The original hour long podcast from that morning is on KROQ's Kevin and Bean podcast site, and we've clipped out everything but the interview and put it up on our own server. The time-stamps we're using for this post are from the clipped version. But do click over to their site and at least go through the motions of downloading that whole morning's show. That way (a) they get the few meager pageviews we can send them and (b) we feel slightly less guilty about (legitimately) slipping this in under academic fair use. Feel free to download other mornings' podcasts too - those boys have been hysterical since we were in high school, and they've only gotten better. The female voice is Lisa May.

The Semiotic Tenacity Of Visceral Judgment

The indict of Kevin's opposition to the project is that his repeated emphasis on the bodily is cheap anti-science being insulated rhetorically by vulgar anti-intellectualism. This critique proceeds by noting that he admits that he doesn't "have any information" to defend his opposition to the program and by observing that the rhetorical move he repeatedly makes creates a binary between scientists and "normal people" (also between experts and "people like us", etc).

The first thing to note about this critique is that from a rhetorical perspective it's totally beside the point. There is a manifest failure of persuasion to be accounted for. Deshmukh on one hand acknowledges that "for [the OC program] public education is real important" because similar programs have been shot down elsewhere. But the multiple scientific arguments being mobilized - beginning around 1:35 with "this is the highest quality water we have in the area" - end up inducing chuckles and eye rolls by the middle of the interview. Deshmukh's science - despite being insulated by somewhat condescending scientific ethos built on awkwardly delivered phrases like "advanced treatment facility" - can't overcome Kevin's "body" which "wants to run [away] as fast as possible." It's downhill almost from the first seconds of the interview where Kevin talks about "water go[ing] directly from your toilet right into a drinking glass."

Rhetoricians of science on the practical side of the discipline - and scholars of public argumentation who seek to probe and enhance public deliberation about technical matters - have before them a problem of persuasion grounded in an inability to account judgment. The dynamic is breathtakingly clear, starting at 2:30:

Deshmukh: People are very supportive. When you hear that you're going to be drinking treated waste water of course it's a shock. But if you hear about where our water supply comes from, the natural water cycle, and then you see the actual treatment, and how we're making this near distilled quality, we actually have a lot of support of the community. We have environmental, medical, scientific support. We have community groups throughout Orange County who are very excited about this project and looking forward to it...
Kevin: [openly laughing out loud] Come on.
...
Bean: So when you talk about all the steps that it goes through... It sounds to me Shivaji that if you had a choice, you would rather drink this water than drink the standard water that comes out of a tap...
Deshmukh: Yeah. This quality that comes out of here is actually better than what you can get anywhere else.
Kevin: I... doubt... that. [laughter]
Bean: But he's got the science though.
Kevin: I know, I don't have any information on my side. I just know for me, personally, my rule is if something escapes you know the sphincter it's out of bounds forever [laugher] That's off, ahh, I'm not touching that ever again

From a rhetorical perspective, Deshmukh's response here is staggeringly tin-eared. People are laughing to help them cope with their revulsion shit, and he slips into a dry, droning, scientistic quibble about definition - "'Toilet To Tap' is actually a misnomer" (oh really?). But then there's the dissertation-level highlight of the interview:

Bean: I guess what we're running into... is your mind tells you it's fine, but your - the rest of your body just wants to run as fast as possible away from it I guess.
Deshmukh: That's why seeing is believing. You know, we invite you guys to come down, take look at the treatment and we can make believers out of you
[lots of laughter and dissembling]
Kevin: What my body tells me is bad for me, you're telling me is OK again.
Deshmukh: Yes, definitely.
Kevin: Wow. You've got a tough job my friend... You should get on the President Bush reelection campaign... that'd be easier I think... a little easier of a battle"

One quick social epistemology gesture before we get to the judgment part. This vulgar "seeing is believing" nonsense drives us insane. At the very end of this post we'll get to a psychoanalytic suggestion for why it's persuasively disastrous to offer to have people personally witness the technological machinations of waste reclamation. But while we're discussing the epistemic undertones of the argument: it's aggressively asinine. The glib statement that "seeing is believing" implies either that mere testimony has inadequate force to generate genuine belief or that personal witnessing trumps social convention in the generation of belief. The former is demonstrably untenable. And if we follow either a pragmatist or a materialist notion of belief - that how you act reflects your genuine belief - then the East German bureaucrat who wrote down what he was told rather than what he saw problematizes the latter assumption. We're not talking about 1984-level doublethink, although the nudge-wink conditions of international diplomacy suggest that we might actually be able to go that far. It's just that belief doesn't work that way at any level.

And neither does judgment. Here we should be unabashedly Peircean, even to the level of picturesque metaphor. Semiotics proceeds when a meaning that's amenable to reflection (thirdness experience symbolically) is generated by mediating between relatively immediate appearance (firstness experienced ionically) and brute existence (secondness experience indexically). It is "built on" that first immediate appearance - in this case, the vague nausea and almost tactile disgust at excrement. This immediate experience persists downstream, in one degree or another, to flow into judgments being influenced by other more epistemically robust streams and tributaries. The scientist in this exchange wants to rhetorically deprive the "body" of any epistemic contribution: the reaction induced by the body is not one that is grounded in belief (and the solution is to create a belief).

And this isn't about feeling - it's about the way that corporeal experience colors private and public judgment. Obviously Kevin's opposition starts off as a visceral bodily reaction. By the time it gets to the context of public deliberation, however, it is circumstantially expressed epistemically. The corporeal "ewww" becomes a cognitive "no" that is both explicitly acknowledged as epistemically inadequate ground as Kevin insists that it's nonetheless valid. This isn't someone fooling themselves about cognitive pretexts: he's not making pseudo-scientific excuses for his believe and then just refusing to acknowledge the other side's better scientific arguments. He's making a very clear claim that - at least for the purposes of public decision-making - his visceral judgment should have valid epistemic status.

We should be careful here though: the defense of this move is not the pseudo-mystical one about the "knowledge of the body" or the feminist one about "different ways of knowing." Rather it's the brute empirical objection that that's how judgment works. The scientist (fallaciously) makes calls on authority and runs a couple of ad populums. He offers up several statistics and even admirably sticks to his talking points about just how distilled the water is. Nada. And when he gets a little too rhetorically bold about open derisive laughter and an eye rolled "come on." He ends up sounding like nothing as much as a politician's spokesperson giving a pro forma spin that's both expected and totally unpersuasive. Except when political spokespeople talk, there's a kind of nudge-wink that going through the motions is what they're supposed to do. In this case we've got a completely failed moment of technical-to-deliberative communication.

This in itself calls into question much of the tradition of argument-based technical-to-deliberative consensus building. What's left unaccounted for is the structure of judgment itself. There is a bodily dimensions to judgment that persists even when deliberation moves into more technical registers. Just as very few people really makes decisions by putting making two columns and putting all the "pro" arguments in one side and all the "con" arguments in the other, very few people approach deliberation over technical matters by hearing out all of the arguments. In this case there's a register that was left simply unaccounted for and it turned out to be the register in which judgment was actually happening.

The Psychoanalytic Importance Of The Repressed

An earlier exchange - at around 1:55 where the Deshmukh has been droning on for 20 seconds about distillation, safety, etc - contains the kernel of a psychoanalytic reading of this interview. It's not enough to note that there is a visceral judgment here that's doing downstream epistemic work. What has to be accounted for is why the visceral judgment is so tenacious - why it gets all the way downstream without being diluted. There's a relatively straight-forward psychoanalytic account in this case, and then one that's a little more embedded in architectonical theory construction. The libidinal investment, and the structure of belief that it suggests, helps to explain why the revulsion is so strong. The exchange that follows:

Kevin: "We understand the technology, but normal bottled water doesn't come from my ass. I mean, isn't that the problem, is that people like; I imagine people are just..."
Lisa: "We don't really know where bottled water comes from by the way Kevin..."
Kevin: "No I know"
Bean: "It could come from your ass..."
Kevin: "But but we do know where this comes from, that's what I'm saying..."
Lisa: "True. They're honest about it anyway."
Kevin: "So Shivaji is this an uphill fight? Do you find that people like us are just uh just grossed out by the very idea? And you could purify it till 100 years from now and... you know... I know where it came from."

Note again the epistemic point: no amount of downstream argumentation about the purity of the water can make up for the initial visceral judgment about "where it came from" (and note also Kevin's tone: almost resigned, but not entirely defensive). But for psychoanalytic purposes, the emphasis on the source of the excrement - rather than on the excrement itself - should not be missed. Human excrement is not like cow excrement that has seeped into the groundwater. It's our excrement that's being returned after having "escaped from the sphincter." We don't particularly need Lacan over Freud to help explain the revulsion to what's being expelled and repressed. But the notion of excrement as a source of both revulsion and fascination - as the libidinal objet petit a dumped in the corner - is a dimension that bears notice.

Moreover, there's another psychoanalytic dynamic at work, above and beyond humans' revulsion to their own waste. That avoidance alone could be accounted for in other ways: as social stigma, as selected instinct, etc. But how humans avoid confronting their own excrement takes us back into the psychoanalytic. The exchange here is a relatively clean example of the Zizekian structure of belief: Kevin knows very well that groundwater may have human excrement in it, but he has managed thus far to disavow that knowledge and act as if he doesn't. His objection is not that the water from Toilet To Tap is necessarily dirtier than groundwater, but that "we do know where" it comes from. It's the circumstantial inability to continue disavowing knowledge of what's in tap water - the fact that it's being, so it were, rubbed in his face - that gives impetus to the revulsion.

The situation is analogous to the far more significant controversy about DNA mapping. Imagine that, after a procedure of sufficient sophistication, your doctor can now tell you the precise day you're going to die and what you're going to die of. The vulgar Ethics 101 question is "would you want to be told," but the psychoanalytic point lies elsewhere. Quite independent of whether you actually get the date and cause, the damage has already been done by your inability to disavow that the knowledge is, so it were, out there to be had. Your knowledge that the Other possesses the answer to your most intimate secret becomes unbearable - it can't but radically transform your relationship to your doctor, to your spouse, to yourself, etc. The knowledge that the knowledge is out there, that someone has it, eviscerates the disavowal that gives fantasy its wiggle room.

In this case the situation is a little more bearable because Deshmukh does not have what it takes to persuade Kevin. Kevin is in fact quite straight-forwardly in a hysterical subject position, having become suspicious that the scientific Other does not have the answers he pretends to have.

But to swing back to the practical side of rhetorical study: given the psychoanalytic insights about this exchange and this controversy, Deshmukh's offer to show Kevin and Bean around the treatment facility is precisely the wrong move. People don't want to be confronted with their own waste - they in a very real sense don't want to know. On phenomenological level the scientists' dry, distant insistence on "public education" is experienced as a palpable, almost tactile revulsion at the image of churning excrement. Deliberative democrats and urban planners are exactly wrong in this case: what is needed is less information to a public that doesn't want to know what happens to its shit.

References:
* Kevin and Bean Podcasts [KROQ]
* KROQ's Kevin and Bean - Judgment In Public Scientific Controversies [IIS]
* Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. University Of Chicago Press, 1995.
* Leben der Anderen, Das [IMDB]

Previously:
* A Peircean Checklist For Conscious Artificial Intelligence
* It Would Be Really Nice If Science Was What Chris Mooney Says It Is (Plus: Climate Scientists Learn The Hard Way That Making Scientific Method Into Collective Identity Is A Bad Idea)
* Greek Version of Scientific Instrumentalism Was Particularly Instrumentalist