excuse our Neurosis. mebbe ange will make it a threesome?
dream date ken informs:
>The Slovene Lacanian School, in general, is attempting to
>provide a detailed map of ideological structures within culture.
> Key to this analysis is a critique of pure desire (in contrast to
>Kant's critique of pure reasoning). So if you run the gambit of
>their writings, there is very little untouched... from popular
>culture to philosophy to literature and performance art and, of
>course, psychoanalysis.
it's also cool coz when you get bored by your dissertation topic you can start analyzing popular culture for a living.
The aim to transcend this is a
>political project, in the Castoriadisian sense, not a theoretical
>project.
explain....? but if i'm gettin' ya: NO SHIT
Theory attempts to grasp what is true... and, following
>Hegel, how truth permutates through a fluid reality. I really
>don't see any ahistorical character to this.
a theory of change. lacking one makes it ahistorical. if the subject is an historical production, if it is contingent, if it is broadly conventional then it has not always been this way and, theoretically, it won't always be this way. WHAT ACCOUNTS FOR CHANGE?
aporetics honey bunch.
>The primary criticism, it seems to me, leveled against
>theorists like Zizek is that he locates things like
>ethnocentrism, sexism, nationalism, racism, and class
>struggle in the Real.
the Real=that which cannot be articulated in language, that which can't be symbolized into abstract utterances and identified. did i get it right teach?
>But this makes a great deal of sense.
noper. you've made a big leap here from the Real is where 'isms' are located and the Real can't be articulated.....so how can you say they're located in the Real. ideologies are sure as hell articulated. but i suspect you mean something else.
If
>class struggle exists, if we live within it, then it cannot be
>explored with a scientific objectivating procedure.
uh yeah. this is NOT a new claim. marx? where do you think the sociology of knowledge and science came from? and quickly thereafter, the sociology of sociology? and quickly thereafter the recognition that we're fucked!? which is to say, when i'm in one of my worser moods it leads everyone right into a damn corner with everyone staring at the lint in their belly buttons.
In other
>words, something like class struggle isn't reduceable to the
>imaginary or the symbolic. To say that class struggle, for
>instance, is Real - it to mean that literally. It is Real, class
>struggle exists.
but it can't be articulated for if it can be then it is imaginary--there is a gap between the experience of class struggle and how we conceptualize it in the language of theory and research. but you can't really say this either because there is no such thing as experience w/o an interpretive language that organizes that experience so that we can understand it.
time to classify the lint in yer belly button mebbe?
Now if you want to say that this denies the
>social character of class struggle, then you have to admit that
>science *can* grasp it completely, or you are forced into the
>position of denying that class struggle exists at all!
kantian ken, you'll have to explain this philosophical maneuver for me.
So these
>kind of Lacanian investigations are highly sensitive to
>change... and well away that history isn't a baseball bat that
>you hit people as a form of correctional social conditioning.
>Lacanian analysis resists this.
so do a lot of other theories ken. marxist and feminist scholarship in particular vigorously resist this as well.
>What is truly novel in this is the "recovery" (in a sense) of the
>importance of the Freudian unconscious. Despite Zizek
>fanatic devotion to Lacan, one of the important aspects of his
>analyses is a damning critique of the philosophies of
>accommodation. Habermas deliberative citizen is sadean... a
>citizen who engages in procedures of interrogation...
and just what exactly is zizek doing if not engaging in procedures of interrogation?
like
>Butler's drag performer who always has to purchase new
>clothes... Is there not a resemblance here between
>Habermas, Butler, and Sade? Kant's postulate of the
>immortality of the soul, Butler's constant performativity,
>Sade's beautiful eternal body, and Habermas's unlimited
>communicative community... even Derrida's hauntology...
>whereby ghosts never rest and torture us the present with a
>spectral past... deconstruction forever! At least the Lacanians
>acknowledge that enjoyment should not be forgotten in
>politics! and that this comes like a double edged sword.
oh well now you've made another leap to 'enjoyment in politics'
TRANSLATION HELP PLS!!!!!!!!!????????
>> so what is the new territory they're mapping? i keep
>reading this stuff and i can't seem to locate any attempt to
>answer this question.
>
>First, I'm not sure that Lacanian social theorists are under
>orders to map new territory.
ahem: "the Slovene Lacanian School, in general, is attempting to provide a detailed map of ideological structures within culture. " [At 04:38 PM 7/23/99 PDT dream date ken wrote this]
I'm quite sure that these folks
>recognize that theory isn't cartography... following Hegelian
>themes... theory doesn't provide a map of the terrain, theory is
>part of that very map. This involves a paradox.
der. no kidding. so this is nothing new, so i should add: "doy!"
>Let's say a journalist is present at the scene of an accident.
>They want to provide an objective account. If they describe
>the scene without their presence, then they've missed out on
>their objective existence. If, on the other hand, the journalist
>wants to include themself, they have to see things from
>outside of themselves... and this is impossible! (this is
>basically the paradox in set theory that Russell talks about).
>So the map becomes the terrain. This isn't new, but it is rare
>to find theorists that are sensitive to this.
oh come on. this is so not new and so not rare it's not even funny! every godamn time any social scientist, particularly those who engage in ethnography, do research and write about it they absolutely HAVE to account for this. everyone has to locate themselves in a methodology chapter and demonstrate that they understand the methodological debates and locate their research within that context.
>The real substance of Zizek's account can be found in Tichlish
>Subjects - where he takes on everyone from Butler to
>Habermas. If Zizek isn't contributing anything new - then why
>is it possible for him to demolish everything from analytic
>philosophy and communicative action to pragmatism and
>postmodernism with a frankly immanent critique?
oh you can't be serious that this is the only defense they have?
>
>I'm just guessing here... but isn't this fairly new?
NO! 'wanna go for a ride ken?'
jason, methodological dualism was used by Alvin Gouldner in _The Crisis of Western Sociology_. and i'm throwing it on this reply to dreamdate ken because it fits with this little debate:
sociologists keep two sets of books, one for the study of 'laymen' and another when he thinks about himself....the sociologist believes himself capable of making hundreds of purely rational decisions....he thinks of these as free technical decisions and of himself as acting in autonomous conformity with technical standards, rather than as a creature molded by social structure and culture. if he finds he has gone wrong, he thinks of himself as having made a mistake. a mistake is an outcome produced not by any social necessity, but by a corrigible ignorance, a lack of careful thought....
when this is called to his attention, he will acknowledge that his behavior is influenced by social forces. he will acknowledge...that there is or can be such a thing as a sociology of knowledge or a sociology of sociology....[but this concession is begrudgingly made. it is] not deeply convincing to him. in short, it is not part of the normal way of thinking about his own everyday work. [p 55]
methodological dualism is based on the myth that social worlds are merely 'mirrored' in the sociologist's work, rather than seeing them as conceptually constituted by the sociologist' commitments...it serves as a powerful inhibitor of awareness, for it paradoxically presupposes that the sociologist may rightfully be changed as a person by everything except the very intellectual work which is at the center of his existence. [496]
now ken, what you can object to is gouldner's assumption that the solution is a kind politicization of the self and self-reflection where the methodological monism that gouldner goes on to espouse assumes that the subject can know and understand himself and how he changes through his work and how his work changes others. etc.
so, it seem to me that this is where there's a difference. not simply in the recognition that theorists/researchers are part of the world they study and translate that world into the symbolic imaginary of theory and social research, but that lacan insists that the project of self-reflexive understanding is a logical and empirical impossibility.
barbie