No...

... and no...

... and absolutely not:

Please thank you.

References:
* Spooky robot cat from Japan won't scratch your eyes out [SciFi Tech]
* Roller-Walker robot changes modes on the go [SciFi Tech]
* Child robot is much more unsettling than a real child [SciFi Tech]

Previously:
* Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents - Red Bull And... Wait, What?
* Mickey Avalon Embraces Rock And Roll Lifestyle With Something Less Than Ironic Distance [Video]
* Desperate Attempt to Make Michael Jackson Cool Again... Succeeds? [Video]

Cross-posted to:
* Mere Rhetoric

We were going to wrap this link into a longer post about online research and organization in the 21st century: the growth of specialized online communities (listservs, blogs etc), the merging of communication artifacts with sites of knowledge production (a science blog is both a place where science happens and an artifact for rhetoric of science scholars), etc. But we're afraid that any pretext of larger relevance might distract people from the sheer awesomeness that is this.

References:
* NO SUBJECT

Previously:
* Psychoanalytic Theory - Come For The Answers, But Stay For The Questions
* Quantitative Hints Of The Big Other
* The Psychoanalytic Pushback Against Philosophy Of Consciousness

Lacanian theory can be justified simply as an approach that reveals interesting problematics and generates tensions with conventional wisdom. But that's almost certainly unnecessarily modest. Lacan's ontological assumptions are philosophically rigorous, especially when refracted through Zizek's Hegelian rereading of the real as the Night of the World, etc. Far downstream, Lacanian social theory converges with the contemporary canon of rhetorical theory - and especially with the Burkean architectonic - at multiple theoretical points. So there are multiple places where a theorist can post up and point to intuitive structures or conclusions in Lacan.

Critics and particularly orthodox Lacanians sometimes argue, however, that a lot of that work is being done by contemporary Lacanian theorists who take Lacan away from clinical psychoanalysis and bring him into contemporary critical theory. The implied problem is that these gestures go not only beyond Lacan but make moves that are in contradiction with Lacan. One way of articulating this question is as: "how rigorous are people's use of Lacanian architectonic?"

To the extent that these charges are tenable they should be taken seriously. It should never be forgotten that Lacan was first and foremost a clinician - he had patients. Less than rigorous theorists often use of Lacan's mere name as a shiny amulet for whatever theoretically and politically palatable conclusions they're in the mood to assert. Zizek often complains that it's amazing how people find whatever they want in Lacan, no matter how fundamentally their conclusions are in tension with Lacan's basic premises or statements.

But there are other places where Lacan's psychoanalytic work can demonstrably be linked to contemporary Lacanian social theory. The theory of the Big Other, for instance, is a fundamentally a psychoanalytic concept. The Oedipal Complex is resolved non-pathologically to the extent that the toddler gives up trying to be the perfect object of the mother's desire and seeks instead to be the object of the generalized Other's desire.

Starting from the top of social theory and working downwards, the Frankfurt discussions of the Law also map on to the Lacanian Big Other. These are socio-linguistic structures that subjects identify with, that are interpolated, and that are transmitted and reproduced. The similarities are so striking that it's difficult not to treat them as homologies. But the question then becomes: why bother with the theory of the Big Other? Is there any reason to believe it independent of this potential convergence between Lacanian theory and neo-Marxist theory.

After the jump, an explanation of the Big Other in psychoanalytic terms and then the clinical evidence for why Lacan's theory of the drives must be part of any account of interpolation.

Our interest in psychoanalysis is strictly theoretical, which is to say that we have no background or training in anything clinical or diagnostic. But even we can see that Mickey Avalon's lifestyle is (a) unhealthy and (b) totally awesome.. Content warning for language and images: video is probably NSFW and definitely NSF2WF (second wave feminists):

"She was a manic depressive. Which was impressive. Very impressive." The man is a veritable poet. Naturally the video is exactly 4 minutes and 20 seconds long (indulgent eyeroll).

References:
* Mickey Avalon "Jane Fonda" (Music Video) live version [Mickeyavalonchannel / YouTube]

Previously:
* Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents - Red Bull And... Wait, What?
* Oh Hell No
* What If The Lacanian Gaze Wasn't Totally Stupid?

The song is "Michael Jackson" by The Mitchell Brothers. Inexplicably listenable and entertaining:

We, on the other hand, are unable to move like Michael Jackson. FYI for the curious.

References:
* The Mitchell Brothers - Michael Jackson prod. Calvin Harris [thebeats / YouTube]

Previously:
* The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars
* Arnold Pouteau's View Of NYC Is Much Better Than Yours
* Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents - New Books We Can't Afford

The only thing that annoys us more than non-rhetoricians rampaging through the rhetorical china shop is when they're obviously right. Language Hat recently tried to hunt down the etymology of anthimeria, which seems malformed. Silva Rhetoricae defines the figure as "substitution of one part of speech for another (such as a noun used as a verb)". The intuitive etymology - Greek anti- "instead of" + mereia "a part" - doesn't account for the h. An alternative etymology - anthos "flower" + meros "part" - is obviously no better because the i suddenly has no place.

Turns out, based on work in the comments by this graduate student blogger, that rhetoricians kind of blew this call:

This is a misspelling of antimeria, I would guess popularized by Cuddon's ubiquitous book. Antimeria was considered synonymous with enallage. I've picked out a couple of definitions in Latin (that predate Cuddon) that I was able to find on Google Books. John Holmes Art of Rhetoric Made Easy (1755) defined the word in this way: 'Antimeria solet pro parte ponere partem.'

Very concise, and it indicates the etymology (anti + mer-; the -ia suffix is obviously used to mark the word as abstract)... Cuddon's 'flowerizing' definition is a good example both of enallage and of folk etymology, albeit of a mistaken form... I just pulled this up on JSTOR. K.R. Brooks, reviewing The Gothic Commentary on the Gospel of John by William Holmes Bennett (Modern Language Review 58.1, 1963, 87-88), noted this about typographical errors:

"It is a small fault, but a pity, that two grammatical terms of Greek origin, descriptive of figures of speech, should be consistently misspelt : for scesis (onomaton), which occurs on p. 36 and elsewhere, read schesis; for anthimeria (p. 39), read antimeria ..."

Language Hat ends up declaring "Now listen up, everyone, the word is antimeria; the -h- is just a garden-variety typo." Who wants to tell Silva Rhetoricae?

References:
* ANTHIMERIA [Language Hat]
* anthimeria [Silva Rhetoricae]
* Cuddon, J. A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. 4, Penguin (Non-Classics), 2000. [Amazon]

Previously:
* Rhetoric Not So Much With the Revolution Thing
* Pentadic Ratios In The Rhetoric Of Addiction
* Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents - New Books We Can't Afford

Now they're just being cruel:

You'd think their marketing algorithms would also cross-check for "likelihood of max'd credit cards given previous shopping patterns". Or do you think that doesn't really matter to them? If you've got a job though, you really ought hook yourself up because this sounds awesome.

References:
* Missiou, Anna. The Subversive Oratory of Andokides: Politics, Ideology and Decision-Making in Democratic Athens. Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Previously:
* The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars
* USC's Student Portal Just Plain Mean
* Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents - Collected Works Of Freud Published

Fetishized social scientific methodologies from dissimilar fields are adapted by grant-hungry researchers and applied to unrepresentative samples of 18-21 year olds in large Midwestern universities before being coded by untrained and apathetic work studies - and you're saying this doesn't produce robust results?

We all make mistakes and, if you believe medical scholar John Ioannidis, scientists make more than their fair share. By his calculations, most published research findings are wrong. Dr. Ioannidis is an epidemiologist who studies research methods at the University of Ioannina School of Medicine in Greece and Tufts University in Medford, Mass. In a series of influential analytical reports, he has documented how, in thousands of peer-reviewed research papers published every year, there may be so much less than meets the eye. These flawed findings, for the most part, stem not from fraud or formal misconduct, but from more mundane misbehavior: miscalculation, poor study design or self-serving data analysis. "There is an increasing concern that in modern research, false findings may be the majority or even the vast majority of published research claims," Dr. Ioannidis said. "A new claim about a research finding is more likely to be false than true."

Though, in fairness to them, they do have significance tests. Oh well. At least medicine isn't a life or death issue.

References:
* Most Science Studies Appear to Be Tainted By Sloppy Analysis [WSJ]

Previously:
* Cog Sci Blog Roundup
* Psychoanalytic Theory - Come For The Answers, But Stay For The Questions
* Disturbingly, Quantitative Analysis May Have Methodological Shortcomings - Blogosphere Edition

We understand that there are disputes about the degree to which Lacanian theory provides the right answers to basic ontological, epistemological, and psychological questions. We happen to think that there's something quite suggestive about a robust Continental theory that converges with so much of the American rhetorical and pragmatic tradition (Burke and Lacan's emphasis on the constitutive but disruptive role of the negative; Peirce and Zizek's insistence that belief is precisely that which affects behavior; the psychoanalytic foregrounding of intersubjectivity; etc). But on an issue like "what does it mean to be human," we suppose that reasonable people of good intentions can sincerely disagree.

Still, it seems churlish to insist that psychoanalytic theory has no value, even as a sensibility or heuristic for uncovering interesting problems. The fundamental psychoanalytic gamble - that the split subject's knowledge has little to do with the operation of her desire - reframes old questions in ways that are genuinely exciting. That it also suggests some alternative approaches and answers is true, but it would be valuable even if it the substance of the theory itself turned out to rank obfuscatory mysticism.

The introduction of the split subject hammers a wedge between cognitive processes and jouissance. The fundamental Stoic ethical problem of the "weakness of the will" is reinterpreted as a post-Frankfurt idea that "you can know how ideology manipulates your desires, and yet enjoy it anyway" - that's already not nothing. But it also insists on fixation and sublimation, and so suggests things like "ethicists who fixate on unethical transgressions and perversions are more likely to be unethical". That of course, turns to be true. And while that suggestion isn't unique to psychoanalytic theory, it's hard to get it rigorously out of most nontrivial psychological theories.

After the jump, what Zizek's "what if you hooked a rat up to electrodes and made it run around" thought experiment has to do with criminal psychopathology:

The Burkean pentad has a bad reputation for lending itself to cookie-cutter "this is the agent, this is the scene, etc" pseudo-book reports. But there are at least a couple of interesting ways to do pentadic analysis, one which is to try to emulate Burke by analyzing rhetorical moves from within pentadic ratios. The manipulation of the agent-scene ratio can paint differing pictures of individual agency and fault. Emphasizing the agent side of the ratio puts whatever happens within the horizon of "personal responsibility". Emphasize the scene side replaces "personal responsibility" with an "it's society's fault" frame. A couple of month ago a post appeared on Mind Hacks about how the rhetoric of addiction - "brain disease" vs. "psychological problem" - is deeply bound up in the politics of blame:

If you believe in the primacy of personal responsibility, push the psychological model, because this emphasises the affected person's actions in staying well. At one extreme, it allows us to blame people who get sick through PKU for not being vigilant enough, or wanting other people to pick up the pieces when they fail to control their diets. If you believe in the primacy of social responsibility, push the disease model, because this emphasises the effects of factors outside an individual's control. At the other extreme, it allows us to absolve the person of individual responsibility for the effects of their illness.

This also lines up with work in political communication and framing. On the qualitative side of the field, there's stuff like "to evoke a problem's origin is to assign blame and praise... Blame for recurring wars and militarism depends upon whether they are seen as originating in the plans of aggressors, the authoritarian character structure of some cultures, [etc]" (Edelman). Quantitative political communication is even more on point here, with stuff like "when poverty is framed as a societal outcome, people point to societal or governmental explanations; when poverty is framed in terms of particular victims of poverty, particularly the homeless, people point instead to dispositional explanations" (Iyengar). Of course these social scientific approaches lack the theoretical depth of the Burkean architectonic, but they're up to different things and the pentad is not something that can be definitively falsified (although why that should count against the pentad is a more... nuanced... theoretical debate).

References:
* Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1969.
* Addicted to neurobiology and politics: [Mind Hacks]
* Edelman, Murray. "Excluded Voices: Realities in Law and Law Reform: The Construction of Social Problems as Buttresses of Inequalities." Miami Law Review 42.7 (1987): 7-28.
* Iyengar, Shanto. "Television News and Citizens' Explanations of National Affairs." The American Political Science Review 81.3 (1987): 815-32.

Previously:
* What Isn't Argument?
* Prof. Nietzsche Frowns Upon Your Glib Globalized Paradigms
* The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars

Anti-cognitivst curmudgeon David Gelernter has a sustained critique of digital AI in Technology Review:

I believe it is hugely unlikely, though not impossible, that a conscious mind will ever be built out of software. Even if it could be, the result (I will argue) would be fairly useless in itself. But an unconscious simulated intelligence certainly could be built out of software--and might be useful. Unfortunately, AI, cognitive science, and philosophy of mind are nowhere near knowing how to build one. They are missing the most important fact about thought: the "cognitive continuum" that connects the seemingly unconnected puzzle pieces of thinking (for example analytical thought, common sense, analogical thought, free association, creativity, hallucination). The cognitive continuum explains how all these reflect different values of one quantity or parameter that I will call "mental focus" or "concentration"--which changes over the course of a day and a lifetime. Without this cognitive continuum, AI has no comprehensive view of thought: it tends to ignore some thought modes (such as free association and dreaming), is uncertain how to integrate emotion and thought, and has made strikingly little progress in understanding analogies--which seem to underlie creativity.

As a matter of sensibility and of theory, this strongly echoes Peirce's insistence on metaphysical continuity. As a matter of sensibility, because it seems very hard to get a coherent theory of experience and learning if one emphasizes discontinuity. As a matter of theory, Peirce emphasizes at least two kinds of continuity. The first is the continuity between subject and object, or rather the incoherence of those categories because they are continuous with each other. The second one - and the more relevant for this discussion - is Peirce's emphasis on the continuity of semiosis - thought emerges as (is?) the qualia of firstness and the recalcitrance of secondness mediated by the interpretative role of thirdness. Inversely, the problems that AI is having - if they genuinely turn out to be a result of discontinuity - would seem to bear powerful testament to the entirety of the tightly-knit Peircean architectonic.

In Peircean terms, Gelernter's argument is that AI can't seem to link thirdness - consciousness - to firstness - immediate sensations of properties. This is why AIs fail with analogies. When humans encounter an analogy, we are "struck" by the similarity between the two things being compared. It hits us in firstness as well as thirdness. But when an AI encounters an analogy, it tries to work on the whole thing cognitively in the register of thirdness. This strategy has been failing for decades - so much so that it's tempting to take it as a rebuke of Searle's "metaphoricity is determinative" approach. After the jump, the limits - or, more properly, requirements - that a Peircean approach suggests for any project that seeks to build a conscious AI..

We've got a couple posts in the hopper - a Peirce vs. Deleuze post (of all things) and a post about how scientific triumphalism empowering anti-science right and the left - but little time to clean them up right now. Plus we're still working our way through posts going back to May - quals was not kind to our blogging - so there's no way we can do a separate post on everything that's mildly interesting. Ergo, link dump:

* We love it when social scientists take pop psychology for rigorous psychoanalytic theory, debunk it, and then declare that psychoanalytic theory has been definitively disproven - even when other scientific studies go the other way. The only thing we like better is when cultural studies people do the same thing ("... but Lacan says women don't exist!"). Naturally, psychoanalytic theory gets no credit for insisting that the infant is fundamentally narcissistic - something psychology is only now beginning to appreciate.

* This will make you feel happy and smug. Promise.

Much more after the jump.

Sometimes Amazon's algorithms do a really good job. Sometimes they suggest things about American shopping patterns that might have been better left unknown:

There are millions and millions of data points that gave rise to this suggestion. Awesome.

References:
* Amazon Marketing And Its Discontents - Collected Works Of Freud Published [IIS]

Previously:
* The Cute Yellow Thin Wedge Of The Coming Robot Wars
* Arnold Pouteau's View Of NYC Is Much Better Than Yours
* USC's Student Portal Just Plain Mean

Sigh. About a minute and a half elapsed between Amazon's server firing this email off and us purchasing the book. This - despite already having most of it in various pieces from various classes. We apparently have what marketers refer to as "low self-control". And what creditors refer to as "debt". So it goes:

Get yours. Why should we be the only people with a US-vs-China credit imbalance to Amazon?

References:
* Collected Works of Sigmund Freud [Amazon]

Previously:
* What If The Lacanian Gaze Wasn't Totally Stupid?
* Oh Hell No
* The Psychoanalytic Pushback Against Philosophy Of Consciousness

Studies like that consciousness of bacteria one from a couple of days ago sometimes get appropriated for "see, humans aren't all that special" kinds of moves. But everything rhetorical - everything that reserves a special place for the intersubjective relationship mediated by discourse - militates against that kind of leveling. Now the trivial answer to that is to embrace some kind of vulgar self-help mysticism about the "special place" that humans have in the world - but that precisely begs all of the questions that the study purports to answer. That's the tactic of an overly impertinent undergrad - someone who claims to sweep away really nuanced distinctions with some pretentious statement (the really rigorous way to make the same move is to do it through Heidegger - this is how John Haugland differentiates AI from humans).

But it's probably impossible to 'just crack' this study's implications. It has the feel of something that's incredibly careful - which means that, without knowing anything about the terrain of the argument, it probably backstops against a lot of easy distinctions. At any rate, it would take some pretty rigorous lessons in the philosophy of consciousness debate to anticipate what's going on downstream. You'd also have to gamble on the chance of finding a distinction that previous brilliant scholars have missed - which isn't a good bet, since many of them undoubtedly had an aptitude for this kind of philosophy in the first place.

But the emphasis on "consciousness" has the feel of being a pretty narrow disciplinary debate, on disciplinary terms that ought not be extrapolated. Which is not to take anything away from the idea that debate should occur within circumscribed disciplinary bounds - but it does cut off the move to smuggle the conclusions of the study ("consciousness is a continuum") into domains in which consciousness has a looser definition.

After the jump: why conclusions in the philosophy of consciousness tell us very, very little about anything but what's going on in the field of philosophy of consciousness.

USC's IT infrastructure often seems like it's run by a bunch of meth-addicted hamsters. True conversation from last week:

Us: The wireless network is crashing every few minutes
Them: Yeah, that always happens during the first week of school
Us: ::blink::

Nonetheless, they've managed to set up an electronic portal to various campus resources that's actually pretty good. We logged in this evening, only to be confronted by this general bulletin from the Comm school:

Hmmm.

Previously:
* Welcome to IIS
* Open Knowledge Roundup - Gearing Up For Fall
* Job Call Roundup - Who Got Their Calls Into Spectra On Time? Edition

We were going to separate these calls into really obnoxious categories - "best line that no one will share any rumors about", "best call that makes absolutely no sense", "best offer with prospects for free catered lunches". Then we remembered that this is not an anonymous blog and that we don't have a job. So after the jump, the roundup of interesting or unusual listings with as little commentary as we could manage. Except to say: who actually uses the word "subserve" in a job call?