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MichelleLuoFirstPaper 8 - 21 Apr 2012 - Main.RumbidzaiMaweni
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| | | I agree with you that the unconscious is a freaky place to dip in, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "[the unconscious] doesn't seem to leave us with much ground to stand on." The unconscious doesn't seem to me to be less abstract of a concept than logic. The difference is that we've been socialized to think logically, but we haven't trained ourselves to "harness" the unconscious. The unconscious is what moves us; people remember things emotionally. I think the challenge is training ourselves to be not only "deeply cognizant of just how limited, fragile, and incoherent legal logic is," as you say, but also to be cognizant of how the unconscious drives us. I am only beginning to grasp what this means for us on a personal level as lawyers, who happen to be humans. But I'm not quite sure how to apply these ideas to the institution of law, where bullshit seems to be a particularly strong force.
-- MichelleLuo - 21 Apr 2012
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> | I agree that logic is no less abstract than the unconscious, which is why I prefaced the quoted text with "there is a real sense that." Like you said, because we've been trained to think logically, this is the mode of thought that feels most concrete to us- that enables us to feel as though we are building upon firm foundation. But I can also understand why this may be more preferable to some, than an alternative, that feels- to many of us- far more elusive.
I like your idea of harnessing the unconscious on a personal level, though I'm a little ambivalent about and uncertain as to what it would even mean to apply this to "the institution of law." To try and depart from logical reasoning would seem to be a move away from the entire enterprise of being a legal practitioner; it's the tool we have to work with, and there are other disciplines that are far better equipped to deal with the utility of emotional memory than the legal profession. Then, again, if we believe that an institution is not a monolithic entity, but comprised of and informed by its constituent parts, I think allowing more than legal reasoning to inform the the way we, as individuals, personally think about our practice, and view our role as lawyers, would already go a long way towards making the profession one we're proud to be a part of. But anything beyond that just strikes me as, perhaps, unrealistic. | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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MichelleLuoFirstPaper 7 - 21 Apr 2012 - Main.MichelleLuo
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-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 19 Apr 2012 | |
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> | Rumbi, thank you for your thoughtful comments. I think your first paragraph is an excellent characterization of my fear - given how easily and successfully I can bullshit, I am afraid that if I am complacent about the kind of work I do in the future, bullshit will be the only thing I'll learn to do well.
I agree with you that the unconscious is a freaky place to dip in, but I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "[the unconscious] doesn't seem to leave us with much ground to stand on." The unconscious doesn't seem to me to be less abstract of a concept than logic. The difference is that we've been socialized to think logically, but we haven't trained ourselves to "harness" the unconscious. The unconscious is what moves us; people remember things emotionally. I think the challenge is training ourselves to be not only "deeply cognizant of just how limited, fragile, and incoherent legal logic is," as you say, but also to be cognizant of how the unconscious drives us. I am only beginning to grasp what this means for us on a personal level as lawyers, who happen to be humans. But I'm not quite sure how to apply these ideas to the institution of law, where bullshit seems to be a particularly strong force.
-- MichelleLuo - 21 Apr 2012 | | | \ No newline at end of file |
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MichelleLuoFirstPaper 6 - 20 Apr 2012 - Main.RumbidzaiMaweni
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| | | My Arctic Barbies experience reflects the tragedy of lawyers. Lawyers must write, make something happen with words. The some thang could be truth, but most lawyers would rather not go there. The writing of legal bullshit doesn't require the difficult task of exploring forms of knowing that go to actual relations among people; it doesn't require knowing anything at all. The lawyer that goes with legal bullshit wakes up in what Martha Tharaud calls "a 'what-is-life-really-about?' stupor" (Lawyerland 128) and he splits.
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-- MichelleLuo - 19 Apr 2012
Michelle, as you know, I really enjoyed both the first draft of this essay, as well as your re-write in progress.
Correct me if I'm wrong, or mischaracterizing your ideas, but I feel like this essay goes to the very heart of what makes it so difficult to be a lawyer- and why people who aren't lawyers regard the profession and its practitioners with wary disdain. As I was telling you earlier, I think "bullshit" is symptomatic of a lot of specialized disciplines that have their own vocabulary, framework, and modes of thought that one must be inducted into- which is pretty much what our entire 1L year has been about. It sounds like what struck you most about the class in which you wrote on Arctic Barbies was how easy it was to not only learn the discipline, but to excel in it, primarily through mimicry and adopting jargon. There is a fear that this the only thing law school teaches us to do, and if we choose, we can walk away from this experience with only that to show for it.
Eben said in one of our classes that as we go through life, we'll come to recognize that the vast majority of people suffer from a dullness of the mind. It's not a lack of intellect or an inability to learn and assimilate information. It's the failure to recognize that there is more to being a great legal practitioner than learning the language, because all you're really allowing yourself to engage with are complex layers of signifiers without any regard to what's actually being signified (to use Saussurian terms).
On the other hand, the unconscious is an incredibly scary and powerful place- and there is a real sense that to recognize that much of what informs what happens in the world comes from there, and not man-made logic, doesn't seem to leave us with much ground to stand on. Perhaps the lesson I would take away from your paper is that it's important for our humanity as lawyers, regardless of what work we end up doing, to be deeply cognizant of just how limited, fragile, and incoherent legal logic is rather than futilely trying to grasp at some "strong" measure of "truth." I don't see a way out of bullshit, but in recognizing and deeply understanding what it is and how we use it, we can best harness it to meet our goals.
-- RumbidzaiMaweni - 19 Apr 2012 |
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MichelleLuoFirstPaper 5 - 19 Apr 2012 - Main.MichelleLuo
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| | | This is one of the more desperate attempts I’ve made to produce some reflection of the world, but I didn’t purposely set out to make things up that may have no basis in reality. I had to write something about Arctic Barbies, and I did the best I could to make connections that made some sense. Maybe this focus on logic – this reaching for abstract relationships that existed only in my mind and not in the real world – is how I came to produce pure bullshit. | |
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< | What is bullshit? | >
> | What is Bullshit? | | | One way to define bullshit is in terms of what it is not - truth. I like what Eben had to say about Harry G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" (an essay I have not yet read), so I will borrow those ideas. Bullshit is not the opposite of truth. Bullshitters don't care about the truth; they care about selling a certain image of themselves. Liars have to know what the truth is in order to lie about it. Bullshitters don't have to know what the truth is to bullshit.
Bullshit in the law is what Felix Cohen calls "transcendental nonsense" – concepts based on logic and nothing else. Transcendental nonsense is precisely a disregard for truth. When we don't tie the "supernatural concepts" to "social fact and ethical value, legal thought "trapez[es] around in cycles and epicycles without coming to rest on the floor of verifiable fact." When unguided by the social forces that ought to mold it, law is bullshit. | |
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< | Thinking Over the Bullshit | >
> | What is Not Bullshit? | | | Holmes argued that logic is a cognitive structure of human beings and that the only way we can think about the world is through logic. If this were true, our cognitive limitations would preclude us from producing any reflection of the world that rises above bullshit. Is this true?
If we're going to think about human cognitive limitations, we should start with biology. We are social animals with the burden of consciousness and this mental process called logic. Before we were human, before we had logic, we were social animals living in a state of relative unconsciousness. The conservative estimate for the origin of human language and other complex cognitive abilities (roughly, logic) is 50,000 years ago. Bednarik, Robert G., A Figurine from the African Acheulian, Current Anthropology, 2003, at 412. Logic cannot be the only way we process information, because 50,000 years is an impossibly short amount of time to "evolve away" the primary mental processes we had before. The unconscious thinking remains.
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< | There is no bullshit in the unconscious. The unconscious thinking of social animals involves the emotional knowing of relationships to other primates and an intrapsychology undistorted by theory of mind. It doesn't frame things in terms of formal relations among ideas/people because it can't, so it can't define the human according to others' judgments. The unconscious, a place where self-representation does not exist, is also a place where bullshit cannot exist. The way around the cognitive limitation of logic then is to make conscious efforts to understand reality through our multiple mental processes, to become aware of the way we think about the world in our unconscious. | >
> | There is no bullshit in the unconscious. The unconscious thinking of social animals involves the emotional knowing of relationships to other primates and an intrapsychology undistorted by theory of mind. It doesn't frame things in terms of formal relations among ideas/people because it can't, so it can't define the human according to others' judgments. The unconscious, a place where self-representation does not exist, is a place where bullshit cannot exist. The way around the cognitive limitation of logic then is to make conscious efforts to understand reality through our multiple mental processes, to become aware of the way we think about the world in our unconscious. | | | The Lawyer Who Bullshits |
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MichelleLuoFirstPaper 4 - 19 Apr 2012 - Main.MichelleLuo
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< | Currently train-of-thought style: To Be Re-Edited | | | How Do We Stop Bullshitting?
-- By MichelleLuo - 13 Feb 2012 | | | 4) In 1982, Mattel released Eskimo Barbie.
5) “Eskimo Barbie is a cultural artifact of a significant conflict between Inuit and Western viewpoints in modern history.” (an actual line from the paper) | |
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< | This is probably one of the more desperate attempts I’ve made to produce some reflection of the world, but I didn’t purposely set out to make things up that may have no basis in reality. I fell into the Barbie paper by accident and the end result was shaky, but during the process, I did the best I could to make connections that made some sense. Maybe this focus on logic – this reaching for abstract relationships that existed only in my mind and not in the real world – is why the end result was bullshit. | >
> | This is one of the more desperate attempts I’ve made to produce some reflection of the world, but I didn’t purposely set out to make things up that may have no basis in reality. I had to write something about Arctic Barbies, and I did the best I could to make connections that made some sense. Maybe this focus on logic – this reaching for abstract relationships that existed only in my mind and not in the real world – is how I came to produce pure bullshit. | | | What is bullshit?
One way to define bullshit is in terms of what it is not - truth. I like what Eben had to say about Harry G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit" (an essay I have not yet read), so I will borrow those ideas. Bullshit is not the opposite of truth. Bullshitters don't care about the truth; they care about selling a certain image of themselves. Liars have to know what the truth is in order to lie about it. Bullshitters don't have to know what the truth is to bullshit. | |
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< | Legal bullshit is what Felix Cohen calls "transcendental nonsense." Transcendental nonsense is precisely a disregard for truth. When we don't tie the "supernatural concepts" to "social fact and ethical value, legal thought "trapez[es] around in cycles and epicycles without coming to rest on the floor of verifiable fact." When unguided by the social forces that ought to mold it, law is bullshit. | >
> | Bullshit in the law is what Felix Cohen calls "transcendental nonsense" – concepts based on logic and nothing else. Transcendental nonsense is precisely a disregard for truth. When we don't tie the "supernatural concepts" to "social fact and ethical value, legal thought "trapez[es] around in cycles and epicycles without coming to rest on the floor of verifiable fact." When unguided by the social forces that ought to mold it, law is bullshit. | | | Thinking Over the Bullshit | |
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< | Holmes said that logic is a cognitive structure of human beings and that the only way we can think about the world is through logic. If this were true, our cognitive limitations would preclude us from producing any reflection of the world that rises above bullshit. Is this true? | >
> | Holmes argued that logic is a cognitive structure of human beings and that the only way we can think about the world is through logic. If this were true, our cognitive limitations would preclude us from producing any reflection of the world that rises above bullshit. Is this true? | | | | |
<
< | If we're going to think about human cognitive limitations, we should start with biology. We are social animals with the burden of consciousness and this mental process called logic. Before we were human, before we had logic, we were social animals living in a state of relative unconsciousness. The conservative estimate for the origin of human language and other complex cognitive abilities (roughly, logic) is 50,000 years ago (Bednarik, R. (2003). A Figurine from the African Acheulian. Current Anthropology, 44(3), 405-413.) Logic cannot be the only way we process information, because 50,000 years is an impossibly short amount of time to evolve away the mental processes we had before. The unconscious thinking remains. | >
> | If we're going to think about human cognitive limitations, we should start with biology. We are social animals with the burden of consciousness and this mental process called logic. Before we were human, before we had logic, we were social animals living in a state of relative unconsciousness. The conservative estimate for the origin of human language and other complex cognitive abilities (roughly, logic) is 50,000 years ago. Bednarik, Robert G., A Figurine from the African Acheulian, Current Anthropology, 2003, at 412. Logic cannot be the only way we process information, because 50,000 years is an impossibly short amount of time to "evolve away" the primary mental processes we had before. The unconscious thinking remains. | | | | |
<
< | There is no bullshit in the unconscious. The unconscious thinking of social animals involves the emotional knowing of relationships to other primates and an intrapsychology undistorted by theory of mind. It doesn't frame things in terms of formal relations among ideas/people and it doesn't define itself according to other's judgments. The way around bullshit then is to make conscious efforts to understand reality through multiple ways of thinking, particularly through forms of knowing that go to actual relations among people. | >
> | There is no bullshit in the unconscious. The unconscious thinking of social animals involves the emotional knowing of relationships to other primates and an intrapsychology undistorted by theory of mind. It doesn't frame things in terms of formal relations among ideas/people because it can't, so it can't define the human according to others' judgments. The unconscious, a place where self-representation does not exist, is also a place where bullshit cannot exist. The way around the cognitive limitation of logic then is to make conscious efforts to understand reality through our multiple mental processes, to become aware of the way we think about the world in our unconscious. | | | | |
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< | How I Could've Not Bullshitted | >
> | The Lawyer Who Bullshits | | | | |
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< | My Arctic Barbie experience, consistently reciprocated over time, is the tragedy of lawyers. Lawyers need to know how things happen in society, but most are content with legal bullshit. | >
> | My Arctic Barbies experience reflects the tragedy of lawyers. Lawyers must write, make something happen with words. The some thang could be truth, but most lawyers would rather not go there. The writing of legal bullshit doesn't require the difficult task of exploring forms of knowing that go to actual relations among people; it doesn't require knowing anything at all. The lawyer that goes with legal bullshit wakes up in what Martha Tharaud calls "a 'what-is-life-really-about?' stupor" (Lawyerland 128) and he splits. | | | | |
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< | I should’ve said, “I’m not here to write about the Arctic. I’m here to write about sex. I’m going to follow Bukowski’s advice to Steve Richmond - 'What you need is life. Your work has to be alive. Drink, write, and fuck.' I can’t do those things if I have to make shit up about the Arctic, so I’m going to drink and fuck and write about it.” | >
> | (981) |
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