Ian Murray wrote:
>
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> Reify:
> To regard (something abstract) as a material thing.
>
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> *And in a fine case of self-reflexive reification*
>
> "History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the
> intellect...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it
> contains everything and furnishes examples of everything." [Paul Valery]
>
True, the marxist tradition contains many instances in which "History" has indeed been reified. Probably one instance is Trotsky's famous proclamation on the "dustbin of history" -- it is possible for the speaker to identify him/herself with a "history outside history" (as Pound does in the _Cantos_), in which case history becomes merely a new version of Plato's Good. But Trotsky could also have been merely using "dustbin of history" as a convenient shorthand, a way of labelling the departing Mensheviks as themselves retreating from the actualities of ongoing history (i.e., practice) in the name of some absolute outside history.
Ian is claiming that Yoshie's use of "History" is, like the use of "Desire" in Plato, Lacan, Butler, Zizek, and Henwood, a puritanical and intellectualist denial of the legitimacy of ordinary human practice and experience in the name of a higher reality (History, Desire) existing outside of and prior to human practice, and in the name of which all actual human practice, enjoyment, etc. can be condemned or rejected as belonging merely to the realm of appearance, possessing no 'real' reality.
Zizek, for example, seems to want us to focus on the Platonic Form, "Human Weirdness," and thus avoid any attempt to arrive at a historical _and_ neurological understanding of the huge variety of human practices in varying concrete contexts. Zizek, that is, proceeds as Plato did when (putting his assumptions into the mouth of his opponent) he has Thrasymachus claim that a mathematician is not a mathematician when he is making a mistake. Similarly, Zizek (in a post fwd to LBO by Doug) wanted Yoshie to offer an explanation for the "weird things humans do." That is, he would not listen to any social (historical or political) or neurological explanation until one had in effect denied those explanatory categories, shifting the discourse to an ahistorical realm in which one had to explain a reified or Platonic "Human Weirdness." Faced with Q in context X desiring a drink of Kool Aid, or with P in context Y desiring anal intercourse with R, or with S in contxt Z desiring a sharper lead pencil, or with Q` in context X` desiring to put down the drink he is carrying to free his hands to tighten his belt, the Platonic Realist ("Socrates," Zizek, Henwood) replies, but those are only _examples_ of Desire, and how can we know that they are examples of Desire until we first know what DESIRE is.
Now the case would have to be argued at length, but I should think that Yoshie's History is not, like Zizek's Desire, a Platonic form but merely an index, pointing us back to the actualities of human practice within which, in any given instance, the collective awareness of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a particular practice is determined.
Carrol