long and incomprehensible sentences.
I’ve suddenly remembered a review in the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television (October 1996) of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s “Unthinking Eurocentrism” which included: “Although the authors write well, the percentage of jargon or buzzwords is high and includes such questionable adjectives as ‘triumphalist’, ‘miserabilist’, ‘palimpsestic’, ‘binaristic’, ‘visualist’, ‘exceptionalist’ and ‘minoritarian’. What’s wrong with ‘triumphal’, ‘miserable’, ‘binary’, ‘visual’, ‘exceptional’ and ‘minority’? Playing fast and loose with the English language is an unfortunate tendency among writers in cultural studies, who encourage graduate students to produce bad imitations.”
Anent The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology:
I am no admirer of the late Marshall McLuhan. I admit that my attitude is as much informed by the opinions of my elders and betters (not many of ’em left, now!), his colleagues, as it was by reading him, or making attempts thereat.
Much of what seemed novel in his thought was old news to some of his colleagues, who were of the opinion that he had simply reworked the scholarship of Harold Adams Innis into a series of aphorisms.
At the risk (risk? the certainty!) of espousing the genetic fallacy, what more may one expect of a program that bears his name?
I wouldn’t necessarily have anything against taking metaphors from quantum physics in general – except for the fact that the humanities have had enough bad metaphors from the sciences, and that they tend to give a flashy “scientistic” flavour to the text which the subject needs as much as a fish needs a bicycle. Work in the humanities should stand and fall on its own ground.
Having scoured the text, I here and there seem to understand what she’s heading at – but the quantum stuff obscures much more than it enlightens. Aside from the fact that she seems to base herself on a more-or-less controversial interpretation of quantum mechanics (of course, all of them are more or less controversial, but that’s a good reason to steer clear of them). And there’s some strange remarks here and there. Is hyperspace really a concept developed in the 80s? Does the fact that we have no sensory experience of other dimensions mean that they are “literally inconceivable in our own imaginative space”? And that to think of a sentence such as “But where phallocentric information multiplicities consume subjectivities, quantum feminist ones proliferate them fractally as orientations, trajectories, processes and movements.”
I don’t think the writer is a fraud, though. I think she really has an idea about what she wants to say. But, granted that it is a piece of text lifted out of a book without context, she seems to shroud it into metaphor within metaphor within metaphor. The idea about witty metaphors is that you put them in between plain language – so they can hit harder.
“This stuff is all just a joke. The Intelligent Design people and the neocons are a lot more dangerous.”
Sure. And yet this stuff is somehow sooo irritating. The combination of vanity and inflation and vacuity and showing off is…like fingernails on a blackboard.
Therefore it is urgently important to make fun of it!
It is immensely irritating, but unfortunately it is worse than that. Ms. Guertin’s nonsense, and stuff like it, causes damage. The people in the business of creating it are 1) prevented from doing something useful and productive, 2) mentoring the next generation of people who will get involved in it and thereby ensuring its perpetuity, and 3) cause others, including intelligent and educated people, to believe that this is what scholarship and even science are about. It amounts to an immense waste of intellectual resources.
The moral of the story is: Never underestimate the power of cognitive dissonance.
-CM
All true. Which I suppose is why I don’t consider it a waste of time to make fun of it – it is harmful as well as irritating. But it’s not as harmful as…things that are more harmful.
I really hate 3. I hate it that anyone thinks this stuff is scholarship. That’s what really gets up my nose, I think – there is such a thing as real scholarship, in many many fields; there are thousands of people doing it; it’s intensely annoying that absurd pasteboard imitations like this are passed off as scholarship.
If there is something meaningful in what she writes I couldn’t be bothered trying to find it because much of what she writes is meaningless. As Merlijn says, the layer upon layer of metaphor gets in the way, but what makes it worse it my eyes is that the metaphors are so bad as to be utterly useless and often completely wrong.
She does get alot of science buzzwords in there though. I’ll give here that.
Is there an equivalent of a Plain English Campaign for the humanities?
I don’t like Plain English or Plain English campaigns. The problem is not that her language is too polysyllabic or ‘elitist’ or difficult or complex or technical; the problem is that it’s all those things and more for patently absurd reasons and out of all proportion to the heft of what she is saying.
Let me be clear. I like polysyllabic words, I like difficult words, I like complex syntax, I like metaphors; I dislike short sentences without dependent clauses; I am not at all a fan of Hemingwayesque writing.
“Let me be clear. I like polysyllabic words, I like difficult words, I like complex syntax, I like metaphors; I dislike short sentences without dependent clauses; I am not at all a fan of Hemingwayesque writing.”
It is utterly inconceivable that anyone would be so grossly mistaken as to think that you would not be the kind of writer with a penchant for polysyllabilism, involving herself in convoluted expression, and who is incapable of making the metaphorical quantum leap from “text” to “meaning”.
snicker
Good example of what I believe is called ‘performativity,’ KB!
This kind of stuff would be less dangerous if it weren’t for the fact that so many “theorists” of this kind are populating English and certain other university departments. It makes me slightly ill to know that these theorists solemnly deliver lectures to undergraduates, who simply accept what they’re told even if it doesn’t make sense. Considering the expense of an education and the wasted time “theorizing” when the student could be learning something about literature or whatever else, I would openly encourage students to complain to their universities for failing to provide competent instruction. I would encourage it, that is, if I had tenure (ironic postmodern hegemonic empowerments of situated pseudo-knowledges being what they are!).
Sorry, I meant to say: “ironically hegemonic empowerments of postmodern pseudo-knowledges.” “Knowledges” is sous rature, of course. That’s much clearer.
I find it especially repellent that this crap is so popular in Women’s Studies programs, because feminist politics is far too important to be left in the hands of such self-important jackasses. GAH!
Someone like Judith Butler has a few important and useful things to say, but not important enough or useful enough to justify the vast effort it takes to distill those few bits from the massive volume of twaddle in which they’re dissolved.
Exactly. I wouldn’t mind Butler if she were content just to say the few important and useful things she has to say, but her need to embed them in the lava of pretentious verbiahhhge causes me to mind her a great deal. Sheep and goats time. Pretentious verbiahhhge is a deal-breaker, as far as I’m concerned.
OB:”Let me be clear. I like polysyllabic words, I like difficult words, I like complex syntax, I like metaphors; I dislike short sentences without dependent clauses; I am not at all a fan of Hemingwayesque writing.”
I am.
And?
Am I right to think that there is a pomo vocabulary of words taken from science/math ( such as quantum) and given canonical metaphorical meanings by the likes of La Guertin for use in such texts ? For if the pomo use of such words is not canonical within pomo, then how is anyone *supposed* by the pomos to understand such texts? Remember that it has been long and repeatedly pointed out to them that what the pomos mean by such words is scientific and mathematical nonsense. So therefore someone familiar with these terms in their scientific/mathematical contexts could not understand the pomo versions, while someone not familiar with the technical contexts would be completely dumbfounded.
I’m really not sure if there is a canonical (within pomo or ‘Theory’) meaning for quantum. I can’t even figure out if it is supposed to mean something in particular or just whatever anyone feels like using it to mean – but I suspect it’s the latter. I think Guertin takes it or uses it to mean something like Special or Significant or More or New Improved Zowie. Quantum feminism is (it seems fair to deduce) Extra Special Super Duper New Bigger Greater feminism. But why? Why would it mean that? Why don’t her students point at her and laugh when she uses it that way?
I’m soooooo tempted just to email her to ask what she thinks the word means. Someone stop me.
Yeah, like someone in this crowd is going to stop you? I say do it.
-CM
P.S. I think Mr. White was making a wry joke in expressing his liking for Hemingway.
Thanks, C. A. Moyer. I’m glad someone got it.
OB: I’d like to see plain english amongst academics in the humanities because, as educators rather than artists, they have a duty to communicate clearly. I don’t like the use of difficult words just for the sake of seeming profound. I want to know as quickly as possible if the person I’m reading has something to say, and that isn’t facilitated by indigestible writing; moreover, if the idea is difficult then it won’t be helped with unreadable prose.
Andy White,
Of course I too ‘don’t like the use of difficult words just for the sake of seeming profound’ – but I also don’t like the elimination of putative difficult words just for the sake of efficiency; and the definition of a difficult word is (also of course) not transparent.
Obviously I’m not championing indigestible writing or unreadable prose – what else have I been talking about in this post? – but it is not the case that there is nothing between Plain English and unreadable prose. To put it mildly.
“I want to know as quickly as possible if the person I’m reading has something to say”
Well there you go – that’s why I can’t stand Plain English campaigns. I don’t take speed to be the only criterion. In fact, frankly, I find that idea quite repellently crude and simplistic.
I’m curious – if you like Plain English and speed, why do you like B&W? I don’t write Plain (or speedy) English.
Okay this is stupid. Reading the Wikipedia entry on Plain English.
“In the late 19th century, several gifted writers (e.g., Abraham Lincoln and Mark Twain) demonstrated that plain English could be elegant when executed properly (e.g., the Gettysburg Address); but they were ahead of their time.”
Absolute bullshit. Take another look at the Gettysburg address – that is not Plain English! People somehow got hold of that idea, but it’s not. ‘Conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’? Come on!
Plain English wants short sentences without dependent clauses. I despise short sentences without dependent clauses, especially when they are the rule rather than the exception. I despise Dick and Jane cat sat on the mat writing. It’s stupid, it’s impoverished, it’s useless for conveying complex thought. Yes, it’s faster and easier, but not all ideas can be conveyed fast and easily!
Obviously I get heated about this. Someone once told me that sentences of the kind that Jane Austen wrote had been rendered obsolete by Hemingway. Oh godalmighty.
I get heated about this, and especially so at the moment; a copyeditor mangled an article of mine the other day, partly by cutting the longer sentences into shorter stupider ones. That editor had a deeply mistaken notion of what writing should be.
“I don’t take speed to be the only criterion. In fact, frankly, I find that idea quite repellently crude and simplistic.”
Because I’m a complusive book-buyer I want the tomes I purchase for information to be as concise as possible. There’s always the next book to get to – and the one after that. And all the while “time’s winged chariot” hurries ever nearer.
“I’m curious – if you like Plain English and speed, why do you like B&W? I don’t write Plain (or speedy) English.”
You write clearly and forcefully about subjects that interest me. You also take the time to respond to my often crude and simplistic comments.
Ah – of books and study there is no end, as Ecclesiastes notes.
(I note you say ‘purchase’ instead of buy. Now that’s one where I out-Plain English you; that word always strikes me as pure dressing up – it sounds more dignified and grand to purchase a sable baseball cap than just to buy one. Me, I just buy stuff, I never purchase anything.)
But do you buy all books for information? Do you buy any books for something other than information? For aesthetic pleasure for example? Do you like poetry at all? (Don’t worry if you don’t – it took me years to realize I did.) (But hey, if you like Marvell enough to use his metaphor, you must like it at least a little!)
The trouble is…there aren’t that many subjects that can be presented as pure algorithms. Plain English is fine for instruction manuals and maybe very brief memos, but other than that…it’s bound to oversimplify.
(Musing) It really is bizarre that people think the Gettysburg address is Plain English. It’s very short, but it’s far from Plain English.
I used purchase instead of buy because I’d already written the word “buyer” in the same sentence. I wanted to show off with some elegant variation. “Vanity, all is vanity” as E. also noted.
Well now see – would you prefer a Plain English version of Ecclesiastes to the KJ translation? I think not!
Tsk. You’ve been pulling my chain the whole time. I’m so gullible.
snicker
“how is anyone *supposed* by the pomos to understand such texts?”
I would be very interested in knowing (not that I think it’s possible, partly because asking the people in question might not necessarily elicit honest answers) what percentage of those who claim to understand these texts even think that they understand them (as well as knowing what percentage of those who write them actually intend them to have real meaning – beyond “enhancing” their reputations).
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Our ancestors set up a new nation. It was set up on this continent 87 years ago. When they thought it up, they thought it should be free. The idea behind it was that all men are created equal. (And if you were Hemingway, you would say, it was a nation not much like any other nation.)
Doesn’t have the rhythm of Lincoln, I agree. When I decide whether I want to read some prose or not it will be the rhythm that will win me, and then if I stumble over too much difficult vocabulary I’ll give up. A lot of short choppy sentences are tiresome to read. A sentence should be like a surfer’s wave that you catch and it takes you and lands you smoothly on the shore.
Let’s see if I can tweak it a little farther downwards.
87 years ago our dads started a new country here. They thought it should be about freedom and democracy.
That sounds very like something Bush would actually say, to tell the truth.
“it will be the rhythm that will win me”
Will you be my Valentine? That’s exactly it. The long sentences chopped into short ones with stupid extra commas added ruined the rhythm. I do not like having my rhythm ruined. It makes me agitated.
How about a pomo Gettysburg Address?
Coming into networked existence at but one Hilbert space along the quantum continuum of timespace – what Fignonsky dubbed the “sense-moment” – our phallocentric forebears projected their hegemonic power-theory onto this earth-matrix, proposing to eradicate the traditional meta-narrative by means of their conjecture that one “man” is equivalent to another “man” is equivalent to still another “man.”
Fun, but not nearly as good as Norvig’s PowerPoint version, though. That’s a scream.
I learned something trying to do this. It’s actually very hard to write like a pomo windbag! At least, that is, for someone who ordinarily strives for clarity in his writing. In any case, I fear my offering actually makes a bit too much sense to really compete with the best/worst.
“I fear my offering actually makes a bit too much sense to really compete with the best/worst.”
Nah, you’re too modest. I found it incomprehensible.
“It’s actually very hard to write like a pomo windbag!”
Yeah, like rolling a pea with your nose for 10 miles. It’s hard, hard work and it doesn’t have to be done.
“Yeah, like rolling a pea with your nose for 10 miles. It’s hard, hard work and it doesn’t have to be done.”
Actually for elegance that should read “It’s hard, hard work and nobody has to do it.”
Brilliant! I especially love the Fignonsky bit.
‘it doesn’t have to be done’ v ‘nobody has to do it’ – hmm – actually I prefer the first – it makes the subject ‘it’ – it is something which doesn’t have to be done; that’s the important thing. It’s less important that nobody has to do it. It matters more than nobody does.
This kind of thing is one reason the stupid mechanical rule-driven ‘corrections’ of bad editors are so bad: the passive is not always worse than the active; sometimes you need it to express a particular subtlety. The ‘rules’ people are taught in 5th grade are useful for bad writers, because they’re better than the alternative, but those rules are the kiss of death for good writers.
It wasn’t the passive voice that bothered me. I am not bothered by the passive voice.
It’s hard work butit has to be done.
It’s hard work but somebody has to do it.
So of course I was trying to write the opposite of the second part of those clauses. If you say “somebody has to do it” you also imply that the job has to be done so I think you pack in more meaning in to fewer words.
No, I defend my correction.
Ya – well I said ‘I prefer’ – then went on to say why, purely out of interest. But it’s not the kind of change I would ever make on something someone else wrote. I might offer it for consideration; I would never mandate it or insert it unmarked. These experiences of being edited (I’ve had a couple recently, I’m not sure I’ve mentioned both) have made me realize that being a good editor is a negative virtue as well as a positive one. With all due modesty, I’m a good editor. I don’t make people write my way!
My vote goes to “nobody has to do it” for the simple reason that it’s also the one that describes the people who do it.
@Merlijn: I call bullshit on you!