ABSTRACT
Cornel West once used a book title, The American Evasion of Philosophy (1989), that might make one anticipate an account of how American thought had missed the boat philosophically. Instead, one finds a kind of celebration of the anti-foundationalist, jazzy and improvisational strain in the tradition. I am reminded a bit of this philosophical ‘evasion’ in the Western physics community’s handling of the ontological implications of QM. Instead of staging a confrontation that would force the issue metaphysically, physicists in the West finessed their way out of contradictions. Evasive psychoanalytic mechanisms may have helped produce that result, but it does not follow that it was a scientific mistake-unless one is committed to a certain account of knowledge. I do not know what Krips’s epistemological commitments are, but I do detect some ambivalence concerning inconsistencies in scientific discourse. He seems ambivalent about Bohr, or, at least, with the way Bohr gets used as an authorizing
figure. There is an appreciation of the post-modern edge of Bohr’s QM, with its refusal to force-fit things into a single global scheme of representation. On the other hand, there is an implied need for an inclusive metaphysical frame, and suspicion of a Bohrian interpretive scheme that ‘bring[s] forward the right bit at the right time’. What does this imply about the dynamics of representation, and specifically, the accountability of the psychoanalytical to the scientific enterprise? The question seems worth exploring. The psychoanalytic framing prompts further questions about where and how the discourses of science get settled. Are the relevant consistencies essentially psychological in nature? And is the real off limits to scientific articulation in the same way it eludes the (Lacanian) subject? One might of course defer the question of how the psychoanalytic account relates to the epistemological one, but at some point in critiquing the discourses of science one more or less has to take a position on what Nancy Sinatra once called ‘truthing’. (I’ll show my own hand shortly.)
With all the energy that has been spent making scientific and philosophical sense out of quantum mechanics (hereafter, QM), we are still some way from understanding the complex relationship of this watershed development to the cultures in which it occurred, and particularly, its comparative reception in different cultures. Historians and sociologists have every reason to study it, but so too do students of culture and rhetoric. Krips has made a creative contribution in that direction, moving us toward a conversation about the cultural mediation of physics. The issue of how ideology is related to scientific theory and its reception is something of a mined field, and one must be astute in avoiding the pitfalls represented by the internalist reading of science, on the one hand, and the ideologically determinative reading on the other (I think Krips is). To suggest, as one sometimes hears, that the understanding of a scientific theory is simply pressed out by an ideological template would be no more illuminating than to say that the reception of science is just exfoliated from the science itself. One searches in vain for a map by which one can simply read off in advance the relationships between science, ideology, and rhetoric. Best not to try. Mapping after the fact is a different matter, however, and here there is much to be learned.
