Saturday, June 21, 2014

Full Metal Žižek: We read self-promoting obscurantist bafflegab so you don't have to to avoid working

One side-effect of recent inquiries into the world of money-leeching rep-snatching journals (and the people who publish in them) was to introduce me to the whole bogus bolus of Neutrosophy. Which is a holus bolus indeed, capable of sucking any field of science of humanities into its maw by sticking the word 'neutrosophic" in front of it (while drowning all meaning in a sepia mist of neologisms and tergiversation). Try it yourself... Neutrosophic logic! Neutrosophic physics! Neutrosophic golliwology!
Now I am not saying that an entire intellectual movement is fraudulent just because its members all pay to publish in mockademic pukefunnels rather than face peer review (though you might very well think that). Just saying, the favourite publisher for one Romanian Neutrosophist is the criminal enterprise that usurped the name of Mitteilungen Klosterneuburg, and Jokull. Another neurosophist favours Jokull and the other hijacked titles Pensée and Wulfenia. To say nothing of that wretched hive of scum and villainy, Lambert Academic Publishing.

Essentially Neutrosophy is Null-Aristotelian logic, but with the serial number filed off the chassis, with less teleportation, and with better taste in clothing.

Its originator is one Florentin Smarandache, who along with 'Caran-d'ache' comprises 40% of a limerick; he is an exponent of the "Philosophy as Performance Artform" school of thought. Since Smarandache mounted the bank he has accrued a network of students and sock-puppets who share the values of that artform (i.e. posturing, self-promotion, self-contradiction and incompetence as an ironic stance).
The genius of Smarandache extends to artistic as well as scholarly output (i.e. writing manifestos and coining movements, not actually creating art). Clearly he is a super-intelligent Van-Vogtian Slan. His students prefer to call him a Renaissance man; Wikipedia editors are far less kind.
You are reading all this at Riddled because the time will come when Slanoj Žižek will fall from grace as the media's source of Deconstructionist opinions on any topic. Here is your chance to acquire hipster status, by knowing Smarandache's name before the other intellectual hipsters take him up as Eastern-European Man of Letters.Remember, you read it here first!
So far his movement has not produced a "Neutrosophy Three" or a "Neutrosophic Continuum", but these works cannot be far away.

6 comments:

zombie rotten mcdonald said...

You know, you might get more traffic if you talked about launching explosive vehicles.

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said...

Coincidentally, I am putting the finishing touches on my novel, "Null-A Game, Set, and Match."
~

Smut Clyde said...

you might get more traffic if you talked about launching explosive vehicles
Thanks for the warning.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

and the other hijacked titles Pensée

I initially misread this as "Penes".

Hmmmmm... I think I'm going to make a million dollars with Make Love the Neutrosophic Way.

Pupienus Maximus said...

Such sloppy work! You make a bold assertion yet provide NO evidence for the better clothing tastes of neutrosophists.

C-

Lee Rudolph said...

Having come late to the party (via a path that began, naturally, at Retractionwatch), and also having re-read a pile of van Vogt this fall (while preparing to throw out—that is, donate an SF collection that stopped growing in about 1965 and had been sitting untouched in a dampish barn since 1999), I hope it's not too late to warn you off The Mating Cry. It manages to combine the worst of van Vogt's usual tropes with both a bit of soft-core pornography AND more than a bit of hard-boiled detective thriller. (Well, I guess the two were already present in Spillane. So this might be described as Spillane with spaceships, superpeople, and so on.)