Jean Baudrillard Did Not Die

Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
tryptych said:
Don't have time to read all this thread now - but wanted to comment on this.

That seems like totally wrong reading of Kuhn to me (in fact it sounds if anything more like Popper) - the whole point is that there is no fixed corpus of scientific knowledge, and part of what instigates changes in paradigms is cultural context, the puzzles and questions that culture expects science to answer. He was rejecting both verification and falsification as methods of moving closer towards a scientific "truth".

Your disdain is for relativism - Kuhn is nothing if not a scientific relativist (remember incommensurability?) - and I guess many would place him in the "post-modern" bracket.
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I never said the corpus of knowledge was 'fixed', did I - if it were, how could it possibly change?

What I meant was, scientific theories stand and fall by how well they explain empirical data - yes, there will be conflicts between rival theories when there is insufficient data to conclusively support either one (eg., Lamarckian vs. Darwinian evolution) and in these situations people go on hunches or intuition informed by whatever scientific culture they belong to; but eventually one side or the other will win out (or the dichotomy will be transcended completely, as in the case of wave vs. particle nature of light) as new data comes to light.
 
T

tryptych

waiting for a time
Mr. Tea said:
I never said the corpus of knowledge was 'fixed', did I - if it were, how could it possibly change?

What I meant was, scientific theories stand and fall by how well they explain empirical data - yes, there will be conflicts between rival theories when there is insufficient data to conclusively support either one (eg., Lamarckian vs. Darwinian evolution) and in these situations people go on hunches or intuition informed by whatever scientific culture they belong to; but eventually one side or the other will win out (or the dichotomy will be transcended completely, as in the case of wave vs. particle nature of light) as new data comes to light.
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Fair enough.. but that is certainly not Kuhn's view. Scientific theories don't just stand on how well they explain empirical data - it's in part due to their ability to answer meta-questions demanded on what science is for (e.g. Kuhn's example of the different demands on science in Newton and Einstein's times).

Not only that, but to branch away from Kuhn, such an idealised view of the scientific method doesn't happen in the concrete practice of science. Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch are good on this... although I would imagine you might regard them as suspect pomo thinkers.

Sorry this is off topic now... will let the thread get back on course.
 
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nomadologist

Guest
That isn't off-topic, it was very relevant and I'm glad someone could say it with confidence--I didn't think Kuhn was being correctly represented but I wasn't sure...
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Hmm. I read 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' a couple of years back and while I'm not sure I got everything out of it, due to its being such a dense text, I think I absorbed the main points, about science advancing by crises being reached in the current paradigm and 'paradigm shift' informing a new world-view, etc.
I'm certainly not saying scientists work in a social vacuum, far from it, I was just pointing out that a theory isn't worth shit (and, even if it is popular with the scientific establishment at one time, it will eventually be discarded) if is a) internally logically inconsistent or b) shown beyond all doubt to conflict with empirical data, and that this is the absolutely vital difference between science and any sort of religion or system of superstition.

Wildly off topic, I know, but it was sparked off by something zhao said earlier in the thread.
 
H

hundredmillionlifetimes

Banned
John Doe said:
D'oh!

Perhaps I was thinking of the, eh, ahem post-apostrophe remix version currently tearing up the reading groups in downtown Dublin :confused:
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Or the injunction to wake up, with the help of some whiskey, to engender "the abnihilisation of the etym?" Or how about a comparable resurrection [remix version] - of a cropse? Whiskey "reawakens" Tim Finnegan: adding an apostrophe to Finnegans Wake gives us the title of a New York Irish ballad, "Finnegan's Wake," about a Tim Finnegan who, a builder by trade, falls from his ladder at work while inebriated, is taken for dead, and has a wake arranged in his honour. In the course of the family brawling that follows the keening and gorging, a bottle of whiskey spills on auld Tim and restores him back to "life."

And we now still have to address whether this - the ontological [or quantum mechanical, "it is and it isn't"] status of the whiskey-Tim - is a Baudrillardian second-order or third-order simulation.
 
D

Dial

Well-known member
k-punk said:
So there can be vibrant, energised desiring machines on an individual level, but scleroticised, exhausted, cultures on the collective level? Isn't this why desire is irrelevant? This sounds like a one-line summary of everything that's wrong with Deleuzianism. :)
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For a brief moment there, around page 8 of this thread, it looked like it was about to become really interesting with the only two (small exaggeration) on this thread who know a rats butt about Deleuze or Baudrillard about to get down to squaring/making a few distinctions.

Instead we got the science schtick. Again. Damn.
 
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J

John Doe

Well-known member
Thanks for that link - very informative and entertaining:

"But the conference unexpectedly escalated into the last-gasp "countercultural event" of the '70s. Two thousand people attended what quickly devolved into a conflagration between Old and New Left: Activists, academics, feminists, and reconstructed Marxists argued for three days, sometimes violently. While Kovel was speaking, half the audience departed to listen to Foucault and Guattari; Atkinson chased Guattari from the podium. As for Deleuze, he managed to present an outline of his concept of the "rhizome," which had not yet been discussed in print--but in French, very slowly, while drawing diagrams of root systems and crabgrass on a blackboard. Foucault, who was already known in America, looked on while his paper on infantile sexuality, an attack on radical academics who mistook their verbal pronouncements against repression for political action, was read aloud by a friend in English. When the lecture was over, members of Lyndon LaRouche's Labor Committee instantly created havoc by denouncing Foucault (and Laing) as undercover CIA agents. In this climate, Semiotext(e) came into being as a cultural venture, and not just a semiotic outfit.

Them were the days, eh?
 
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mister matthew

Active member
sorry for the off-topic, but it didnt seem worth starting a new thread for:

could anyone recommend where best to start with Irigaray?

cheers :)
 
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version

Well-known member
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version

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"He had an incredible mastery of himself ... except, ah, except in the car ... he loved to drive, he was handsome, full of women, even when I met him he loved cars, he loved speed. So when there was an imbecile [slowing him down] I saw a being next to me, like a demon, coming out of Jean's head. You cannot imagine, it was something incredible, scary. It was a total change of personality. Apart from that, when there was an imbecile who asked him a totally stupid question, at a conference, at dinner ... otherwise never."

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