It must have been on Question Time, and I can't remember the precise context now, although it was probably something to do with ASBOs. One of the panel that week was Benjamin Zephaniah, and, with reference to bad behaviour amongst young people, he said something like the following (I'm afraid this is from memory, so I'm bound to be paraphrasing): "What can you do when young people resort to violence? You cannot tell them to look up to their elders and betters for examples. If they look to politicians for their examples all they see is that every time politicians have a dispute, they go to war." I thought this was possibly one of the best things I've ever heard said on Question Time.
It doesn't really matter if I write this blog or not, in the sense that nothing really matters, but today I have been given cause to think about my approach to writing here. I happened to look up the statistics for my blog, how many visitors I get, where from, how regularly and so on, and I was quite surprised. I am curious about this sort of thing, but I'm not obsessed. Honest! This is the first time I've actually looked this stuff up (hence the surprise). I'd always assumed, despite my relatively high ranking in the My Opera blog tables, that I have about a dozen readers and get maybe half a dozen hits a day or less. Not that I'd even thought about it that concretely, but my general sense was something along those lines. I won't give figures here. Or shall I? Would that be vulgar? I can't remember the exact figures, anyway. They're not that high, but they are much higher than I imagined. It's funny, writing a blog like this is a bit like giving a speech from behind a one-way mirror to an audience you can't see. Occasionally there comes a voice over the PA from someone in the invisible auditorium. It's quite eerie in a way.
Anyway, I just mention this because now that I know there are actually people out there who are kind of listening (and I assume that's what repeat visits indicate) I feel a little bit shaken up and that maybe I should be slightly more responsible, and less of an arsehole. I don't know, maybe that's a bit of a tall order. In any case, I do feel inclined now to make the most of this blog and the free publishing opportunity it provides me. So far – you've probably noticed – I've treated this as a place to toss off – in a slapdash way – whatever I happen to be thinking at a certain moment. I'm not even sure I can promise an improvement in quality, since I certainly am inclined to privilege my pen-and-paper fiction. We'll see. Anyway, I still have some more of that pen-and-paper writing to do this evening, so I'll try to keep this short.
Before I go, here are a few more things I happened to be thinking about. First of all, despite not being particularly able to respond with alacrity to the request made by Ashley Tisdale here, I have to say that, more often than not I do consider myself to be materially wealthy. To put that in perspective without being vulgar and mentioning figures, I don't own a car, or a house, or have a mortgage, I hardly ever buy new clothes (they're usually donated to me by well-wishers) or new CDs or go to the cinema, and I don't have annual holidays abroad etcetera, etcetera. But I do find that, as I said, most of the time, I basically feel materially wealthy. I don't know why that should be when plenty of people with more money than myself don't feel wealthy, but it does interest me. There are some ways in which I feel a lack of money, largely to do with issues of travel and time, but I have to adapt to those limitations. However, I have an inkling that the way I feel on this score is really pretty natural. I drink green tea in very attractive Japanese ceramic tea bowls. I sit in front of the fire and read Bruno Schulz or Graham Greene. I occasionally watch a DVD, such as I Walked With a Zombie, and I can post my thoughts to an audience of literally quite a lot of people, whenever I want (depending only on those time issues, really) here. Oh yes, and I can go for walks and take pictures of trees. Sometimes I even buy sun-dried tomatoes. So, what is this if not a life of luxury? I'm sure it sounds funny, because I'm sure I always do sound funny, but I mean it.
I mentioned a while back that I'm reading The Great Turning by David C. Korten. There are some interesting figures within:
More than 1.2 billion people now struggle to survive on less than $1 a day. Some 2.8 billion, nearly half the world's population, survive on less than $2 per day.
I'd like here to contrast some of this writing with what I consider to be academically influenced bad writing. In the comments section of a previous post I accused Albert Camus of this affliction, but having had a quick look at some of his essays online, I find them disappointingly well-written, and must go elsewhere to find my specimen of useless wank… No, I've just seen the time. I still have miles to go before I sleep, so must bring this post to a conclusion, I'm afraid. Please find below the sample of David Korten's text that I was going to compare favourably with with some piece of obfuscatory nonsense (maybe later):
Had the benefits of the sixfold increase in global economic output acheived since 1950 been equitably shared among the world's people, poverty would now be history, democracy would be secure, and war would be but a distant memory. Driven by the imperatives of dominator power, however, the institutions of Empire allocated more than 80 per-cent of the benefit of this extraordinary growth to the most fortunate 20 percent of the world's people.
Robin Davies writes:
If you want some classic “obfuscatory nonsense” you should read Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont.It’s a hilarious and devastating expose of the worst excesses of postmodernists’ misuse of scientific terminology. Sokal got a spoof article published in an American cultural studies journal Social Text which can be read here:http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
Hmmm. So far it reads like one of my blog posts.
I think I’ve heard about this. I shall take a look.
One pretty interesting point for me, in what I’ve read so far of Reading Popular Physics, is the idea that a lot of writers these days feel like they have to really bone up on science in order to, I don’t know, be relevant or something, but that they’re not boning up on ‘real science’ as such, anyway, but on ‘popularised science’ – that science in the public arena with which they expect their readership to have at least a passing familiarity. This is interesting to me because, I certainly feel that pressure, but I’m also aware of the old addage, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and I’m afraid that it might tend to limit rather than stimulate my imagination, that, perhaps with no scientific knowledge at all, I could ‘accidentally’ make an imaginative/intuitive leap that has more scientific or other relevance in the long run than if I try really hard to incorporate and take into account the little scientific knowledge I do have. It’s a difficult one. Having, as I do ‘a little knowledge’, I suppose I can’t reverse the process, and I’m interested in having more. But I feel more and more inclined – as it perhaps becomes more and more difficult to do so – to throw caution and scientific ‘knowledge’ entirely to the wind when it comes to my writing. Otherwise the results might be, well, that I fall between two stools or something, or write something like that essay, which I probably already have done.As the book, Reading Popular Physics suggests, negotiating the differences between disciplines or fields of study or whatever you want to call them, is actually quite tricky. Should we try to bridge those gaps, or should we remain in our cliques? In the words of Mr Bowie… Well, the title of this blog post.
Reminds me that I’ve dipped into this recently and hope to read the whole thing if I have time:http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&id=uvnYaN8VnesC&dq=reading+popular+physics&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=AvwIL0y4AL&sig=qdx6inhevrMCBj1EjBrJ7GeJBJQ#PPP1,M1
I feel like I’m beginning to hit paydirt (is that really the expression? It sounds odd) here:”As Althusser rightly commented, “Lacan finally gives Freud’s thinking the scientific concepts that it requires”.59 More recently, Lacan’s topologie du sujet has been applied fruitfully to cinema criticism60 and to the psychoanalysis of AIDS.61 In mathematical terms, Lacan is here pointing out that the first homology group62 of the sphere is trivial, while those of the other surfaces are profound; and this homology is linked with the connectedness or disconnectedness of the surface after one or more cuts.63 Furthermore, as Lacan suspected, there is an intimate connection between the external structure of the physical world and its inner psychological representation qua knot theory: this hypothesis has recently been confirmed by Witten’s derivation of knot invariants (in particular the Jones polynomial64) from three-dimensional Chern-Simons quantum field theory.65″I think one problem with the scientific context, for me at least, is that science seems to require jargon to describe fairly specialised areas of investigation, so it’s perfect for slipping in nonsense unnoticed. I feel like, in humanities subjects, there’s far less need for jargon in the first place, so it’s much easier (for someone like me) to sort the wheat from the bullshit, so to speak.
Robin Davies writes:Sokal’s point was that these postmodernists were dragging scientific terminology into the fields of cultural studies and philosophy where they were inappropriate. It’s clear from the truly mind-boggling examples in the book that these postmodernists were using scientific jargon to impress and/or bamboozle people. Their use of the jargon was at best wrong and at worst utterly nonsensical. I think my favourite example is the feminist who suggested that E=mc2 was a sexist equation because it “privileges what goes the fastest”.
Yeah, I have to examine that essay a bit more. I was a bit tired last night and didn’t read the whole thing.But it does possibly coincide with some of the points made in Reading Popular Physics.I think I read a Bad Science column on this whole postmodernist thing once. I broadly agree, as I’m sure that what I’ve written recently on the subject suggests, that there is a lot of misuse of jargon around, particularly in modern intellectual circles, when people want to, well, as you said, to bamboozle and impress, and thereby to retain some kind of cultural power. I do associate this strategy with academia, though there are also things I like about academia.
Robin Davies writes:
Should anyone so desire they can produce their own meaningless jargon-ridden thesis using the postmodernism generator:http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Excellent!!!! I might want to get back into education some day.
I see, just press the refresh button. A new essay each time. Damn. I feel so redundant. From now on, all my blog entries are going to be written with this.