Issue 08 - Junk

A Letter from the Editors

Gadfly Magazine is run out of Philosophy 716, a small but often ambitiously-populated seminar room in Columbia’s Philosophy Hall. A glossy wooden table— “ ” etched into its side—fills the lion’s share of the room. Seventeen sturdy wooden chairs surround the table, and a hodgepodge of cushioned, stackable chairs crowd whatever floorspace remains. Everyone in 716 expects to hear, at some time or another, the desperate, plaintive beeping of the light switch by the room’s doorway. After some inscrutable interval, the room seems to wonder whether everyone has left quite yet; we scramble to press the button, reassuring it that we are still there.

It is in the grips of 716 that we chose this year’s theme: junk. In his application to join Gadfly, one of our newest editors, Aharon Dardik, suggested the theme “Junkspace,” a term coined by philosopher-architect Rem Koolhaas in 2002. “Junkspace,” wrote Aharon, “describes and critiques the modern architectural style of buildings, having traded their soul for efficiency, ease, and comfort. Koolhaas pulls at a thread of dissonance that each one of us can feel, an underlying sense that despite our modern spaces being optimized, we do not, as human beings, feel that they

are optimal. The buildings feel dead. Despite all the meticulous planning, the space is simply junk.” Aharon added that Junkspace “is not limited to architecture, but is, rather, a force that infects all aspects of our lives as we trade art and care for efficiency, scale, and uniformity.”

The notion of Junkspace resonated with us in 716. That might be because Columbia University is Junkspace— “the body double of space, a territory of impaired vision, limited expectation, reduced earnestness,” according to Koolhaas. The university, unable to contain itself, profilerates, accumulates—more property, more students, more capital. Of course, one need not feel the presence of Columbia University to feel the presence of Junkspace. Our very planet, increasingly both sunbathed and waterlogged, itself faces assimilation into junk-hood.

To talk about Junkspace is to talk about everything. It connotes a composite, a whole which fails to deliver on the promise of its parts. A critique of Junkspace is a critique of modernity, of neoliberal society, of ecological catastrophe.

Junk , on the other hand, is something we can grasp. We find it in trash cans, give it to our neighbors, leave it on the street, stoop it, keep it in our homes. And, as Sherrye Ye reminds us in “R3ceipts,” it’s something that can tell the story of an individual, just as Junkspace tells the story of the failed promises of modernity. Blending poetry, music, and visual art, Ye considers, with wit, humor, and vulnerability, possibly the most common— and most revealing—piece of junk we encounter in

day-to-day life: the receipt. Equally revealing as the junk we throw away is that which we consume. In “Slug Gaze,” Matthew Mason explores how the “live slug reaction meme”—easily dismissed as the sort of internet junk with the lifespan of a housefly—functions not only to capture a socio-cultural snapshot of our present attitudes towards sexuality, but to produce and regulate sexual discourse itself.

Junk is the product of an ambivalent process which attempts to separate the useful from the useless, the needed from the unneeded, the coherent from the incoherent. As Zimu Zhang elaborates in “Awareness in the Transgender Gaze and the Birth of Trans Kinship,” the transgender gaze produces just such a separation: an understanding of “the relation between the gendered self and the world,” which creates a heightened awareness of gendered features. But, she argues, rather than discarding those features deemed incongruent, the transgender gaze brings them together into a new, coherent whole. In Wenni Iben’s interview “The Values We Don’t Talk About,” the philosopher Arnold Berleant proposes a similar subversion of the junk/non-junk distinction in the realm of aesthetics. We should, he argues, learn to recognize even our most unpleasant sensory experiences; when we dismiss negative aesthetic experiences as junk, we deprive ourselves of the aesthetic sensitivity necessary to fully experience beauty.

Our fifth piece, Keith Peterson’s “Paradise Lost,” returns more directly to Junkspace, contrasting the image of Hawaii as a “hyperreal fantasy land” with the “underlying wasteland” that exists in reality.

The underlying impulse behind this situation is the insatiability of touristic desire: writes Peterson, “The desiring void always yearns for more—more escape, more pleasure, more jouissance—whatever external sacrifice or mutilation or exploitation is necessary to chase that eternally suspended goal.” The wasteland of Hawaii is the junk left by the wayside in the pursuit of this fantasy.

We conclude the magazine with two philosophical critiques of scientific paradigms and the junk they might contain. As Rob Gilbert reminds us in “Misplaced Concreteness,” “every science starts out as philosophy”; this is especially important in young sciences such as psychiatry and psychology, where “underlying assumptions need to be clarified and basic questions need to be articulated.” Through a mix of philosophical analysis and personal reflection, Gilbert considers two approaches to the ontological status of mental disorders, considering both their existence and location. On the other end of the scientific spectrum, in “Junk Science,” William Freedman interviews the physicist Peter Woit about his critiques of string theory, a dominant theory in modern physics. In Woit’s view, string theory is “a failed research program, [...] unique among failed research programs in its practitioners’ unwillingness to admit that it’s failed.” Both of these pieces highlight the fact that science does not develop through the linear pursuit of knowledge, but through complex historical, philosophical, and social processes. It is through these processes that junk science is identified and discarded.

We don’t intend or expect to stem the flow of “natural

corporate exuberance” to which Koolhaas attributes

Junkspace’s proliferation with issue no. 8 of Gadfly Magazine. But we have been honored to work with a truly extraordinary team of writers, artists, editors, designers, and coordinators to produce a magazine that is—and we say this with no shortage of confidence— anything but junk . For that honor, we thank our wonderful contributors and board. We would also like to thank Columbia University’s Department of Philosophy for helping us to produce Gadfly—and particularly for allowing us the use of 716.

Cordially,

Chase Alexander Bush-McLaughlin

Aiden Frederick Sagerman

Editors

Editors-in-Chief: Chase Alexander Bush-McLaughlin & Aiden Frederick Sagerman Managing Editor: Skylar Wu

Chief Article Editors: Joanne Park & Lara Smith

Chief Interview Editor: Soham Mehta

Chief Column Editors: Jalsa Drinkard & Milène Klein

Discussion & Events Coordinator: Bellajeet Sahota

Copy Editors: Maria Levit, Maya Platek, Danielle Zheng

Design Editor: Hazel Lu

Social Media Manager: Ashley Blanche Waller

Article Editors: Rose Clubok, Nora Estrada, Jeongin Kim, Amelia Landis,

Ashling Lee, Sanaaya Rao, Kyle Y. Rodstein

Interview Editors: Chimelu Ani, Henry Astor, Wynona Barua, Gabriella Calabia, Haniya Cheema, Qingyuan Deng, William Freedman, Wenni Iben, Lily Kwak, Oscar Luckett, Kylie Morrison

Column Editors: Lucia Yinuo Cao, Brian Chen, Aharon Dardik, Hermella Mesfin Getachew, Elise Sickinger, Judy Tao

Columnists: Yassine Abaakil, Gabrielle Epuran, Axel Icazbalceta, Ashley Blanche Waller, Tony Xiao, Moxuan Xiong, Zimu Zhang

Editors Emeritus: Cecilia Bell, Emilie Biggs, Alice McCrum, Saikeerthi Rachavelpula, Jonathan Tanaka

R3ceipts

Table of Contents

The Slug Gaze: Discourse, Discipline, and the Live Slug Reaction Meme

Awareness in the Transgender Gaze and the Birth of Trans Kinship

The Values We Don’t Talk About: A Conversation with Arnold Berleavnt

Paradise Lost: Hawaiian Tourism and Corrosive Desire

Misplaced Concreteness and Mental Disorders

Junk Science: Peter Woit on String Theory

Sherrye Ye Matthew Mason

Zimu Zhang

Conducted by Wenni Iben and edited by Wynona Barua

Keith Peterson Rob Gilbert

Conducted by William Freedman and edited by Oscar Luckett

R3ceipts Sherrye Ye

The Slug Gaze: Discourse, Discipline, and the Live Slug Reaction Meme

Matthew Mason

On February 21, 2022, Tumblr user @butchdot reposted a tweet, a seemingly innocuous joke about the brevity of the gay kiss in the most recent Star Wars movie. But this post inaugurated the explosively popular, if equally niche, “live slug reaction” meme. The meme itself is remarkably simple in form: a picture—taken from a tweet by @PinkRangerLB—of a “frowning slug monster” that appears for “twice as long” as the gay kiss that it follows. Soon, the image was shrunk down and placed to the side of an image with the words “Live Slug Reaction” in white on red posted above the slug’s face. An image adorned with the live slug reaction typically features two characters of the same gender engaged in some action that could be construed as homoerotic: fighting, looking each other in the eyes, hugging, or (rarely) actually kissing.

The gaze of the slug signals a homoerotic act is taking place. Indeed, the slug’s original role in Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is preserved in each variation of the meme. His frowning, displeased face signals that the queer moment is taboo, transgressive—either because the characters themselves are not queer in their respective media franchises or merely because of the slug’s homophobia. Yet, the sheer ubiquity of the meme would seem to indicate that these potentially homoerotic moments in popular culture are anything but taboo. What, then, is the actual function of the slug’s gaze, both in its common presence and its seemingly repressive function? To fully understand the role of this meme in shaping the way sexuality is discussed, categorized, and policed in online spaces, we first have to explore the function of the meme in internet

subcultures.

Memes are unusual because of the extremely casual manner in which they are presented. Unlike TV shows, movies, books, or other established forms of media, memes are intended to be

looked at, laughed at, and scrolled past without further thought. Simultaneously, memes are an integral part of contemporary internet culture, no matter what social media platform you prefer. This ubiquity and informality of memes is what interests Bradley E. Wiggins,

an associate professor of media communications at Webster Vienna Private University, in his book The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture. Wiggins argues that memes form a discourse, defined as “a set of possible utterances and other forms of expression which direct and constrain what human agents can understand and what meanings can be articulated concerning a particular field of knowledge or subject matter.” That is, whenever

a user wants to make a joke, comment on current events, or otherwise interact with digital culture in a way that makes them feel cool or “in-the-know,” it is the cultural context of memes that conditions the viewer’s interaction with them.

Tumblr user @girlblocker’s take on the live slug reaction meme illustrates how popular memes affect the way we think about real world events. Their meme features a still of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars, with the live slug reaction box in the bottom right corner. The popularity of the slug reaction meme

at the time of the slapping informed and directed the way that this user thought about this event and shared

those thoughts online. Indeed, @girlblocker illustrates a crucial part of Wiggins’ understanding of the meme-as-discourse. On the one hand, discourses are restraining: they make it so the only ideas that get widely circulated are those that adhere to the shared cultural understanding of an event, limiting the diversity of thought available to a given online subculture. On the other hand, discourses are freeing: they enable the expression of ideas that might not otherwise be able to be thought and communicated widely. How else could someone have thought of the potential homoeroticism of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock to protect the reputation of his wife as the patriarchal protector of the household other than through a meme designed to identify queer moments in media? Under any other frame of analysis, such a consideration would be so absurd, so silly, so

frivolous that it would be ruled out entirely. But, through the discursive power of the meme and the specific frame of the live slug reaction, such a concern can be raised, remarked on, and put into cultural circulation without controversy. For Wiggins, these functions of discourse are inseparable. The set of ideas that memes represent becomes the terrain on which a member of a digital culture thinks, both the boundary of thought and its territory, so that the very categories of what is possible and impossible to express or even believe are “constrained and defined” by discourse. Yet, Wiggins leaves unexplored how the content of a specific meme can inform the resulting discourse. What is the significance of the live slug reaction meme’s focus on the transgressive character of queerness and homoeroticism?

The function of the slug

in @girlblocker’s queer Tumblr community is deeply related to the way its group members enter into a discourse. A discourse, as a culturally specific way of communication, is specific to a subculture, to a group of people communicating in their own unique way. Thus, potential members of a subculture must seek out and learn the terms and norms of a discourse to enter into the corresponding subculture. In his essay “Language, Socialization, and Silence in Gay Adolescence,” William Leap, professor of anthropology at American University, argues that this process of learning and entering into a discourse is a defining feature of the queer comingof-age experience. For him, finding queer-coded relationships or homoerotic messages in popular media “provides rehearsal for encounters with gaycentered messages in social settings.”

This rehearsal mostly consists of two activities: reinterpreting heteronormative or mainstream texts as queer and building a vocabulary of queer references, slang terms, and slogans from various pieces of media. The live slug reaction meme requires Tumblr users to engage in both activities. The creation of the meme necessitates “mak[ing] sense of gay-centered messages in seemingly heteronormative texts” through identifying and naming moments where gay-centered messages come to light. Given the contemporary influx of explicitly queer representation in media, the ease of identifying queer-related messages can fluctuate wildly. Identifying the queerness of Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy (two female Batman villains) kissing in a recent comic, as in @pixiestrikesback’s post, is much more straightforward than

spotting the homoerotic tension between Lego Batman and Lego Joker in The Lego Batman Movie in @northpen’s take on the meme. Yet in both instances, members of queer digital culture(s) are meant to seek out and name the presence of queerness. Likewise, the circulation of the slug meme and its popularity help users build what Leap calls “a personal repertoire of gay commentary,” enabling them to interact with other members of their online community while expressing their own queerness and signaling it to other users.

Arguing that a meme indoctrinates teens and young adults into a queer discourse does sound like something straight out of an Alex Jones podcast— although I personally do not think that the kind of “indoctrination” described by Leap has to be bad. Sadly, the live slug reaction meme is purely discursive and will not make you gay.

Leap notes that a common feature among the gay men he interviewed for his essay is “the consistent presence of the first-person active voice” as “they describe personal struggles to take charge of their gay socialization process itself as self-initiated.” So, teens and young adults first recognize themselves as queer before starting the process of joining a queer community and its associated discourse. Even if an individual is closeted, “closets have keyholes, closet doors have cracks,

and closet walls are thin,” meaning that there is still room within the repressive constraints of closeted living for individuals to look for and receive queer media and imagery and enter into queer discourse. This wiggle room within hostile constraints is why the live slug reaction meme and the queer digital community it has circulated in is so important: it gives young queer folks a space to explore their own identity and queer-related messages in media in a way that is safer than in-person means. In particular, most users of the live slug reaction meme do not list any personally identifying information on their blogs. So, interacting with the slug and similar memes mitigates some of the risks associated with talking about queerness in a public setting while enabling users to “define gay identity to their own satisfaction and to articulate it successfully with other components of

adolescent experience,” as Leap argues.

The slug meme, then, has no power to change the actual feelings of sexual desire experienced by those who see or make it. The meme only governs the way users think and talk about their sexuality—the transition between felt experience and communication of ideas. Furthermore, for those in repressive environments like the closet, the live slug reaction meme creates an empowering discourse: one that allows members of a marginalized community to freely express their sexuality in a way that both transgresses and denaturalizes the norms, constraints, and taboos of heteronormative society.

However, as Michel Foucault famously argues in The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, the empowerment felt through the intentional transgression of the taboos of sexuality are, cruelly,

still a part of the power that regulates sexuality. His argument rests on the centrality of confession:

The obligation to confess is now relayed through so many different points, is so deeply ingrained in us, that we no longer perceive it as the effect of a power that constrains us; on the contrary, it seems to us that truth, lodged in our most secret nature, “demands” only to surface.

And sexuality is an essential thing that one confesses:

What if sex in our society, on a scale of several centuries,

was something that was placed within an unrelenting system of confession? The transformation of sex into discourse, which I spoke of earlier, the dissemination and reinforcement of heterogenous sexualities, are perhaps two elements of the same deployment: they are linked together with the help of the central element of a confession that compels individuals to articulate their sexual peculiarity – no matter how extreme. Therefore, the power that regulates sexuality is simultaneously productive, as it produces a specific discourse on sex; and invested in making individuals feel that it is reductive, in that their ability to talk about sex and sexual deviance is restrained. There are few obvious obstacles preventing an individual

from posting a meme anonymously on Tumblr; they will not face sanctions nor will they will not receive vitriolic hate mail. But, despite this lack of actual or material oppression, posting an explicitly queer meme can still feel transgressive and empowering.

The live slug reaction meme is an arena in which this complex interplay between production and reduction take place as the confessional impulse: users seek and find the truth about the media that surrounds them—the sexual secrets encoded in popular culture—and tell, in the form of a meme, what Foucault refers to as “whatever is most difficult to tell.” In this way, the slug meme entices members of the queer digital community to think about their sexual desires, as well as the communication of those desires, in a specific way: one that proliferates certain kinds of heterogenous sexualities but

still reinforces the existing regime of sexual regulation.

This interplay between the proliferation of certain forms of non-normative sexuality and the rendering unthinkable of other forms of non-normative sexuality can be seen in the difference between gay and lesbian versions of the live slug meme. Male characters that are subject of the slug’s reaction and not explicitly queer in their media of origin are caught in a variety of potentially homoerotic acts: characters are depicted locking eyes, wrestling, hugging, and hitting each other. There are characters who engage in less reciprocal relationships, with one character looking wistfully at the other, or images where two male characters are simply near each other and not clearly interacting. There are also a surprising number of images that take humorous or otherwise downplayed

kissing between male characters as serious material for the meme.

On the other hand, sapphic versions of the meme that do not depict explicit or canon kisses are nearly non-existent. In fact, I could only find two sapphic versions of the meme, by users @dawnstar1 and @ oak23, and both of them rely on the same act: two female characters joking about marrying each other, which is transformed into a serious admission of love through the slug’s gaze. So, juxtaposed with a rich collection of all the ways men can love men and the various acts that can signal that loving, the discourse about sapphic attraction is much more limited: absent, for example, are implications of sapphic sexual desire. Thus, the live slug reaction meme is part of a disciplinary system, one that restricts the kinds of thoughts participants in this queer digital discourse

can communicate and spread—even without the conscious knowledge of the participants. The freeing act of making the meme is itself constrained by a subtle system of control, a productive act that reinvests in a discourse that limits what forms of sexuality are available.

@bionic-jedi, revealing another still from Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker depicting our good friend the slug hugging a male side character, claims that the slug is gay, and so his look is one of approval or identification;

If and how the slug meme enacts these disciplinary constraints is up for debate within this queer digital community: @jesterjamz labels the slug as a homophobe, who looks at queer moments with disgust;

@strawberry-crocodile states that this indeterminacy is their favorite thing about the meme; @jackklinemybeloved attempts to sidestep the conversation about the potential bigotry of the slug and instead insist that the slug’s disappointment is in Disney’s shitty representation of queerness in having a two-second kiss. The common element among these disparate interpretations of the meme is that the humor is derived from thinking about the central image as queer. It’s absurd, laughable even, to think that queer-coded moments in your favorite TV show or movie are best demarcated through

this reaction of the rather awkward looking slug. The rare but popular examples of the meme that feature heterosexual character pairings gain their funny quality through the unexpectedness of thinking of these moments as queer. So, rather than the slug’s gaze judging a certain action as disgusting or praiseworthy, a cheap commodification of representation, or a moment of queer identification, the slug merely identifies queerness, with humor derived from the accuracy of his gaydar and how hard he strains to exercise it. But this identification is still a disciplinary one. A take on the meme from @3dmonstermaze is particularly good at illustrating the discipline enacted by the mere looking of the slug. They depict the visage of the slug at the top of the watch tower in a panopticon. The panopticon is a prison designed so

that the inmates cannot know whether the guard is looking at them or not. Power becomes internalized: the inmates assume they are always being watched and act accordingly, even if the guard is looking away or absent. By replacing the figure of the guard with the slug, this Tumblr user identifies the surveilling function of the meme. Users want to be identified by the slug, they want to enter into the discourse of the queer digital community. But, that identification comes at a cost: you must articulate your desire in ways that match normative expectations and categorize your identity into the already existing schema of sexuality, into the vocabulary of what actions and what imagery properly communicate queer desire as indexed by the meme. To avoid external forms of exclusion and marginalization, you must self-police your identity and sexual desire, curating

it to assimilate into the community, into the forms and expressions of desire that are recognizable to the slug and to the community as a whole. Thus, the function of the live slug reaction is to naturalize this panoptic gaze and disseminate it to more quotidian parts of users’ lives, to their everyday interactions with media and the material world.

sexual categories. Given the exclusions that come with this subtle regulation, we need a new way of talking about sex and sexual desire that is more expansive than the currently available categories. But the allure of abiding by existing sexual categories and communities is powerful, and norms of discourse cannot just be wished away. To quote Tumblr user @fufaitazu, “i can’t fire the [slug] thing, it’s not on the payroll, so: if you ARE a homosexual under our employ. invest in salt.” So invest in salt we shall.

What is at stake is sex itself. The kinds of sex acts that are available to an individual, as well as the forms of intimacy and intimate relationships an individual knows about, are limited by the information, images, and representations of sex and desire that are accessible to them. The slug meme thus subtly regulates sex and sexuality by making users adhere to existing

Awareness in the Transgender Gaze and the Birth of Trans Kinship

Zimu Zhang

A Brief Introduction

This column was born from my desire to describe and account for my experience and perhaps the experiences of others observing the world through a trans vision. In Columbia’s very own English professor Jack Halberstam’s 2001 paper, “The transgender gaze in Boys Don’t Cry,” the theory of the transgender gaze was first expounded. Later this was further developed in his 2005 book, In A Queer Time and Place. Through incorporating principles of psychoanalytic film theory in his analysis, Halberstam proposes that the transgender gaze can be characterized by 1) the destabilization of cisnormative conceptions of gender via subversion and reversal of lack, and 2) the ability to remain in realms of queerness, resisting heterosexist and cissexist institutions.

In this essay, I seek to argue that this account of the transgender gaze is incomplete and that the transgender gaze also entails the development of heightened awareness of gendered features and their fluidity in ourselves and in others. I further contend that this trans attentiveness also extends to the act of “seeing through.” Distinct from internalized transphobia or a cisnormative image of the world, “seeing through” is the ability to view said gendered features as part of an entirely new trans identity. That is, an identity that isn’t a representation of some ideal image of male or female (e.g. a male with a penis) but instead a trans body that’s detached from these representations. The act of “seeing through” then facilitates trans kinship via recognition of each other’s transgressive relation with cisnormativity.

I do not believe this observation completes the

account of the transgender gaze. I think the trans experience (as with all experiences) isn’t fully described by words, so a socalled “complete account” will not be possible. However, I believe that my “add-on” is relatable to many and can perhaps constitute a missing chunk in previous articulations.

***

Sartre’s Social Anxiety

As mentioned in the introduction, Halberstam uses techniques commonly associated with psychoanalytic film theory, which is when critics utilize the ideas of psychoanalysts (e.g. Freud, Lacan) in critiquing films. Within film, the relationship between the camera shooting the scene and a scene being shot makes the idea of looking and being looked at especially pertinent. Tracing the origins of psychoanalytic film theory in

this respect, one eventually arrives at conceptions of intersubjectivity. For this reason, I believe Sartre’s look would be the appropriate place to start our review of existing literature.

For Sartre, as made clear in Being and Nothingness, the look originates in the self as a subject and in the Other. Under this conception, to look is to have the ability to render oneself, a subject, as the center of the universe of objects that exist around us. This look empowers us to induce a sense of anxiety in other subjects if they are in our presence. Furthermore, we also recognize ourselves as being looked-at and thus experience shame and anxiety when encountering other looks. Sartre provides an example that is useful in understanding his thesis. In his scenario, I find myself in a park where I walk along and enjoy the scenery. At this moment, all I can

recognize are other objects (things that don’t have consciousness). There are no subjects receiving my look; there is simply the freshly cut lawn, the hazel-colored bench, and the lush oak tree. Everything’s position is situated around me, the only ego present.

However, as another person appears on the other side of the park, the situation dramatically transforms. Far from a stable condition that validates my subjectivity in its totality, reality transforms into an intersubjective tug of war. I am no longer the center of the universe. Although, to me, the bench may still be 5 meters away, to the newly initiated subject within the park, it is perhaps 10 meters away from them. Every object within the scene takes on a new sense of objectivity—our perceptions have introduced multiplied meanings to the objects. What this all amounts to, for Sartre, is a sense of shame.

We too become the objects of the person on the other side of the park’s look . We are trapped in the Other’s perception of us while having no insight into their perspective. The anxiety that emerges from our inability to control the Other’s perceptions of ourselves is what led to the famous quote in Sartre’s play No Exit: “Hell is other people.”

the dizzying sensation of being thrown off-center. It is important to note that Sartre doesn’t believe that the feeling of the Other’s gaze necessitates us to physically be able to see another subject present in our field of vision. Instead, it can be born out of any external phenomena which suggest to us another subject may be present and gazing at us. This can take the form of footsteps, the rustling of leaves in the park, or perhaps the wind. Here, in Sartre’s work, we can begin to see the conception of internalizing the gaze of the Other. ***

Permanent Incoherence

Here, shame isn’t limited to a feeling of humiliation but rather encompasses a shift in our understanding of self,

The gaze, for French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, originates in the Big Other the discourse of the symbolic order, that is, in the institutions, laws, language, and culture that exist around

us. But, differing from Sartre, Lacan understands the gaze not to originate in other subjects but in ourselves.

During the mirror stage, however, the child gains a sense of coherence. They see themself as an object amongst other objects in the mirror; the waving limbs are all interconnected and are no longer simply things in their peripheral vision. In the unity of the phenomena experienced by the child, an understanding that they are a coherent object in the world just like others arises.

The internalization of the gaze first develops itself in the mirror stage of child development. Lacan postulates that prior to a child’s recognition of themselves in the mirror, they feel incoherent. The child can only see their body parts waving around and get a sense that they can produce noise, but there is no unity between the different components of their physical form.

For Lacan, this is fundamentally a misrecognition— méconnaissance —because humans are subjects, not objects. Subjects differ from objects in that they have lack, and thus have desires that coherent objects shown in the mirror do not. Desire makes us feel like we are never our real selves. This is seen very easily in everyday life, where individuals strive towards completing certain goals and acquiring or forfeiting various qualities or objects. In this process, we believe we are becoming

more like the coherent version of ourselves— the ideal ego. Through the action upon these tasks, one believes they are decreasing their own lack, thus getting closer to the object they had previously seen in the mirror. However, we don’t recognize that whenever desires are met, new desires always appear; the lack in one subject is never fulfilled because it is precisely what defines a subject’s ontology. The gaze from the Big Other is internalized in every subject through the mirror stage and constantly pushes individuals to seek out a complete version of themselves , repetitively attempting to fulfill their desires with no end. ***

Sex Objects

The term “male gaze” was first coined by art critic John Berger in his 1972 series Ways of Seeing on BBC,

then further developed and applied to film theory by feminist theorist Laura Mulvey the following year in her 1973 essay, Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema. As outlined by thesethinkers, the male gaze is a view of the world from a cisgender, male, heterosexual perspective, in which women are rendered passive sex objects. Berger begins his exploration of the subject matter through nude renaissance paintings. He observes that women are often the passive subjects of nude paintings. They are never occupied with any tasks in these depictions other than presenting themselves for the visual pleasure of the contemporary owner—the male aristocrat. Women are often dormant and illustrated with minimal energy, lying around exhibiting their bodies. Instead of being a human subject capable of having

judgments, desires, and the ability to act, the woman is objectified. Within the nude, the female subject shows awareness that she is being gazed at. This is usually conveyed through her gazing at the viewer of the painting—breaking the fourth wall. She isn’t merely naked in the moment—she exists for the satisfaction of the male spectator qua owner. Nudity isn’t an expression of the female subject’s feelings or desires but rather an emblem of submission to the gaze of the male owner. The male gaze of the artists pushes them to depict women in such a manner to satisfy the sexuality of the heterosexual man. As Berger commentates, “they [women] exist to feed an appetite, not to have any of their own.”

Conversely, men in paintings are active subjects and are always engaged in certain tasks at hand. Whether that be engaging in serious discussion or in the process of fighting a war, they are

changing the world around them and not merely existing for the male voyeur.

Mulvey further develops the theory of the male gaze within cinema and draws references from Lacan and Freud. Women in cinema, she postulates, not only serve as a sexual spectacle for the viewers in the auditorium but are also the sexual objects for the characters within the film itself. She makes the keen observation that female characters are often the prize for the male protagonists’ actions and heroism, and the sexuality of the female character also shifts as the story progresses. She notes that within films, female subjects are at first on display, fully showing their sexual prowess, being an object of desire. However, as the female character becomes intertwined with the male protagonist and falls in love, her independent sexuality slowly disappears as she becomes his property.

Thus, she becomes only “consumable” for the male protagonist; there is an exclusivity that starts to develop. And in order for the audience to further access this pleasure, which the male protagonist seems to have monopolized, the audience needs to adopt and imagine themselves as the male protagonist. In both the instance of the female subject being fully accessible to the audience and the moment she becomes an object exclusively for the male protagonist, viewers must adopt the male gaze to gain any semblance of the pleasure derived from spectatorship—scopophilia. The male gaze thus becomes a necessary part of enjoying most cinema.

The male gaze does not limit itself to literature and cinema. It is allencompassing. There floats a constant reminder that women should be “presentable” and “pleasant”

around men; the male gaze is internalized, and thus also panoptical. Women must constantly impersonate the male voyeur and seek to understand whether or not they can satisfy male heterosexuality. This is where the normative understanding that “girls care more about looks” comes from. Operating within the perverse patriarchal

incentive structure, women are expected to surveil themselves and ensure that their bodies are worthy of being gazed at. Those who are socialized as boys are brought into a culture in which it is enjoyable to

evaluate a woman’s looks and sexual appeal, and they are expected to do so. Beginning in childhood, the male gaze is internalized; it constantly evaluates and re-evaluates a woman’s potentiality as a desirable sexual partner.

***

Role Reversal (TW for this section: sexual violence)

a “way of life.” In the chapter “The Transgender Look” in Halberstam’s In A Queer Time and Place, two films he analyzes Boys Don’t Cry and By Hook or By Crook serve as the basis for the above argumentation.

In my reading of Halberstam, I found that he ascribes two key characteristics to the transgender gaze. First is the destabilization of cisnormative conceptions of gender via an alteration of lack, and second is the affirmation of queerness as

Elaborating on Mulvey’s argumentation that female characters often serve as the object of desire waiting at the finish line for the male protagonist, Halberstam further argues that even queer cinema featuring gay, lesbian, or other queer relationships often works to confirm “the rightness of heterosexual object choice.” These romances seem to always have the inevitable development “within adulthood from adolescence to romance to marriage to reproduction to death.” The transgender gaze, conversely, rejects this cisgender heterosexual cinematic structure and disrupts previous conceptions of object choice.

This is seen clearly in the biographical film Boys Don’t Cry, based on the brutal murder of a trans man named Brandon Teena in 1993. In the film, Brandon finds himself in a horrific situation where two of his “friends,” John and Tom, go to excruciating lengths to figure out his sexual anatomy. Brandon’s romantic interest, Lana, defends him and offers to be the inspector of his sex. When the two later enter Lana’s bedroom to complete the inspection, Lana refuses to peer into his pants and tells Brandon that she is sure that he’s a man and it isn’t necessary. Following a b-roll of the cobalt night sky over which Lana says, “we can just beam ourselves out there,” we are returned to the living room, where Lana brings back the “results.” Unconvinced, John and Tom direct Lana to another part of the house and proceed in a detestable fashion. Brandon is violently shoved into

the bathroom, where he is disrobed, and his genitalia is revealed to them. Following the brutal reveal, Lana is brought into the bathroom, and John and Tom force her to acknowledge their findings. Even then, Lana refuses to look, unwilling to “privilege the literal over the figurative”—Brandon’s anatomy over his gender identity.

During this violent scene, there is a moment of silence. In slow motion, a shot/ reverse shot is introduced in which a fully clothed Brandon gazes at the naked Brandon, the subject of his peers’ assault. In this instant, Halberstam believes the transgender gaze is most apparent—it shows a divide between the literal castrated Brandon and the figurative transgender Brandon, whose existence is validated by Lana’s refusal to look in the previous scene. Here, the stability of gender is questioned via the reversal of lack. The male subject,

Brandon, represents lack, castration anxiety, and incoherence, whereas the female subject, Lana, retains a complete, coherent existence. There is no castration anxiety regarding Lana. As Halberstam says, “Lana can be naked without trauma while Brandon cannot.” It is only in the female gaze that the existence of the male subject is affirmed, not the other way around, as explained in Mulvey’s analysis of classical cinema. Through this reversal, our conception of how being female can only entail castration anxiety and lack is disrupted, and we begin to view gender more fluidly.

Let us now move on to Halberstam’s analysis of By Hook or By Crook . In this lowbudget queer buddy film, two trans characters Shy and Valentine — traverse the queer spaces of San Francisco, in which they build a friendship. There

are several qualities to this film that garner high praise from Halberstam. Firstly, the transness of characters was detached from the medical the mismatch between the sexed body and the individual identification —and instead, their genderfuckery is associated with “wit, humor, and style.” Secondly, the film is uninterested in describing and explaining the gender experience of the characters to the oblivious cishet viewer. According to directors Harry Dodge and Silas Howard, the film’s purpose was to pay tribute to the creativity within queer subcultural spaces in San Francisco. The fragmented image of gender in this film leans in on the unintelligibility of the trans experience, and thus constitutes a transgender gaze—it is devoid of formal explanations of the characters’ genders. Lastly, queerness is universalized in this cinematic universe.

No one in the spaces the duo visit in the film reacts to their queerness—it is the default state of being in these enclaves. The existence of the straight world is completely denied, and, as Halberstam puts it beautifully, “the queer cinematic world comes to represent a truly localized place of opposition an opposition, moreover, that is to be found in committed performances of perversity, madness, and friendship.”

The transgender gaze is the view of the world produced when people engage willfully in the eccentric relationships and networks built by transness and queerness. In this sense, the ability to see the world as a realm of possibilities for the creation of queerbeing-in-the-world is radically different from the capabilities of cissexist and heterosexist institutions.

***

Spotting a Fellow Tranny in the Wild

Now, as any contemporary theorist would, I will introduce my argument by analyzing a cultural artifact or phenomenon. However, instead of an obscure film from the 1980s, let us talk about the various Reddit posts I’ve encountered in transgender subreddits that are admittedly transfeminine (transfemme)-dominated.

One topic that seems to come up often is the awkward yet happy yet anxiety-inducing scenario of the trans author spotting another possible trans person out in the wild. Often, discussion ensues in the comments about the phenomenon of the

fascinating capability of trans individuals to spot other trans people in public. In the following section of my column, I will extend Halberstam’s definition of the transgender gaze by analyzing the emotions in these trans encounters and argue for how my extended definition leads to trans recognition in public. And finally, I will contend that trans kinship necessitates the existence of a transgender gaze.

Other than the instances where there is an object signifying their transhood—that is to say, for example, trans pins, shirts, accessories, etc—the encounter will always involve uncertainty. There is no way to “get to the bottom of it” only by gazing. This is the anxiety-inducing part of these encounters, as the assumption or attempted assumption of the other person’s transhood comes from the act of clocking.

There must be some incongruence within the existence of the subject they are gazing at for the trans gazer to even register the other person as possibly trans. Other than the anxiety derived from unknowability, shame and anxiety are projected onto the other person. This is because if they are trans, and a trans subject who desires to be unclockable, the recognition of their incoherency puts their existence to shame. This is also a reversal of the Sartrean look . Instead of the fear of being trapped in the Other’s perception, I

feel anxious and ashamed for the Other because they are trapped within my perception. There is violence in this gaze: the possible trans subject’s existence is violated. However, as mentioned earlier, happiness is also critical in such encounters. This is for a much more straightforward reason. The recognition of someone within your group creates a realm of queerness in which kinship is formed through the shared community’s struggles. Only through the transgender gaze can the plethora of emotions originating from trans x trans encounters exist.

Part of the impacts and characteristics of the transgender gaze can be felt in the emotions elicited by trans encounters. In analyzing the happiness experienced between trans individuals, we can link back to Halberstam’s understanding of By Hook or by Crook. Aside from

happiness inhering in the transgender gaze, there are three other major characteristics that I want to introduce. Firstly, a keen awareness of gendered features and thus, at times, the reversal of the Sartrean gaze. Secondly, the ability to view gendered features as parts of a trans subject not as mere representations of the past gendered self. Thirdly, the creation and facilitation of trans kinship.

In becoming trans, one must understand that they, to any degree, are incongruent with the present gendered self. Recognizing this incongruence implies understanding how the world interacts and treats their gendered existence. Through simply subsisting in society, subjective transhood is birthed because the relations we form in the present feel off. Know here that I’m not arguing that transhood is defined by an incompatibility of mind and body, but rather that

individuals recognize their transhood through grasping the relation between the gendered self and the world. Detecting these relations ultimately leads to understanding how certain body parts are gendered to an extreme (penis, vagina, breasts, etc.) while others (arms, fingers, etc.) are not.

Our more malleable and performative features also become apparent in their relation to gender— for example, clothing choice, movement, and hair length. For the trans subject to become more coherent in the Lacanian sense, they must alter themselves. This does not imply an external change in features—though some choose to alter themselves in this way. It can, more importantly, be a change in recognition and internal identification. Through this alteration, the trans subject approaches their ideal ego. In this process,

the trans subject has had to have gone through two phases and thus has been familiarized with how the gendered self, both in its rigid and malleable forms, interacts with the world. As such, there is a distinct understanding of what, ever so vaguely, constitutes itself as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or anything else. The transgender gaze is this understanding of the gendered world that few cisgender people can grasp. Let us now further investigate the transgender gaze by applying it. Looking at myself, I become, cliché as it may be, my own harshest critic. I begin to notice all the microscopic hairs on my body that I know will never be noticeable to anyone else, yet whose existence bugs me and forces me to shave them all away. The transgender gaze is acting in full force. It’s the constant anxiety of fearing whether my voice is passing and whether or not my Adam’s

apple is bulging too much. It’s catching myself in the mirror and ensuring that I appear womanly enough— presentable... Of course, not everyone is a desperate transfemme attempting to become unclockable like me, so what I have said is by no means universal. However, perhaps what is more relatable to people across all trans identities is our awareness of how our experimentation and alteration of our bodies and internal recognition can profoundly impact how others treat us, and our self-worth. To return to my own experience, I derive a perverse pleasure from suturing the male gaze to the transgender gaze and being impressed with the feminine spectacle that is me being as smooth as an egg, as if there would be people inspecting all the nooks and crannies of my body to find hair.

In viewing others, everyone becomes a study guide for

me. In understanding their gendered self in relation to the world, I can alter myself accordingly to achieve my ideal relationship with the world. In the women around me—their clothing, shoes, jewelry, and mannerisms all features amass to a data bank of sorts that can be utilized for my benefit. The act of learning about other gendered bodies as a means to better our own existence is something that I believe is rather common in the trans experience.

We thus arrive at the explanation for why other trans subjects are easier to spot for the trans viewer and how the Sartrean gaze is reversed. Born from our

keen awareness of gendered features comes a special trans obsession with others’ being. We begin to notice the veins in the other’s hand, the sharpness of their jaw, and the thickness of their eyebrows. In the other becoming a transsuspect in your eyes, under the presumption that they have the desire to pass and never even become a trans-

a sense, you have evaluated their gendered performance, and you recognize their transhood. At this point, the above description appears to resemble some type of internalized transphobia, or what Halberstam would claim to be the male gaze’s obsession to prefer the literal over the figurative. However, there is a big difference here between those two alternative explanations.

suspect, the Sartrean gaze is reversed. You become ashamed and anxious because you have violated their existence by trapping them inside your gendered perception of the world. In

This brings us to the second major characteristic I mentioned earlier in this section. The gendered features that are seen here through the transgender gaze are not merely remnants of the past or a representation of maleness or femaleness but rather a part of a unique trans identity. In the Deleuzian sense, the transgender gaze forgoes representational and arborescent thinking but rather becomes antirepresentational and rhizomatic. Perhaps an

example might serve to clear this up. The trans woman’s penis is not a representation or remnant that is universal to the ideal male image, but instead becomes something new on its own the girl cock. There is nothing male about the girl cock: it is a girl’s penis, that no man possesses. The transgender gaze does not render the existence of the gendered feature to relate itself to the past gendered self but rather allows it to become part of a new coherent trans body. The gendered features exist only in relation to each other, not as representations of ideal images.

Through this gazing at one another, trans kinship is born. When we look upon other trans beings through the lens of the transgender gaze, our feeling is never one of disgust or repulsion. We might feel those two negative emotions, but such feelings come from internalized transphobia, not the transgender gaze itself.

Rather, the transgender gaze allows us to view others as coherent, unique beings. Through this gaze, we view each other’s transgressive existences as beautiful on their own, existences that do not need to be defined or confined by language or science. In recognizing transhood, we also recognize the common struggle of incongruence felt by us. Through the transgender gaze, we ultimately affirm transness as a way of life and begin to create new queer networks and facilitate ones already there. Building something together requires the recognition of the other, and it is only through the act of gazing, literally or not, that we take the first step toward kinship.

The Values We Don’t Talk About: A Conversation with Arnold Berleant

Conducted by Wenni Iben and edited by Wynona Barua

Arnold Berleant is a philosopher, pianist, and musical composer. He is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Long Island University and Past President of the International Association of Aesthetics. He is the author of several books and articles in philosophy, particularly in aesthetics, environmental aesthetics, and ethics, including Art and Engagement and Sensibility and Sense: The Aesthetic Transformation of the Human World, both of which cover topics discussed in this interview. Our discussion centers on Berleant’s aesthetic philosophy, to which he takes a naturalist approach that diverges significantly from traditional Western aesthetic philosophy. This interview was conducted by Wenni Iben and edited by Wynona Barua.

Gadfly: I’d like to start with a fairly broad question. There

seems to be a tendency within our society, both on an institutional level and on an individual level, to think of the aesthetic realm as inessential or of secondary importance, if it is seen as important at all. An easy example to point to is how art and music programs are often among the first to be cut by schools when funding is short. But it seems that you don’t think that the aesthetic realm is inessential or even necessarily separable from any other aspect of the social world. Why and how is the aesthetic significant to the human world?

Berleant: My view of aesthetics is founded on perception. Perception is the fundamental avenue on which we travel through the world, so that our journey, whether we choose it or not, is an aesthetic journey, so to speak: it’s a journey of experience, a journey of perception. The experience that aesthetics is concerned with is sensory experience— an experience of the world

sensorily, but also multidimensionally, because I don’t believe there’s pure sensation—certainly not in the way that British empiricists essentially talked about it.

Aesthetic experience is complex and filled with associations and meanings. For me (I haven’t written such a paper, but I may in the future), aesthetics is primary philosophy—it’s “first philosophy.”

[Editor’s Note: “first philosophy” is a term used to denote the philosophical study of the fundamental condition of existence. The term has often

been used to describe metaphysics, as in René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, in which Descartes ruminates on the nature of human existence, and in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, in which Aristotle describes metaphysics as the ‘study of being qua being’.]

It seems that you’re saying that because aesthetics comes from perception, aesthetic experience is inescapable. But, to me, it seems as though there is a difference between ‘direct perception’—like the perception of my desk as ‘brown’ and a sound as ‘loud’— and the aesthetic perception of this table as ‘beautiful,’ or this sound as ‘unsatisfying.’

Well, I think I understand what you’re saying: that perception is neutral, and the aesthetic would seem to be something else. I don’t

entirely agree with that. I think that all perception has an aesthetic. One of the things I’ve talked about in Sensibility and Sense is “negative aesthetics”: the perception of negative aesthetic experience. [This can reflect lost or frustrated possibilities for enrichment, as in banal design, or it can produce outright pain, for example, in the experience of dismay in witnessing the clear-cutting of an oldgrowth forest, or of revulsion when encountering kitsch.] Since, unfortunately, much of most people’s lives are colored by this negativity [whether it be in mundane building design or gaudy art] they don’t think of it as beauty and may not even think of it as ugliness. I use the term aesthetic offense, which is an experience that betrays the capability of perception to enhance our lives. And that’s true in all environments: it’s true in cities, it’s true in suburbia, it’s true in the countryside, and

it’s true in the wilderness.

So, you’re effectively saying that perception always has some sort of aesthetic element to it. Yes. In saying that, I’m not saying that there’s beauty in it: I’m saying there’s a value in it. If you think perception is neutral, think of riding in a subway car. In seeing the ads above the windows, you are confronted with perceptual stimuli, and most of it is offensive, whereas good design can be comforting. Do you think it would be fair to say that aesthetics is the normative aspect of perception? Yes, it’s normative in particular ways. I hadn’t thought about it in this way before, but it’s more in the sense that all perception, I think, has value. I don’t think perception is ever neutral— we would instead say that it’s “bland” or “uninteresting.”

I have to point out what’s probably obvious, which is that perception is always, in some way, aesthetic.

Perception allows us to be sensitive to the aesthetic negativity that occurs in perception, and unfortunately, most people’s perceptual world is, I believe, highly negative. The kind of reform I’d like to see in the world is to make it more positively aesthetic. It seems that, in recognizing perception as fundamental to aesthetics, you place aesthetic value in the mind of the perceiver rather than in the object (i.e., as a characteristic of an object to be discerned by an observer). In terms of aesthetic experience, then, what is the relationship between myself, as an observer capable of perception, and the object perceived by me?

I’m glad you asked that question, because it leads me to talk about a very fundamental aspect of

my views, which is that aesthetics demonstrates an experience that is not dualistic. There’s no subject, and there’s no object. This is a complex dynamic, which I tried to articulate in a book

called The Aesthetic Field. Aesthetic experience has four principal components that are not separate elements but contributing components: “the object,” the creative component, the performative component,

and the focus of attention of the object (the perceptual component).

The tradition that coalesced in the late 18th century with Kant’s Critique of Judgement [which takes beauty as an intrinsic quality of certain objects discernible only by a removed, “disinterested” party] is, for me, not only a misrepresentation of aesthetic experience but deeply misguiding.

conscious, and attentive.

I’m afraid that it took me a long time to realize the misleading character of the dualistic conception of the world. And of course, once I discovered Spinoza, I realized that he long ago recognized this, but many aestheticians and philosophers never got beyond Descartes.

The capacity of aesthetic awareness enables us to see a connection with other things and the connections that things have with us so that we see that we live in a world of interconnected relationships. And in those experiences that we call aesthetic, these relationships are highly perceptual,

In your book Sensibility and Sense, you caution readers against regarding aesthetic experience—or any experience, really—as a purely subjective event, even as you recognize perception as a fundamental factor in aesthetics. Could you say a little bit more about why we shouldn’t see aesthetic experience as purely subjective? Certainly. I don’t think there’s any such thing as pure subjectivity. Consciousness and perception are always informed by things outside the body, so to speak. They

involve our exchange with an environment. You’re sitting in your room: that’s an environment. I’m sitting in my study: that’s an environment. I look outside and see trees: that’s part of my environment. Perception is not internal: perception is a connection to the environment. Without an environment, we wouldn’t have perception. If our senses were completely closed off (I’m talking about more than our conventional five senses), it would be like being in a black hole, so to speak. It would be hell. So there’s no “inside” or “outside” when it comes to perception—there’s no side. Within your understanding of aesthetics, do you think there is room for “personal taste”?

of the time, I don’t think people look at shadows. We look at things that cause the shadows but ignore the shadows. They’re sort of negative. But shadows are fascinating. I discovered shadows last winter. They create a moving picture: as the sun moves, the shadows move, and so do the intricate relationships of the shadows to objects, which appear to move as well. So it’s a fascinating, moving panorama. So much of what we call taste is based on awareness. Now that I’m aware of (that is, more sensitive to) shadows, I see them much more consciously or directly: I see shadows in the grass now. I’m being a little facetious, but it’s a good personal example.

Personal taste seems to me to be influenced by—if not based on—the degree of awareness we’ve developed. My favorite example recently has been shadows. Most

I think taste is something that we can try to cultivate, and education makes a stab at it with courses like art appreciation and music appreciation, so they can be doors to dimensions

or regions of perception.

So taste is, you might say, personal values that are placed on perceptual experiences, influenced by education in experience. The way of living aesthetically that I’m describing is a kind of understanding that would open people up to developing a sense of taste and not tolerating what “experienced perceivers” regard as “bad taste.”

I think subjectivity in perception is a philosophical fiction, and I think that so much of philosophy, especially modern philosophy, is based on that false assumption. That’s why I think that aesthetic philosophy is “first philosophy”: it’s the primary condition from which we philosophize. Is that because aesthetic experience is one of, if not the most basic way in which we make normative value judgments?

Yes. As we discern characteristics of aesthetic experience and develop our philosophy of aesthetics, we are exploring a normative dimension of the world.

I’d like to move on towards the role of aesthetics in other areas of philosophy since you refer to aesthetics as first philosophy. Could you talk a little about your understanding of the relationship between aesthetics and ethics?

Maybe I should say that both aesthetics and ethics, as domains of philosophy, have broken this world of experience into these different categories. That doesn’t mean experiences come to us in categories. Experience is replete: it’s full. So I think that the focuses of these two branches of philosophy are a little different. Aesthetics focuses on perceptual venues and meanings; the focus of ethics is on human values— life values. These are our

categorizations. The world doesn’t come in these separate ways, I think. That’s what intrigued me when I wrote a paper on the aesthetics of terrorism. I think terrorism is one of the most ugly, destructive acts conceivable. But it has an aesthetic element in that it has a perceptual force and content. That is why terrorists do it. They are trying to make an impression; they’re trying to make the headlines and to publicize a cause. I think, in most cases, that’s true. So the values of the aesthetic and the ethical are fused in cases like that. But,

of course, not everybody sees it that way. They make ethical judgments about terrorism, which are obviously warranted— there are sociological and political judgments that should be made, as well as aesthetic ones. The thing about aesthetics is that it brings the negativities more directly home to us, the way photographs of people injured, maimed, and torn apart by explosions can do.

It’s interesting that you bring up photographs because there’s been a lot of writing on how photographs can be misleading. Do you think that, in that way, aesthetics can be misleading as well?

I think it’s interesting to ask where the meaning lies in aesthetic experience. It seems to me that the meaning is in the interpretation that the perceiver makes about a photograph or an object. One of the contributions

that developing aesthetic perception can provide is to get us to perceive directly without judgment, because as soon as we make a judgment, whether it be an aesthetic judgment or an ethical judgment, we are categorizing and evaluating perception on a standard other than aesthetic. Is your thinking that, once you’ve developed an awareness of the role the aesthetic plays in your everyday life, you can distinguish between the ethical values associated with some object and the effects the aesthetic quality of an object has on you?

Yes, I think you’re aware of these different kinds of values and areas of understanding and judgment, you become more discriminating, but at the same time, you become more sensitive to the fact that the scale of values is not uni-dimensional. For example, you might call

a picture of a tragic event ethically distressing, and yet as a picture, it could be visually moving. It’s good to be conscious of the difference, conscious of the intrusion of ethical judgments into aesthetic perception. But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be connected: they should, and they can make the aesthetic even more powerful. I’m thinking of combat scenes I’ve seen of what’s going on in Ukraine: horrifying and yet perceptually forceful with a powerful aesthetic component. I think it’s good to be able to perceive clearly and directly and not be distracted by moral judgments, political ideology, or any preconception that stands in the way of perception.

That’s funny. I think a lot of people would say something different: they would say to focus on the ethical or political aspects of something and not be distracted by the aesthetic

elements.

If something is complex, it is wise to be aware of the complexity and not be blind to it.

I would love to turn to a discussion of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. In particular, I was interested in this concept of the “perceptual commons” that you have. Can you describe what the “perceptual commons” is?

I must give due credit to the student I had many years ago, Clarice Allgood, who coined that term, which I seized upon because it’s such a perfect term. It’s the

idea that perception is not owned by anybody: that the world of perception is a commons. It’s like the traditional commons in the village center where everybody can graze their flocks because it’s a common ground. Well, the perceptual commons is the understanding that the world of perception is not owned— it’s not private. In this way, any individual, group, or organization that questions, blocks, or privatizes an element of the perceptual commons is doing an injustice to the world of other people. For instance, in some areas where water is not abundant and thereby precious, private companies have taken over the water supply and charge for and control its use. Well, water is not private property—water is part of the perceptual commons, just like the air is. I’m very conscious of the air that I breathe, and when there’s automobile exhaust, I feel as if I’m being poisoned.

The air is a perceptual commons and no one has the right to pollute it. This holds, I think, for changes in the organization of the Earth’s surface. These changes are public changes: they have a public value, and that value must be honored. My favorite example has to do with advertising signs on the highway. Just think of a road that offers a beautiful view with an ugly advertisement right in the middle of it. I think that that’s a social crime. Changes should not be made in the interests of private entities. The idea of a perceptual commons is that the earth— the planet—is the common ground of everyone, and no one has the right to monopolize or exclude others from the experience of it.

You also write that the perceptual commons can serve as some sort of basis for creating a new form of society.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it sounds like the perceptual commons serves as a reminder that we also have to respect the relations that we have with each other within society, the relation that we have with the environment, and with every other being that needs the environment to live.

That’s absolutely true. I think it’s an intrusion to belch smoke into the atmosphere. So that recognizing the

commonality of environment and of environmental perception is very valuable. I’ve never developed this in anything I’ve written, but it is a good direction because I think it’s important to see the social values in our perceptual experience.

For example, sometimes people will talk so loudly that nobody in their vicinity can carry on a conversation. That’s a perceptual intrusion. Another example is how I was outside a building in a small city the other day when I heard this loud “music” coming from a vehicle a block away. The person playing the music was having a good time without thinking about how it was affecting other people. So perception or awareness breeds consideration and social sensitivity. You can see all the different ways in which aesthetics has social implications.

The way you describe it reminds me a lot of the way that we normally think of “natural rights” in the United States, where everyone has the right to do as they please, as long as their actions don’t infringe on anyone else’s rights to do the same.

Yes, Mills’ On Liberty says just that. Yes, it’s a feeling that you could extend to the perceptual commons as well. Of course, it’s very hard to do anything that doesn’t affect other people. But to be conscious of the social effects of one’s actions that, I think, is a mark of civilization.

Paradise Lost: Hawaiian Tourism and Corrosive Desire

Keith Peterson

The Hawaiian Islands: the Midwest of the Pacific, an American center of notquite-foreign paradise, and capital-H Home for the majority of my life. The first of these titles comes from an off-hand quip I made while growing up on the island of Maui. The “Midwest of the Pacific” is about as geographically midwest as the continental midwest (read: not very, it is physically rather eastern), lined with small and isolated towns connected by nauseatingly repetitive fields, and with nothing to do but listen to the emo music that typifies the placeless experience. While this nickname described my feelings as a teenager trapped between the confining borders of a depthless sea, it is only somewhat accurate. Aside from the obvious (Michigan is not an island), Hawaii comprises a unique situation: differing from the continental United States both due to its colonial

history and subsequent relationship with tourism, it is best defined by its perpetual line-walking. It is a part of the United States but never quite perceived that way (whether in an anti-imperialist lens or an exoticizing one), a historically self-sufficient chain of islands but generally regarded as tourism-reliant, and a place I call home but somewhere I could never have stayed.

For those unfamiliar with the Islands beyond the popular understanding or a general awareness of their existence, this somewhat bleak conception may come as a surprise. A clear discrepancy exists between my perception of Hawaii as a barren “Midwest of the Pacific” and the shiny advertised images of sunsets witnessed from resort tiki bars. However, I believe this dissonance to be a feature, not a bug, of the tourist economy. That is to say, tourism relies on obscuring the view of the

underlying wasteland it created in order to maintain a perfectly crafted image. In this article, I will set out to unmask this image and explore the idea of Hawaii’s tourism as desire, an endless search for a missing piece of the self within a hyperreal fantasy world. I will also discuss desire’s corrosive and mutilating function; specifically, how this has unfolded in the Islands to produce what I call a wasteland in physical, cultural, and linguistic senses.

To understand the meaning of tourism as desire, I will start by explaining what I mean by desire itself. Here begins a small detour into

Lacanian psychoanalysis: the theory of psychological development in relation to desire, language, and society as conceived by Jacques Lacan. Consider the infant, who lacks the burden of language to give meaning and weight to social expectation, conflict, and identification: their world is structured entirely around innate drives and the resulting jouissance (roughly translated to “enjoyment”) their satisfaction creates. But this all-encompassing state of jouissance does not last, as socialization soon occurs. Socialization, which coincides with the initiation of language, forces us to face the reality of our separate existence—for instance, by verbalizing the distinction between “I” and “you.” This has two effects: on one hand, we can now understand the idea of society and our own place in it, while on the other, our seemingly ideal state of unmediated jouissance is

lost, as society and language now regulate the pursuit of desires. When coming from a place where jouissance rules all, its collapse brings about the crumbling of our entire world and sense of being. In the instant where we acquire the language to describe this jouissance, we experience a nebulous, dissatisfactory feeling that some crucial part of ourselves is missing. In place of this unknown missing piece, we spend our lives shuffling through potential fixes, be it a new relationship, a new job, or perhaps, a vacation to the

beautiful and exotic Pacific.

This unknown missing piece of the self is what Lacan called objet petit a. Despite its name, this is not an object in the physical sense nor directly the object of desire. Rather, it constitutes multiple things: the void left by our past of unmediated jouissance, the root cause of all of our desires, and all of the temporary objects we desire, which we use in attempts to fill the void. It is important to note that objet petit a is fundamentally paradoxical: socialization and language both cause

the unknown lack within the self and enable it to be pursued. This causes a state of endless chasing, of eternal desire for an “object” we will never find. This begs the question: why do we desire what we do? Philosopher and Lacanian scholar Slavoj Žižek writes in The Plague of Fantasies that “desire is, of course, metonymical; it shifts from one object to another, through all these displacements, however, desire nonetheless retains a minimum of formal consistency, a set of phantasmic features which, when they are encountered in a positive object, make us desire this object.” The identities of particular objects we desire are no accident; threaded subconsciously between our desires are common forms or features determined by personal experiences with our own objet petit a, whatever that may be. Put simply, we all have a

unique “type” in our desires, whether or not we recognize it. While this presents most obviously in romantic interpersonal relationships (such as a man who prefers blondes), beyond this realm the same principle of metonymy remains.

With Hawaii, common desirable features might include images of escapism, of beauty, of unlimited consumption, or of entertainment. These can be reified through various cogs in the tourism machine: long ocean-bounding flights denoting physical otherness, silent beaches allowing escape from work and responsibilities, multi-storey malls with plentiful luxury goods for purchase, or cultural performances catered to viewers’ presences and desires. While particular reasons underscoring tourist desire are unique to each visitor, many share a quality: the escape into fantasy. Insofar as the objet

petit a is a loss of a state of fantasy—a paradoxical and artificial escape soaked in jouissance—the object of desire (in this case, Hawaii) is itself fantastical. Consider the glossy image of the Islands as promoted by tourists and popular culture. What are pristine warm beaches, sunset cocktails, rainforest adventures, personal helicopter rides, exaggerated luau performances, and all-youcan-eat buffets, but signifiers of a certain themed fantasy? This fantasy is entrenched in escapism and is perceived to be so physically and culturally otherworldly that one is as close to pure unadulterated jouissance as one was at infancy. If desire is an unending search for an impossible return to jouissance, it follows that a perfect site for desire is a place that is so other it is largely perceived as primitive, as infantile. The islands’ exoticism is key to their status. Hawaii is

othered: physically, by its island geography and temporal distance; culturally and linguistically, due to such historical differences being emphasized and advertised. Yet, it is easily accessible and close to home for U.S. travelers due to its political history (being a part of the U.S. has perks to travelers: no currency exchange, no pesky unfamiliar language, no passport required—hell, there’s even a Costco?!). Hawaii walks this crucial line between harboring a missing fantastical otherness the psyche seeks out without being too “other” to become inaccessible. But then, why not stay? If Hawaii’s escape is a near-perfect realization of desire’s goals, why not extend that vacation to create a perpetual tourism that infinitely fulfills the insatiable yearning for jouissance? This brings us to an important distinction: the object of tourist desire

is itself artifice. The islands appear to be tailored to this desire, creating a polished hyperreal image of land and culture. You cannot stay too long, you cannot swerve too far off the perfectly maintained path lest you break the simulation and find once more that the desiring void within you is still empty. The French theorist Jean Baudrillard describes what is meant here by “simulation” in Simulacra and Simulation: “Pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact … whereas simulation threatens the difference between the ‘true’ and the ‘false,’ the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary.’”

“Artificial” Hawaii is not simply a once-a-year show, or a falsehood which can be turned off. The Hawaii of advertisements is “true” in the sense that this image is baked irrefutably into the fabric of the land and history, but it is “false” in the sense that it was not always like this—this is not a “natural” state or development. Even now, when the culture of tourism has become so intertwined with the islands, the image of Hawaii is certainly not without maintenance: both cultural reproduction of desirable images and its physical upkeep.

This maintenance, then, arrives in these two distinct forms: physical maintenance and the maintenance of perception, which has moved alongside technology from primarily cinematic ventures to democratically reproduced images on social media. These two systems continue the cycle of tourist desire

and strengthen the islands’ current reliance on the tourist economy. While studies of cinema concerning Hawaii are extensive, in short, a significant portion of the islands’ exotic paradisiacal image since before their statehood can be attributed to its Hollywood depictions. In Hollywood’s Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War, Delia Caparoso Konzett writes that “Hollywood’s cinematic apparatus was and is instrumental in construing the mythology of contemporary Hawaii and its incorporation into the United States,” and “as such, it makes artificial and externally imposed changes appear as natural and self-evident, with Hawaii appearing as a legitimate new space representing US interests.” This active and intentional cultural overwriting not only masks the truth of Hawaii’s colonization and annexation, it turns the

islands into their own unique fetishized object. While I would argue that, presently, cinematic depictions of Hawaii are not so central to its outside cultural perception, this is only due to a natural sequential replacement to film: the world of social media. Instead of propagandizing films, copious amounts of Instagram beach pictures and exotic travel vlogs continue the social reproduction of tourist desire in the age of instant

technology. Perhaps even more sinister is the physical maintenance required for Hawaii’s image, due to the exploitation of the real people and natural

resources it necessitates— the gallons and gallons of water funneled into pristine green golf courses, the main tourist roads being paved and repaved to imagine an eternal newness, and the artifice of resorts perfectly landscaped with the hands of local underpaid labor.

The issue with desire stems from its corrosive nature. As Lacan said in his Seminar XI, “I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you… I mutilate you.” This is why I describe Hawaii as a wasteland—the inevitable result of maintaining the simulation central to tourist desire. Let me give some imagery: every piece of land without distinguished economic function is brown. This summer, the very region I lived in, Upcountry Maui, was restricted in its water use with a $500 fine to those who dared to water their lawn and attempted imitation of resort paradise’s greenery. I remember back

home in an environmental science class when the teacher said that Hawaii is one of the most biologically diverse regions on the entire planet. It just so happens that it also has nearly 400 endangered and threatened species according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a painful ecological irony. Equally endangered is Hawaii’s very language: the University of Hawaii Foundation notes how in 1985, after nearly a century of the native language being banned in schools, only 32 children under the age of 18 were fluent. Moreover, as the indigenous Hawaiian activist Haunani-Kay Trask writes in “Lovely Hula Lands: Corporate Tourism and the Prostitution of Hawaiian Culture,” “today, glass and steel shopping malls with layered parking lots stretch over what once was the most ingeniously irrigated taro lands, feeding millions of Hawaiians over thousands of years.” Now,

these same shopping malls are increasingly abandoned: the K-Mart on Dairy Road is now nothing more than a U-Haul storage lot, while the malls of Maui have all been threatened with foreclosure. Everything has been chewed up and prepared to be spat out.

This is our Hawaiian gothic: images of a land and culture that once was, now replaced with nothing but simulacra, the image without the origin, a visual and physical cleaving between the world of tourist fantasy and the wasteland found beneath. It is no surprise to me that the royal capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Lahaina, is now a primary site of this experiential severance: resort complexes boasting their own private luaus are mere miles from the environmentally barren neighborhoods which make up the most impoverished parts of Maui. Fantasy and wasteland are two sides of

the same corroded coin. The problem with desire is that the current object is never enough. The desiring void always yearns for more—more escape, more pleasure, more jouissance— whatever external sacrifice or mutilation or exploitation is necessary to chase that eternally suspended goal.

I do not speak of “wasteland” out of pessimism, but rather an honest depiction of Hawaii as it stands today.

The contrasting images and experiences of tourist fantasy versus wasteland call back to Jean Baudrillard’s simulation, where the sign or image meant to represent a reality now provides a different function. His third stage of the sign speaks of the image that “masks the absence of a profound reality.” If wasteland is to be barren, ignored, and hidden away, then Hawaii’s absence is covered by its artifice. Here, absence is only visible in these placesthat-once-were and in an apt

image for the very idea of wasteland: the dump, with its unceasing plastic bag flights and glaringly explicit sterility. You cannot look away; you cannot pretend. Abandoned ex-sugar cane fields, long-ignored concrete jungles, residential

of paradise. But I argue that this unmasking is necessary; the acknowledgment of wasteland serves as a starting place for renewal. You must look; you cannot pretend anymore.

regions of undeniable poverty, the landfill and the winding road which takes you there, the lives lived for generations outside of resort acreage—tourists do not dare here, lest they unmask the perfect image

Haunani-Kay Trask wrote in 1991 in her previously referenced essay that “Hawaiians have been struggling for over 20 years to achieve a land base and some form of political sovereignty on the same level as American Indians.” Two years later, on the 100th year anniversary of the end of the Kingdom of Hawaii, the United States issued an Apology Resolution which formally apologized for the nature of the annexation. Despite being a supposed act of responsibility which acknowledged the U.S. government’s participation in the Kingdom’s overthrowing and the Native Hawaiians’ residual claim to their lands, the Resolution ultimately led nowhere. In testimony before the

U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, legal scholars made it clear that the particular diction of the word “whereas” used in the Resolution has “no binding legal effect” beyond clarification of intent. In other words, the law does not actually do anything. The legal status of indigenous Hawaiians remained the same.

Thirty-one years after Trask’s work, the fight for Hawaiian sovereignty is nowhere near complete. With decadelong movements such as Protect Mauna Kea actively fighting against building on sacred grounds and increased discussion on the detrimental effects of tourism over the COVID-19 pandemic, Native Hawaiian activism is as strong and crucial as ever. I believe that grassroots movements such as these not only force an unflinching public view on Hawaii’s wasteland, but also have proven effective

in ways moderate legal efforts often have not. The University of Hawaii Foundation describes the endangerment of the native language as mentioned previously, but also the resulting bottom-up revitalization it is currently undergoing: “The 2010 census reported that 24,000 households identified Hawaiian as their dominant language.” This revival occurred as a direct result of collective indigenous efforts to teach more children the language through an immersive education movement, a testament to the power of shared action and a symbol of hope. If we are ever to recover from the corrosion of tourist desire, and of the consequences which brought about this wasteland, we must push back against the Islands being used. We must push back and continue fighting. Our solidarity is more important now than ever.

Misplaced Concreteness and Mental Disorders

I. Introduction

While the terms “mental health” and “mental disorder” are ubiquitous, their widespread use and acceptance are remarkably recent. The notion of there being a mental component of health and wellbeing that needs maintenance, care, and treatment just like the body does is new: only a century ago, medical practitioners generally dismissed persisting mental problems as ill humors, or—less generously—as character defects. Today, many of us are inclined to attribute persisting mental problems to diagnosable mental disorders and to call for their treatment just like we do for diseases like cancer. According to the John Hopkins Institute, just over a quarter of the American population suffers from what the American Psychiatric Association considers a diagnosable mental disorder—a disease

it deems pharmacologically treatable—in a given year.

Every science starts out as philosophy, and the medical sciences are no exception. Specifically, the medical sciences of the mind like psychology and psychiatry are still young and at the philosophical stage where underlying assumptions need to be clarified and basic questions need to be articulated. While philosophy remains foundational in even the most mature of sciences—like physics—the philosophical foundations of the sciences of the mind remain contentious and insecure. In regards to mental disorders, we are still faced with the fundamental task of identifying our object of inquiry—just what sorts of things these disorders are. We need to ask and address the following questions: Are these mental disorders intrinsically present in the mind or brain independently of identification and diagnosis, or is their

existence contingent on recently formulated diagnostic categories? Assuming they do exist, at what level (neurological, psychological, social, etc.) should we examine and attempt to understand them? Should they be considered diseases akin to physiological diseases, or are they some other kind of “thing” entirely?

II. Mental Disorders and Misplaced Concreteness

If a mental disorder is a disease, it is one that cannot be pulled apart from its symptoms and understood in and of itself. A disorder like bipolar depression,

with its characteristic mood oscillations, is not analogous to a physiological disease like cirrhosis and its hallmark symptom of jaundice. In the case of cirrhosis, it is clear just what causes the jaundice: the scarring of the liver prevents it from removing the chemical bilirubin—a yellow-tinged waste product—from the blood, which then causes yellowing of the skin and eyes. But, in the case of bipolar disorder, it is less clear what causes its hallmark symptom of mood oscillations; indeed, there does not seem to be a disease that exists apart from the symptoms.

My use of bipolar disorder as an example is not without some personal investment on my part, as I myself have been diagnosed with this disorder and at times struggle with a rather severe form of it. When I first went to see a psychiatrist about my sustained bouts of deep depression that, like

clockwork, follow similarly sustained bouts of elation, I simply reported these to him and elaborated on their frequency and intensity. There was no examination. My psychiatrist did not closely examine my brain in search of some locatable disease that causes my bouts of elation and depression. I simply reported my symptoms and he gave me my diagnosis. Moreover, unlike jaundice, my symptoms could not be seen, and my psychiatrist had nothing more than my self-reporting on which to base his assessment.

Despite the absence of some special brain scan for detecting bipolar disorder, some might insist that the disease which causes my symptoms, while not yet identifiable, must nonetheless be somewhere in my brain or central nervous system. But even if there were some identifiable abnormality in

the brain that correlates with the symptoms of bipolar disorder, a psychiatrist would not be in any better of a position to locate the disorder in the brain in the way cirrhosis can be located in the liver, since the abnormality itself could very well be just another symptom. Moreover, insofar we can imagine a case where a patient possesses liver scarring without the hallmark symptom of jaundice, we can imagine a case where a patient possesses this abnormality in their brain but does not experience the mood oscillations. While we would not hesitate to diagnose the former patient with cirrhosis, we likely would indeed hesitate to diagnose the latter patient with bipolar disorder.

When we insist on there being some concrete, locatable disease for a mental disorder that causes its symptoms, we are guilty of what the mathematician

and philosopher Alfred Whitehead aptly called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (also known as the reification fallacy): mistakenly attributing thinghood where no identifiable thing can be found, and drawing hard boundaries where there are none. To insist that my bipolar depression is some physical entity that causes my mood oscillations—just like cirrhosis causes jaundice—is to draw boundaries between symptoms and disease when there are no such boundaries.

III. Systematic Misplaced Concreteness and the Diagnostic Model

Currently, a charge of misplaced concreteness is being leveled against the standard approach to mental disorders from within the community of mental health practitioners itself. The prominent

English psychologist Lucy Johnstone has made an influential but controversial case that we should reject the diagnostic model of mental health altogether. For an article series called Conversations in Critical Psychiatry, Psychiatric Times

published a lively discussion in which the psychiatrist Awais Aftab, a proponent of the diagnostic model, interviews Lucy Johnstone. Rather than psychiatric diagnosis, Johnstone urges mental health practitioners

to adopt what she, along with a team of like-minded psychologists, have formulated and called the Power Threat Meaning Framework: a conceptual alternative to psychiatric diagnosis that she says can help “people to create more hopeful narratives or stories about their lives and their difficulties, instead of seeing themselves as blameworthy, weak, deficient, or ‘mentally ill.’” While Aftab is open to alternative approaches, he is slightly impatient with Johnstone’s closed attitude to the standard diagnostic approach because, while it may not work for everyone, it certainly does—as he maintains—for many individuals.

Johnstone rejects the diagnostic model entirely because it attributes to these disorders—which what she calls forms of “severe distress,” in a deliberate avoidance of diagnostic language—an objective

medical reality that should not be assumed unless it can be unequivocally shown that they are caused by medically-identifiable defects in the brain. As she says, “If you have a reasonably complete hypothesis, based on a person’s life experiences about why they are having mood swings or feeling suicidal, then you don’t need another competing

hypothesis that says, and it is also because you have bipolar disorder/clinical depression/borderline personality disorder.” More generally, positing the existence of some disorder

in addition to the person’s symptoms or stress is, at best, perfectly redundant, since all there is as evidence for the disorder is the symptoms—and there is no additional evidence for some isolatable entity that causes such symptoms. Moreover, this way of thinking may ensnare both the psychiatrist and patient into a vicious logical circle where the existence of the disorder is inferred from the symptoms, and the symptoms are explained by way of appeal to the disorder. This circular thinking is vicious because it is disempowering for the individual and might even reinforce their disorder (or distress); if a person views their distress as symptoms being caused by a disease that they cannot control rather than as a “reasonable reaction to adversity,” they are more likely to passively accept their distress and succumb to their diagnosis. In other words, they may be

disinclined to work toward a solution in which they can assume an active role. Therefore, the diagnostic framework can diminish the role of agency in managing and possibly overcoming the patient’s distress.

In contrast, Aftab maintains that different approaches to mental health need not be mutually exclusive, but in fact can be mutually illuminating. He insists that Johnstone’s charges against the diagnostic approach are “restricted to a rather specific biomedical understanding of diagnosis, in which the diagnosis is incompatible with meaning and agency and ignores personal and social context.” However, Johnstone is less concerned with what she sees as an abstract metaphysical debate over the nature of these disorders or forms of distress, and more with how diagnostic psychiatry cultivates a clinical culture. She characterizes this culture

as one where disorder labels “are applied by doctors and nurses, working in hospitals and clinics” in a manner that reinforces the message that “they need to be managed by drugs just like diabetes,” and that patients are powerless against their distress without medical intervention. Rather than diagnosis, Johnstone advocates for a method known as formulation, where the therapist and client work together to build a narrative that carefully situates the client’s distress in the context of their lives to locate a specific source of trauma—however severe— and work toward resolution. She maintains that this approach has been quite successful, even with more severe cases, such as what is typically diagnosed as schizophrenia. It is important to note that this trauma need not be instantiated by some specific event, but might consist of less severe but frequent and consistent

micro-traumas, such as being treated poorly, but not necessarily violently, on a regular basis. Additionally, it could be a widelyenveloping trauma that, as such, is difficult to pin down to any particular instance, like generally feeling alienated from a world in which every economic exchange entails suffering somewhere down the supply chain. Much easier to pin down, it could be the trauma of being one of countless people who directly suffer from such exchanges. In any case, Johnstone urges practitioners to “shift from the question of what’s wrong with you to what’s happened to you.”

IV. Misplaced Concreteness Verses Misplaced Abstractness

In Johnstone’s view, when mental disorders—ranging from anxiety to depression to even schizophrenia— are viewed as symptoms

caused by independent diseases rather than distress that can be traced back to adversity and trauma, concreteness is woefully misplaced. For Johnstone, concrete thinghood is being attributed to where there exists no concrete, locatable, and identifiable thing, leaving the diagnosed patient powerless against their distress as a patient with terminal stage cirrhosis is against the loss of their liver. However, from the fact that there is no concrete thing, it does not follow that there is no disease. To take this logical leap is to commit what I will inversely call the fallacy of misplaced abstractness, failing to acknowledge the existence and role of such disorders in the suffering of countless people. While misplaced concreteness may preclude the patient’s agency by reifying their disorder, misplaced abstractness may lead to the outright dismissal of the patient’s

distress, particularly when it does not appear to be amenable to therapy. Take my bipolar disorder as an example: I have experienced rapid oscillations between blissful contentment and debilitating bouts of depression that have, throughout much of my life, recurred independently of good or bad circumstances since my adolescence. How would Johnstone address a patient (or client as she prefers) such as myself who does not have any experiences of adversity that I can pinpoint to explain my distress? If she nonetheless

insisted that I do have such experiences, however unidentified, would she not be guilty of a distinct sort of misplaced concreteness that pushes me to ascribe trauma where there is none—that may lead me to blame people who are, in fact, innocent? Furthermore, how can she be sure that my disorder does not have some organic cause in my brain or elsewhere? Might she be hasty to rule out my discord being due to “perverted action of various glands which physiology will yet discover” as William James put it? If psychiatrists tend to be guilty of the fallacy of the supremacy of the particle, might Johnstone be guilty of precluding the particle?

That said, I would never insist on exclusively zeroing in on my brain to locate my disorder and barring out any consideration of my life history and social context. Moreover, even if there is

some identifiable defect in my brain, it would not show the direction of causation between the disorder and that defect. As I suggested above, the defect in my brain itself could be just another symptom of my disorder, and the phenomenon of neuroplasticity—where experience is shown to physically alter the brain— suggests that the defect could be removed along Johnstonian lines without medical intervention. So while I refuse to misplace abstractness on my disorder and deny its existence altogether, I do not wish to misplace concreteness, either. That leaves me with two opposing fallacies, somewhere between which must lie the truth.

V. Misplace Concreteness: Treat the Abstract as Concrete

It should be noted that when Whitehead coined the fallacy of misplaced

concreteness he did not think it should be avoided altogether like most fallacies are. Instead, he considered its occasional adoption to be useful—if not necessary—for scientific theory. As he says, “We must note (the fallacy’s) astounding efficiency as a system of concepts for the organization of scientific research.” For Whitehead, every “thing,” from a tree to a disorder, is a moving and changing process as opposed to a fixed thing— embedded in a moving and changing network of other similarly moving and changing processes. Concreteness is misplaced when a part of this moving and always changing network is abstracted from the rest of the network and treated as an independent stable object rather than the dependent, changing process that it is. In other words, the fallacy consists in treating an abstraction as a concrete thing. But in order for science to conduct

a narrowly-focused inquiry into any particular part of the network, it must artificially separate that part, and momentarily entertain a fiction in which the fact of its fundamental dependence on the rest of the network is omitted. Take a tree, for example: while a tree may appear to be a stable and isolatable entity, it is in fact deeply interwoven with its surrounding ecology, and is changing at all times. That stoically straight trunk with its branches are always growing and releasing oxygen into and pulling carbon dioxide out of the surrounding air, as its roots dig deep down into an underground mycelium network to exchange nutrients with other

similarly-interdependent trees. Concreteness is misplaced when the tree is abstracted from the rest of the forest and treated as an independent, stable thing; however, such misplacement amounts to a necessary fiction in which disbelief must temporarily be suspended when inquiring into the forest’s constitution. Indeed, much of our empirical knowledge about all of these facets of the forest—the mycelia, the nutrients, the oxygen, and the carbon dioxide—is the result of an inquiry into each one that operates on the basis of this necessary fiction, the omission of which would prevent scientific inquiry from taking aim.

Whitehead’s account of the fallacy is more nuanced than the name suggests. Rather than indiscriminately attacking all instances of the fallacy, Whitehead suggests that the fallacy might be helpful in some

cases, while less so—if not outright harmful—in others. He clarifies that, as long as misplaced concreteness “doesn’t abstract away everything that is important in our experience, the scientific thought which confines itself to them will arrive at a variety of important truths relating to our experience.” We can learn all sorts of things about the forest by honing in on a tree and forgetting about the rest of the forest, just as we can learn about the body by honing in on an individual organ. The fallacy is only problematic when such “excluded things are important in your experience,” in which case “your modes of thought are not fitted to deal with them.” When trying to uncover the etiology of a disease in a particular organ, zeroing in on that particular organ only gets us so far if the disease’s cause occurs at the level of the organism as a whole. For example, type 2 diabetes,

involving the pancreas, might stem from poor lifestyle choices including poor diet, lack of exercise, and even lack of sleep.

VI. Concluding Questions and Remarks

If misplaced concreteness is often useful in science, might it ever be useful when applied to mental disorders? Lucy Johnstone argues convincingly that such misplacement creates more harm than good by abstracting from important facts like social context and life history. Yet Johnstone’s conclusion overlooks cases in which it may be helpful

for some individuals; for instance, treating my bipolar disorder as a disease over which I lack direct control may help me by allowing me to distance myself from it. Not only would this prevent me from outright blaming myself for possessing the disorder, but it may also save me from a great deal of inner turmoil that arises from worrying over how my thoughts, activities, and relationships might negatively affect how I cope with my disorder. The assumption of a neat separation between my disorder and the rest of my being may save me from a lot of unnecessary stress. Ultimately, such a separation may prevent me from becoming excessively preoccupied with my disorder, allowing me to focus more productively on things in which I can more readily engage—like those thoughts, activities, and relationships.

That being said, it should not

be ignored that the concept of misplaced concreteness, as Whitehead originally formulated, only has to do with the sorts of things that can be unequivocally picked out by the sciences. Although a tree cannot be genuinely severed from its surrounding ecology, it can serve as a tangible fulcrum for the entire web of relationships in which it is embedded. For a mental disorder, no such fulcrum is present. While the brain may suggest itself as a clear candidate for such a fulcrum, I have already shown that the disorder cannot simply be identified with some part of the brain, even if that part is correlated with the symptoms of the disorder in all cases. It is not merely my brain that has bipolar disorder; it is me, myself, that has it. And this self, like the tree, is fundamentally dependent on the broader network in which it is embedded; but, unlike the tree, this self cannot be

empirically detected and unequivocally picked out by the sciences. More pointedly, we can learn about the world when we isolate the tree from its context in a way that we cannot when we isolate me from mine. Misplacing concreteness on

the tree is benign as long as the rest of the forest is not relevant to our purposes, but misplacing concreteness on myself severs me from my contextual roots and abstracts away what makes me who I am.

Like Aristotle’s account of

virtue as a golden mean, the truth lies somewhere between two opposing fallacies. On the one hand, we should not ignore social context and life history when we look at mental disorders, nor should we rule out the role of human agency in managing and possibly overcoming them. On the other hand, we should not write them off as figments of our diagnostic imagination and dismiss the suffering of countless people. While certainly erring toward the latter, Johnstone stops short of the extreme by acknowledging that severe distress is a serious problem for many that needs to be addressed. However, she risks woefully overlooking cases where the distress does not appear amenable to her formulation-oriented therapeutic approach. Furthermore, if we want to understand these disorders, we would be remiss not to consult the very individuals who suffer from them, and

listen closely to what they have to say about them. We should not dismiss cases like my own where the mental disorder appears to be the heaviest, hardest, and most unyielding slab of concrete there is—that which stubbornly persists independent of context. While I wholeheartedly acknowledge the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, there are times when my disorder seems more fixed than concrete itself.

Junk Science: Peter Woit on String Theory

Conducted by William Freedman and edited by Oscar Luckett

Dr. Peter Woit is a senior lecturer in the Math Department at Columbia University. His research focuses on the intersection between pure math and theoretical physics, specifically using mathematical structures to unify Quantum Mechanics and gravity. Dr. Woit is a notable critic of String Theory, publishing the book Not Even Wrong and the blog of the same name to try and combat what he sees as a growing wave of unscientific practices in modern physics. This interview was conducted by William Freedman and edited Oscar Luckett.

Gadfly: First, could you give us a brief primer on String Theory and its goals?

Woit: It’s a long story, and it’s one reason I wrote a book, Not Even Wrong. So String Theory first appeared in the

late 60s or early 70s as a different set of fundamental degrees of freedom than in the standard theories we’re working with.

You can think of the standard theories we’re working with as, at some basic level, being about particles and quantum theory of certain particles. String Theory, instead of being about point-like particles, is about one-dimensional loops— objects which have a lot more degrees of freedom. The original hope was that String Theory would be used to solve problems like how protons work, and that never really worked out the way people wanted. Then, in the early 70s, we got this wonderful unified theory called the Standard Model. One of its problems is that it didn’t really tell you about gravity. It didn’t really give you a quantum theory of gravity or unify with gravity. So right about 1984, there was all of a sudden a huge change in the field that

people had been mostly abandoning the things that they’ve been trying to do, especially the people who are more mathematically oriented, and started working on this project of can we get a unified theory of quantum gravity and other interactions using String Theory.

My argument would be that this was an idea which never worked out. Maybe the simplest thing to say about why it didn’t work out is that what they were trying to do was to start with 10 spacetime dimensions. The theory was that strings most simply move in 10 spacetime dimensions, but we only see four, so you have to do something with the other six. The initial hope was that there were a limited number of consistent things you could do with the other six. But I think the bottom line just turned out to be: there’s so many things you can do with the other six dimensions. You can get

pretty much anything you want out of this. So it ends up being a vacuous idea that can never predict anything. It can’t really tell you anything about anything useful or give you a useful model of the world, which is going to constrain anything.

It seems like critiques of String Theory can be sorted into two categories: scientific concerns about the math or its specific correctness, and epistemological concerns over its falsifiability, ability to generate predictions, etc. Are these really distinct concerns, and if so, how do you distinguish between the two?

I think the arguments that people later got into about falsifiability are just an artifact of the fact that they

actually had a failed theory that really didn’t work. I would argue that they’re trying to change the grounds of how you evaluate whether something works or not instead of admitting that this just doesn’t work. I would actually go so far as to claim some of this was actually in bad faith. Instead of being willing to admit that an idea wasn’t working, they were trying to say, “Well, okay, the standard ways in which you understand a scientific idea and how you evaluate the idea and whether it works or not, we have to change those.” I personally was shocked to see that happen. So in your eyes, the change in the epistemological requirements of a scientific theory was a reaction to a failure? It was an attempt to avoid failure. The sociological problem is that if you’ve been working on some research program for 20

years, and you have a huge amount invested in it, admitting that it doesn’t work and can’t work is extremely painful and carries a huge cost to you personally in terms of your career, your self-image, your ability to get a grant, your ability to get your students employed, how your colleagues look at you, and people are just not willing to accept that cost and admit what has happened. They’ll start saying, “Well, maybe it’s not really so bad, the standard way you think about falsifiability isn’t really relevant, you should be evaluating what I’ve done in a different way.” And I think that’s really a bad idea.

How does String Theory play into the traditional models of epistemology? I’m thinking specifically of Karl Popper and people of his vein, where it has to be able to generate a prediction and has to be able to be disproven. Does String Theory satisfy those

requirements? Or does it need to change the bounds of epistemology to be valid?

is very hard to evaluate an idea at a specific time. You can argue about how we evaluate an idea where you are at a given point. It’s much easier to decide to look at how an idea is evolving.

There are a lot of well-known problems with Popper and falsifiability. I think people in the philosophy of science have always been very well aware that the so-called demarcation problem of saying, “here’s when you’re no longer doing science,” is not so simple when you’re doing science. Unfortunately, the best thing that I’ve seen in philosophy of science, the most relevant thing, I only found out about after writing Not Even Wrong. There’s the notion of whether a research program is progressive or degenerative. I think the way I would say it is that it

If you start with an idea like String Theory, it’s very hard initially to say, “Well, is String Theory right or wrong?” Because you don’t completely understand it, there clearly are lots of ways you can change the idea and lots of possible things that can happen. What you can evaluate is, in some sense, the derivative: what direction is it going? You can look at an idea and say, “Okay, this is where it was in 1984. And this is where it was 20 years later,” and compare and say, “Was this progressive? Was this making progress on the problems that it initially posed for itself and that it was going somewhere?” Or was it degenerative, in that it just started making more and more excuses for things not working out? I think

String Theory is a classic example of a degenerating research program.

It seems like one draw to String Theory is its elegance, specifically that if it is true, it describes the entire universe with a surprising amount of brevity. Similarly, equations like the Dirac equation and Einstein’s e=mc2 are lauded for their ability to describe complex concepts with relatively small equations. Are elegance and simplicity valid reasons to prefer a theory? Or do they just distract from something more important, like correctness?

I think elegance and simplicity are extremely important. One way you tell a successful theory for something like the Dirac equation is that there’s some very, very large ratio between the non-trivial implications of some particular structure and what it takes to tell you that structure. I can write down

something in a couple of lines which has huge numbers of implications for the world, which then turn out to be true. Having that really powerful idea is really the thing we’re looking for.

My argument about String Theory has always been that the problem with String Theory is that you don’t actually know what it is. So String Theory, from the beginning, has always been not a specific thing but a bunch of hopes and dreams that something exists. So when people talk about the elegance of String Theory, you have to be very careful and ask them, “What exactly are you talking about?”

There are two possible things that they can mean by that: one, they can mean certain specific calculations about what happens when you try and develop these theories of these onedimensional objects. And some of those calculations are quite, quite interesting. And there are a lot of

interesting mathematical structures. But those calculations don’t actually tell you about anything in the real world. So there are a lot of nice, elegant, mathematically interesting things that come up under String Theory, but they’re completely disjointed from the real world. Those are not the things that look like the real world. You could say String Theory is quite elegant. There’s a certain consistency relation that has to happen in ten spacetime dimensions. We don’t live in ten space-time dimensions; we live in four space-time dimensions. If they’d gotten four, that would have been impressive. But then there’s a separate aspect of the whole String Theory program, which is that people have always hoped that, although these things don’t really work, maybe if we work in this direction and look for this kind of thing, we’ll find something, and it will then

work and give us an elegant explanation of everything. So I think this is true if you look at Brian Greene’s book

The Elegant Universe, a lot of the elegance of the theory that he’s referring to really is hypothetical. If you assume there’s a theory that has all these wonderful features, then all this great stuff is going to happen, but it hasn’t worked out—it really hasn’t. And so you have to be very careful when somebody tells you String Theory is a beautiful, simple,

elegant thing. Ask them to write down the equation, and they’re going to do one of two things: they’re either going to write down an equation, which you can explicitly show has nothing to do with the real world, or they’re gonna start telling you about some set of equations they’re hoping to find, which they haven’t found yet.

In the abstract, divorced from the specifics of String Theory, is elegance a valid reason to pursue a theory? Or is it a coincidence that the best theories we have happen to be elegant?

I think there is very much a reason to pursue it. A lot of the great successes of the theory are these very, very elegant ideas, and trying to find more of them is certainly a good idea. This might get more into metaphysics, but do you have

a theory on why that is? Why is it the case that elegant theories seem to pop up everywhere?

Various people have accused me of being somewhat of a mathematical mystic. I do think that there is, at some fundamental level, a relatively simple and coherent unified theory of how physics works, about how the material world works at a fundamental level. But even more so, I think there are also a lot of unifying principles in mathematics. Mathematics is a very disparate endeavor, many different things go on, but there are some things which unify a lot of different ideas in mathematics. My belief, in some sense, is that these kinds of unifying structures we’re finding at very deep levels of mathematics, and the ones you’re finding in physics are actually closely related, so that there’s some deep level at which you’re not looking for just a unified theory of

physics, but also a unified theory of math and physics. I mean, it’s a bit grandiose and a bit crazy, but that’s at least an interesting motivation for looking for certain kinds of things.

not even wrong.” I think sometimes this is interpreted more as a term of abuse; “That’s so stupid, that’s not even wrong,” but that’s not the complete meaning, I think.

Your book and blog derive their names from Wolfgang Pauli’s phrase, “not even wrong.” What does that phrase mean?

Well, one reason I use that is that it actually has several meanings. Pauli was known to start yelling, “Oh, that’s wrong. That’s false. That’s just completely wrong.” So then somebody late in his life asked him about some particular paper, and he shook his head and said, “Oh, that one, that one’s

Most of the work that we do as theorists starts with ideas that are too vague or not well thought out enough that we don’t actually understand well enough to really see what you’re going to be able to do with them. So, you’re always in the state of thinking about ideas, where you can’t know yet whether they’re right or wrong, and there is no way to tell whether they’re right or wrong because you don’t understand them well enough yet to know. So dealing with the “not even wrong” theories is, I think, also an inescapable part of what we’re doing all the time. So it’s not purely a term of abuse, it’s also part of an inescapable part of what we do.

So a theory being “not even wrong” means it is not developed enough or valid enough to even be disproven?

I would say that it’s not necessarily a form of abuse if you’re dealing with a theory which is not well understood or developed, because you could argue that we’re at a stage where we don’t understand it well enough yet to know whether this is right or wrong. But then I think it becomes more of a form of abuse if people insist on working with welldeveloped ideas that have been shown to be empty ideas which don’t lead anywhere. Those ideas are not right or wrong: they’re just not saying anything. And so that becomes: “Yeah, that’s not even wrong, because that’s just an empty idea.”

How do pragmatics play all of that? Can a theory that’s non-falsifiable and “not even wrong” be useful without that

epistemological backing?

And does that make it worth pursuing anyway?

In a lot of arguments about String Theory, people will admit that this didn’t end up doing what we hoped it would do, but it’s led to all these other things, and there are a lot of valid arguments that work on String Theory has led to a lot of interesting work in pure mathematics. So by trying to solve problems in String Theory, or by trying to improve String Theory, people ended up in a very

rich area of mathematics and doing interesting things in that area. There’s something in mathematics called mirror symmetry. It’s a little bit hard to describe it, but to mathematicians, it’s a really unexpected structure if you’re trying to analyze higher dimensional spaces. There’s a lot of questions about their topology, and there’s a lot of general structural questions about what happens with higher dimensional spaces. They had this problem of how to deal with the extra six dimensions of String Theory, so they started looking at certain six-dimensional spaces, these so-called Calabi-Yau manifolds, and they actually found an interesting new structure in the topology of these things, which was really unexpected. Mathematicians have kind of taken that and run with it. It’s led to some really amazing new ways of thinking about topology. I had a little bit of an

embarrassing history with this. I was in Austin, and right at the beginning of this, there was this physicist, Philip Candelas, there. He’s one of the early people who worked on this. He brought me into his office and said, “Look, you’re a mathematician. So I have been doing these calculations with these spaces with these cohomology groups, I found this new pattern in these groups.” And I didn’t really know much about that part of algebraic geometry, so I looked at it and said, “Well, gee, that’s nice.” But that was actually kind of the beginning of this, it was almost an experimental result that physicists started looking at these things. That’s something which, if it weren’t for String Theory and people looking at those questions of String Theory, I’m not sure if that would have come up or how people would have seen those things.

So there are certainly good pragmatic reasons for working on a theory, even if it isn’t doing what you originally wanted it to do. But I think the danger with that is people will sometimes then use the fact that this has led to these other interesting things to somehow try and vindicate the original idea. So it’s been part of this refusal to admit that the original idea didn’t work out by trying to claim that the fact that it led to this other stuff means that it must be a great idea somehow, no matter how bad it looks.

Last question on String Theory. Why is it a unique epistemological problem? It seems like there are a million other abstract essentializing theories. Why is String Theory unique among them?

I have a fairly simple and blunt evaluation. It’s a failed research program. It’s one of many, many failed research programs. People have had

lots of ideas about how you’re going to unify physics and how you’re going to get quantum gravity, and they don’t all work. But it is unique among failed research programs in its practitioners’ unwillingness to admit that it’s failed. The fact that nearly 40 years since this really took off that you’ve still got people writing books and giving talks and going on about how this is a great success is a pretty unique thing that I’ve never seen before.

I guess it’s unique in that it’s still taught at MIT.

Not only at MIT, I should

say, there’s some more local places also.

You’ve written a fair number of blog posts about what you call fake physics. Could you just give us a definition of that term first?

That was somewhat motivated by the fact that, like everyone else, I found the period of 2016 to 2020 to be a very difficult time to retain one’s sanity and being in an environment with our democracy where crazy and obviously untrue things were being promoted everywhere and were becoming a part of our life. It was a reference to fake news. And early on, one thing that I’ve done with the blog was to try to use it to combat hype about String Theory and other things, because a lot of what I always found annoying was that we’ve been well aware of some problems with String Theory, but you’d often find that somebody had gone to

the press, and told them, there’s this brilliant idea, it’s great, it’s working well, everything’s fine. And we knew very well this was not true. So I would often write blog entries about that kind of hype explaining, “here’s this press article that just came out saying this about String Theory or about some other thing. And here’s why it’s actually not not true, and what’s actually going on.” So during the Trump era and the era of a lot of concern about fake news, I had started referring to some of these stories as fake physics.

Is Fake Physics a distinct category from fake news, or does the injection of science make it especially bad?

It’s a different, specific phenomenon. The argument from people who think I’m wasting my time is, “Well, look, the press is full of bad, inaccurate stories about science. Always has been, Always will be. So what?”

When I write these things, I often get people who write back to me saying, “Aha, yes, exactly the same thing is happening in my field.”

If you look at This Week’s Hype, I’ve tried to keep it focused on things to do with String Theory and failed ideas about unifying physics. So I tried to fight against a specific kind of thing, which I think has done a huge amount of damage

to physics. And I think it’s the same thing with the question of fake news. We’ve always had people publishing articles about aliens being found or whatever. There’s always been bogus news out there. The problem is really when it becomes a real danger to our democracy and our society. I think we have been seeing that point recently, which is kind of new.

This seems to be at least tangentially related to what people have been calling the “quantum woo” or “quantum mysticism,” where lay people will erroneously apply quantum mechanics that they don’t understand to religious or metaphysical questions. It seems reasonable that science could have some role in metaphysical questions, thinking of neuroscience and biology’s impact on the philosophy of the mind, but do you think physics can ever be used to answer questions in fields like metaphysics?

There are certain things that physicists can tell you about the physical world and physical reality, and how things work. But I often find that people come to me and say, “Oh, you’re a physicist, and you’re thinking about these issues of what was the beginning of time, and whatever. So can you kind of tell me something about the meaning of existence and these deep questions about

life?” and I have to come out and say: “You’ve come to the wrong person. This is just not what I know.” I know some really interesting things about these mathematical structures and theories about how the physical world works, but the kinds of questions that interest you, where it all comes from, and what does it all mean? I can see why you think there might be a relation to what I do, but there really isn’t. I’m the wrong person to ask.

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