In doing my usual extreme late-night webcrawling I came across a link to a conference on autism and representation. I'm surprised by how angry the topics make me: there's someone I went to grad school with, not someone I disliked (I didn't like anyone in the program all that much, but I was so depressed that it's not surprising--it's the one segment of my life that's left no traces in the present. I am not in touch with a single person from that stage of my life) and his paper is the usual academic hodgepodge about representation and language: Lacan is in there somewhere, and Damasio, and Bernie Rimland for a little flavoring, and somewhere in there he acknowledges that he doesn't have the expertise to say much about the neurological aspects. But then, WHEN DOES THAT EVER STOP AN ACADEMIC FROM BLOVIATING? None of these people ever knew what the FUCK they were talking about once they wandered outside the narrow precincts of their specialties (time period, genre), but they blithely appropriated magpie-style their little symbols that weren't symbols at all but other people's complicated problems or lives or disciplines (neuropsychology--sure, let's just throw that around, even if you have no idea what the FUCK it means or what the consequences are, what they really look like).

I was guilty of the same thing myself, of course: somewhere on my hard drive is a bad chapter of the Dissertation That Wasn't, and if I recall correctly, I spent pages and pages punning on the relation between childbearing and writing. When I had no clue what childbearing actually means, but I was rather clever about it all. It's embarrassing.

And it's so nice to be cute about signifiers and language and the mirror stage when in fact Lacan has NOTHING to do with actual child development, and language development has real actual consequences: it's not just an endless chain of signifiers to diddle with or experience jouissance or whatever the hell.

This is of course ridiculously unfair: when I wasn't busy wanting to hide under a desk, I thought most of my fellow wannabe academics were a fairly admirable group, even if they scared me. I envy, I guess, the liberty to see this as an academic conference paper topic, and it's nothing that black academics haven't brought up about white appropriation.

Bedtime.