some disingenuous claims

I’ve blogged before about ways in which people use adjectives dishonestly. One example I mentioned was the phrase “naive realism.” What happens here is that the person using this phrase actually despises realism tout court, but adds the word “naive” as a sort of pseudo-qualifying epithet to do the dirty work. (Latour compares this process to workmen using swear words to help them move heavy furniture and freight.)

The person wouldn’t have the courage to come out and say “but that’s realism!”, because that would make them sound simplistically dogmatic. Yet if they say “but that’s naive realism!”, then suddenly they gain a cheap air of sophistication. Nor are they ever called out onto the mat to prove that a particular form of realism is in fact naive.

Another example is when people accuse a philosophical text of degenerating into “bad poetry” (this is a popular one). The people who use this phrase would be no more supportive of good poetry than of bad; they simply want to exclude all poetry from philosophical work. Yet they can’t say: “But that’s poetry!”, because this would sound silly in its dogmatism. (I was once at a philosophy lecture where an old-fashioned positivist anthropologist in the audience raised his hand and exclaimed: “But that’s unscientific!” Same sort of thing.)

Here’s a different but loosely related example… One of the energy-sucking trolls on the fringes of our republic (“Eli,” but that’s just an alias for someone we already know and who is still stinging from my last retaliation against him) recently claimed that on the tape of my Dublin lectures from April I’m only saying that I “like” and “dislike” things rather than making arguments. Nonsense. There are plenty of “arguments” in the Dublin lecture, whether you like them or not. The real issue is that the troll doesn’t want anyone saying that they like things in a philosophical context. But he can’t come right out and say: “But Harman said that he likes things!”, because that would expose him as the sneering killjoy that he is. So he has no choice but to exaggerate/lie and claim that I was only saying that I like things rather than providing arguments.

And this is the root of both the troll and the grey vampire: they are bothered by the pleasure and enjoyment of thinking. Filling the previous role of the sophists for the new conditions of our own age of decadent critique, they think that to say “no” is the only intellectual act available to human beings. Affirmation is naive. Critique is profound.

If you keep a close eye on what unleashes the most anger in our corner of the blogosphere, it is never truly fallacious claims, but rather enjoyment. If someone gets happy about taking a trip, reading something wonderful, or simply enjoying a dish of delicious strawberries, something like rage wells up all around us. I’ll leave it to the Lacanians to explain this.

My only point about the energy-suckers right now is this… Everyone reading this post will be dead in 100 years. The majority of us may be dead in 50 years. You’ll be dead for billions of years before the universe collapses (assuming it even does collapse), so why rush the process? Why negate what nature itself will negate soon enough?

Why walk through meadows of flowers and sneer about how they mean nothing to you? If they mean nothing to you, then just sit at home and scoff and feel superior in your scoffing. There will be no shortage of friends to invite over to share in the sneers. (I can give you a few names, if you’re feeling lonely.)