Post-conference trauma (again)

Have just returned from a conference. One of those conferences where my humble and harmless ideas are greeted with baffled silence, theatrical eyerolling and straight-out spite. It is astounding how reliably the mere suggestion that some (a few) human attitudes and behaviours might be universal leads to the spontaneous collective performance of shaming rituals like avoiding eye-contact or denying verbal communication. An evolutionary psychologist would interpret all this as evidence of the old cheater-detection mechanism. Stupid, just-so story-telling evolutionary psychologist!


That is not so good. But on the positive side: I'm far less palpitatious in these situations than I used to be. What is more, these days I even manage to come up with halfway sensible ripostes (even when feeling under the weather!). In fact, I think that this time I managed to make points that are not dissimilar to those made by Terry Eagleton in a recent review of an academic study of John Cleland (of Fanny Hill fame) - only maybe not quite so eloquently.

So this is what I kind of said today:

In postmodern eyes, sexuality is at its best when deviant, since the normal and conventional are thought to be on the side of power. This is the reason words like 'normal' and 'natural' are nowadays swathed in scare quotes, as they are in this study. Yet crooked bankers and serial killers are deviant, while sunlight, death, panic and arthritis are natural. Whatever else they may be, human beings are natural material objects. Normality and convention can be on the side of enlightenment; if being allowed to go on strike isn't normal, it ought to be; convention dictates that you shouldn't kick vagrants who ask you for money. Postmodernists celebrate the marginal, while failing to note that neo-Nazis fall into that category. They also take the side of minorities, a group which includes tax evaders. In any case, those who prize the deviant should also cherish the normative, since there would be no deviancy without it.

Thank you Terry. I only wish I'd read your review before the conference.

Quote for the day

At a conference I attended earlier this year, a Lacanian from Norway told me with a dismissive little smirk (quote): "I don't buy the whole evolutionary psychology thing."

Of course she "bought" the whole mirror stage thing - just like I had done (silly me!) when I was younger (though said Lacanian was much more mature than I was then and the mother of several children - who apparently had all successfully mastered their mirror stage and the accompanying trauma).

I don't get it - what in the following quotes makes it so preposterous and provocative that it would deserve the scorn of the ignorant (for surely the Scandinavian Lacanian had never read any of the evolutionary psychology that she discounted so flippantly)?

… all normal human minds reliably develop a standard collection of reasoning and regulatory circuits that are functionally specialized and, frequently, domain-specific. These circuits organise the way we interpret our experiences, inject certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental life, and provide universal frames of meaning that allow us to understand the actions and intentions of others. Beneath the level of surface variability, all humans share certain views and assumptions about the nature of the world and human action by virtue of these human universal reasoning circuits.

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer

Sounds perfectly sane to me.

Maybe they don't have evolved rational capacities in Norway (or sanity, for that matter). That's what a national diet of liquorice and akvavit does to your brain. Which is why that woman and I would never be able to understand each other, but can only serve as one another's objects of desire/knowledge, caught in the self-constituting gaze of the distant/masterful anthropologist.

Why.Do.People.Think.That.Way?

And another really meaningful Machtwort

Interesting. The British government has finally gotten around to stripping President Mugabe of Zimbabwe of his honorary knighthood.

First of all, I didn't know that Mugabe was an honorary knight. Did you? But then I also didn't know that Nicolae Ceausescu belonged to this illustrious circle of worthies before the knighthood was taken away from him in 1989.

What is the mysterious link between receiving a knighthood and being a dictator (or ageing pop star, for that matter)? Is it causal or merely coincidental?

And second: That's of course one hell of an effective political measure to take. I'm sure Mr Mugabe will be impressed.

[UPDATE: Nice touch in the Mail, where the front page screams: "Queen strips dictator Mugabe of his knighthood". You can just imagine the scene, can't you .... Oddly enough, the relevant article puts things in perspective. Oh, words, words, words.]

Of love and excrement

Francis Sedgemore points us to a classic set of propositions by Slavoj Žižek on the cultural significance of toilet facilities and pubic hair:



Our own contribution focuses on the topic of love. Not as comforting as you might think...



'Something went terribly wrong."

Yep.

Realsatire?

I need to share my bewilderment at the odd cover that Penguin chose for Jim Crace's novel Being Dead.


It's not so much the cover itself that bothers me (which is quite apt, though I hate the silly Blair Witch font), as the quote from the Guardian review they have chosen to add as a little marketing gimmick. These days, if a book is not encrusted with smartarse statements by Oxbridge-educated pen pushers it's apparently deemed worthless (which is why those random snippets from the Sunday supplements now make up a sizeable part of any serious publication. It's worse in the States, of course, what with The-Woman-Who-Doesn't-Have-A-Clue-About -Literature Winfrey).

I secretly hope that, like me, others don't bother to read them either.

In case you can't read this one:

Being Dead
Jim Crace
"A Joy to Read" Guardian

Don't get me wrong: it's quite an astute evaluation of this book, which, by the way, I can wholeheartedly recommend. It's a must for any committed materialist and contains beautiful passages like this one:

Judging by the modest blood-flow of her far from modest wounds, Celice’s heart had ceased pumping almost as soon as she was hit. Her skull was not as thick as Joseph’s. (That was something that she’d always known about the man. Her husband was curmudgeonly, distracted, timid and thick-skulled.) Her skull was weaker than the granite too, of course. The bone caved in like shell. Her brain, once breached and ripped, was as pale and mushy as a honeycomb, a kilogram of dripping honeycomb …. The blows across her face and throat cut off the blood supply and, though her brain did what it could to make amends, to compensate for the sudden loss of oxygen and glucose, its corridors of life were pinched and crushed. The signals of distress it sent were stars. The myths were true; thanks to the ruptured chemistry of her cortex, she hurtled to the stars (6-7).

But taken out of its context and placed next to the title in this blunt manner, the word "joy" in the Guardian quote seems a trifle ... flippant ... to me. Or is that just my sense of humour?