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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   25588 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 18, 2025

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I don't really know where you're then getting this notion that we can draw any conclusion from what she says to how theoretical objects are thought up for use in scientific scenarios.

It was the idea that occurred to me while reading the text, so I just went with it!

I fully admit I'm engaged in a "motivated" reading. I'm more concerned with trying to extract a coherent philosophical idea from the text rather than with reconstructing Irigaray's exact mental state. But I don't think my interpretation is baseless either.

Backing up to give more context:

What is left uninterpreted in the economy of fluids—the resistances brought to bear upon solids, for example—is in the end given over to God. Overlooking the properties of real fluids—internal frictions, pressures, movements, and so on, that is, their specific dynamics—leads to giving the real back to God, as only the idealizable characteristics of fluids are included in their mathematicization.

Or again: considerations of pure mathematics have precluded the analysis of fluids except in terms of laminated planes, solenoid movements (of a current privileging the relation to an axis), spring-points, well-points, whirlwind-points, which have only an approximate relation to reality. Leaving some remainder. Up to infinity: the center of these “movements” corresponding to zero supposes in them an infinite speed, which is physically unacceptable. Certainly these “theoretical” fluids have enabled the technical—also mathematical—form of analysis to progress, while losing a certain relationship to the reality of bodies in the process.

What consequences does this have for “science” and psychoanalytic practice?

Roughly: Science can't just give a direct description of every single microdetail of reality. It has to "symbolize" things -- create simplified and idealized theoretical models. These models are inevitably attached to linguistic imagery.

And if anyone objects that the question, put this way, relies too heavily on metaphors, it is easy to reply that the question in fact impugns the privilege granted to metaphor (a quasi solid) over metonymy (which is much more closely allied to fluids).

Honestly not entirely sure what this part means. I assume that she's saying that solid imagery is more metaphorical, and fluid imagery is more metonymic, and her questioning here is impugning the privilege that the current imagery of physics grants to solids over fluids.

Or—suspending the status of truth accorded to these essentially metalinguistic “categories” and “dichotomous oppositions” — to reply that in any event all language is (also) metaphorical,+ and that, by denying this, language fails to recognize the “‘subject” of the unconscious and precludes inquiry into the subjection, still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence to solids.

They key part is really the line at the end, "the subjection, still in force, of that subject to a symbolization that grants precedence to solids". The current "symbolization" of physics grants precedence to solids. But she's implying that that could change. We could imagine an alternative symbolization that grants precedence to fluids instead (without changing the content of the underlying physics).

it's likely because it is a simpler concept to do math with, than fluid cows.

Again the suggestion is that the imagery could change without changing the math.

Solid objects are already a lot more "fluid" than they might initially appear. See for example The Problem of the Many. It's not too hard to imagine an alternative conceptual landscape where we view the world of macro objects as being fundamentally populated by fluids, with "solids" being an exotic deviation from the fluid norm, if they even exist at all.

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