A Hard Stare

Consider The Lobster

Helen Lewis :

Okay, my big problem 

with The Lobsters is that 

it's scientifically — bollocks.

Right? It’s just, you cannot 

read across from lobsters 

and what they do to what

humans —

JBP :

Of course you can —

that's why serotonin

works on lobsters.

Helen Lewis :

It works in two different ways, 

so it — (Looks frightened, checks notes)

Serotonin makes lobsters 

more aggressive;

it makes humans less 

aggressive, right? That's — 

JBP :

No, that's not right —

Serotonin makes human

 beings more dominant but 

less aggressive, and the

only reason it makes them 

more dominant is because 

they're less irritable and 

they're less defensively 

aggressive.

So it's not bollocks —

I know my neurochemistry;

so if you're going to play 

in neurochemistry, 

let's go do it.

“The central postmodernist claim seems to me that because there’s a near infinite number of ways to interpret a complex set of phenomena — which actually happens to be the case — You can’t make a case that any of those modes of interpretation are canonical. And so, if they’re not canonical, and if that canonical element isn’t based in some kind of reality, then it serves some other Master.

And so The Master that it hypothetically serves for the postmodernists is NOTHING BUT POWER because that seems to be EVERYTHING they believe in. 

They don’t BELIEVE in Competence. 

They don’t BELIEVE in Authority. 

They don’t seem to believe in an Objective World, 

because everything is LANGUAGE-MEDIATED. 

So it’s an extraordinarily cynical perspective : that because there’s an infinite number of interpretations, none of them are canonical. 

You can attribute everything to Power and Dominance.

It’s a Radical Relativism."