Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
"...Perhaps laughter will then have formed an alliance with wisdom; perhaps only 'gay science' will remain."
User ID: 342
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
13d ago
Paywalled, but here's a summary from reddit:
"Some OpenAI employees who tested Orion report it achieved GPT-4-level performance after completing only 20% of its training, but the quality increase was smaller than the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4, suggesting that traditional scaling improvements may be slowing as high-quality data becomes limited
- Orion's training involved AI-generated data from previous models like GPT-4 and reasoning models, which may lead it to reproduce some behaviors of older models
- OpenAI has created a "foundations" team to develop new methods for sustaining improvements as high-quality data supplies decrease
- Orion's advanced code-writing features could raise operating costs in OpenAI's data centers, and running models like o1, estimated at six times the cost of simpler models, adds financial pressure to further scaling
- OpenAI is finishing Orion's safety testing for a planned release early next year, which may break from the "GPT" naming convention to reflect changes in model development
“Some researchers at the company believe Orion isn’t reliably better than its predecessor in handling certain tasks, according to the employees. Orion performs better at language tasks but may not outperform previous models at tasks such as coding, according to an OpenAI employee. That could be a problem, as Orion may be more expensive for OpenAI to run in its data centers compared to other models it has recently released, one of those people said.”
This is one of several articles/posts/tweets coming out of the LLMsphere over the past couple of weeks that are renewing concerns over LLMs hitting diminishing returns.
Of course this is just speculation until OpenAI actually releases Orion (or whatever they end up calling it). And really we would need several models past Orion too to actually extrapolate a pattern. But this does fit with my subjective impression that the leap from GPT-3 to GPT-4 was not as big as the leap from GPT-2 to GPT-3, and the leap from 4 to o1 was not as big as the leap from 3 to 4. The fact that they're considering again releasing a new model without calling it GPT-5 is also telling. They know how psychologically important the "GPT-5" moniker has become at this point and they won't give that name to a model unless it really represents a major leap forward.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15d ago
I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns.
I can!
But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy
Sure!
not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?
This phrasing makes it sound like the response to Covid arose naturally from "the facts on the ground". But the response to Covid was a political and ideological choice. We could have chosen differently. There was no direct unmediated causal link between the actual effects of Covid and the measures we took in response.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
15d ago
If we get another pandemic under Trump and another round of global lockdowns, I will update heavily towards thinking that Covid was intentionally planned and the new one is too. Because that would just be a little too perfect.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
16d ago
No. They’ve still won it. Reports of a pendulum swing are greatly exaggerated.
I don’t think most people voted for Trump as an explicit anti-woke vote. My impression is that the modal voter was voting mainly on the economy, with maybe a smattering of other more “procedural” considerations in play (the assassination attempts, the lawfare, etc). I don’t think wokeness was really on the radar this election cycle for most people.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
Oh sure. I agree completely. But if we’re stuck with universal suffrage, then the least we can do is require that people actually go to the damn polling place if they want their vote to be counted.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
The voting process should select for higher agency / lower time preference voters. That’s a good thing; those are the people who should have a bigger influence on politics. It’s outside the Overton window to require an IQ test as a precondition of voting, but thankfully it’s still within the Overton window to have some very simple and reasonable measures like, requiring that someone physically travel to a polling place, or requiring that someone procure a mail-in ballot for themselves. Any slight barrier to entry is better than canvassers going door to door and telling people “just sign on the dotted line, please” in order to harvest votes.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
It’s not just the fact that turnout overall was higher in 2020. It’s specifically the fact that Harris underperformed Biden by 15 million votes and Trump underperformed his 2020 results by 3 million votes. Why the massive difference for the Dems but not for Trump?
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
Popular vote counts for Democrat candidates since 2008, per Wikipedia:
Obama 2008: 69,498,516
Obama 2012: 65,915,795
Clinton 2016: 65,853,514
Biden 2020: 81,283,501
Harris 2024: not yet finalized, but currently at 66,415,077
What is the steelman for why I shouldn't take Biden's anomalously high vote count in 2020 as evidence of fraud? I never looked too closely into the details of the 2020 fraud claims, and I'm sure that this issue has already been discussed at length previously, but it seems like it would be reasonable to revisit that discussion in light of Harris's vote count dropping back to be more in line with the historical average. (The votes are still being counted, but we can safely assume that her total vote count won't go too much higher than 70 million. Biden got over 10 million votes more than that.)
Trump's vote total of 74,223,975 in 2020 was also elevated compared to what would historically be expected of a Republican candidate, but it seems less anomalous in light of the 71,352,277 votes he's received so far this year. Whereas Harris has drastically unperformed Biden while simultaneously performing more in line with other Democrat candidates.
It's not exactly a formal statistical analysis, but this does somewhat increase my credence that there was substantial fraud in 2020. It just doesn't pass the smell test that there were ~15 million people who were that excited to vote for Biden, who had largely never voted Democrat before, and then they all just failed to materialize again in 2024.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
We’d be waiting potentially for weeks for an official call. So the major news networks use statistical modeling to project a winner within a reasonable timeframe.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
17d ago
Fox and other major networks have called Georgia for Trump. Thank God that one’s not going to stretch out into the week (I hope). Good sign that we might get a quick resolution in the other swing states.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d ago
It depends on how contested it is. Often we basically know who won by around midnight on election day, so about 16 hours from now. But famously in the 2000 election, no one knew who the winner was for weeks because no one could agree over who won the state of Florida.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d ago
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-non-naturalism/
Most often, ‘non-naturalism’ denotes the metaphysical thesis that moral properties exist and are not identical with or reducible to any natural property or properties in some interesting sense of ‘natural’.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d ago
What is "anti-empiricism"?
It's a bit difficult to define, because the idea I had in mind is a loose federation of beliefs and attitudes, and doesn't really have any specific criteria. In terms of concrete beliefs though, I would say that the core of it would be something like an openness to entities and propositions that we don't (or can't) have direct empirical confirmation of, like God, souls, ghosts, UFOs, etc. In more rarefied territory, it would be an affinity for philosophical positions like: hostility to logical positivism, belief in abstract (non-spatiotemporal) objects, belief in non-naturalistic moral facts. But independent of any concrete beliefs about the existence or non-existence of specific entities, I think it's also a psychological disposition to see things as being suffused with meaning and significance.
And is this an example of it?
Not really. Lots of people are recalcitrant in the face of new evidence when it contradicts their deeply held beliefs. That's more of a human trait than a left-right trait. But, if someone just has an overriding commitment to making sure that children have access to puberty blockers for some reason, I don't think there's anything metaphysically there that doesn't fit into a purely materialist/naturalist worldview.
"Anti-empiricism" is in no way intended to be an insult of course. I personally have a strong anti-empirical streak.
I'm still hoping to get some replies written to your recent posts on art, BTW. Keep up the great work.
Thank you! I really appreciate that.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
18d ago
Tucker Carlson appearing on Joe Rogan experience speculated that UAPs are real, but are not alien visitors from other planets but supernatural in origin and always has been here.
Honestly based.
Why are apparently cooky beliefs entertained by top influencers on the right?
The contemporary American right is an accident of history, an odd amalgamation of people that hold disparate and often mutually contradictory beliefs. So generalizing about them as a group is difficult. Nonetheless I speculate that there are (at least) two factors at play here:
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I believe there is a "religious temperament" that predisposes one to not only literal belief in the supernatural, but also anti-empiricism in general, more "speculative" modes of thinking, etc. An appreciable number of these people find themselves on the right for various reasons (the phrase "the religious right" exists for a reason).
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Leftism is the socially dominant ideology in elite culture, so the right naturally attracts contrarians who are attracted to odd ideas for their own sake.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
19d ago
I was considering writing a post on this exact topic, but I refrained, because I wasn't sure how to press my vague discontent into a substantive thesis.
I'll be happy when we can go back to weekly threads that don't contain the term "prediction market". I've always found the LW/SSC fascination with monetary betting to be somewhat crass. (I'd be inclined to speculate that "make all your beliefs pay rent" is only a few steps away from "make all people pay rent".)
It's sometimes claimed that intelligence just is pattern matching. So, trying to successfully predict a major one-off event like a presidential election could then be seen as the ultimate IQ test, the ultimate test of one's ability to reason in an uncontrolled and data-scarce environment. And I can see why that would be an intriguing challenge to take on. But pattern matching has its limits, and ultimately it just feels obvious to me that there's not much that can be said in terms of election forecasting besides "well, we'll see when we see".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
20d ago
You even pulled the stupid language games trick here--"my last top-level post"
By my count, out of his last 100 comments, 23 were about Israel. I think that's a reasonable level of engagement with one topic.
throws in a completely unnecessary qualifier to determining whether you're a little too focused on something for the community's comfort.
I mean, if community comfort is the issue - not a single one of @coffee_enjoyer's posts has ever made me uncomfortable, and in fact I value his presence here highly.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
21d ago
He talks about how previous generations of award-winning books were written by people who had actual practical "lived experience" of the things they were writing about (e.g. Hemingway actually fought in a war), often without having ever attended college.
I think the valorization of "lived experience" for writers and artists (which, in practice, typically means the valorization of a specific kind of experience, to the exclusion of others - traveling to distant places, exposing oneself to physical danger, etc) is misguided.
Consider this post, which linked to this graph, where people were asked how many unarmed black men they thought were killed by police in a single year. About one in five "very liberal" respondents said that the number was 10,000 or more - but the actual number is nowhere near that high. Now imagine that someone has the "lived experience" of watching their unarmed black male friend get shot by a police officer. Perhaps he hears one or two anecdotes from friends that they also knew people who had similar experiences. We can imagine that this experience might affect him greatly; we can imagine that he might start to think that this experience is more common than it really is, and he might go on to write an award-winning book about it, and this book might produce more people like those 1-in-5 Very Liberal respondents who think that police shootings of unarmed black men are much more common than they actually are. In this case, we would want his lived experience to at least be tempered by some "book learnin'". Otherwise, he might go on to write a book that was quite politically deleterious. There are some truths that can never be arrived at even with a lifetime of "lived experience" - there's no getting around the need for data, abstract reasoning, the need for knowledge of other people's experiences so you can find the common patterns.
Or consider all the things that are in principle impossible for anyone to have direct experience of. If you want to, say, write a book that deals with the historical connections between contemporary wokeism and Stalinism, or maybe the French Revolution - you're going to need to read other books for that. Eventually, historical events become so distant that no one alive could have experienced them.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
22d ago
Thank you for taking the time to reply, I really do appreciate it.
I think this is an instance of the Motte of a Motte-and-Bailey that is commonly deployed in defense of every academic discipline that operates according to "humanities rules". Motte: "This is just a bunch of guys shooting the shit. Sometimes they even produce interesting things that I personally enjoy. Why do you, an outsider who doesn't even appreciate any of this, barge in and try to impose rules such as your 'epistemic standards'?"
Sorry if I didn't emphasize this enough, but I did say that you had to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. What I meant that "guys shooting the shit" is a helpful way to approach some continental works. I don't think it's the best way to approach all continental works. Derrida's Voice and Phenomenon lays out some claims and arguments in the philosophy of mind that, I think, can be phrased in simple and accessible terms. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is a pretty down to earth history of the development of the western prison system over the last several centuries. They're just, like, normal books. Nothing too mysterious going on.
I do think that Lacan goes off the reservation sometimes, to the point that the commentaries and secondary sources on his work are sometimes better than the original works themselves. But that doesn't mean that everything he wrote is bad, and it certainly doesn't mean that every work of continental philosophy is bad.
Bailey: "These people are the world authorities on philosophy. We pay them to do philosophy and all philosophers agree that they are the most influential and insightful philosophers, so we should defer to them in matters of philosophy."
"Deference" to an "authority" is a concept that's about as antithetical to philosophy as you can get. For every single claim in the history of philosophy, you can find examples of someone asserting the opposite; for every canonical philosopher, you can find another canonical philosopher who thought the first guy was an idiot. Even if you were to just focus on continental philosophy alone, I really can't emphasize enough just how fragmented it is. Philosophy just is debate and disagreement, in a way that no other field is. I mean it when I say that if you walk into an English department (which is where continental philosophers usually hang out in the US) you can find people who think that Lacan was bullshit and evil, Sartre was bullshit and evil, Derrida was bullshit and evil... who is the authority to defer to? No one would be able to agree!
Analytic philosophers I think are quite scrupulous about this, to a fault. Because of continental philosophy's greater focus on specific figures rather than isolated positions and arguments, it's more common to get people who are "fans" of one figure or another, and I acknowledge that sometimes it looks like they're treating them as an authority figure. Although I don't think that's really what's going on usually. When someone says "Marx said X" for example, it should be read as more like "X is a claim that was developed in Marx's work, so you should refer to his works if you want further justification for it" or "I believe X is true, but I didn't come up with it, Marx did", rather than "you should believe X because Marx said so". More like citing your sources, rather than an assertion of authority. Even if someone did start treating their favorite philosopher like an authority figure, they wouldn't be able to do so without major cognitive dissonance, for all the reasons mentioned above; they'd have to explain why there are a lot of other philosophers who think their favorite "authority" was wrong about everything.
I can't personally vet the psychology of everyone who talks about philosophy. Maybe there are some people who really do believe "X is true because Y said so". But, that doesn't reveal anything in particular about philosophy itself. That just reveals that that particular person is dumb and wrong. It would be like saying that data fabrication is a part of science because some scientists have fabricated data before.
As a result, there are Lacanians and Deleuzians sitting in IRBs and ethics boards and asking to be persuaded, in their terms, before I am allowed to use my funding to perform scientific experiments
I would be legitimately fascinated and highly interested if you could provide specific examples of that happening.
we defer to them in questions of what arguments are acceptable in politics and school; and ultimately they are what anchors the chains of trust and authority that we use to determine which political movements are legitimate (at risk of pulling clichés from the bingo board, the argument that the druggie who runs off with five pairs of sneakers as he torches the store is misguided but has his heart in the right place ultimately leads back, via many chains of simplification for political expediency, to some humanities tract full of "poetic language") and which ones are to be treated as threats.
I think you're overestimating the real world impact of academic philosophy here. I think it would be kinda neat if it actually did have that level of impact. But I don't think it does.
I believe (and please correct me if I'm wrong; I'm not trying to put words into your mouth) that you see a direct causal link between continental philosophy on one hand and contemporary wokeness on the other. It's a claim that I've seen repeated in various forms on TheMotte on multiple occasions, and I've always disagreed with it, for 3 main reasons:
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Broadly speaking, I don't think that people hold the political positions they do because they read a book, or even because they talked to someone who read a book. I think people believe the things they do because they want certain things (wealth, power, various types of freedom, etc). The desire and the need for something concrete comes first, and then they look for an ideology later to justify it. So, for example, I don't think that DEI exists in the US today because of humanities academics. I think it exists because that's naturally the sort of thing that arises when you have an ascendant coalition of racial minorities and a demographically declining racial majority.
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The "big names" of continental philosophy are not particularly woke (there's little in their work that would be recognizable as modern wokeness, anyway) and in fact I think there are resources in their work that could be a benefit to anti-wokeness.
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Regarding the point about obscurantist language - do you think that's somehow necessary to leftist politics? If they were forced to only use simple words then the whole thing would collapse? Because I think that's clearly not true. You can easily put all the key tenets and arguments of wokeness into simple language. To reiterate the point above, woke people are woke because of the intrinsic content of the positions, not because they were hypnotized by a humanities tract.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
24d ago
The rabbit from Zootopia is hot and a little uppity. She absolutely wants and deserves to get gangbanged by a bunch of foxes. No trauma involved at all!
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
24d ago
Defining art in the way you do is like defining marriage as a convenient way to save on rent
That's exactly what it's not! That would be a utilitarian definition of marriage. I am offering what I believe to be a thoroughly anti-utilitarian conception of art.
What is the work of art to you when it no longer has a use? When it doesn't teach you anything, when it doesn't help you do anything, when you don't gain anything from it? Do you only value it as long as it still has a functional purpose, as long as there is still some benefit to be gained (such as, knowledge of beauty and truth)? That's the real question.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
24d ago
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture".
Well now you're putting words in my mouth, which I don't appreciate.
I wasn't trying to attribute that claim to you at all. I'm sorry for the confusion. That's a claim that other people have made, and I brought that up to give some context about my thoughts on painting as a medium.
I'm saying that creepy fetish art will never make human culture even a little bit better and have a good chance of making it slightly worse.
Right, and I disagree, for the all the reasons I outlined in the OP. I think that sexuality is privileged as an artistic subject matter, and therefore a pornographic painting is no worse off than a landscape, a still life, etc.
but the obscurantist language only really seems to serve the purposes of instilling delusions of the speaker's intelligence
I think reading and writing big words is fun and enjoyable. And it rarely matters to me if the original author had a high opinion of their own intelligence or not. (Undoubtedly many posters here have big egos because of their intelligence as well, but that doesn't hinder my enjoyment of TheMotte). So I think the poetic language is a good thing, up to a point (you can always take anything too far, of course).
hide argumentative flaws and open up "you don't get it" as a defense against those who point them out.
Yeah, there definitely are people who will just sneer with "you don't get it" in response to any criticism, and that can get very obnoxious. But at the same time, there are people who actually just don't get it! And they refuse to even give the text a chance, while at the same time passing sweeping judgements on it, and that can get equally obnoxious.
I had this exchange on HN recently, where people took a sentence from an analytic philosophy paper and were saying that it was bullshit. But that was just because they didn't know the definitions of the (frankly, basic and common) terms being used. Once I explained the definitions, people agreed that the sentence actually made sense. When you have this sort of interaction repeatedly when discussing philosophy, where people say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's bullshit", it starts to wear on you. At least take the time to understand what's being said and what the context is.
Now, I wouldn't defend all works of continental philosophy. Some of it probably is bullshit (or, more politely, "poetry"), although that in itself isn't unusual - Sturgeon's Law, 90% of everything. But you really have to evaluate every work on a case by case basis. Derrida is often held up as the archetypal example of postmodern bullshit, but if you look at something like his Voice and Phenomenon for example, and you cut away some of the poetic verbiage, I think that book is actually making claims and using arguments that analytic philosophers would basically accept as reasonable. And there's been tons of work in the last two decades on the "analytic rehabilitation" of the earliest continental figures like Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, etc.
I think it's helpful to think of continental philosophy as a sort of 20th century version of TheMotte for French academics. They had their own memeplex, their own points of reference, there was a whole context surrounding it that isn't immediately obvious if you're approaching it for the first time in 2024. These guys all knew each other, they went to the same seminars and published in the same journals; sometimes they were writing "serious" arguments, and sometimes they were just shitposting at each other. A lot of times on TheMotte we'll have someone come along and say "y'know, I've just been thinkin' about this thing" - about leftists and rightists, about men and women, about whatever it is. And then they make some sweeping claim, that may or may not be particularly well supported empirically, but often enough it still makes you go "y'know, I think that guy might be onto something". And that's often the sort of value I get out of continental philosophy. Plainly there's some sort of value in this activity that we do on TheMotte, because we all keep coming here.
Therefore, there is no """"objective"""" reason to prohibit mother-son incest.
That wasn't the conclusion of the argument; that was a premise in the argument. What I quoted was clipped out of a much lengthier chapter about the relationship between psychoanalysis and ethics. He wasn't trying here to demonstrate that there is no objective reason to prohibit mother-son incest; he was basically just assuming it, with reference to Lévi-Strauss's work as support. Rather he was using the distinction between father-daughter and mother-son incest as an illustrative example to show how there are some domains of human activity that are governed by market logic, and some that are not, and psychoanalysis is interested in the latter.
You can of course challenge his premise, and claim that he didn't support it well enough. But that just goes without saying; philosophers attack each others' premises all the time.
It's all arbitrary systems of rules! By the way, arbitrary systems of rules are cool.
Well, yes? That's literally his position. He would say that the Law is baseless and arbitrary, but that in no way implies that we should get rid of it. The subject who refuses to allow himself to be "duped" by the Law and steadfastly "sees it for what it is" is psychotic. And being psychotic is a bad thing. (Deleuze and Guattari thought that being psychotic was a good thing, which precipitated their big break with Lacan.)
Unfortunately, the working mode of continental philosophy made it impossible for continental philosophy to consider it - the authors themselves would never write it, because ticking boxes like this would signal self-doubt and weakness that is entirely at odds with the image of the infallible sage that descends from his mountain to pronounce deep wisdom
I do agree that there's a cultural aversion in continental philosophy to showing doubt and uncertainty about your own arguments, and I think that's a bad thing. Analytic philosophers are just better in this regard.
and if one of the students pointed it out, he would presumably just receive a pitying smirk from Lacan, and perhaps a remark about how he is clearly yet to grasp the difference between the signifer and the combinatoire or something.
Not entirely off base (especially if we're talking about Lacan specifically, and how he actually dealt with his students - it's well-documented that he was a bit of a dick), but at the same time, I think you're underselling the amount of disagreement that actually exists in continental philosophy. No matter how great a continental philosopher might think his favorite guy is, he's still acutely aware that there are lots of other people who all think his favorite guy is bullshit. The Derrideans and Deleuzians think that the Lacanians are all closet fascists because they still believe that there's a unified human subject with transhistorical properties, and the Foucaultians think that the Derrideans have an inflated view of the power of philosophical discourse, and the Marxists think it's all postmodern bullshit that's distracting us from the real material struggle of the working class. So would the other students all come to correct the student who pointed out an objection? Maybe, but they could just as easily say "yeah, you're right, that stuff is all crap, you should read this instead".
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
24d ago
But your comment, while thought-provoking
Thank you, that makes me very happy! I really appreciate it.
has done nothing to dissuade me from my original perspective that human culture is not in any way enriched by a rendering of the bunny rabbit from Zootopia getting gang banged.
Something I may not have emphasized enough was that there's a fundamental ambiguity in that claim. Does a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia getting gangbanged enrich human culture? Does, say, a non-sexualized drawing of a horse enrich human culture? We can't really answer the question as it's posed. We need more information, more context. Is the drawing of the horse Guernica, or is it something that a kindergartner put together with finger paints to take home and put on the fridge? That information is going to change how we answer the question. So it is with fetish art as well. That's my position.
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the claim that we've passed the point where any individual drawing/painting can constitute a "significant enrichment to human culture". We've been painting images for thousands of years and we've explored a tremendous amount of the possibility space. It's possible that we've simply run out of fresh ground to cover, within the confines of this one medium. But a painting with a sexual subject matter is no worse off than any other type of painting here.
I think the future possibilities of art lay in what could broadly be described as "narrative", and I do think some of those narratives will contain sexual content that might strike some observers as "excessive" at first glance.
@Folamh3 made the following claim:
No one can tell me that human culture is enriched by a drawing of the rabbit from Zootopia being subjected to a gangbang. [...] I'm not saying "disgusting fetish art isn't part of human culture": of course it is. I said that human culture isn't enriched by this content. It isn't a net-positive contribution to human culture: it's one of those parts of human culture that we're profoundly ashamed of [...]
to which I objected, briefly. @twodigits expressed interest in a more detailed and thorough rebuttal. I said that I didn't want to compress it to a list of bullet points; but I realized upon further reflection that there was probably nothing shorter than a small book that could do full justice to this topic. I started to prepare an abridged version of my argument to post here, but even the abridged version broke 10k characters by the time I was finished with the introduction. So, you're getting the bullet point version. I'm happy to further expand on any of the points raised here, if people are interested.
Essentially I think that the artistic value of pornography lies in treating it as a species of horror. The greatest works of art bring us into communion with trauma, the uncanny, the abject - and sex is traumatic, uncanny, and unsettling in a particularly aesthetically interesting way; it is simultaneously both a natural and necessary act, and also the center of our strictest ethical prohibitions and most ferocious spiritual crises. I don't think that every artistic work that has pornographic content necessarily has high value, or even any value at all; undoubtedly, the majority do not. I only think that pornographic content isn't disqualifying when evaluating a work's artistic merit. That a work contains graphic sex is, in a vacuum, as informative as saying that the work contains depictions of landscapes or sunsets.
It has been remarked repeatedly in the psychoanalytic (Freudian) tradition that there is an intrinsic link between art and trauma. Kristeva writes in Powers of Horror:
I have sought in this book to demonstrate on what mechanism of subjectivity (which I believe to be universal) such horror, its meaning as well as its power, is based. By suggesting that literature is its privileged signifier, I wish to point out that, far from being a minor, marginal activity in our culture, as a general consensus seems to have it, this kind of literature, or even literature as such, represents the ultimate coding of our crises, of our most intimate and most serious apocalypses. Hence its nocturnal power, "the great darkness" (Angela of Foligno). Hence its continual compromising: "Literature and Evil" (Georges Bataille). Hence also its being seen as taking the place of the sacred, which, to the extent that it has left us without leaving us alone, calls forth the quacks from all four corners of perversion. Because it occupies its place, because it hence decks itself out in the sacred power of horror, literature may also involve not an ultimate resistance to but an unveiling of the abject: an elaboration, a discharge, and a hollowing out of abjection through the Crisis of the Word. [pg. 208]
McGowan and Engley on their Why Theory podcast, a podcast which analyzes both classical philosophy and contemporary culture from a Freudo-Marxist perspective, put it perhaps more poignantly and directly in their episode on psychoanalytic aesthetics:
The art object doesn't give me something... it takes away something. I think that's the absolute psychoanalytic premise. You look for the great work of art by looking for those works that take away something from us. [62:48]
I think this is such a lovely formulation, one that strikes me as almost self-evidently true. Existence is suffering, and the greatest works of art reconcile us to that fact; and in some sense it really is just that simple.
Further justification for this premise is given by framing it as an anti-capitalist gesture (again quoting from the same episode):
[The great work of art] takes away from us the dream of success, so there's a way in which the great work of art, psychoanalytically understood, is inherently anti-capitalist. Because it does not allow us to believe in the promise of accumulation. Its whole point is you have to keep going [emphasis mine - this is what distinguishes the psychoanalytic theory of art from mere nihilism or defeatism] - but even if you win, even if you get it, what you're getting is nothing. [50:00]
Now, I'm significantly more friendly to capitalism as a literal economic system than, well, than basically everyone else who's into weirdo continental philosophy. So unlike most of the intended audience for this work, I don't think that merely saying that something is anti-capitalist makes it ipso facto good. But if "capitalism" is treated here as a synecdoche for utilitarianism, then I can definitely get behind the sentiment being expressed. Art is the domain where we refuse to be governed by utilitarian logic; it's wasteful, irrational, even to the point of being actively detrimental; but that's what makes it beautiful.
Funny enough, in this same episode, there's a section which is very relevant to a post that @Baila wrote some time back - at 44:30 it is flatly stated that a canon of the great works of psychoanalytic art would simply be "the works that induce the most amount of psychic trauma". Eisenman has company! Of course, a purely literal reading of this claim is hard to defend from objections: if the greatest works of art are the ones that induce the most trauma, then why don't we just, I dunno, build a "sculpture" that cuts people's legs off. That would be quite traumatic, so wouldn't that thereby be the greatest work of art? Obviously some additional nuance has to be added, but I still think the claim is gesturing at something importantly true. I would perhaps invoke something like the Aristotelian idea of the virtuous mean: everything in the right amount, at the right time, in its proper place. Too much of a good thing can become a bad thing; you have to have the right amount of the good thing, and no more. I think we can imagine too, a "proper amount" of suffering. Not too little, and not too much, but rather exactly as much as is called for.
If this premise about the link between art and trauma is accepted, does anything more even need to be said in defense of sexuality as legitimate artistic content? Plainly, there is something traumatic, unsettling, "shameful" about depictions of sexuality; otherwise they wouldn't be so tightly controlled, and the claim I'm responding to would never have been made in the first place and I would not be writing this post. "No, don't go there, that's too far" - well, it's precisely an artist's job to go to such places. Nonetheless, I think some further elaboration is possible.
In many ways, sexuality is the artistic subject par excellence, because sex makes everyone see like an artist does; they see what is concealed from ordinary sight, they see the act as more than it really is. The dense network of strictures, rituals, and emotional associations that surround sexuality cannot be reduced to purely rational or utilitarian concerns about its possible harms or effects. There is something intrinsically spiritual about it, something intrinsically excessive - "here, no, here you have to stop; this is different." In an ironic way, the censorship of sexualized art is itself already a recapitulation of the fundamental artistic act; the distinguishing of an object against all reason, an act of resolute commitment, the creation of a value. Why, exactly, would anyone get so dreadfully upset about pixels on a screen, numbers on a hard drive, light entering the retina? But you know it's not just pixels on a screen; you see it as something more. It is precisely this "something more" that art makes us confront.
In Seminar VII (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), Lacan spoke on the origin of the incest taboo:
Claude Lévi-Strauss in his magisterial work no doubt confirms the primordial character of the Law as such, namely, the introduction of the signifer and its combinatoire into human nature through the intermediary of the marriage laws, which are regulated by a system of exchanges that he defines as elementary structures – this is the case to the extent that guidance is given concerning the choice of a proper partner or, in other words, order is introduced into marriage, which produces a new dimension alongside that of heredity. But even when Lévi-Strauss explains all that, and spends a lot of time discussing incest in order to show what makes its prohibition necessary, he does not go beyond suggesting why the father does not marry a daughter – because the daughters must be exchanged. But why doesn’t a son sleep with his mother? There is something mysterious there.
He, of course, dismisses justifications based on the supposedly dangerous biological effects of inbreeding. He proves that, far from producing results involving the resurgence of a recessive gene that risks introducing degenerative effects, a form of endogamy is commonly used in all fields of breeding of domestic animals, so as to improve a strain, whether animal or vegetable. The law only operates in the realm of culture. And the result of the law is always to exclude incest in its fundamental form, son / mother incest, which is the kind Freud emphasizes.
If everything else around it may find a justification, this central point nevertheless remains. If one reads Lévi-Strauss’s text closely, one can see that it is the most enigmatic and the most stubborn point separating nature from culture.
The point being that, even if we stipulate that everyone involved is a consenting adult and no harm will result, incest is still absolutely prohibited. Strip away all "rational" reasons for caring and there still remains a primordial element that people recoil in horror from. This was empirically vindicated by Haidt's work on moral reasoning - people persisted in their moral judgements even when all of their discursive justifications had been disarmed. Only the intrinsic, transcendent horror of the act remained. But it is precisely this transcendent horror that is the domain of art.
Anyway. I don't think that fapping to porn is some great revolutionary transgressive act or something. I just think that, as I said in the beginning, the fact that a work contains graphic sexual content should not be an intrinsic mark against it. Every work has to be evaluated holistically, in its full context. I don't really accept a distinction between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" types of artistic content in the first place, but even if I did, I would think that sexuality was very much on the legitimate side, for all the reasons aforementioned.
Not a problem! I’m happy to continue the conversation at any time if you ever want to.
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