> .... social life needs .... agreed upon rules, norms, habits of
thought and action which make life simpler. there is nothing a
priori wrong with that.
You're kidding. Who's social life? Mine? I don't think I need life to be simpler. Gabba gabba hey? I don't think so. We are taught that life needs to be simpler, we are told that we need life to be simpler, "Keep is simple stupid." When you hail people as stupid, lo and behold, they respond in stupid ways.
Tis a great myth that life should be diluted to involved only three [unquestionable!] perspectives: truth [father], rightness [son], and truthfulness [spirit]. As for a priori's - you've logged time with Ockham and his razor. That's too much a priori for me. Besides, even if Ockham is right, and the simpler of two explanations is probably the correct one... this doesn't mean that it is good (for us). The truth may be, in fact, true, it might even be objective, but this doesn't mean that it is good. And this is Zizek's point. It isn't the illusion that brings us down, it is our image of reality itself.
> it would not be a particularly 'free' world if we had to
negotiate the rules that we agree to every damn time we
assembled or did anything together.
Being free to negotiate rules isn't much of a freedom. Having to choose between two or eight undesirable laws isn't freedom, although Ford would love us to think that ("you can have any colour car you want, as long as it is black").
> institutions are both enabling and constraining. and if you
don't like that b/c it sounds like durkheim well read foucault
who, i hate to tell ya but i will anyway, read plenty of
durkheim. [tho clearly he set about to reframe durkheim's
conservative functionalism].
Someone mentioned to Lacan that Foucault was doing research on madness, and was going to an asylum to study. Lacan noted, "Good, he should stay there." I'm glad that Foucault has read Durkheim, but he's still wrong. Foucault argues that the effect brings about its own cause... but this is a zero sum game for Foucault. So there is no means of resistance. All there is only perversion. You subvert or trangress the rules, which simply emphasizes the rules - there is a fetishization of content here (both of which Freud and Marx were critical of). Foucault forgets what psychoanalysis remembers: that it is only in neuroses that rules themselves are questioned. Perversions and psychoses are positions based on unquestionable knowledge (absolute knowledge of the rules). Hysteria questions this, and questions everything. In hysterics, the effect outdoes the cause, not in perversion / trangression. Someone has a grand olde theory of carnival... where the rich become poor and the poor become rich (for the duration of the festival). This is perverted. A sick joke.
> now, concretely this works like this: when i go to teach a
class, both me and my students are spared a lot of frustration,
time and agony because the institution of the academy is
basically nothing more and nothing less than structured
according to normative ideals and practices that *guide* [not
dictate] our expectations of one another and ourselves.
They dictate practices. If you don't pay, you're out, just as one example. Certain behaviour in class is unacceptable (and should be!). And plagarism?
> i don't have to stand there and tell them what to expect from
me, what i expect from them, what a blackboard is, what chalk
is, what books are and what to do with them, where and how
to sit, etc because we all already know a lot of this. otherwise
we'd spend about 3 wks sorting all of this out. i still have
to spell out some rules and expectations--in part because
these are increasingly contested, in part because i'm a
woman and don't carry as much authority, in part because i do
things differently than the norm.
No two expectations are the same. Keeping it simple results in a kind of watered down "good boy, good girl" school ethic. Ie. the protestant work ethic. And yeah, especially because you are female. Several of my friends who have taught classes and run the dissertation gambit have been targeted by students and faculty because they are women. If then are feminist, so much the worse (feminist content is courses is strongly discouraged these days - feminism is to be replaced by gender, sexuality, culture, or women's studies). Women are less likely to receive scholarships, women are less likely to be admitted to the program on the merits of their proposals,
male students are still asked for more verbal input during classes, women tend have to work harder to achieve equivalent grades to other male students. At least this is fairly common in the administrivia at the U of T. Maybe things are different elsewhere. This stuff is so bloody obvious at departmental meetings and such. And damn, more students use exclusive language (deliberately!) now than they did a few years ago.
> >and, to follow Horkheimer and Adorno, doesn't this really
> >mean that enlightenment relives subjects of the burden of
> >thought?
>
> and what, ken, is the primary force behind this? the
ideational operations of rationalization? well huh, looks like
you're stretching horkheimer's and adorno's weberian
commitments waaaaaay farther than they ever wanted to
take them.
It was a quote. Dialectic of Enlightenment is broken into three parts: myth and enlightenment, kant and juliette, and the culture industry (the chapter on anti-semitism was added later). Their argument is this: normative economic models and commercialism (exchange and utility) have colonized science, science, in turn, has colonized the processes of morality, and art has been commodifed by both. In effect, the three spheres that Weber distinguishes have been completely fused in a lethal model. This is why Horkheimer and Adorno rely on an emphatic model of reason, the fusion of the spheres demand a critique of the fusion - which can only be done with a reason that is critical and practical - and engaged in all three spheres simultaneously. This is why Habermas must systematically undercut every aspect of their analysis. Habermas *needs* the three spheres to be distinct (however counterfactual this is). Habermas then relies on the power of the reconstructive sciences to confer validity to the normativity of all forms of communication oriented by an attempt to understand. This normativity is then used to separate, thematically, the three spheres. His argument is circular, a very nice and complicated tautology.
ken