- on "OBJECTIVISM":
- "Anyone who has studied at an American university--especially in quantitative social science, public policy, philosophy, or human neurology or genetics--is likely to be quite familiar with this approach, which I will term objectivism--the gallant spectacle of the social researcher on an elevated platform from which she reduces the people she studies to biological units and what they say and do to quantified behavior. Her own discourse, naturally, remains beyond the pale of inquiry."
- "Objectivists regard their own words as too 'scientific' to require any outside explanation--unlike the poor slobs they study, whose words are objectified as verbal behavior, thereby ensuring that they are never considered on their own terms.... Objectivism is defined precisely by this double-standard--an unavoidable one, since treating a scholarly paper as the behavior of the researcher rather than a text to be analyzed and critiqued would make it impossible for research to function."
- "I would love to see the expression on an opinion pollster's face were she told by a journal that, instead of publishing her paper, they were going to ask her yes-and-no questions about the issues it raised and print them along with her responses."
- "Desire and exploitation are what preclude the self-enclosed mental life objectivists take as axiomatic: the provoking object that would make us whole always slips away, whether in work or in sex, forcing us to cross the doorsteps of others along the pathways of loss in the very act of saying, 'I am.'"
- "When it comes to human interactions, no experimentally-based discourse has remotely approached the contextualized, nuance-within-nuance rigor of a well-composed novel."
- "The ferocity of the postmodern culture wars is a convenient cover for the far more sweeping objectivist campaign to silence modernism itself--the entire skein of dissidence and dissonance that permeated the twentieth century."
...the most profoundly subversive essay
currently available on the Internet
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