Comments on: culture studies and capital markets: parallel or converging?

By: Grant

Grant — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 23:27:53 +0000

Steve, beauty, that is precisely the issue, or one of them anyhow, so it turns out that you do have to be a weatherman… if we can persuade the capital markets that there is utility here, someone will pay us to build these darn things. another task for the reinvented b-school. Thanks, Grant

By: steve

steve — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 20:10:19 +0000

The problem of useful cultural analysis seems to me to be a “hole in the middle” of the scale of analysis. We have lots of local weather reports (“women in New York City are wearing brown boots a lot”) and some long-term climate analysis (“identity is fracturing” or “cultural diversity within developed countries is increasing”) but not much at the level of the weather front or high-pressure system. We’re not even sure what the equivalent sort of report or theory would be.

My guess is that progress here can only come with the right kind of mesoscopic analysis, the equivalent of weather fronts and systems, where we could predict the partly contingent structure of culture change. Specific content may vary, but I bet there exist repeating patterns such as cultural eddies that form behind passing trends, or the way a fad coalesces out of a surrounding medium of social interaction like a hurricane over a warm ocean.

By: Grant

Grant — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 14:45:29 +0000

Peter, I am guessing that paradigmatic perplexities occur in physics because the world is difficult, not because, as is the case in cultural studies, the writer is self indulgent. Thanks! Grant

Jared, thanks, I think this must be why God created MIT and the comparative media program. Mind you, my years of service in the Israeli military were really very useful, too. (And here I am using the usual cryptological convention in which “Israeli military” stands in for “University of Chicago.”) Thanks, Grant

By: Jared

Jared — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 14:32:21 +0000

First time commenter, not-so-long-time reader:

I love your ideas, Grant, but as you’ve said you managed to acquire your education in a fairly unique setting. What is your average would-be-cultural-maven to do? They can’t get a liberal arts degree, because almost all the liberal arts programs are infested with cultural studies or gerolatry. They can’t get a business degree for reasons you’ve discussed before. What can they do besides joining the Israeli military?

By: Peter

Peter — Wed, 09 Nov 2005 13:47:37 +0000

Very interesting post, Grant (as usual).

A comment on the Sokal affair: The credulity of cultural studies researchers when presented with gibberish purporting to be theoretical physics is matched only by the credulity of theoretical physicists when presented with gibberish purporting to be theoretical physics. This is shown by the Affair Bogdanov, in which French twin brothers gained PhDs in theoretical physics (in 1999 and 2002) and published papers in respectable journals (including “Annals of Physics”) for work which other theoretical physicists thought was nonsense. For an account by one leading physicist, see:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanoff/

If physicists themselves are fooled by such nonsense, what hope is there for the rest of us.

But perhaps we should not be too hard on the journal referees and PhD examiners in physics for their credulity, since the subject is already so weird. Gerhard Mack, a German physicist wrote in 1994 on the question, “What is a thing?”

http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-lat/9411059

His answer is that a thing is an object in an appropriate category (a certain mathematical structure):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory

Even for those of us with a knowledge of category theory, Mack’s work is beyond parody.