Signification

Signification is the first part of three posts on, Roughly speaking, ‘Being a people person’ (the other two are Mad Maths and Observation-Action-Response.)

This might all be nonsense, but if you’re interested, keep on.

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Intro: Scott Aaronson vs. The Internet

I came pretty late to the party. As in, I didn’t know about the Scott Aaronson vs. the Internet situation until a colleague of mine posted it on one of the virtual boards we have these days. It looked interesting, so I started reading.

The article turned out to be Laurie Penny’s  reply to Scott Aaronson’s comment, so I went and read  comment #171 and got sucked into the debate. It’s interesting. If you’re interested in gender politics and how it is to exist in the world as a nerd, I think the responses to Scott Aaronson’s #171  and the virtual shouting, discussing, yelling, and taunting are an interesting insight into a part of life that’s rarely brought into such clear focus.

Scott Aaronson’s experiences were a surprise to me. His openness and honesty helped me appreciate a perspective I hadn’t really considered before, one of a young male teen feeling absolutely lost in a discourse (yes, I said it) of gender. His teenage confusion, frustration, and plain terror of gender relations (Aaronson is a white heterosexual man) could only be escaped with the “life of the mind” he found in mathematics. Math was a life-saver, keeping Aaronson from his suicidal thoughts. The feminist literature he read – admittedly, pretty radical books (e.g. Andrea Dworkin) – made matters worse than better, until Aaronson even considered chemical castration, so deep was his self-loathing. I won’t go into detail about how he survived his teens and early twenties, Aaronson is quite adept at explaining that himself (really, go read it). Suffice it to say that he is in a much more content place now, mentally, emotionally, and psychologically, living with a partner and a daughter he quite obviously loves.

And then it gets interesting. The responses to Aaronson’s comment are… quite unbelievable at times. A lot of people got very angry, seeing in Aaronson’s #171 comment (and his follow-up “What I believe”) nothing more than white heterosexual male whining, a harsh bit of check-your-privilege. But, there were enough people who were willing to listen to what he had to say and actually discuss the matter. I think the general consensus was that being a nerd is not easy. The bone of contention was whether that particular suffering, in this case that of the heterosexual white male nerd in a pre-Sillicon Valley Billionaire culture and society, exempt said nerd from the usual WASP categories of privilege. To Aaronson, his suffering as a teen nerd does trump whatever WASP privilege he apparently had – he states that he had no sense of being privileged while growing up – which was why the backlash was so violent. I think Laurie Penny’s response summarises the problem rather nicely:

These are curious times. Gender and privilege and power and technology are changing and changing each other. We’ve also had a major and specific reversal of social fortunes in the past 30 years. Two generations of boys who grew up at the lower end of the violent hierarchy of toxic masculinity – the losers, the nerds, the ones who were afraid of being creeps – have reached adulthood and found the polarity reversed. Suddenly they’re the ones with the power and the social status. Science is a way that shy, nerdy men pull themselves out of the horror of their teenage years. That is true. That is so. But shy, nerdy women have to try to pull themselves out of that same horror into a world that hates, fears and resents them because they are women, and to a certain otherwise very intelligent sub-set of nerdy men, the category “woman” is defined primarily as “person who might or might not deny me sex, love and affection”.

Penny has a lot more to say on the complex situation nerds of either gender found themselves in before the STEM super-stardom of the last three decades, (she also allows for space for the implications of ethnicity). I won’t go into it here, Penny’s article is really worth a read, and she explains her point rather well. Now, I don’t know if and how things have changed for nerdy teens today in American High Schools – which is another thing that would be interesting to look into. I do wonder how much of what was blogged and posted about had and has to do with the American high school culture, and how much of it is globally applicable, but I digress. The reason I started this whole post is because the debate got me thinking about what I always think about: structure, perspective, and prevalent systems of definition.

Here it goes.

‘Hard’ vs. ‘Fluid’ signifiers

So, here’s the thing. One of the main points of frustration almost everyone blogging and posting about #171 wrote about was the lack of communication tools young nerds have when facing their love/sexual interest. There seem to be no safe tools to communicate, and, in the light of Aaronson’s experiences, those tools that are available seem as helpful as a bear-trap in the woods, metaphorically speaking. The love/sexual interest would be the bear in this scenario, and as bear-traps go…

Ok. But: isn’t the problem here not so much a lack of tools to ‘access’ the love/sexual interest, than a difficulty to grasp the tools available due to their ambiguity? The problem, as always, is: how much is too much? Where, exactly, is that line that should never be crossed? How does ‘act normal’ work? You laugh, but I’m serious. This is a problem for very many people.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll stick to the STEM inclined set. We have, on the one hand, a group of people whose frame of reference are ‘hard’ signifiers such as mathematical formulas like a simple (a+b)² = a² + 2ab + b². On the other hand, there are your generic social situations where ‘fluid’ signifiers are necessary, e.g. “When is it ok to take a girl/boy by the hand, even if it’s ‘just for fun’?”

So, wouldn’t the basic difficulty be how to grasp the above mentioned fluid signifiers, which, by definition are not ‘graspable’ qua fluid?

What I mean is:

A: we have a system of fluid signifiers, a given social situation.

B: the means available to understand that system are hard signifiers, like mathematical formulas (plug in the respective numeric value, et voilà)

Trying to make A comprehensible via B… wouldn’t it be like trying to hold water? Only so much can be retained in the palm of one’s hand. Ok, one can make containers, but there’s the rub: the point, is not, as it were, to hold the fluid. It’s not about holding the water – as in ‘grasping’ the fluid signifiers. The objective is usage and application. And for that fluidity, as a concept, has to be understood in toto. Not simply grasped, piecemeal.

To keep with the water metaphor: the point of fluid signifiers is being an active part of their practice, i.e. jumping in and swimming in the water, immersing oneself in the element, understanding top wave and under currents etc., and maybe even trying some surfing. The point is finding out how the fluid signifiers work, not deconstructing the fluidity into its particles, e.g. ‘put hand carefully on non-breast and non-gluteus maximus area of female and no slap will happen’. That, I would say, would amount to a momentary ‘grasping’ of the fluid signifier re physical contact, i.e. ‘don’t touch the woman’s breasts or derriere and you’re good’ in any given situation.

You can see how this might get problematic, especially in sexual situations.

When does the formula ‘do not touch x or y at any given z’ in any given situation of z, stop being applicable? When does z turn to a given situation s (sexual situation) where ‘do not touch x or y at any given z’ no longer holds, because ‘touching x or y is very desirable’ to a value of l+n (not too little and not too much)? Where does the change happen? How succinctly identify when the ‘do not touch’ formula no longer holds and the ‘do touch’ formula does hold? Very tricky business, that.

This is where conceptual fluidity is necessary. The problem is that it’s so infinitely hard to apply within ‘hard signifier’ systems. The above ‘grasping’ situation has little to do with actually experiencing the fluidity of the signifier, i.e. understanding when and what kind of touching is possible and acceptable at any given moment (from situations z to s), without the previous rigid particularization of ‘put hand on non-breast and non-gluteus maximus area and no slap will happen’.

So, as many a nerd knows all too well, when wondering whether you can approach the person you are romantically/sexually interested in (let alone kiss and touch that person), the system that makes (a+b)² = 2² + 2ab + b² make complete sense does not help. The particularization and precision processes so necessary in STEM fields is actually counterproductive in this case. That is not to say that fluid signifiers are not particular and precise. It is simply that the nature of their particularity and precision is very different from the kind in (a+b)² = 2² + 2ab + b² .

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[Continued in the post Mad Maths]

Know yourself
s.