Catachresis, Quantum Mechanics, and the Letter of Lacan

In a series of recent publications, Alan Sokal has criticized contemporary cultural studies for slavish adherence to “postmodern literary theory.” In particular, he accuses cultural critics and their Gallic sources of failing to observe proper standards of logical rigor and attention to evidence. In addition, he criticizes “theorizing about the social construction of reality,” which seeks to explain scientific knowledge as the outcome of social causes rather than the “objective” representation of reality. ¹ These criticisms are implicitly linked, although Sokal never clarifies the precise nature of the connection. The unstated assumption seems to be that in seeing science (or reality) as socially constructed, the grounds for appealing to evidence and logic is undermined—thus leaving the door open for ideological influences and fuzzy “subjectivist” thinking. ²

Sokal’s criticisms can be answered in several ways. Over the past forty years or so, much work in the history of science has demonstrated that throughout its history, science has responded to social influences, frequently brokered by borrowings from “popular” writings on science or philosophy. ³ Sokal’s criticisms may also be countered more directly by showing that poststructuralist thought throws productive light upon science. ⁴ The present article contributes to the latter form of of scholarship by showing how poststructuralist theory—specifically, a Lacanian reading of Freud—illuminates a particular episode in the history of quantum mechanics (QM).

My starting point is the provocative claim by the Lacanian cultural critic Slavoj Zizek that QM constitutes a site where, possibly for the first time in its history, science confronts what Jacques Lacan calls “the Real”—that is, anxiety-provoking points of failure in its symbolic order. ⁵

According to Lacan, who follows Freud closely on this point, all manifestations of the Real exhibit a common trajectory: initially repressed, they leave only a few stray signifiers floating on the surface of conscious belief. The repressed always returns, however, resurfacing in a more or less modified form that Freud calls the “symptom.” I shall argue that this trajectory of repression and return explains an otherwise puzzling aspect of the history of a particular interpretation of QM: the so-called orthodox interpretation introduced by Niels Bohr, which I introduce in the next section. Upon its introduction in the mid-thirties Bohr’s interpretation quickly took on the mantle of a regnant orthodoxy. Soon after its inception, however, it was challenged by a more formal, statistical interpretation introduced by Max Born. By the fifties, it was swamped by a sea of rival contenders, including various “hidden variables” interpretations—such as David Bohm’s, which, by pretending to a comprehensive representation of reality, suppressed all signs of the Real. Remarkably, however, the Bohr interpretation has, at least at a rhetorical level, continued to exert a spell over the discourses of QM, retaining the honorific title “orthodox interpretation” despite the fact that only a few of Bohr’s original concepts have survived unscathed. I shall argue that the puzzling intransigence of Bohr’s signifiers can be understood as an instance of what Freud calls “the return of the repressed.”

Quantum Mechanics and the Real

Bohr argued that in order to be comprehensible, descriptions of quantum phenomena must be framed in the language of classical physics:

It is decisive to recognize that however far the phenomena transcend the scope of classical physical exploration, the account of all evidence must be expressed in classical terms. . . . The argument is simply that by the word “experiment” we refer to a situation where we can tell others what we have done and what we have learned and that, therefore, the account of the arrangement and the results of the observation must be expressed in unambiguous language with suitable application of the terminology of classical physics. ⁶

As Bohr also pointed out, however, quantum phenomena do not belong to the domain of “middle-sized” objects to which the concepts of classical physics apply, and therefore they cannot be described in classical terms. Thus the following dilemma appears: either descriptions of quantum phenomena are expressed in classical terms, in which case they are meaningful but not correct, or...