Messing about with its brain, doing things to it with laser beams – obscure object of desire edition

by John Holbo on November 23, 2010

In the course of concocting a bad argument against Peter Singer, Zizek says something … well, you tell me:

Jacques-Alain Miller, the main pupil of Jacques Lacan, once described an uncanny laboratory experiment with rats. In a labyrinthine setup, a desired object (a piece of good food or a sexual partner) is first made easily accessible to a rat; then, the setup is changed in such a way that the rat sees and thereby knows where the desired object is, but cannot gain access to it. In exchange for it, as a kind of consolation prize, a series of similar objects of inferior value is made easily accessible. How does the rat react to it? For some time, it tries to find its way to the “true” object; then, upon ascertaining that this object is definitely out of reach, the rat will renounce it and put up with some of the inferior substitute objects. In short, it will act as a “rational” subject of utilitarianism. It is only now, however, that the true experiment begins: the scientists performed a surgical operation on the rat, messing about with its brain, doing things to it with laser beams about which, as Miller put it delicately, it is better to know nothing. So what happened when the altered rat was again let loose in the labyrinth, the one in which the “true” object is inaccessible? The rat insisted; it never became fully reconciled to the loss of the “true” object and resigned itself to one of the inferior substitutes, but repeatedly returned to it, attempted to reach it. In short, the rat was in a sense humanized; it assumed the tragic “human” relationship toward the unattainable absolute object that, on account of its very inaccessibility, forever captivates our desire.

Zizek provides a footnote for the rat experiment: “See Jacques-Alain Miller, Ce quifait insigne, unpublished seminar 1984-85; lecture given 3 Dec. 1984.” Unfortunately, since it is unpublished, I cannot. It doesn’t sound impossible. But the whole ‘doing things with laser beams’ aspect is suspiciously approximate. Has any rat experimenter, to your knowledge – oh, CT commentariat – devised a method of consistently laser-inducing utopianism in rats, I suppose you might call it. Rats that just won’t settle for second best, jouissance-wise? Or is Zizek peddling some Lacanian urban myth?

The Zizek passage is from “A Plea For Leninist Intolerance” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Winter, 2002), p. 549-50.


{ 303 comments }

1

extexan 11.23.10 at 3:55 am

I’m not familiar with the piece, but there’s a Spanish translation of the seminar on WordCat :

Los signos del goce
Jacques-Alain Miller
Buenos Aires ; Barcelona ; Mexico : Paidos, 1998.

Permalink: http://ucla.worldcat.org/oclc/42943979

2

Tony Sidaway 11.23.10 at 4:07 am

This was undoubtedly a reference to the notorious “rats with frickin laser beams mounted in their foreheads” experiment. Unfortunately the paper never made it to publication owing to a series of unfortunate accidents that befell the reviewers. Piranhas can be such unpredictable swimming companions.

3

Glen Tomkins 11.23.10 at 4:15 am

I used to know the answer

…but the lasers sliced up that part of my recall circuits, so it’s all gone now.

4

Matt McIrvin 11.23.10 at 4:23 am

The laser beam was in the form of a green light at the end of a pier.

5

engels 11.23.10 at 4:27 am

Speaking of tragic, obsessive relationships towards an unattainable absolute object: I am confident that the next really, really egregious footnote John Holbo digs up will finally be the definitive nail in the coffin for Zizek’s philosophical reputation.

6

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 4:30 am

My mental life is nothing if not a labyrinthine set-up, engels. We all have our own forehead mounted lasers to bear, I suppose.

7

Substance McGravitas 11.23.10 at 4:36 am

8

Dr. Hilarius 11.23.10 at 4:45 am

Oh, God but do I hate psychologists. This experiment falls into the general category of “let’s damage rat brains and see what happens.” Often introduced by a statement that “little is known about what happens when we ablate this part of the brain” while never really explaining why this shouldn’t be left in the very large universe of unknowns.

But to add wacky philosophy to bad science; T. D. Lysenko where art thou?

9

Jimmy Zed 11.23.10 at 5:21 am

Don’t know about the rats, but what’s here is a more or less standard illustration by example of Freud’s death drive.

Other example, boy falls in love with girl, girl doesn’t like boy. Boy feels incomplete … feeling won’t go away, he drones on. Rational utilitarian logic would dictate that he would move on, but no… he is undead in his irrationality — zombi-ish. Zizek is fond of this notion, and it is more or less a staple in psychoanalysis.

10

David 11.23.10 at 5:25 am

It’s all very Pynchonian.

11

Lemuel Pitkin 11.23.10 at 5:26 am

We all have our own forehead mounted lasers to bear, I suppose.

Just when I was getting ready to be really, really irritated with someone t.b.d., along comes this line to make the whole blog thing a net positive. Someone is right, or at least funny, on the internet.

12

musical mountaineer 11.23.10 at 6:01 am

Absolutely fucking useless. Get back to me when we can use a laser beam to elide utopianism in humans.

13

Zebbidie 11.23.10 at 7:09 am

Perhaps it was a loser beam.

14

Colin Danby 11.23.10 at 8:27 am

Farther down Z’s page I see a zombie reference. Work in libertarians and you have the all-purpose CT post.

15

otto 11.23.10 at 9:27 am

Where’s our Irish bailout blogging on CT? The Wild Geese are unusually silent.

16

Torquil MacNeil 11.23.10 at 9:34 am

It is so hard to tell without any detail about what that laser is doing, but if we accept the data is as it is presented, the most obvious initial thesis is that the treatment has shortened the rat’s memory or its learning capacity (insofar as they are different) not that it has tampered with the engines of desire. I would bet that this was research into memory.

How weird that Zizek believes that human beings never settle for second best. He has obviously never been to Southampton.

17

ajay 11.23.10 at 10:25 am

I can’t help feeling (just to tie two threads together) that the humanities might find it a bit easier to get funding and respect if they didn’t take manifest lunatics like this seriously. This is the public face of modern philosophy here, like it or not. This and Bernard-Henri Levy. When someone says “I’d like a grant to study the expression of cell growth factor gamma-14-B in mice”, then people think “aha! serious intellectual effort! big brains attacking complicated problems! possibly cure for cancer!” If someone says “I’d like a grant to study modern philosophy” people think “Zizek”.

18

a neuroscientist 11.23.10 at 10:26 am

There are hundreds of expts out there showing that cutting out bits of rat brain makes it hard for the rat to learn new things (e.g. http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&q=rat+learning+ablation&btnG=Search&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo=&as_vis=0). I don’t know the specific experiment described, but I would be very surprised if the neuroscientists interpreted it in the anthropomorphic terms described.

As for lasers, the fashionable research these days is in optogenetics, where you use a laser to turn on specific brain cells in a genetically modified fly or rat. The scientist with the laser can control exactly what the rat does, which is pretty amazing. http://neuromancy.wordpress.com/2010/06/20/optogenetics-in-1000-words-or-less/

19

Chris Williams 11.23.10 at 10:55 am

Sod off ajay – 95% of us are researching falsifiable stuff like everyone else. It’s just the odd loon whose following exists chiefly in fans of cultural studies who can get away with this kind of crap. But the loon gets the publicity. Grrr..

20

Chris Williams 11.23.10 at 10:56 am

Hmm… grumpy reply alert. Sorry if the above was overly grumpy. Hugs.

21

Nabakov 11.23.10 at 11:25 am

I can see the book now. Lasers For Algernon.

22

Chris Williams 11.23.10 at 11:27 am

Who lased my cheese?

23

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 11:34 am

I was thinking it would be “Fur and Trembling”, the tale of how a simple laser created a Rat of Faith. Very Mrs. Frisby-meets-Kierkegaard.

24

ajay 11.23.10 at 11:36 am

95% of us are researching falsifiable stuff like everyone else

Oh, absolutely. Didn’t mean to imply otherwise. But, as you point out, the loons get the publicity. And the humanities don’t seem as good at publicly rejecting loons as the sciences. No one’s going to think that Deepak Chopra and Rupert Sheldrake represent the face of modern physics, but people like Zizek, who (it appears from the quote above) simply make stuff up as it suits their argument, are still part of the community.

25

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 12:16 pm

For the sake of fairness: it really doesn’t seem incredible to me that this is a real experiment. Zizek is, of course, winding up to over-interpret the results in his signature, buffo style. But that’s sort of separate.

26

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 12:25 pm

Sorry, some comments – such as neuroscientist’s – got turned on late

27

Jim Buck 11.23.10 at 12:34 pm

My money is on Zizek describing an actual experiment, rather than ‘just making things up’. Anyroad up, I’m an avid purchaser of Zizek’s books—in hardback! I read his entire ouvre, last year, and found it a most pleasurable reading experience. If he appears on my TV, or speaks on my radio–then it eggs my day, just right. I’m happy for my hard-earned taxes to go towards the nurture of philosphers as interesting as Zizek.

Here’s a wild goose: http://blogs.ft.com/westminster/2010/11/osbornes-paean-to-the-irish-economy/

28

Tim Wilkinson 11.23.10 at 1:02 pm

Well he definitely made up on account of its very inaccessibility, which since it features in what seems vaguely to correspond to what the rest of us would call a ‘conclusion’ is unfortunate for what seems vaguely to correspond to what the rest of us would call ‘the argument’.

29

Chris 11.23.10 at 1:21 pm

I think perhaps the most interesting thing here is what the implicit claim that humans don’t settle for inferior outcomes says about Zizek’s own life. After all, merely contemplating the existence of his janitor, let alone actually talking to him, could demolish that claim in five minutes (surely Zizek doesn’t believe anyone’s dream career is taking out other people’s garbage). So why doesn’t Zizek have an example in his own life of humans giving up on Icarus and booking a seat on a banal, but functional, aircraft instead? Has his life really been *that* sheltered?

Maybe Zizek meant that humans don’t stop *thinking about* the unattainable dream even while they’re actually pursuing the good-enough present; but nobody asked either group of rats what they were thinking about, did they? Humans don’t *behave* the way the brain-damaged rats behave; we do, in fact, accept unpalatable realities, even damn awful ones like slavery (and even when we’ve sworn up and down in advance that we wouldn’t).

30

ajay 11.23.10 at 1:54 pm

For the sake of fairness: it really doesn’t seem incredible to me that this is a real experiment.

I think there are four options in roughly this order of probability:

1) Zizek is misremembering and/or embroidering a description of a different experiment given by Miller
2) Zizek has invented it out of whole cloth
3) Zizek is accurately reporting an inaccurate description given by Miller
4) The experiment took place exactly as reported

This experiment, if it happened, must have been performed at the very latest in about 1982 in order for it to be written up and published in time for Miller to read about it and refer to it in a lecture in 1984. That’s really quite early for some animal psychologists to be using a laser for delicate neurosurgery. It’s not impossible, but it’s right at the start of that application; AFAIK laser neurosurgery doesn’t date back to much earlier than 1980. (Neuroscientist, please correct me here.)

31

dsquared 11.23.10 at 2:05 pm

Once, more, this seems perfectly clear to me; Zizek’s illustrating a general point he wants to make about the human condition by reference to something he once heard in a seminar about an experiment somebody did with rats. It’s not obvious to me why this is a stupider thing to do than, say, asking “what is it like to be a bat?” and hoping that the answer is going to tell you something about artificial intelligence. As far as I can see, the sin that John is accusing him of doesn’t amount to much more than writing in a racy and excitable prose style, rather than writing huge constipated chunks, leavened with annoying and cutesy in-jokes about zombies.

Zizek isn’t boring to read, and he often comes up with intelligent and valuable insights (the “unknown knowns” being a very good example). That puts him heavily in the lead over an awful lot of modern philosophy. I really think that all this “haha! look what the funny foreign man is saying!” stuff is really quite ignorant and about twenty years past its sell-by date.

32

dsquared 11.23.10 at 2:11 pm

On rats and lasers, I have “A History of Lasers in Neurosurgery”, with people lasering rat brains as far back as 1964.

33

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 2:11 pm

“I think perhaps the most interesting thing here is what the implicit claim that humans don’t settle for inferior outcomes says about Zizek’s own life.”

Well, in Zizek’s defense, he’s pretty clearly driving at the idea that what is noblest in human life is not to settle for inferior outcomes, even when attaining the better ones is impossible. Yes, there are lots of janitors, but if you are going to be a janitor and rationally settle for second-best, you might as well be just an animal. The paradox he is pushing is that man – and a few laser-damaged rats, I guess – is the only irrational animal. This is what is highest and best in us. (That’s not quite it, but it’s closer than: Zizek doesn’t know people settle for second-best.)

34

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.23.10 at 2:20 pm

What dsquared said.

Factual accuracy of the story in question is completely unimportant in the context of this essay.

35

The Modesto Kid 11.23.10 at 2:28 pm

Thanks for linking the essay, M. Vieuxtemps. I found D²’s comment really intriguing and am looking forward to reading the essay. That said, can I find John’s post hilariously funny without commiting to a disrespectful view of Žižek?

36

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 2:34 pm

“I really think that all this “haha! look what the funny foreign man is saying!” stuff is really quite ignorant and about twenty years past its sell-by date.”

I don’t see that foreign-ness has anything to do with it. Which leaves us with: look what the funny man is saying. I think that’s a fairly evergreen genre. So it seems to me unsustainably self-serious to maintain that one should not, as a point of decency (or whatever the relevant scruple is here) point out that Zizek writes in a buffo style.

If you think my post betrays actual ignorance or misunderstanding, I am happy to stand corrected. I do say – sincerely – that it might well be that this experiment was really performed. If so, I would actually be kind of curious to hear about it. That said, for Zizek to weight the experiment with these sorts of tragic overtones is … well, funny. It’s one thing to wonder what it’s like to be a bat or a rat. It’s something else to wonder whether a rat can be a Kierkegaardian knight of faith if you ‘do things to it with laser beams’. The latter option may be favored on grounds of its sheer non-boring-ness – there’s no accounting for taste. But it’s a bit too ‘magnets, how do they work?’ for me.

37

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.23.10 at 2:39 pm

That said, can I find John’s post hilariously funny without committing to a disrespectful view of Žižek?

It’s still absolutely unacceptable, comrade.

38

The Modesto Kid 11.23.10 at 2:47 pm

Back to the re-education camp, I guess…

39

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 2:48 pm

Henri is right that the factual accuracy of the story is quite irrelevant to what Zizek is trying to argue. And I don’t mean to imply that there is anything wrong with passing along anecdotes in a published essay, which is really all he is doing. With a footnote, to boot. Yet: 1) I wonder whether it was a real experiment. 2) I maintain that he writes about it in a funny way.

There is something very Hegelian (or Schopenhauerian) about contemplating animals in this way, and boldly speculating the Progress of World-Spirit (or the tragic nature of the World As Will) in their physiology and behavior. But somehow lasers makes it funny. Hegel plus lasers = humor.

40

Jonathan 11.23.10 at 2:48 pm

I agree somewhat with dsquared’s point above, but even Zizek’s most ardent defender would have to admit that he is as casual with facts as McLuhan, for instance. One of his books opens with a proposal that Stalin had Benjamin assassinated, for example (which, to be fair, is supported with a reference to a Guardian article that I never looked up).

41

ajay 11.23.10 at 2:48 pm

Factual accuracy of the story in question is completely unimportant

Well, that’s a relief, because I was just about to point out that he’s talking nonsense about the Russian Civil War too.

42

AcademicLurker 11.23.10 at 2:49 pm

It’s something else to wonder whether a rat can be a Kierkegaardian knight of faith if you ‘do things to it with laser beams’.

Kind of awesome, actually.

If only Adam Kotsko would drop by to defend Zizek, this blog would recapture its glory days.

43

ajay 11.23.10 at 2:53 pm

I agree somewhat with dsquared’s point above, but even Zizek’s most ardent defender would have to admit that he is as casual with facts as McLuhan, for instance.

Which does make me wonder: why is this considered acceptable in this field? In any other academic field, persistently being “casual with facts” by accident or on purpose is really bad for your reputation. Accepting it here seems to imply that rigour isn’t really necessary. But the sort of thing that would get a reprimand in the sports pages of the Daily Mirror seems to pass entirely unnoticed.

44

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 2:57 pm

“It’s something else to wonder whether a rat can be a Kierkegaardian knight of faith if you ‘do things to it with laser beams’.

Kind of awesome, actually.”

Yes, the more I think about it, the more I want to write the short story. Which may just go to show why people – including me – keep on keeping on reading Zizek.

45

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 3:02 pm

“Which does make me wonder: why is this considered acceptable in this field? In any other academic field, persistently being “casual with facts” by accident or on purpose is really bad for your reputation.”

I don’t think it’s alright to be casual with facts, but relating a scientific experiment in the form of an anecdote – while resting really no weight on it – and providing a source where you heard about it, seems ok.

46

Zamfir 11.23.10 at 3:07 pm

It does seem to fit in wider pattern of first thinking of an interesting thing to say, then making up the facts to support it.

47

Michael Drake 11.23.10 at 3:10 pm

Hence the expression, “It is as if scientists have done things to my brain with laser beams.” See Man on Subway, unpublished remarks, conversation of 11 Nov. 2010.

48

Matt 11.23.10 at 3:23 pm

Yes, there are lots of janitors, but if you are going to be a janitor and rationally settle for second-best, you might as well be just an animal.

Well, I hope that’s not his conclusion, because if it is, it’s pretty dumb.

49

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 3:29 pm

“I hope that’s not his conclusion, because if it is, it’s pretty dumb.”

Yes, I think it is. But at least it’s not dumb for any reason that has to do with rats or lasers.

50

ajay 11.23.10 at 3:29 pm

relating a scientific experiment in the form of an anecdote – while resting really no weight on it – and providing a source where you heard about it, seems ok.

But it is part of a pattern. Later on in the essay he describes the preparations for the 1920 restaging of the Storming of the Winter Palace – “Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students, and artists worked round the clock, living on kasha (tasteless wheat porridge), tea, and frozen apples, and preparing the performance at the very place where the event really took place three years earlier…Many of them not only actually participated in the event of 1917 but were also simultaneously involved in the real battles of the civil war that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food.”

There weren’t any civil war battles going on near Petrograd in November 1920. That was the year before. He’s made that up, in order to make it a better story – it’s much more dramatic if the re-enactment is happening in the middle of the war, involving actual frontline troops, rather than in its immediate aftermath.

Now, of course he’s not writing an essay about the course of the Baltic campaign; his argument doesn’t stand or fall on this fact. He could have made the same argument, even with the same example, without including this misstatement.

But he didn’t. Here as elsewhere, he’s inventing corroborative detail in order to add verisimilitude to an otherwise (you’ve got to assume) bald and unconvincing narrative. Good ideas, as a bright man once said, do not need to have lots of lies told about them to ensure their acceptance.

51

Zamfir 11.23.10 at 3:32 pm

No, the direct conclusion of that part of the article is

“Lenin is for us not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite on the contrary, to put it in Kierkegaard’s terms, the Lenin we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism. “

52

John Holbo 11.23.10 at 3:41 pm

Yes, Zamfir, we should leave the janitor out of it and get back to Lenin, but the point is sort of the same: the Lenin-in-becoming is an absurdist-heroic knight of faith. He sees that the ideal is impossible but goes for it anyway. Politics is not the art of the possible for Zizek but, properly, a kind of indominable will-to-the-impossible. That’s why he likes the rats as a symbol.

Now we can add a bit of nuance here: it isn’t strictly impossible. IMPOSSIBLE impossible. It’s just impossible, so far as you can tell. And yet it’s also true that, for Zizek – the whole ‘vanishing mediator’ thing – being a hero, even a tragic failed one, is a kind of triumph in its own right. So even if it’s IMPOSSIBLE impossible, you should still go for it.

53

Sev deMonterey 11.23.10 at 4:17 pm

Matt McIrvin 11.23.10 at 4:23 am

“The laser beam was in the form of a green light at the end of a pier.”

Hmm. Could be a neon sign at the Americana Mall. Exit 31E off the Cross Island Parkway. Human desires cannot perhaps ultimately be satisfied, but as we have seen, through shopping, they can in a sense be ratified.

54

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.23.10 at 4:20 pm

Good ideas, as a bright man once said, do not need to have lots of lies told about them to ensure their acceptance.

Come on, ajay, this hardly qualifies as “a lot of lies”. Don’t look too close, take it for what it is, and you might start liking his writings too.

55

Sev deMonterey 11.23.10 at 4:24 pm

And Gatsby may not have got Daisy, but he did have some pretty nice shirts.

56

Tim Wilkinson 11.23.10 at 4:24 pm

Trouble with Zizek is he has lots of good stuff, but always peters out at the end. Still better than not petering in in the first place, though.

More irritatingly, he includes too much wank. In that essay, the whole ‘Of Apes and Men’ section should have been cut, for instance – rat-lasers, impossibility, all that guff.

Isn’t he really (when he’s good) a political theorist rather than a philosopher? When I hear Z mention truth or knowledge I reach for my Browning. (Actually, I use a disposable cigarette lighter for this purpose instead of an actual Browning.)

57

ajay 11.23.10 at 4:51 pm

Don’t look too close, take it for what it is, and you might start liking his writings too.

So the best approach is basically “stop taking Zizek so seriously”? Happy to oblige.

58

zamfir 11.23.10 at 4:57 pm

If I were cultured and in Goerings’ hands, I might prefer the Browning over the cigarette lighter.

As for Zizek, I personally just can’t manage to extract the interesting ideas from the weird, and I don’t like the weird enough on its own. This might be a failure on my side, although one I suspect enough others share.

Take this essay: on the one hand, it’s craziness about Lenin and rats and Freud. If to u try to cut through that, you end up with something like “follow your dreams”. In between, there might be an optimum mix of cutting enough but not too much.

59

Torquil MacNeil 11.23.10 at 5:23 pm

“Trouble with Zizek is he has lots of good stuff, but always peters out at the end. ”

The trouble with Zizek is that once you have subtracted the bits he has made up, misunderstood or misremembered, what’s left tends to be pretty banal. The lasered rat is a case in point. He works himself (and dsquared) up into a lather with what, on the face of it, when the froth has been boiled off, amounts to: some brain damaged rats suffer memory or learning impairment. I find it hard to enthuse.

I do say – sincerely – that it might well be that this experiment was really performed. If so, I would actually be kind of curious to hear about it.

60

Dr. Hilarius 11.23.10 at 5:58 pm

Don’t settle for second best. Follow your dreams. I guess it’s like Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Only with brain-damaged rats. Impressive.

61

sdf 11.23.10 at 6:09 pm

Academic is well-known in his and related fields as a liar. Academic continues to be taken seriously since the lies are just him goofing around. Smart people cease, if they ever began, to take said academic seriously. Smart people cease, if they ever began, to take his readers seriously. Upping the ante in this ways, academic proves that he is Derrida’s successor. Despite his many intellectual and moral failings, I am unaware of his ever having just made shit up even if only of minor importance to his “arguments.”

62

Ginger Yellow 11.23.10 at 6:09 pm

It’s not obvious to me why this is a stupider thing to do than, say, asking “what is it like to be a bat?” and hoping that the answer is going to tell you something about artificial intelligence.

Maybe not, but then Nagel’s argument is pretty stupid.

63

engels 11.23.10 at 6:22 pm

Yes, Nagel and Zizek are both cretins compared to the average CT commenter.

64

bianca steele 11.23.10 at 6:25 pm

ajay @ 30
My guess would add a fifth option slightly before your first, or split the first into two, giving: Zizek is giving an interpretation of the facts as presented by Miller that Zizek intends to be heard as true despite the facts that the experimenters may wish to deny its truth. It’s also possible he’s relaying Miller’s interpretation of the facts, either straight or his interpretation of Miller’s understanding as heard by Zizek.

What is “stupid” (@31) is leaving the essay to being read in two different ways, by people who do and don’t know that the experiments are most likely to have involved memory and ability to learn new things, not desire at all, and implying that people who do know it are the ones who are reading the essay wrong, and are stupid, immoral people, who can’t know what’s important or what being human really means, which Zizek as a psychoanalyst naturally considers to be just about the most important thing possible.

And I agree with John H. that the lasers makes it funny, though it may be even funnier, if the lasers are real, that the way Zizek’s translator put it makes it look like he thinks they aren’t real, that maybe Miller interpolated this science-fiction-y technology thing called a la-ser because Miller didn’t understand what was really going on.

65

Tim Wilkinson 11.23.10 at 6:27 pm

Maybe read only the 1st and 3rd sections, and the 3rd and first paragraphs from the end. Then you get basically some stuff about liberal-democratic orthodoxy and the third way, and the need for political as well as economic reorganisation. This may even be a rule of thumb applicable to any Zizek piece.

Also get some (perhaps, vaguely) anti-dsquared sentiment about voting for the lesser evil:

Should one strategically support center-left figures like Bill Clinton against the conservatives, or should one adopt the stance of “It doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t get involved in these fights-in a way, it is even better if the Right is directly in power, since, in this way, it will be easier for the people to see the truth of the situation?” The answer is the variation of old Stalin’s answer to the question “Which deviation is worse, the rightist or the leftist one?” They are both worse. What one should do is adopt the stance of the proper dialectical paradox. In principle, of course, one should be indifferent toward the struggle between the liberal and conservative poles of today’s official politics. However, one can only afford to be indifferent if the liberal option is in power.

66

bianca steele 11.23.10 at 6:30 pm

Nagel’s argument is great if you think it’s easy to imagine that tomorrow a spaceship might land in the parking lot down the road, the door might open, and bipeds might walk out the door, with you not certain whether said bipeds were sentient creatures.

67

geo 11.23.10 at 6:33 pm

engels @63: Nagel and Zizek are both cretins compared to the average CT commenter

Yes, that’s certainly my opinion as well.

68

Anonymoose 11.23.10 at 6:36 pm

I love the irony of a critical theorist/lacanian psychologist that thinks of himself as a philosopher writing about not settling for second best.

69

engels 11.23.10 at 7:13 pm

BIanca, what are you talking about?

70

bianca steele 11.23.10 at 7:27 pm

71

engels 11.23.10 at 7:36 pm

If you say so…

72

Aulus Gellius 11.23.10 at 7:45 pm

1. Of course, the way Zizek talks about the experiment makes it humorously clear that he doesn’t really understand the science. But that’s pretty obviously deliberate, yes? I mean, when he talks about “messing about” and says that these procedures are ones “about which. . . it is better to know nothing,” he’s pretty clearly taking the pose of someone who doesn’t know much about the science, but finds this an interesting story. So there’s nothing misleading or unethical there: it’s not like he said, “they do things with lasers, which I would happily explain, if only space permitted,” or something like that.

2. The use of janitors as a refutation of Zizek’s point about a “human” refusal to settle for second-best is pretty silly. Obviously, humans (and not just janitors, actually) sometimes settle for second-best, and I don’t see Zizek denying that. The claim is something more like “humans (and laser-altered rats) are unique in that they are capable of sometimes refusing to settle for second-best, even when the best is unattainable.” So the janitor might have settled for an unfulfilling job, and maybe this one is also in a loveless marriage of convenience, and accepts that his children and all their descendants unto the end of time will also settle for being janitors in loveless marriages of convenience, but if he occasionally bets on the Lions to win the Super Bowl, he is still exercising that part of his humanity.

73

roy belmont 11.23.10 at 8:28 pm

Second-best for the laser-wielding researchers(forborne scare-quotes there) is of course working with the rats themselves. A kind of custodial necessity thanks to all that liberal ethical/moral claptrap.
What would be first-best is a pool of anatomically parallel but legally defined subhumans.
Surely somewhere there are advances being advanced upon involving GM-stylee ratoid humanistical non-humans. Someday we will be able to laser away brains of all-but-legally us-like thems. And then yah buoy. Think of the lives we’ll save!
Think of the things we’ll understand! About ourselves and stuff.

74

Jacob T. Levy 11.23.10 at 10:28 pm

“But it’s a bit too ‘magnets, how do they work?’ for me.”

It’s always important to read the Holbo comments to a Holbo post, because sometimes he saves some of the comedy gold for later on in the conversation.

75

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.23.10 at 10:46 pm

@46 It does seem to fit in wider pattern of first thinking of an interesting thing to say, then making up the facts to support it.

Is it not the stance of the proper dialectical paradox?

76

stubydoo 11.23.10 at 11:07 pm

Zizek is not a philosopher, he is a performance artist.

It so happens that I appreciate his art, so I sometimes partake in it. No harm in me reading such a book, just as there is no harm in me reading a novel, or listening to an album by my favorite musician. No reason why you should stay away from a product just because it doesn’t inform or educate in any worthwhile way.

So I don’t have much interest in all the discussion of the quality of Zizek’s contributions to philosophy. Is there someone, somewhere who actually takes him seriously?

77

Colin Danby 11.24.10 at 1:20 am

The more apt paradox is that to take SZ seriously is not to take him seriously — he is *obviously* full of jokes, feints, and bluffs, not to mention gestures toward the politically and epistemologically unspeakable. (As noted upthread the rat bit is chock full of don’t-take-this-too-seriously cues.) To read him is to be looking for the ruse. No verbal incendiaries, no this-can’t-be-right, no Zizek. He is hardly the only figure in the history of philosophy of whom that could be said. It seems to me totally reasonable to say you don’t want to play spot-the-ruse, or at least not with him. But the more po-faced among us might reflect on how easily they let their chains get yanked.

78

david 11.24.10 at 2:01 am

Yikes, I’m surprised to see Davies pwned by Holbo, but there you go. There may be a bunch of neat little things in there — though unknown knowns isn’t worth all that much that I would pay for — but here Zizek comes off as a wanker, and I might even take the bat think if I had to choose.

79

Adam Kotsko 11.24.10 at 3:19 am

This seems weirdly like a post in which Holbo defends Zizek.

In defense of the “about which it is better to know nothing” remark, I’ve read this anecdote in a few places in Zizek and took it to be both a paraphrase of Miller and to mean that the experiments performed on the rats were horrific and therefore it’s better for one’s mental health not to go into detail — not a hand-wavy gesture saying the details are irrelevant or “I would tell you the details, but I’m lazy.”

As for Miller’s own medical expertise, I have poked around on Google and can’t be sure, but Lacan definitely received full training as a medical doctor, just as psychiatrists in the US generally do — and given that Miller was a practicing psychoanalyst (analyzing, among others, Zizek), my assumption is that he went through similar training as well, putting him ahead of me, John Holbo, and presumably most other commenters here in understanding studies of neurological experiments. Zizek, however, did not receive medical training, so he is basically relating an anecdote, as like 14 million people in this thread have already said. If relating an anecdote is problematic or evidence of intellectual sinfulness, may God have mercy on us all.

80

john c. halasz 11.24.10 at 3:42 am

@78:

Nope, Miller was a Normale Superieure philosophy grad and son-in-law. But then the Lacanians championed “lay” analysts and the quality of French psychiatric training that Lacan undertook was pretty crappy.

Still, without having read any of the underlying material, it seems that Z’s reference to the rat experiment must have been a joke, since memory and desire are closely interlinked, surgically eliminating a rat’s memory/learning capacity to produce sheer desire, ( as if experimentally producing an Id), amounts to a reduction to absurdity. The standard Lacanian point would presumably be that only language qua the “symbolic order” can generate and sustain desire, which however rooted in the body and repetition compulsion, is fundamentally distinct from any material cause or given.

81

dsquared 11.24.10 at 7:51 am

I don’t see that foreign-ness has anything to do with it

I think it clearly does. As with nearly every single example of the genus “argument by excerpt and pfaugh!”, the actual point being made is wholly unexceptionable. Bernard Williams has probably wrote reams of paper on the subject of the existence or otherwise of a moral intuition that there is something wrong with accepting a forced choice, and there is a whole subgenre of people who drop remarks about “neuroscience” in contexts where they are clearly bluffing and doing so much less artlessly than Zizek. So what you’re actually objecting to here is not that Zizek is making these arguments, but that he’s doing so without adopting the house style and habits of Anglo-American professional philosophy. In other words, foreign.

And I don’t think I’m going to walk away from “ignorant” either, as applied to this particular argument. As I say, it is exactly the argument by short excerpt followed by “what rot!” that was done to death in the 1980s; if it was ever a fresh or interesting rhetorical technique, this was before I was able to read grown up papers. The problems with it are:

a) it’s amazingly cheap and easy and clearly anyone with a working cut and paste function can do it to anyone they don’t like as long as they can spell “pfaugh”.

b) it’s very obviously an invalid argument, as is any schema of the form: Premis, I don’t understand X, Conclusion (anything about X). This is particularly problematic in practice, as it means that the argument is typically used by people complaining about a standard of “rigor” that they apparently don’t propose to apply to themselves.

82

dsquared 11.24.10 at 7:59 am

And of course, Colin Danby at #77 has the fundamental point exactly right. It’s a bit curious to see comments like #17 suggesting that Zizek is making humanities education unpopular – he’s actually very popular indeed.

Even as a funding pitch, I would suggest that both cultural studies and modern philosophy are in many cases putting up “please give me some money to go and think about the inner life of zombies for three years”, which is going to be a tough sell however you put it.

83

zamfir 11.24.10 at 8:03 am

Dsquared, are you sure the Anglo-American part is doing the work here, and not the professional part? It seems the objection is mostly that Zizek doesn’t behave like a academic, scientist-style philosopher but more as a writer or essayist. There are probably many non-Anglo philosophers who feel the same way

84

zamfir 11.24.10 at 8:10 am

And aren’t on the other side a lot of his supporters Anglos?

85

John Quiggin 11.24.10 at 8:45 am

@82 “A tough sell”. I hope not. As you know, I’m long zombies right now.

86

x. trapnel 11.24.10 at 8:54 am

@82: I dunno, without the zombie craze in philosophy, we wouldn’t have this fantastic short story.

87

John Holbo 11.24.10 at 9:02 am

“So what you’re actually objecting to here is not that Zizek is making these arguments, but that he’s doing so without adopting the house style and habits of Anglo-American professional philosophy. In other words, foreign.”

Sorry, dsquared, but what makes you think I am doing this?

“Premis, I don’t understand X, Conclusion (anything about X).”

I agree that this looks like a bad argument, but what does it have to do with me? What is the X, in this case? And what is the conclusion I am invalidly drawing about X?

88

John Holbo 11.24.10 at 9:05 am

“the actual point being made is wholly unexceptionable.”

What is the actual point of the passage, according to you?

89

Nabakov 11.24.10 at 10:20 am

Why do all threads about humanising desire in rats using laser beams end up like this?

I once read a thread which didn’t and I know it’s still out there somewhere.

90

dsquared 11.24.10 at 10:30 am

but what makes you think I am doing this?

Well you actually said that you were just making fun of the way he expressed himself, and you’ve said in the past that your main reason for disliking Zizek is that you think he does the same sort of thing as mainstream Anglo-American philosophers badly, so it’s a pretty reasonable inference. Since that is actually a very clearly written and quite entertaining passage, perhaps you’d care to expand on what your problem is with it, since you’ve specifically said that it isn’t to do with the other possible candidate (ie, that Zizek’s joke/anecdote about the rat operation might be some sort of terribles intellectual imposture)?

What is the actual point of the passage, according to you?

Same as it is to everyone else in this thread, including you, at post number 33. As I say, it’s really quite clear. The argument about Peter Singer might be as bad as you say it is, and Ajay is right that there weren’t battles around Petrograd in 1920, but this is actually a rather good piece of Zizek.

I mean, you actually get this right and ignore your own point in post 36:

“It’s one thing to wonder what it’s like to be a bat or a rat. It’s something else to wonder whether a rat can be a Kierkegaardian knight of faith if you ‘do things to it with laser beams’. The latter option may be favored on grounds of its sheer non-boring-ness – there’s no accounting for taste. But it’s a bit too ‘magnets, how do they work?’ for me.”

Well yes; a matter of taste is exactly what it is (although let’s be clear about which is the majority, normal, mainstream taste here – Zizek has movies made about him, while books about philosophical zombies are almost literally unsellable outside the academic library market). And that is all there is to it. But when something’s a matter of taste, the liberal, intelligent thing to do is appreciate that other people’s tastes differ from yours and basically leave it at that. Beyond a bit of good natured banter (which your Zizek campaign really isn’t), it’s just bad intellectual manners to engage with someone via the argument-by-pfaugh, because you’re presenting something which is basically a matter of your own personal taste in a style which ought to be reserved for matters of fact.

Basically, it’s all just a little bit “Disco Sucks” for my taste.

91

JK 11.24.10 at 11:09 am

I agree with dsquared 81,82, etc up to a point.

My favourite example is Dawkins’s dismissal of Derrida as incomprehensible junk combined with a second rate reproduction Derridean ideas in meme theory.

But I think it’s worth saying Sokal, by contrast, was much more careful and does actually have some understanding of the ideas involved, understing also that the schema in 81 is not good enough. He has pointed to some clear examples of ignorance, especially in translation of scientific terms. But his main argument was more along the lines – “Look at the hoax. Shouldn’t that make you think?”

The more explicit argument was that the left should be a champion of reason, not a critic. That makes him a precursor of Al Gore, Ben Goldacre and Sam Harris – whch is nothing to be proud of. But I do think he had a point at the time. And I’m pretty sure Sokal still thinks poverty wages are a bigger problem than alternative medicine.

(Btw, does anyone know if the english translation of Being and Event is translated by someone with as poor grasp of set theory as appears at first glance?)

92

Matt 11.24.10 at 11:16 am

But when something’s a matter of taste, the liberal, intelligent thing to do is appreciate that other people’s tastes differ from yours and basically leave it at that.

Oh, no. Not at all. Rather, it means that you use ridicule and scorn rather than argument. As a master of this form yourself, D^2, I’m sure you know this, and are probably practicing it right now. (I draw no conclusions here about Zizek, about whom I know very little and have even less interesting in getting to know more about, but just point out that this bit here is a nice school debate move, but clearly is just that.)

93

ajay 11.24.10 at 12:03 pm

Zizek has movies made about him, while books about philosophical zombies are almost literally unsellable outside the academic library market

Counterexamples: “Blindsight”, by Peter Watts. “The Prefect” and “Revelation Space” by Alastair Reynolds. Virtually everything by Greg Egan. And even, arguably, “Red Dwarf”.

94

Chris Williams 11.24.10 at 12:26 pm

JK@91, what’s yr problem with Ben Goldacre, exactly? I’d hate to think that you are in the process of doing to him exactly what you’ve just accused Dawkins of doing to Derrida.

Indeed, I wonder if both in your opinion of this issue, and in the wider debate about Zizek, there’s something going on that you alluded to in your mention of Sokal. Which is that the public image of Intellectual X is semi-autonomous from the actual work of Intellectual X. What Sokal actually said isn’t quite the same as what many of his fans like him for saying. The forward (IIRC) to the second edition of _Intellectual Impostures_ is rather good here, as S&B politely turn down exhortations from know-nothings to _really_ put the boot into the pomos, on the basis that this, if necessary, would be a job for philosophers: their task was to point out people getting the science wrong.

Another similar case in point is the (very entertaining) afterword to Richard Evans’ _In Defence of History_, wherein he roundly lambasts more know-nothings who had wanted him to R.P.T.B.I. the pomos. In both cases, the right-wing reviewers saw debate as a spectator sport between goodies and baddies (Burritoboy – how are ya?) rather than something which has value only insofar as it is derived from rational analysis.

The moral of this story is that (as usual) we need more of the ‘is’ and less of the ‘seems’. Which is where I came in: I want Zizek to tell me about real experiments, not made-up ones, and being a historian, I want references that I can follow so I can tell the difference.

95

John Holbo 11.24.10 at 12:56 pm

dsquared, I was sort of expecting you to say that the point of the Zizek passage was something different than I said it was. How am I guilty of misrepresenting him, according to you, if I haven’t gotten anything wrong, according to you?

Also, I really don’t understand this apparent general ban on mockery or ridicule. You mock and ridicule people all the time.

Your case against me basically seems to be the following:

1) Many ignorant people have mocked ‘theory’.
2) Therefore, anyone who mocks ‘theory’ must be ignorant.
3) Therefore Holbo must be ignorant of Zizek, because he tends to mock Zizek, and Zizek is a Theory-y kind of guy.

Isn’t it obvious that’s the move from 1) to 2) is bad, so you’ve got nothing well before you get to me?

96

Mieczyslav F. Rakovski 11.24.10 at 1:10 pm

FWIW, I think D^2’s position here boils down to identifying with the team he was on 20 years ago at Oxford when bash/defend arguments about postmodernists were still new, interesting, and fashionable.

97

THR 11.24.10 at 1:30 pm

Well, I wanted to say something that would strike them weird.
So I said ‘I like Slavoj Zizek, and I like his beard.

Actually, whilst Ziz may be a little loose with references, in this case, it’s good that he gave one at all, and Jacques-Alain Miller is not an intellectual fabricator. Halasz, it was not Miller who championed ‘lay analysis’ but Freud, and the ‘object’ sought after here is not symbolic, but more likely, the objet petit a.

98

dsquared 11.24.10 at 2:01 pm

Which is where I came in: I want Zizek to tell me about real experiments, not made-up ones, and being a historian, I want references that I can follow so I can tell the difference.

But if you’re a historian reading Zizek to learn something about history you’re definitely going to be disappointed because as Ajay notes, he’s not very good at getting his facts straight (nor is Foucault, which is a real shame and it’s not OK that so many Foucauldians give him a pass for ‘improving’ his facts. He does cultural studies; I don’t think it makes much more sense to be frustrated at him for illustrating his points with anecdotes than to be frustrated at David Chalmers for talking about zombies. (Example chosen carefully – I actually do think that trolley-problems are pernicious because they smuggle lots of questionable hidden assumptions).

99

dsquared 11.24.10 at 2:12 pm

How am I guilty of misrepresenting him

You’re not. You’re guilty of the use of argument-by-harrumph. Different thing. If I wrote “The Declaration of Independence says that everyone has the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Pfaugh!” then what was wrong about that wouldn’t involve misrepresenting it.

Isn’t it obvious that’s the move from 1) to 2) is bad,

Set out syllogistically, my argument is:

Premis 1) Things which were monstrously over-used in the 1980s aren’t effective mockery
Premis 2) Quote-and-harrumph at cultural theory was monstrously over-used in the 80s.

Lemma 1) Quote-and-harrumph isn’t effective as mockery. (from 1,2)

Premis 3) Criticism of cultural studies needs to be either valid argument or effective satire, or it looks really ignorant
Premis 4) Quote-and-harrumph isn’t a valid argument

Lemma 2) Quote and harrumph looks really ignorant (from 3, 4 and Lemma 1)

Premis 5) You did that
Premis 6) Please stop.

Conclusion: Therefore, please stop (from 6).

Any further argument to “Holbo is ignorant” I’m not planning to make. It was this post that was pretty ignorant – otherwise you’re a right guy (albeit one who has an unfortunate tendency to lose all quality control when writing about Zizek).

100

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.24.10 at 2:28 pm

Oh, lighten up.

101

anxiousmodernman 11.24.10 at 2:31 pm

Winner of thread: Slavoj Zizek.

102

ajay 11.24.10 at 3:08 pm

he’s not very good at getting his facts straight (nor is Foucault, which is a real shame

Which brings us back to the question of why “improving the facts” is apparently OK in cultural studies, but frowned on in every other part of academia. This is either sloppiness or dishonesty, and it would get you pilloried in any other line of work. Dawson didn’t get a pass for “improving” the facts about Piltdown Man. N-Rays destroyed Blondlot’s (extremely good) reputation, even though they were almost certainly not a deliberate fraud.

It is, on the other hand, more or less OK in entertainment. No one complains (or at least not too hard) if a novel puts a shop on Piccadilly that’s really on Bond Street, or puts Napoleon on a grey rather than a chestnut at Waterloo.

There’s an interesting comparison to be made with Glenn Beck here – another man who doesn’t feel the same obligation to stick closely to the facts when developing his theses, and who defends himself by saying that he’s just an entertainer, a gadfly, a “rodeo clown”. (And one, dsquared might like to note, who is even closer to the mainstream than Zizek.)

103

The Modesto Kid 11.24.10 at 3:09 pm

Wow, what a fruitful thread this is being! x.trapnel, thanks very much for the link to Gregory’s story.

104

John Holbo 11.24.10 at 3:26 pm

“Quote and harrumph looks really ignorant”.

Yes, this is all well and good, but what does it have to do with me? What do you mean by ‘harrumph’, such that it would apply to my post? I appreciate that you are trying to object to what you feel is a form of inarticulacy, but I feel it has at this point infected your objection itself. Why does joking about Zizek, based on actual understanding of Zizek = harrumph (which sounds like the opposite of joking) = looking ignorant (which sounds like the opposite of doing something based on actual understanding)?

“Any further argument to “Holbo is ignorant” I’m not planning to make.”

I’m still looking for the argument that ‘Holbo is ignorant’ that you’ve already made. After we’ve found that one, you can not make another or not, as you like it.

“It was this post that was pretty ignorant”

Then why did you say my interpretation of Zizek was right?

“an unfortunate tendency to lose all quality control when writing about Zizek”

So long as you admit that I keep this tendency well in check, never letting it result in – oh, say – actual losses of all quality control while writing about Zizek, I will concede that there might be a homunculus upstairs that answers to this description, dsquared. Or there might not. (You are free to guess, but you are still only guessing.)

105

Torquil MacNeil 11.24.10 at 3:51 pm

This is fun. Does the dsquared on here who thinks it so naughty to be rude about people one thinks are intellectually dishonest or incoherent. realise that there is another dsquared who often writes on CT making mock of people he thinks are intellectually dishonest or incoherent? What are the odds, eh?

As far as I can tell, the content of dsquared’s criticism of this post amounts to: laughing at Zizek is racist because, er … look over there, zombies!

106

AcademicLurker 11.24.10 at 4:00 pm

As far as I can tell, the content of dsquared’s criticism of this post amounts to: laughing at Zizek is racist because, er … look over there, zombies!

Wat to flaunt your non-undead privilege there TM.

107

dsquared 11.24.10 at 4:13 pm

John, your post is made up of a quote from Zizek, prefaced with a sentence saying that you don’t understand what it means, and postscripted with a sentence saying that you think he’s fibbing about the rats. You’ve since, in comments 25 and 39, said that he might not be fibbing about about the rats and it doesn’t matter if he is, and in comment 33 that you do understand what it means.

So all that is left is the quote, and a general air of disapproval. Hence, “quote and harrumph”. The point is that this post is really just an invitation to the audience to dismiss Zizek without further consideration, on the basis of (seemingly simulated) incomprehension of a short quoted passage. That’s the same sort of thing as garden variety anti-intellectualism. I don’t see how it can be considered a joke, but if it were to be, it’s a very weak, very old and rather reactionary one.

108

dsquared 11.24.10 at 4:15 pm

As far as I can tell

If that is as far as you can tell, Torquil, you’re probably not going to be able to tell whether you’re any good at sarcasm or not either.

109

dsquared 11.24.10 at 4:23 pm

and finally:

Zizek says something … well, you tell me:

the ellipsis between “something” and “well” cries out to be filled with an epiglottal noise of some sort, doesn’t it? I really don’t think that the “what me, harrumph?” line is going to be defensible.

110

Torquil MacNeil 11.24.10 at 4:24 pm

@107

Ouch! (How’s that?)

111

Colin Danby 11.24.10 at 4:36 pm

Fact-improving is never “OK,” Ajay. What you seem unable to imagine is that it is possible to use a thinker critically, that there are responses in between worshipful acceptance and snort-what-rubbish.

If the great never screwed up the rest of us would have a lot less to do.

112

John Holbo 11.24.10 at 4:40 pm

I hadn’t intended cunningly to feign anti-intellectualism or ignorance, as you apparently assumed, dsquared. Sorry, it hadn’t occurred to me until just now that you even thought so. (Where would be the rhetorical advantage in that? The paragraph isn’t very hard to understand, after all.) I was, per the post, soliciting readers’ thoughts about the experiment, which I didn’t know whether to believe in or not. I wondered whether anyone knew anything about it. And then I believe I gave tolerably clear indication that I found Zizek’s interpretation of the experiment to be humorously absurd, in its implications. Perhaps I was in fact unclear in all this – though it is hard for me to see it. But that was, at any rate, the intention.

113

bianca steele 11.24.10 at 4:42 pm

On zombies, I like The Serpent and the Rainbow (the book by the Harvard anthropologist, not the movie with Bruce Willis). Has that been superseded?

114

dsquared 11.24.10 at 4:45 pm

#109 to #112.

115

MPAVictoria 11.24.10 at 4:46 pm

I notice that dsquared has cunningly avoided responding to the posts which point out the fact that dsquared regularly engages in exactly the type of behavior he is accusing John of.

116

bianca steele 11.24.10 at 5:03 pm

@98 But the ratio of theorizing to describing examples is much greater in what I’ve read of Foucault than in what I’ve read of Zizek, so more of the argument is spoiled if the examples tend to be bad. (Not that errors of fact in Foucault aren’t a problem in the subfields of history he’s been influential in.)

117

x. trapnel 11.24.10 at 5:15 pm

On zombies, I like The Serpent and the Rainbow (the book by the Harvard anthropologist, not the movie with Bruce Willis Bill Pullman). Has that been superseded?
Bruce Willis, indeed. Next you’ll be inventing experiments with rats and lasers, Ms. Steele.

118

dsquared 11.24.10 at 5:17 pm

#115: I thought I had dealt with this, but apparently it needs to be spelt out (god, you people kill me). I am all in favour of jokes, mockery, sarcasm, and even outright abuse. But not old jokes that I consider to be weak. It’s a matter of style, but it’s not just a matter of style; there is an objective fact of the matter about whether “quote and harrumph at cultural theorists” was done to death in the 80s.

Coming next week: “Call that a breakfast?” Did Zizek ever even visit a rabbi, and I think it’s ridiculous to suggest that Talmudic scholarship illustrates objective violence!

119

Adam Kotsko 11.24.10 at 5:18 pm

I don’t see the reason for doubting the study exists, other than the assumption that Zizek must be making it up because he makes things up constantly. It’s curious, given that he provides a reference for where he heard about the study, a reference it’s presumably possible for someone to follow up on. And “a neuroscientist” does verify that the laser thing isn’t totally implausible, though it does obviously sound weirdly sci-fi-ish. The other example of making things up is the story about Stalin killing off Benjamin, for which he also provides a reference. Unless using secondary sources is ipso facto “making stuff up,” I don’t see much evidence that Zizek is an inveterate maker-up of stuff.

120

ajay 11.24.10 at 5:20 pm

If the great never screwed up the rest of us would have a lot less to do.

People who promulgate untruths, deliberately and repeatedly, through fabrication or recklessness, for their own good, aren’t generally described as “great” unless the word “great” is immediately followed by the words “big fat fraud”.

121

Adam Kotsko 11.24.10 at 5:20 pm

Indeed, I’ve never been convinced that Foucault is a maker-up of stuff, and I think it’s alarming that many of his American fans will immediately concede that he is and say it doesn’t matter.

122

Substance McGravitas 11.24.10 at 5:36 pm

It’s a matter of style, but it’s not just a matter of style; there is an objective fact of the matter about whether “quote and harrumph at cultural theorists” was done to death in the 80s.

Oh dear, an objective fact must necessarily win an argument in disputes over matters of style.

123

dsquared 11.24.10 at 5:42 pm

thanks for making that explicit.

124

Tim Wilkinson 11.24.10 at 5:44 pm

First rough outline of an analtyical taxonomy of examples in support of argument:

A constructed trolley-type problem is at one end of one scale I suppose. Features: 1. much background is left unspecified as irrelevant – or obviously decidable on the basis that it is supposed to be irrelevant, or that the proper assumptions are obvious and decide any unspecified aspects. 2. The situation is carefully constructed like a lab experiment to focus the issue sharply.

At the other end might be a randomised sample of a certain kind of situation taken from the real world.

Then you have cherrypicked anecdotes, which fall somewhere in between

Also examples from fiction – these are often a bit like real world anecdotes, with advantages: having a limited back-story (so no danger of suddenly being undermined by new dicoveries); often – being widely known/familiar; and perhaps being nicely conceived, dramatic, poetic and all that. But they were also often themselves constructed (1984, clockwork orange, etc etc) to make a more or less clear-cut point.

There’s another layer here, because the example used was itself contrived as a (non-thought) experiment – though obviously not in support of any point that Zizek makes – (and futher and in particular, I still think his strange insertion of because of its very unattainability betrays unclarity and carelessness about what is actually being said)

So one might ask – do these different kinds of example have differing rhetorical force, does Zizek misrepresent his example as being of one kind when it is not, and does this represent a sneaky trick?

I don;t really care myslef because the whole section should have been cut.

125

Steve Williams 11.24.10 at 5:48 pm

Substance@122

‘Oh dear, an objective fact must necessarily win an argument in disputes over matters of style. ‘

Hence the importance of the word ‘just’ in ‘it’s not just a matter of style’?

126

Torquil MacNeil 11.24.10 at 5:49 pm

“Oh dear, an objective fact must necessarily win an argument in disputes over matters of style.”

What, even when the the objective fact is, like, all 80s and rubbish and racist sort-of and about Zizek who is all cool and much more popular than Holbo! That’s fighting talk!

127

Matt 11.24.10 at 5:58 pm

But not old jokes that I consider to be weak. It’s a matter of style, but it’s not just a matter of style

But when something’s a matter of taste, the liberal, intelligent thing to do is appreciate that other people’s tastes differ from yours and basically leave it at that.

Putting these two together lets you know a lot about arguing with D^2, I think, and why it’s often not too profitable, whatever his other virtues may be.

128

Substance McGravitas 11.24.10 at 5:58 pm

Hence the importance of the word ‘just’ in ‘it’s not just a matter of style’?

Certainly that “just” saves the “objective fact” from being an argument about style when it’s buttressing a complaint about a clichéd attack.

129

bianca steele 11.24.10 at 5:58 pm

x.trapnel: You’re right. I had it confused with Angel Heart, too.

130

Colin Danby 11.24.10 at 6:12 pm

Again, Ajay, there is some distance between one’s ideal scholar and the big fat fraud. Back to my point about using thinkers critically, which, yep, you don’t get.

But don’t let me discourage you! This thread could use at least five more comments on Why Truth is Important, because who knows, someone might stop in who has never thought of that.

131

dsquared 11.24.10 at 6:12 pm

As I say, you people are killing me.

Premis 1) There was a certain kind of joke done, a lot, in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Premis 2) When done a lot, jokes lose their appeal.

Lemma 1) The specific kind of joke referenced in Premis 1 has lost its appeal.

Premis 3) The specific joke referenced in Premis 1 has not yet regained its appeal through nostalgia, ironic distance, or any other of the many ways in which an old joke might become funny again.

Conclusion) It’s not funny, sir.

For the avoidance of all doubt and to preserve myself once and for all from nitpicking roundheads (I kill me) , I will happily concede that premis 2, while in my view an entirely reasonable sociological generalisation across English speakers, is not a proposition of quite the same status as premis 1. Premis 3 might legitimately be considered purely a matter of taste, although I personally would view it as being derived from implicit premises in the form of lawlike generalisations about the ways in which an old joke can be rehabilitated.

Premis 1, though, is just a fact.

132

geo 11.24.10 at 6:13 pm

Dsquared: aren’t sentences like this one, from In Defense of Lost Causes, worth simply ridiculing:

The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular.

Not all of Zizek is like that, but all too much of him is.

The essay from which this thread departs is not, however, like that: it is an intriguing though not fully intelligible (this is Zizek, after all) argument that, apart from what Lenin did, which was mostly monstrous and destructive of socialist hopes for the rest of the century, what Lenin was was something else, something inspired and invaluable.

Could anyone on this thread who has read the essay in question, “A Plea for Leninist Intolerance” (Critical Inquiry, Winter 2002) explain what that “something else” was?

133

Substance McGravitas 11.24.10 at 6:20 pm

Premis 1) There was a certain kind of joke done, a lot, in the 1980s and early 1990s.
Premis 2) When done a lot, jokes lose their appeal.

The ones with punchlines are getting especially annoying.

134

MPAVictoria 11.24.10 at 6:31 pm

geo:
You and your Anglo-Saxon racism.

135

weserei 11.24.10 at 7:23 pm

@132: If you bother actually parsing it rather than just gaping at all the big funny words, it’s actually a perfectly meaningful sentence.

136

MPAVictoria 11.24.10 at 7:31 pm

weserei:
I call BS on that. Please explain to me in plain English exactly what the sentence means.

137

dsquared 11.24.10 at 7:57 pm

132: dunno. might be. I’m not sure how you’d go about ridiculing it though, without just going the full Bill Buckley and doing that ha-snort thing that got done to death in the 80s. I might have a go at a self-deprecating version of the same thing – ie, quote it and say something like “cor blimey guvnor, cooeee, all these words are going over my head”, but I’d always be worried that I was pretty transparently doing a second-generation hipster version of PJ O’Rourke’s stand up act.

I would guess that if I understood it in any depth (and I must say I’m not at all a fan of those bits of Zizek that veer off into needless technical Lacanian jargon), I could probably do something reasonable in the way of ridicule but I don’t, and barring massive advances in gerontology, won’t. And I’m just nervous about going fully studs up on something where I a) don’t understand what I’m talking about and therefore b) can’t be acceptably sure that I’m not making myself look like a hell of an oaf.

I suppose in many ways this is the risk manager in me (alternatively, the deep underlying insecurity that makes me such a charmless young man). If you give me a subject on which I know what I’m talking about and the other guy doesn’t, I’m like a pig in shit when it comes to ridicule and sarcasm, I could do it all day. On a subject where I don’t know what I’m talking about though, even when I have a canny suspicion that the other guy doesn’t either – well, maybe it’s old age but I’m just more reluctant to run those risks these days. Surprised that so many are.

138

funnyman 11.24.10 at 8:05 pm

Best. Thread. Ever.

139

rm 11.24.10 at 8:19 pm

In case anyone still doubts that conservatives are the real postmodernists (or, if you will, “big fat frauds”), Christine O’Donnell was discussing this experiment on TV three years ago. Who know she read Zizek?

140

geo 11.24.10 at 8:48 pm

I’m just nervous about going fully studs up on something where I … can’t be acceptably sure that I’m not making myself look like a hell of an oaf

This attitude strikes at the very heart of online communication. If we all demurred to such silly scruples, the Web would instantly fall silent.

141

engels 11.24.10 at 9:09 pm

We can but hope…

142

yabonn_fr 11.24.10 at 9:18 pm

This is all so 2010. Pfaugh!

143

I repeat myself 11.24.10 at 9:23 pm

The staggering soldier clumsily reached towards the pommel
of his dangling sword, but before his hands ever touched the
oaken hilt a silvered flash was slicing the heavy air. The thews
of the savages lashing right arm bulged from the glistening
bronzed hide as his blade bit deeply into the soldiers neck,
loping off the confused head of his senseless tormentor.
With a nauseating thud the severed oval toppled to the
floor, as the segregated torso of Grignr’s bovine antagonist
swayed, then collapsed in a pool of swirled crimson.

144

weserei 11.24.10 at 10:23 pm

@136: The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular.

In more and shorter sentences:
We often use the term “universality” in describing concepts which we feel have general validity–things like reason or ethics, single things whose authority radiates out to all things. But there is another kind of universality, that which already rests in all things, not because of any trait they have but in their being individual things. An individual thing, by virtue of being individual, is in contrast with the universe of things. This contrast is itself a connection. This connection is not dependent on what the traits of an individual thing are, as much as it may be its traits that come to mind when we try to think of how it contrasts against the background of the universe. Instead, the individuality just reverses into universality. We see this happen in particular when we examine our own reactions to living in an imagined community with social norms. (The particular norms do not matter, just as the particular traits of the things involved do not matter.) When we encounter neighbors, people who are a part of our community, people we have moral obligations to, their individual presence evokes the social norms that belong, and make us belong, to this community. By letting their existence do this, we are doing something other than looking at them as individual subjects like ourselves. In the process, we are also doing something other than looking at ourselves as bringing to mind obligation and belonging for the other person.

Does that clear anything up?

145

Substance McGravitas 11.24.10 at 10:31 pm

Thanks, weserei, for going to those lengths.

146

Kevin 11.24.10 at 10:31 pm

Shorter Weserei on Zizek: iterative universalism (Walzer).

147

John Holbo 11.24.10 at 11:03 pm

“the ellipsis between “something” and “well” cries out to be filled with an epiglottal noise of some sort, doesn’t it?”

At a certain point, dsquared, I think you need to consider that the harrumph you keep hearing might be your own.

As to why I doubt the experiment exists? Well, because it is oddly described and uncertainly sourced. My first thought was the same one that was suggested upthread: maybe this was actually an experiment about memory and learning, not an experiment that established – or even suggested – the possibility of rats that just can’t settle for second-best. So I was curious.

148

geo 11.24.10 at 11:16 pm

Does that clear anything up?

Emphatically not, at least for me. Your sentences are certainly less obscure and rebarbative than Zizek’s, but I have no idea whether your paragraph is a valid paraphrase of Zizek’s original — that is, whether it expresses whatever Zizek may have intended to say via the original. This is not because I claim to know what Zizek intended and can assert with any confidence that you have missed his meaning. Rather because I simply see no way to derive your sentences from his. Some of the words are the same, and some of the sentences have a nice lilt. But to present it as a paraphrase of Zizek is about as convincing as presenting Hal Lindsay’s novels as a paraphrase of the Book of Revelation. It’s a fantasia (far more pleasing than Lindsay’s), but not a paraphrase.

By the way, you still have quite a bit of work to do, I’d say, to make your own paragraph cogent. There’s still a lot of loose talk. “Reason” and “ethics” are not “single things” in any normal sense, at least compared with the “individual things” that are the main subjects of this paragraph. There is a “kind of universality” in “their being individual things” — sounds a little odd; I would have thought that what there is in being an individual thing is individuality. “This connection is not dependent on what the traits of an individual thing are, as much as it may be its traits that come to mind when we try to think of how it contrasts against the background of the universe.” This sentence is not flagrantly, extravagantly, pompously unclear, like Zizek’s, but it’s not at all clear. “Instead, the individuality just reverses into universality.” Could you replay that? “Their individual presence evokes the social norms … By letting their existence do this, we are doing something other than looking at them as individual subjects like ourselves.” No, we are looking at them as individual subjects and then thinking of the social norms we share with them.

It’s a sterling effort, and like Substance, I’m grateful. But I’m not convinced.

149

musical mountaineer 11.24.10 at 11:49 pm

Nobody on this thread has yet asked the really important question: what object, from the point of view of a rat, is an inferior substitute for a sexual partner?

150

bianca steele 11.24.10 at 11:49 pm

If I were going to ignore the question of the reality of the experiment, and look for the most (humanly) interesting aspect of the paragraph, it would look to me like (in part) an assertion of the existence of people who are presented continually with unmistakable evidence that their goals are impossible but who show no sign of having recognized that–which SZ of course considers a heroic thing, and associates with Lenin, the idealist of Bolshevism who does not yet know that in the next generation precisely his own idealism would transmute into totalitarian violence (afaict so far). And presumably I ought to attempt to apply this to myself. However, I am unable to recognize anything that matches SZ’s description. If his name were Don Delillo, I might have a little more patience with that kind of thing, but not in every paragraph, not even then.

151

MPAVictoria 11.24.10 at 11:55 pm

144:
I appreciate the effort but like geo I have no way of knowing if what you are saying has more than a passing connection with the cited text. I would argue that an undergraduate would not get away with the kind of confusing prose used by Zizek in this case. This may just demonstrate my “Anglo-Saxon” bias but I can live with that.

152

weserei 11.25.10 at 12:37 am

Geo, i’m just not really sure what else there is to explain. If you don’t like calling universal singularity (the thing I explain in sentences 1 through 4 of my paraphrase) by that name, OK. If you don’t think reason and ethics are single things, that’s OK–they’re my examples and not Žižek’s. If you don’t agree with the idea behind the Neighbor-Thing (my sentences 10-12), that’s OK, but that’s different from the passage being incomprehensible. If you think Žižek is making too much of the individual-universal connection, same deal. Disagreeing with something is different from that thing being gibberish, and the difference matters a lot for the argument you’re trying to make.

As for why my paraphrase seems to contain a lot the original sentence doesn’t, it’s because most of what I’m having to do is insert definitions. If you asked a mathematician to explain a particular theorem in calculus to someone who only knew algebra terms, regardless of how smart that person was, the explanation would look very different from the original proof. You don’t, on the basis of that, conclude that Leibniz was a fraud.

153

Substance McGravitas 11.25.10 at 12:38 am

An individual thing, by virtue of being individual, is in contrast with the universe of things. This contrast is itself a connection.

It seems to me that assertion of A Set of All Individual Things is just asking for trouble. But to the Zizek essay about Lenin linked to above, how is is possible to read the first few paragraphs without noticing bullshit? It’s like Jonah Goldberg but assertive.

154

weserei 11.25.10 at 12:46 am

MPAVictoria, I didn’t see your latest post, because I wrote and deleted a couple different versions of what I ended up posting in response to geo. But, basically: 1) there’s a lot of technical vocabulary in there, 2) Žižek explains it if you read the entire book, and 3) as a lot of people have been pointing out higher up in the thread, you can do this sort of cherry-picking for a lot of writers on advanced topics of all sorts.

155

The Modesto Kid 11.25.10 at 1:54 am

weserei@144 — Thanks!

156

engels 11.25.10 at 3:27 am

MPA, just out of interest, what’s your opinion of Kant or Hegel? Is their prose up to ‘undergraduate’ standards of comprehensibility to people with neither knowledge of or interest in what they are talking about?

157

John Holbo 11.25.10 at 3:27 am

“what object, from the point of view of a rat, is an inferior substitute for a sexual partner?”

I was wondering that, too!

158

LFC 11.25.10 at 4:10 am

I haven’t read any Zizek, except the scraps on this thread, but if I were in a charitable mood I guess I’d assume that the notion of “universal singularity” is doing some work in a larger argument. Because you don’t need to it to describe “the shared condition of being a unjiindividual

159

LFC 11.25.10 at 4:15 am

Sorry, I hit post by mistake. I’ll try again:

I haven’t read any Zizek, except the scraps on this thread, but if I were in a charitable mood I guess I’d assume that the notion of “universal singularity” is doing some work in a larger argument. Because you don’t need to it to describe “the shared condition of being a unique individual,” which is what it seems to mean in the quoted passage, if I understand the paraphrase correctly.

“Universal singularity” does have a paradoxical, sort of Hegelian I guess, ring to it, though having read very little Hegel I’m sort of speculating. Someone told me that Horkheimer and Adorno, ‘Dialectic of Enlightenment’, is also full of this kind of locution. Haven’t read that either.

160

LFC 11.25.10 at 4:17 am

correction: “need it” not “need to it”

clearly not a good typing evening

161

musical mountaineer 11.25.10 at 4:18 am

I was wondering that, too!

Never mind, I figured it out. As a kindness to other commenters, I’ll keep the answer to myself.

162

John Holbo 11.25.10 at 4:36 am

I’m with geo on this one, even though I think weserei does a commendable job of attempting a reading. The problem is 1) the product is suspiciously far from the starting-point. 2) the product is, for the reasons geo points out, still unclear and of doubtful intellectual merit, although much improved. (We need to avoid conflating weserei’s achievement with Zizek’s. “When a man is proud because he can understand and explain the writings of Chrysippus, say to yourself, if Chrysippus had not written obscurely, this man would have had nothing to be proud of.” – Epictetus. I haven’t read Chrysippus, but I’ve read Zizek.) That said – and anticipating the obvious objection – you can’t prove anything about Zizek’s whole body of work from a single passage. It could be cherry-picked to sound bad! Yes but a journey starts with a single step and all that. There’s no way to engage Zizek’s whole body of work. You have to start somewhere. Geo’s initial challenge was reasonable: show me this bit that looks to me unintelligible really means something. weserei’s attempt to meet the challenge was reasonable. And geo’s response that he’s not satisfied is, likewise, reasonable. (Why not?) The next thing should be for weserei – or someone – to suggest how the rest of Zizek’s book, or argument, or something, really shows that what strikes geo – and me – as probably a lot of loose talk is really highly precise technical talk, such that the analogy with calculus and so forth is truly apt. Myself: I don’t believe it. I think it’s confusing, not helpful, to approach a Zizek text and expect that it will be something like a calculus text. It just isn’t technical in that sort of way. But if weserei thinks otherwise, then there should be some way to satisfy geo at least a bit more, by showing that and how this is so. Give some indication of what keeps the seemingly loose stuff from actually being loose.

Now maybe someone will want to object that geo is moving the goalposts. (weserei already sort of has lodged this objection.) First geo said it was gibberish, now he says it’s just not obviously right! ha-HA! But really: if it turns out that geo is right that what weserei is substituting is still basically unclear and not very interesting, then substantially geo was correct in his initial objection that the writing was objectionable. There is no good reason to write about rather vague notions in an apparently highly technical way, because that just means you are being pseudo-technical. Again, if it really is technical and sharp and all that, under the hood, then geo will be happy to admit he was wrong, I’m sure.

So, by way of keeping the conversation productive: weserei, how to you respond to geo’s concerns about ‘loose talk’? Where is the tightness that he is missing?

I don’t think there is any double-standard here, regarding Zizek vs. Kant or Hegel or some more ‘traditional’ philosopher. Or at any rate there shouldn’t be. If you think that something is total nonsense in Kant, you should ask a Kantian why it isn’t total nonsense, since it looks like nonsense. I study Wittgenstein. A lot of people think that stuff looks like nonsense. That means I have to deal with people asking me why stuff I think is interesting isn’t nonsense. Sometimes it’s hard to explain, but that doesn’t mean I have the right to say ‘you mocking ignoramus!’ I don’t think I do.

So let me requote geo’s response

““This connection is not dependent on what the traits of an individual thing are, as much as it may be its traits that come to mind when we try to think of how it contrasts against the background of the universe.” This sentence is not flagrantly, extravagantly, pompously unclear, like Zizek’s, but it’s not at all clear. “Instead, the individuality just reverses into universality.” Could you replay that? “Their individual presence evokes the social norms … By letting their existence do this, we are doing something other than looking at them as individual subjects like ourselves.” No, we are looking at them as individual subjects and then thinking of the social norms we share with them.””

It seems to me this deserves a reply. weserei is free to say that something he (or she) hammered out in a blog comment box isn’t yet perfectly clear. I don’t mean to pin him (or her) to this thing. But I’m with geo in not yet seeing the need for these apparent technicalities. It looks to me as if one could get across the gist of Zizek’s point in ordinary terms, and then it would appear rather ordinary. Which would be an improvement in presentation, not a debasement of some higher, technical achievement.

163

engels 11.25.10 at 5:05 am

Here’s a fun game: pick a sentence S at random from some book by writer W. Loudly proclaim that W is a moron and S is incomprehensible and challenge anyone who disagrees to translate S into plain English. If no-one accepts your challenge announce that you were right and S is gibberish. Otoh if someone accepts and gives you an explanation of S say that this proves that W is an obscurantist who uses off-putting jargon when simple English would have been perfectly sufficient to get the point across and that the underlying point — being so easily and concisely expressible — is quite banal. A fine way to kill time on the internet! (Suitable for ages 6 and upwards)

164

engels 11.25.10 at 5:12 am

Btw I wouldn’t compare Zizek to Kant or Hegel but I do suspect this mode of trial by blog comment, with plucked sentences to be ‘translated’ into ‘plain English’ and biographical testimony from anonymous people with an internet connection who may or may not have read a dozen pages of the writer under discussion that they ‘personally just can’t manage to extract the interesting ideas from the weird’ – is unlikely to serve them any better.

165

weserei 11.25.10 at 5:27 am

What Engels said, which largely repeats what I said earlier, which largely repeats what Daniel Davies said even earlier, etc. ad nauseam. This game doesn’t have a winning move, because the other side can always just reset to the initial position.

166

Substance McGravitas 11.25.10 at 5:34 am

Engels, the essay referred to in the top of the post is linked in the thread. Maybe we could up the ante to, say, six paragraphs. Or maybe the whole article!

What I get from the first two paragraphs is that there is a TV show in France in which people make life-changing decisions. The freedom to present the life-changing decision to become a racist is apparently impossible because liberal democracy. This is odd to me because Front National, but nevertheless it’s a metaphor for the whole of the Western world where I gather racism is not allowed.

This naturally reminds Zizek of Lenin, so he quotes a paragraph about shooting complainers and extracts from it the deepest part of Lenin’s message: “his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true choice.”

Then he anticipates the mockery of his critics by somehow asserting that Marx is beloved on Wall Street but they think Lenin is a step too far: you can only talk about Lenin this way, Zizek! Are you some kind of heretic?

Surprise! He is!

After that, he explains that the consensus will not support his writing what he writes, which is why he works all over the world I guess. “There is nothing easier today than to get international, state, or corporate funds for multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious, or sexist violence.” Which is interesting news and where can I get this money? Somehow this part ends with freedom being the possibility to question the dominant strain of thought. That right there is a new idea.

167

John Holbo 11.25.10 at 6:34 am

“Btw I wouldn’t compare Zizek to Kant or Hegel but I do suspect this mode of trial by blog comment, with plucked sentences to be ‘translated’ into ‘plain English’”

I don’t think that the blog format is really essential to it, engels. You could do the same thing in a philosophy seminar, close reading a text. You pick a passage that seems problematic and then discuss what it means. Someone who thinks there’s something wrong with it can challenge someone who thinks there’s something right with it. There is no requirement that it be ‘translated’ into ‘plain English’. But if the terms used are not admitted by one side to be understandable, it’s generally productive for the other side to try to explain what the terms mean. Plain English works great, but obviously sometimes you need technical terms. And then it’s considered a good idea to try to explain why their introduction is warranted and how they will be used.

So I don’t think that the fact that this is a blog is really an excuse for failure to engage in a productive manner.

“This game doesn’t have a winning move, because the other side can always just reset to the initial position.”

Well, that’s philosophy for you, I suppose. But, if this counts as an objection, it is just as much an objection against you as against anyone else – against me, or geo. So why not just not take this line instead? Try just to play it straight. (You can still be quite sarcastic around the edges, obviously.)

168

dsquared 11.25.10 at 7:13 am

At a certain point, dsquared, I think you need to consider that the harrumph you keep hearing might be your own.

No, mate, no. I have reached that point, and I don’t think that there is any possible way in which your opening sentence: (“In the course of concocting a bad argument against Peter Singer, Zizek says something … well, you tell me”) wasn’t intended to display contempt for the material following it.

169

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.25.10 at 8:37 am

Substance 166, Somehow this part ends with freedom being the possibility to question the dominant strain of thought. That right there is a new idea.

I dunno, to me, at least, the text leading to “This is the point that one cannot and should not concede: today, actual freedom of thought must mean the freedom to question the predominant liberal – democratic postideological consensus – or it means nothing” seems reasonably relevant to the point.

Now a new idea, of course, but also certainly not an easily tolerated one; not an obvious, not a popular one.

He’s saying this all the time:
“Now we talk all the time about the end of the world, but it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Life on earth maybe will end, but somehow capitalism will go on.”

170

fewmet 11.25.10 at 8:59 am

Amidst all this tumult over whether Zizek was accorded sufficient respect by Holbo’s ellipsis, the real issue has been lost. There are scientists using lasers to create an army of mice who never, ever give up! They can’t be bargained with. They can’t be reasoned with. They can’t remember… Um. They can’t learn, so I’m guessing they can’t feel pity or remorse…especially remorse as that capacity seems require memory. Pity is also probably not a feature, since these are mice we are talking about. The point is that these mice are not Kierkegaardian knights of faith, they’re Terminators! Unless Terminators are also Kierkegaardian knights of faith, which I suppose is something we must consider.

171

john c. halasz 11.25.10 at 9:11 am

O.K. That passage cited @ 132 is precipitate, highly presuppositioned, and stylistically opaque, and in my very limited reading of him, Zizek tends to flit about in a somewhat schizo fashion, hopping about to various illustrations of his “point” rather than clearly laying out his argument. (I don’t know if and where Zizek patiently lays out his theoretical apparatus, since I’ve not read much of him due to lack of interest, but maybe Adam Kotsko could provide some bibliographical references). But I’m not sure ridicule, based on upholding stolid empiricism and plain sense, is exactly an appropriate response, since that seems to be the trap his “provocations” are laying in coming at the matter from a much different “place”. That’s more like just s defensive refusal to engage, though that too is anyone’s right.

So with meek trepidation and on the basis of limited acquaintance/speculative ignorance, I’ll offer some interpretive pointers on how that gnarled passage might be understood. And, of course, solely as a matter of explication, not necessarily endorsement or approval. The starting-point would be Hegel’s definition of the individual human being qua “subject” as the “concrete universal”. A thing can not be specifically identified and understood solely on the basis of its universal substantial form to which are added its particular attributes. Rather those particular attributes must be synthesized with that substantial form, that is, tied together in their specific way of being. (The issue is something like Duns Scotus’ haecceity, the this, az opposed to the what and the that). Moving then from the object pole of the thing to be understood to the subject pole of the “thing” doing the understanding, the individual human being must be specifically situated and involved with particular experiences and activities, even as, qua subject, it must participate in the universality of reason as a world-comprehending power. The thinking-activity of the individual subject then generates synthetic understanding of its objects by mediating between participation in the universality of reason and the particularity of its involvements, with reason providing the “light” to the world and the individual the receptivity and active application of that “light”, such that the individual can come to understand its own situated place within the rational order/intelligible structure of the world. Hence the individual is termed “the concrete universal”. Thus far just potted Hegel, which I trust is a POV not to difficult to understand.

To get to what Zizek might be saying, a few existential and Lacanish twists on Hegel’s individual as concrete universal are required. To get to the “singular universal” a first premise is that the individual qua “true subject” is not to be identified with the substantial ego with its particular attributes and pre-determined causal history, by which it is at once distinguished from and held in common with all other such substantial egos, (such as determinations of class, race, gender, etc.). The individual only becomes the “true” subject when it accedes to his/her desire, (which is always the desire of the other, hence something transpersonal, which exceeds the individual). And in becoming the “true” subject of desire the individual becomes an empty form, shorn of its particularities, hence a “universal” individual. But the individual only accedes to his/her desire when its ego is split open through encountering its contingent anchoring in the particularity of “the real”, which is what always remains outside of language and the symbolic order, with its ranges of possibilities and understandings, which is identified with the Freudian unconscious of primary repression. Which takes the guise of that occluded part or remnant of the self that has already been imprinted or marked by the desire of the other prior to the existence of the self and the assumption of its history, which is termed in the jargon “the little other-object” and which is said to be the “cause” of desire. Hence in acceding to the truth of desire in the universal, but empty form as a subject, the individual is also tied to the contingent particularity of its existence through the historicity of a transformative event. Hence the individual qua “true” subject of desire is styled oxymoronically the “singular universal”, which, as rooted in the historicity of an event and the finite project of an existence, is to be distinguished from the sort of universality that represents a homogeneous understanding of the world as a whole, since the event is a rupture in that homogeneous sort of universal order. It is henceforth a matter of remaining true to one’s desire by keeping faith with its “cause”, (which in French “foi” overlaps with remaining loyal to), in a becoming that is uncertain precisely because not pre-determined by some prior order. But perhaps the key point is that to accede to the truth of one’s desire as a subject is a choice, which yields a commitment, but it is not a choice based on any pre-existent will or volitional capacity, nor on any pre-determined causal inevitability, nor is it a choice of this or that particular attribute, but rather a choice which emerges from an involuntary encounter with obdurate contigency, and which only exists through its own performativity as the choice to exist as an “universal” subject of desire.

One might ask what the sort of structural transformation that is supposedly to emerge in an individual undergoing psychoanalysis has to do with a vast collective historical event such as the Russian Revolution. Well, as far as I can tell, the only connection is that desire is supra-personal and always mediated through a symbolic order. It seems to be largely an argument from analogy. But if there is a large collectivity of individuals refusing their place in and identification within the structure of the prevailing symbolic order, and seeking to rupture that order and transform its structure, or, perhaps, to alter their relation to any such structured symbolic order, perhaps they could be styled a collectivity that is assuming the universality of its desire as free and equal subjects. And, of course, Lenin/communism is being valorized precisely for its radical egalitarianism, over against liberalism and its order of distinctions, which tends to reproduce inequality precisely in the proclaimed cause of equality. Which gets transposed into the Lacanian frame of the universality of equal and equally collective desires without such distinction. The rather preposterous forced stylization of Lenin as a “knight of faith” involves an obviously similar transposition.

At any rate, think of this what you will. I’m just ‘splainin’. And hoping I don’t get into too much trouble with the cognoscenti.

172

fewmet 11.25.10 at 9:25 am

OMG, zombies!!! Why can’t Zizek reach across the aisle with some of that zombie talk the Anglo-Americans go in for? They’re a great example – no second best for them. It’s brains or nothing with these shufflers. Cold, dead eyes on the prize. You can tear one in half and it’ll still drag itself with it’s arms, striving for the optimum. Give ’em zombies, Zizek!

173

Torquil MacNeil 11.25.10 at 9:40 am

” “This is the point that one cannot and should not concede: today, actual freedom of thought must mean the freedom to question the predominant liberal – democratic postideological consensus – or it means nothing” seems reasonably relevant to the point.Now a new idea, of course, but also certainly not an easily tolerated one; not an obvious, not a popular one.”

Not a popular idea? Really? It reads like every other editorial in The Times to me: I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death … etc, etc.

And that is the main problem I have with Zizwek. When he is not talking in circles to epate the Anglo-Saxon consensus (or whatever it is) he just seems to be re-heating tired old bar room banalities.

174

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.25.10 at 10:07 am

Sure, truisms like ‘I may not agree, but I will defend’ are commonly accepted, but not the actual criticisms of the consensus. Can you link to a leninist editorial in The Times?

175

Torquil MacNeil 11.25.10 at 10:11 am

“Sure, truisms like ‘I may not agree, but I will defend’ are commonly accepted, but not the actual criticisms of the consensus.”

But that is a quite different thing. There’s not principle that says every possible criticism must be ‘accepted’ in the sense of agreed with or acknowledged to be valid. But they are all ‘accepted’ in the sense that their expression is tolerated. Surely we don’t all have to actually read Socialist Worker on principle?

176

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.25.10 at 10:33 am

Well, perhaps you read Socialist Worker and rejected it on merits, but he apparently feels that in the mainstream culture it’s simply being dismissed out of hand. So, you disagree. So, it sounds like there is some sort of a controversy here, after all.

177

Torquil MacNeil 11.25.10 at 11:33 am

I don’t want to derail the thread, Henri, if it is still alive, but you sort of make my point for me. If Zizek’s only complaint is that he would like to see ‘mainstream culture’ more open to radical political theorising, it is pretty weak tea, isn’t? It’s not substantially different from a Roger Scrutonish complaint that the curriculum is lacking in cultural rigour or the complaint of an opera buff that that there isn’t enough Wagner on TV (probably Roger Scruton again). I am not saying there is no merit in those complaints, just that they are a pretty standard part of the national conversation. Zizek stands on his hands and makes rude noises to give the impression that he is saying something alarming or difficult or dangerous, but really you can hear that sort of argument from my mum (sorry mum)

178

Epikhairekakia 11.25.10 at 11:59 am

This gives new meaning to that old apophthegm “Don’t lase me, bro”.

179

Zamfir 11.25.10 at 12:59 pm

Torquil, I think you are doing now what Engels warns about upthread: compacting Zizek to a few simple lines, then complaining that those few simple lines are hardly worth the effort.

180

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.25.10 at 1:12 pm

Why, I agree that complaints about the standards of political discourse within the doctrinal system (in Chomsky’s lingo) are relatively common, but hey, what about the style? You are not likely to hear a story about idealistic mice, or a bunch of Eastern-European communist-era jokes at Chomsky’s lecture.

181

AcademicLurker 11.25.10 at 1:12 pm

Honestly, is

“You liberals claim to be tolerant but….there some things that you don’t tolerate! HAHA!!!”

really such a brilliant new idea? I’ve actually enjoyed what I’ve read of Z, but the ridiculously self-congratulatory way in which he plays shock-the-liberals and casts himself as some sort of irascible skamp pointing out what no one dare acknowledge is one of the duller aspects of his writing.

182

dsquared 11.25.10 at 1:32 pm

really such a brilliant new idea?

it’s not new, but it is entirely relevant and it’s not as if modern liberalism has actually come up with a particularly convincing answer to it.

183

tomslee 11.25.10 at 1:35 pm

Early criticisms in the thread focus on the lazzzeerrrss anecdote, casually thrown in, and Z’s defenders say that’s OK because the factual accuracy is unimportant in context.

Later criticisms focus on the obscurity of the central argument, and defenders point to the necessity for technical terms and the difficulty of translating into simple English.

I have no problem with either casual anecdotes or obscure technical jargon, but I’m trying to think of a place where I can justify using both, side by side, and I can’t.

184

Steve Williams 11.25.10 at 1:46 pm

tomslee@181

‘I have no problem with either casual anecdotes or obscure technical jargon, but I’m trying to think of a place where I can justify using both, side by side, and I can’t.’

The two things aren’t ‘side by side’ though; two completely different passages are being debated. Unless you’re saying that no one person can express both casual anecdotes and technical jargon at any point, even in two completely different published places, published several years apart, in this instance. I’m sure there are plenty of physicists who’ve cracked jokes over the dinner table – is that problematic?

185

Substance McGravitas 11.25.10 at 2:44 pm

Torquil, I think you are doing now what Engels warns about upthread: compacting Zizek to a few simple lines, then complaining that those few simple lines are hardly worth the effort.

Zamfir I’m pretty sure that’s my fault as I just rewrote the start of the article in a mean fashion. But it would be interesting to me if someone would identify where in the article the valuable stuff starts and why I should look past the obvious bullshit to get to it.

186

John Holbo 11.25.10 at 3:00 pm

“I have reached that point, and I don’t think that there is any possible way in which your opening sentence: (“In the course of concocting a bad argument against Peter Singer, Zizek says something … well, you tell me”) wasn’t intended to display contempt for the material following it.”

I prefer to think I was displaying High Bemusement. But no matter. So long as you have seen fit quietly to retract the charge of ignorance, I am is satisifed, and we can agree to disagree about the rest.

187

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.25.10 at 3:01 pm

Substance, what about Walter Benn Michaels (here, for example), who writes something similar and also quite controversial. Can you see any valuable stuff there?

188

LFC 11.25.10 at 3:05 pm

engels @164: biographical testimony from anonymous people with an internet connection

You are also an anonymous person with an internet connection, unless engels is your real name.

189

John Holbo 11.25.10 at 3:11 pm

“it’s not new, but it is entirely relevant and it’s not as if modern liberalism has actually come up with a particularly convincing answer to it.”

But the problem with Zizek’s take on this particular issue is that he himself has nothing to say about it, except that it is new. Which isn’t true. What he thinks are new, heretofore unnoticed, unspeakable features of liberalism are old, well-documented, much-discussed features of liberalism. Not that they are unproblematic. dsquared is right about that. But the idea that liberalism is not a presuppositionless position; that there are limits to toleration; none of this is new.

190

Zamfir 11.25.10 at 3:12 pm

Take this:

So how are we to respond to the eternal dilemma of the radical Left? Should one strategically support center-left figures like Bill Clinton against the conservatives, or should one adopt the stance of “It doesn’t matter, we shouldn’t get involved in these fights-in a way, it is even better if the Right is directly in power, since, in this way, it will be easier for the people to see the truth of the situation?” The answer is the variation of old Stalin’s answer to the question “Which deviation is worse, the rightist or the leftist one?” They are both worse. What one should do is adopt the stance of the proper dialectical paradox. In principle, of course, one should be indifferent toward the struggle between the liberal and conservative poles of today’s official politics. However, one can only afford to be indifferent if the liberal option is in power. Otherwise, the price to be paid may appear much too high</I.

Perhaps not of deep and brilliant insight, but it tries to give answers to questions CT posts here regularly try to answer too. The article makes more of such points: that the liberal left is hard to fight because it has already incorporated lots of the socialists' demands, that the internet brings many socialist and communist concepts back in the spotlight, that Microsoft is a monopoly that makes more sense to nationalize than regulate. There is this passage, which I personally think is OK in its description of Greenpeace:

Today we can already discern the signs of a kind of general unease. Recall the series of events usually listed under the name of Seattle. The ten-year honeymoon of triumphant global capitalism is over; the longoverdue seven-year itch is here-witness the panicked reactions of big media, which from Time magazine to CNN suddenly started to warn about the Marxists manipulating the crowd of “honest” protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one: how to actualize the media’s accusations, how to invent the organizational structure that will confer on this unrest the form of a universal political demand. Otherwise the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is a marginal disturbance, perhaps organized as a new Greenpeace, endowed with a certain efficiency but also strictly limited goals, marketing strategy, and so forth. In other words, the key Leninist lesson today is that politics without the organizational form of the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) new social movements is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: “You want revolution without a revolution!”

Altogether, it’s not world shocking new stuff, but an amusing essay that combines lots of ok, if not very original ideas. It has more value if you actually think Zizek is amusing. I don’t, and apparently you don’t either. But I can see how people can find him amusing.

191

Zamfir 11.25.10 at 3:24 pm

Hmm, the above was intended as response to Substance

192

tomslee 11.25.10 at 4:11 pm

Steve Williams @182. I missed the switch at comment 132, where the two disputes centre on different pieces of writing. Of course “side by side” was key to my comment. I trust I am not at risk of Leninist intolerance.

193

Tim Wilkinson 11.25.10 at 4:35 pm

Again, the problem is still that Z never (so far as a cursory reading of a tiny sample of his stuff, skipping oafishly over anything that looks too much like Freudulent/Hegelious/Lacanic verbiage, has divulged anyway) has any very useful suggestion about, er, what is to be done.

194

Substance McGravitas 11.25.10 at 4:40 pm

it’s not new, but it is entirely relevant and it’s not as if modern liberalism has actually come up with a particularly convincing answer to it.

It’s also a reverse cherry-pick. Observe:

Wubba wubba wubba. Bong bong bong. What is acceptable in discourse is delineated by the surrounding political culture. AHOOGA.

195

dsquared 11.25.10 at 4:47 pm

But the problem with Zizek’s take on this particular issue is that he himself has nothing to say about it, except that it is new

well he has nothing to say about it in that particular sentence, you mean.

So long as you have seen fit quietly to retract the charge of ignorance

As applied to you personally I never made it and am happy to apologise for any implication otherwise; as applied to this post, I can confirm I still think it was pretty ignorant.

196

geo 11.25.10 at 4:52 pm

the key Leninist lesson today is that politics without the organizational form of the party is politics without politics

Thanks, Zamfir, for citing this. Of course the left need sto get politically organized, and not only in a party. Who disagrees, or could disagree? If this were Lenin’s “key lesson,” he would hardly be different from Rosa Luxemburg, Big Bill Hayward, Mother Jones, Eugene Debs, the American Populists, the Russian Mensheviks, Ralph Nader, etc., etc. Unfortunately, Lenin’s “key lesson,” and the lesson all subsequent Marxist-Leninists seem to have absorbed from him all too well, is that this party needs to, and is entitled to, organize itself hierarchically, demand unquestioning discipline from its members, seize state power without clear majority support, and thereafter violently suppress all political opposition or even criticism. I suppose Zizek would, if pressed, admit that this was a dead end (though if you read some of his remarks in Defense of Lost Causes to the effect that Stalin and Mao were on the right track but didn’t go far enough, you might suppose otherwise). If so, then Zizek’s recommendation of Lenin the political organizer seems to amount, as someone said above, to a provocative banality.

197

Zamfir 11.25.10 at 5:10 pm

Sure, but if it’s true it can’t hurt to repeat it in many different ways. Is Lenin a smart way to make the point? Well, as Dsquared reminds us, people make movies about Zizek and not about us, and using Lenin for examples surely has something to do with that.

At the very least, Zizek might help in an Overton-window sense. It’s better when people position themselves as the less-weird, less-radical alternative to Zizek than as the less-weird, less-radical alternative to Bill Clinton.

198

dsquared 11.25.10 at 5:13 pm

For crying out loud, if you precis anything to a sufficient degree it will sound banal. You people would gone “meh, nothing new” to the Sermon on the Mount.

199

Tim Wilkinson 11.25.10 at 5:16 pm

Meek to get world

200

Tim Wilkinson 11.25.10 at 5:18 pm

(can’t resist the secular call-and-response: ‘Oh, I’m glad they’re getting something cos they have a hell of a time’)

201

Zamfir 11.25.10 at 5:21 pm

I can well imagine that “meh, nothing new” would be my response to the sermon on the mount. In those days, there was no way to know that Jesus really was the son of God, and not the local Slavoj Zizek.

202

Tim Wilkinson 11.25.10 at 5:24 pm

And here will be a nine-bladed chariot – not seven, not eight…

203

geo 11.25.10 at 5:28 pm

But, dsquared:

1) The Sermon on the Mount was actually rather original. And at least in the King James version, it is heart-stoppingly, gooseflesh-raisingly eloquent. If Zizek could write like that, he could recycle Dale Carnegie and I’d adore him;

2) Why on earth does Z cite Lenin in support of worker/citizen self-organization? Lenin is (in)famous precisely for destroying all vestiges of worker/citizen self-organization and substituting the despotic rule of a “vanguard” party, thereby discrediting the very ideal of socialist revolution among most democratically-minded people for a century after. Just because Lenin said that organization is better than no organization, we’re supposed to be impressed? Don’t you think Zizek is teasing us, in his lumbering way? It’s a little like recommending vegetarianism on the authority of that German fellow, I forget his name.

204

fish 11.25.10 at 5:36 pm

Let me attempt a spot of cheese-making and say I believe there was a misunderstanding upthread.

D^2 wrote “Any further argument to “Holbo is ignorant” I’m not planning to make.” meaning the ‘further’ to apply only to ‘argument’, and saying that he was arguing only so far as the posts’ ignorance, not JH’s.

JH interpreted the ‘further’ as applying to ‘argument to “Holbo is ignorant”’ and so presumed that D^2 was implying that he had already made an argument to “Holbo is ignorant”.

205

bianca steele 11.25.10 at 5:57 pm

[Zizek]’s saying this all the time:
“Now we talk all the time about the end of the world, but it is much easier for us to imagine the end of the world than a small change in the political system. Life on earth maybe will end, but somehow capitalism will go on.”

This was already written by Mrs. Philip Rieff forty years ago.

206

engels 11.25.10 at 6:01 pm

Why does Zizek look to Lenin for insights into revolutionary practice rather than Ralph Nader? That’s a tricky one, Geo…

207

Jim Demintia 11.25.10 at 6:05 pm

Student: But Herr Professor, the facts contradict your argument.

Hegel: So much the worse for the facts!

208

Substance McGravitas 11.25.10 at 6:09 pm

Why does Zizek look to Lenin for insights into revolutionary practice rather than Ralph Nader? That’s a tricky one, Geo…

Perhaps it’s because, as outlined early in the piece, he needs to go beyond the bounds of what is sayable in the current political discourse. So Lenin=the unpresentable racism on French reality television shows.

209

Zamfir 11.25.10 at 6:11 pm

Perhaps people used lasers on Nader, so he always wants what he cannot get.

210

Substance McGravitas 11.25.10 at 6:15 pm

This is a really funny line in the course of an essay seeking to extract lessons in freedom from Lenin:

One cannot dismiss Singer as a monstrous exaggeration.

211

Substance McGravitas 11.25.10 at 6:19 pm

Also thanks to Zamfir for those paragraphs, which when reading the piece made me perk up a little: I enjoy Clinton/Third Way bashing and arguments about how far to the right you can swing before you’re part of the problem. I just don’t see Zizek being more illuminating than other people who may write fewer things that are stupid or crazy.

212

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.25.10 at 6:31 pm

This was already written by Mrs. Philip Rieff forty years ago.

I don’t think it was true 40 years ago. Plenty of real political stuff was going on at the time, unlike today.

213

bianca steele 11.25.10 at 6:45 pm

HV @ 214:
Yes, but . . . most of what Sontag was doing at the time was explaining to habitues of the New York City galleries why they shouldn’t be afraid of performance art, which is not especially political, unless you consider it a political act to advocate for currently existing trends in art against resistance from those formerly dominant, or unless you believe that the artistic avant-garde is a part of the political avant-garde.

214

Torquil MacNeil 11.25.10 at 8:37 pm

And another thing …

Zizek is very often just plain wrong in his assertions about liberal society, the ones he builds his teetering scaffoldings upon. In the Lenin essay for example he blandly informs that it would be ‘a priori’ impossible to include a family of racists in the TV programme he cites as representative of the politico-cultural gestalt. But unless French TV is very unlike the rest of TV he is completely wrong, isn’t he? TV producers would leap for joy if they tracked down a family that had ‘chosen’ to be racist. He makes these claims early and with ‘daring’ reference to popular culture so you hardly notice, until you have been through all the rigmarole, that his starting assertions are foundationless even in his own terms and it is all built on sand.

I agree with Ajay, he is really little different from Glenn Beck and everything that dsquared and others have claimed in his defence would do as well in defence of Beck, which is a poor look out for Ziz.

215

Torquil MacNeil 11.25.10 at 8:37 pm

And another thing …

Zizek is very often just plain wrong in his assertions about liberal society, the ones he builds his teetering scaffoldings upon. In the Lenin essay for example he blandly informs that it would be ‘a priori’ impossible to include a family of racists in the TV programme he cites as representative of the politico-cultural gestalt. But unless French TV is very unlike the rest of TV he is completely wrong, isn’t he? TV producers would leap for joy if they tracked down a family that had ‘chosen’ to be racist. He makes these claims early and with ‘daring’ reference to popular culture so you hardly notice, until you have been through all the rigmarole, that his starting assertions are foundationless even in his own terms and it is all built on sand.

I agree with Ajay, he is really little different from Glenn Beck and everything that dsquared and others have claimed in his defence would do as well in defence of Beck, which is a poor look out for Ziz.

216

dsquared 11.25.10 at 8:38 pm

I agree with Ajay, he is really little different from Glenn Beck and everything that dsquared and others have claimed in his defence would do as well in defence of Beck, which is a poor look out for Ziz.

pfaugh.

217

Substance McGravitas 11.25.10 at 8:46 pm

Here Zizek does unpaid intern work for Jonah Goldberg:

Along these lines, Claude Lefort himself, whom no one can accuse of communist sympathies, recently made a crucial point in his answer to Francois Furet: today’s liberal consensus is the result of 150 years of the leftist workers’ struggle and pressure upon the state; it incorporated demands that were one hundred or even fewer years ago dismissed by liberals as horror. As proof, one should just look at the list of the demands at the end of the Communist Manifesto. Apart from two or three of them (which, of course, are the key ones), all others are today part of the consensus (at least that of the disintegrating welfare state): universal suffrage, the right to free education, universal health care, care for the retired, limitation of child labor, and so on.

In context that appears to me to be a proof of liberal hegemony and how terrible it is.

218

MPAVictoria 11.25.10 at 8:49 pm

dsquared:
Quote-and-pfaugh at Crooker Timber comments was monstrously over-used in the mid 2000s.

219

Torquil MacNeil 11.25.10 at 9:38 pm

“Quote-and-pfaugh at Crooker Timber comments was monstrously over-used in the mid 2000s.”

Especially when, as here, it is evidently smuggling in a racial slur!

220

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.25.10 at 10:02 pm

In context that appears to me to be a proof of liberal hegemony and how terrible it is.

Well, yeah, terrible to a marxist, if a consequence (or the purpose) of liberal hegemony is preventing those two or three key demands from being fulfilled. This is the whole point.

221

Substance McGravitas 11.25.10 at 10:13 pm

Well, yeah, terrible to a marxist, if a consequence (or the purpose) of liberal hegemony is preventing those two or three key demands from being fulfilled. This is the whole point.

Which Marxists have been fighting against free education?

222

John Holbo 11.26.10 at 2:20 am

“JH interpreted the ‘further’ as applying to ‘argument to “Holbo is ignorant”’ and so presumed that D^2 was implying that he had already made an argument to “Holbo is ignorant”.”

Yes, that is correct. I believe there was a misunderstanding, and we are happily past all that. It occurs to me that this quote-and-‘pfaugh’ business – which is not my style, but I’m always interested in learning a new tune – is very elegant, when performed as a recursive operation. You just need lots of spare inverted commas.

“Pfaugh.”

Pfaugh.

Then, in response:

”’Pfaugh.’ Pfaugh.”

Pfaugh.

And so forth.

And then you can probably sing it in a plangent, Carol King ‘why is everyone moving the goalposts’ way.

“So ‘pfaugh!’ away/Doesn’t anyone stay in one place anymore?”

Or you can describe the whole culture of the comment box in the form of a traditional children’s song. (This round is for dsquared.)

Where, oh where is dear little Danny?
Where, oh where is dear little Danny?
Where, oh where is dear little Danny?
Way down yonder in the ”’Pfaugh.’ Pfaugh.” patch.

Come on girls, let’s go find him,
Come on girls, let’s go find him,
Come on girls, let’s go find him,
Way down yonder in the ”’Pfaugh.’ Pfaugh” patch.

Pickin’ up ”’Pfaugh.’ Pfaugh”’s, put ’em in your pockets,
Pickin’ up ”’Pfaugh.’ Pfaugh”’s, put ’em in your pockets,
Pickin’ up ”’Pfaugh.’ Pfaugh”’s, put ’em in your pockets,
Way down yonder in the ”’Pfaugh.’ Pfaugh” patch.

223

john c. halasz 11.26.10 at 5:27 am

Good. Now that it has been established and agreed that this Holbo post is not actually about Holbo and the utter probity of his cognitive intentions, but, er, about the matter originally cited, might I ask what exactly was the bad argument being concocted against Peter Singer, and just why was the (elided?) “argument” bad? The story about the the lobotomized rat was pretty clearly a reductio ad absurdum, (since, among other things, rats are not the sort of beings that can enter into a symbolic order and thus be possessed of desire), and, in context, it was Singer to whom the claim was attributed that humans are themselves mere animals and thus animals should be afforded the same considerations as humans. In turn, the point was that the lobotomized rat proved incapable of the secondary elaborations and rationalizations by which it could settle for second ( or third or fourth, etc.) best, which, more by way of analogy and parody than “evidence”, was aimed at a criticism of the adaptionism involved in Singer’s utilitarian POV, whereby human beings should merely accept the substitute gratifications of commoditized production and consumption and their assigned place within its hierarchical order, rather than authentically assuming their own desire. Since it was Singer who had reduced humans to bare life, denying any marker of the distinctively human in terms of the assumption of desire. (Hegel would have made approximately the same point: very well then, self-consciousness is a skull-bone). That Singer’s POV amounts to a liberal form of Social Darwinism I thought one of the cleverer turns in an otherwise prolix and scatter-shot essay. (I particularly liked how he contrasts his discussion of Shostakovich’s opera with a discussion of Eisenstein’s film, both somehow as exemplifications of Stalinism, when no copy of the film survived).

So given that the rat experiment anecdote functioned as a metaphor rather than any evidential proof, (and that there is no leap from the lobotomized rat to Lenin as knight-of-faith in evidence), what exactly is a) bad about the comment on Singer and b) why is the sloppy citation and evidential basis of the experiment an issue? (That’s what I found odd about Kotsko’s first comment here: he seemed to be making a weird argument from authority, when no such basis was relevant or needed. Aside from the fact that neuro-science as a really going concern post-dates Lacan,- I would date its start with the guy with the snails in the late 1970’s-, and doesn’t form any part of Lacanian type claims about mental contents).

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Henri Vieuxtemps 11.26.10 at 7:11 am

“Universal compulsory school attendance. Free instruction.” The former exists even in Germany, the second in Switzerland and in the United States in the case of elementary schools. If in some states of the latter country higher education institutions are also “free”, that only means in fact defraying the cost of education of the upper classes from the general tax receipts. Incidentally, the same holds good for “free administration of justice” demanded under A, 5. The administration of criminal justice is to be had free everywhere; that of civil justice is concerned almost exclusively with conflicts over property and hence affects almost exclusively the possessing classes. Are they to carry on their litigation at the expense of the national coffers?

“Elementary education by the state” is altogether objectionable. Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfillment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people! Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school.

— Critique of the Gotha Programme

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Henri Vieuxtemps 11.26.10 at 8:14 am

…what you and Geo’s democratically-minded people don’t seem to realize is just how radical revolutionary marxism is. Therefore lenininsm is something to analyze, while liberalism is something to condemn. Crazy? You bet. So what.

226

ajay 11.26.10 at 9:26 am

213: unless you believe that the artistic avant-garde is a part of the political avant-garde.

Quite the reverse at times, of course: large chunks of the artistic avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s were funded by the CIA as a countermeasure against what you might call the political avant-garde. See Saunders, “Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War” on abstract expressionism).

227

Alex 11.26.10 at 10:11 am

But unless French TV is very unlike the rest of TV he is completely wrong, isn’t he? TV producers would leap for joy if they tracked down a family that had ‘chosen’ to be racist.

I think we’ve actually had that TV show, haven’t we? Certainly I can recall media guff about reality-TV contestants saying racist things.

2) Why on earth does Z cite Lenin in support of worker/citizen self-organization? Lenin is (in)famous precisely for destroying all vestiges of worker/citizen self-organization and substituting the despotic rule of a “vanguard” party

This is an excellent point. I think you can only get around this by speaking to Len-in-theory and ignoring Len-in-practice. The vanguard was meant to grow out of the self-organisation of the working class, after all – that’s why he said “vanguard”, rather than say “an elite commando unit designed expressly to carry out a coup d’etat and use the apparatus of the state to crush the parties of the Left that were actually supported by the majority of the working class”. A vanguard is an integral part of the army whose reconnaissance screen it provides.

Of course that wasn’t how it happened. It’s left as an exercise to the reader to wonder if agreeing with Lenin in theory while accepting that there might have been a few minor cock-ups in the implementation is anything you should be doing.

228

ajay 11.26.10 at 10:37 am

Defining by a general law the expenditures on the elementary schools, the qualifications of the teaching staff, the branches of instruction, etc., and, as is done in the United States, supervising the fulfillment of these legal specifications by state inspectors, is a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people!

This doesn’t make any sense at all. So the state can
a) decide how many teachers to hire and how many schools to build where, and presumably provide all the money needed for said hiring and building
b) dictate what sort of people the teachers should be, how much they should be paid, who their managers are, and under what conditions they can be fired
c) lay down what subjects the teachers should teach the kids, for how long, and when
and
d) regularly inspect the schools to make sure a-c are being followed …

but that’s ” a very different thing from appointing the state as the educator of the people”. How? Why?
Education, here, is being carried out entirely by a force of civil servants under the orders of the state. If that isn’t “appointing the state as the educator of the people”, then what is?

The administration of criminal justice is to be had free everywhere; that of civil justice is concerned almost exclusively with conflicts over property and hence affects almost exclusively the possessing classes

In other words: “I am unable to think of any circumstance in which poor people might want to sue rich people.”
I think “pfaugh” is pretty much the only acceptable response here.

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dsquared 11.26.10 at 12:26 pm

nearly everyone writing in the nineteenth century had some sort of unworkable or silly idaes about the design of modern welfare states though – if you’re going to pfaugh Marx for that, you’re going to have a very sore epiglottis by the time you’ve done everyone.

I’m pretty sure (on the basis of the way in which SZ usually uses Lenin as an example rather than that specific idea), that he’s talking more about “Len as symbol” rather than Len-in-theory or Len-in-practice.

230

ajay 11.26.10 at 12:32 pm

229: well, the education point is not so much unworkable – I wouldn’t mind that so much – as logically impossible. I honestly don’t see the distinction he’s trying to draw here between, on the one hand, a state education system (which is Bad) and a system in which the state pays for everyone’s education and dictates the content and nature of said education (which is Clearly Different and thus OK).

The civil justice point is not logically impossible, but still wrong.

231

ajay 11.26.10 at 12:41 pm

The point is that these mice are not Kierkegaardian knights of faith, they’re Terminators! Unless Terminators are also Kierkegaardian knights of faith, which I suppose is something we must consider.

This is an interesting point that needs considering: obsessive, uncompromising pursuit of an unattainable goal, while disregarding slightly less desirable but attainable alternatives, is not, contra Z, typical human behaviour. (Look around you.) Nor is it what we generally think of as desirable human behaviour. Leaving aside the brain-damaged mouse experiment (which may or may not have existed), there are other examples of this sort of behaviour in the natural world – mostly from not very intelligent animals, like (say) insects flying into lights.

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belle le triste 11.26.10 at 1:00 pm

There’s a nice animal fable by James Thurber about a moth that eschewed lamps and candles and instead spent its life trying to fly towards a star. It never got there, obviously, but it outlived all its contemporaries, and in repose at the end of a long life spent its days entertaining and amazing its little great-great-grandchildren with tales no one living could contradict of how it HAD in fact reached the star.

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Torquil MacNeil 11.26.10 at 1:33 pm

“There’s a nice animal fable by James Thurber about a moth that eschewed lamps and candles and instead spent its life trying to fly towards a star. ”

Which is how moths probably do in fact navigate, funnily enough, although by moon rather than starlight. That’s why they end up self-immolating in candles. It is because it is programmed to fly to towards the moon that it ends up spiralling into the candle flame (someone else can explain the optics, it is beyond me).

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ajay 11.26.10 at 1:47 pm

It’s actually because they are trying to fly at a fixed angle to the moon. It’s easy to see that if you try to move while keeping a fixed object at 90 degrees to your direction of travel, you’ll go round and round in a circle. If the object is at less than 90 degrees to your direction of travel,you’ll spiral in and eventually hit it. Try it yourself in some convenient open space.

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Torquil MacNeil 11.26.10 at 2:03 pm

That does not explain why they fly into candles when they are brighter than the moon though. It has something to do with the physiology of the moth’s eye that makes the ‘attempt’ to fly toward a distant light source keep them flying in a straight line but when the source is closer (candle) they spiral in. I read about it once in New Scientist. I realise an unkind person could say that was a bit vague, but at least no lasers.

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Henri Vieuxtemps 11.26.10 at 2:07 pm

Both the civil justice and education points actually seem quite trivial and consistent with their view of the government being a tool of class-domination. It appears that they would (reluctantly, I’m sure) accept government control of “legal specifications”, but not the government being in charge of education, i.e. providing the curriculum and employing the teachers.

237

ajay 11.26.10 at 2:09 pm

Yes, it does. The moon’s so far away that “keep the moon at 30 degrees to your line of flight” is a great rule for flying in a straight line; the apparent angle of the moon to the line doesn’t change, however far along the line you go. But with the moon replaced by a close object, the same rule leads to you flying in a spiral inwards towards the object.

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Torquil MacNeil 11.26.10 at 2:13 pm

Yes, I did notice that after I posted the comment. But I would much prefer it if the moth was ‘trying’ to fly towards the moon and I definitely remember somethong along those lines so I claim Zizekian privilege.

Henri @ 236: what on earth does that have to do with lepidoptery?

239

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.26.10 at 2:20 pm

Eh, I’m lost, I guess. Where am I?

240

Substance McGravitas 11.26.10 at 2:30 pm

Henri, Marx was not fighting against free education.

241

dsquared 11.26.10 at 2:43 pm

Education, here, is being carried out entirely by a force of civil servants under the orders of the state. If that isn’t “appointing the state as the educator of the people”, then what is?

I think the thing that’s missing is a) the state deciding the detail of the curriculum and b) the state using the school curriculum as a vehicle for imparting state propaganda and/or civic values. Surely that’s the point of bringing the comparison with church schools into it with “Government and church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the school”.

242

Substance McGravitas 11.26.10 at 2:48 pm

I agree with dsquared’s interpretation of the language about what is objectionable in education.

243

ajay 11.26.10 at 3:15 pm

241: Well, that makes sense, but in that case it’s rather badly put – “I don’t mind if the government funds and runs the education system, just as long as it doesn’t have any influence on it” and so I will fall back on the last refuge of the continental philosopher and assert that it must have lost something in the translation from the original German.

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ajay 11.26.10 at 3:18 pm

I believe that, in a battle a l’outrance, Marx and his squadrons of (literally) lunatic moths would have been no match for Zizek plus his armies of uncompromising laser mice, but only a rigorous examination in comic book form could convince me one way or the other.

245

dsquared 11.26.10 at 3:38 pm

“I don’t mind if the government funds and runs the education system, just as long as it doesn’t have any influence on it”

if you replace “government” with “church”, isn’t this a pretty mainstream position?

246

geo 11.26.10 at 3:52 pm

j.c.halasz: it was Singer who had reduced humans to bare life

No, not at all. Singer doesn’t deny that humans have all sorts of marvellous mental capacities that animals don’t, like writing poetry or long philosophical blog posts. How could he? We poets and philosopher-posters are men (I mean menschen), not mice, much less moths. His point is that: 1) inflicting unnecessary pain on humans is clearly wrong; 2) humans feel pain because they have a nervous system; 3) animals, like humans, have a nervous system (though not identical to that of humans) and therefore also feel pain (though not identical to that of humans); hence 4) inflicting unnecessary pain on animals is wrong (similarly, though not identically, wrong to inflicting unnecessary pain on humans).

247

ajay 11.26.10 at 4:10 pm

245: is it? Where?
In countries where the church (or organised religion more generally, not to be parochial) funds and runs some or all of the education system,
a) it normally has quite a lot of influence on the schools concerned
and
b) that’s seen as a feature, not a bug, by all parties.

248

dsquared 11.26.10 at 4:18 pm

Well, it’s the view of Richard Dawkins, isn’t it? As far as I can tell, he’s willing to concede the right of religious organisations to own and run schools, but doesn’t want them to be allowed to use those schools for religious indoctrination. Or, if I’ve got this wrong and he does actually want them to be banned from even owning schools then a) this doesn’t strike me as very consistent and b) although it’s not mainstream, it’s still a fairly coherent point of view.

Thinking about it, a lot of Michael Gove’s rhetoric when in opposition took more or less exactly the Marxist view of central government funding, standards and inspection but local (or even parental) control over teaching. Not sure what that proves, other than that there’s nothing new under the sun.

249

Henri Vieuxtemps 11.26.10 at 4:29 pm

Well, of course they (Marx and Engels) are not against government control of education per se, not at all. In fact, they’re all for it, and they would indeed insist on it, provided the government in question is their proletarian government. All this talk, like 242: “Marx was not fighting against free education”, it’s just missing the point completely. Revolutionary marxism is very radical and it’s not liberal.

250

ejh 11.26.10 at 4:53 pm

Is there in fact a Marxist view of central government funding which one could exactly hold?

251

Substance McGravitas 11.26.10 at 4:57 pm

All this talk, like 242: “Marx was not fighting against free education”, it’s just missing the point completely.

I really don’t think it is. If you look at the passage in question awfully near it is “This paragraph on the schools should at least have demanded technical schools (theoretical and practical) in combination with the elementary school.” Well, demanded of whom?

252

bianca steele 11.26.10 at 5:58 pm

ajay @ 226:
The idea of the CIA promoting abstract expressionism for propaganda purposes, for any other propagandistic goal than simply asserting the possibility of US artists without close European questions being worth looking at, is pretty humorous. Either the art guys they had at the time were actually pretty progressive in their taste (which feeds the argument from the conservative movement and now the tea partiers that the so-called liberal consensus of the 1950s was not what we’d now call neoliberal but was actually very liberal in the American sense), or they simply thought indiscriminately of all Art as Good (which doesn’t help either), or they were trying to subvert European art-lovers, who in their minds were probably mostly communists anyway, by showering them with what they considered bad art (which would irritate the likes of Roger Scruton), or they were ideologically confused. Unless the book you cite has evidence that the CIA was organizing art teachers and as-yet unrecognized painters into cells, or something?

253

bianca steele 11.26.10 at 6:03 pm

European connections, not “questions”

254

stop! 11.26.10 at 6:05 pm

John Holbo: Please, Stop!

I see right through your “oh, I was just a little curious about this Zizek piece, thoughts y’all?” routine, and it makes me sick. It’s monstrous what you’re doing here. This is just another in your long series of twisted and inhumane experiments, where you, Doktor Doktor Holbo, are the mad Lacanian scientist, and the commentariat, unwittingly, becomes the mass of mice which you can subject to any number of perversities (though in general, the less said about these things, the better).

The purpose of these experiments: to fully maximize the CT comments/content ratio. You’ve tried “Zizek…pfarrumpf!” once already, but simply pasting an excerpt from an inaccurate Zizek interview and submitting it without analysis for our approval only got you 205 comments. Variations were clearly needed. “Libertarians… pfarrumpf!”, “Goldberg… pfarrumpf!”, and “Trolleys… eh?” were on the cutting-edge of c/c ratiometrics, and still taught as textbook cases to budding c/c scholars everywhere. But now, Doktor Holbo, you find a piece that contains both Zizek and freakin’ laser beams. How can you resist? You think it will be your masterpiece.

But it won’t be, Holbo. You will never be satisfied until that elusive 1,000 comment mark is reached without you having to say anything meaningful at all. You worry that maybe it can’t be done. Maybe all of this pffarumpfing has been for naught. Worry not, Holbo. I have had enough of these sick games, so I will share with you how to accomplish the impossible… on one condition: that you hang up your lab coat and leave us mice alone.

Submit for our approval, sans the “awkwardly long, but I think it sets a nice, smug tone”-title, an illustration: a saintly Kierkegaard holding back Slavoj Zizek who is trying to push Jonah Goldberg into the path of an oncoming trolley. Tied to the tracks: Alan Sokal.

The 1,000 comments will be yours.

255

piglet 11.26.10 at 6:06 pm

Marx’ objection to state-run education seems pretty obvious to me. Interestingly, Marx cites the American public education system (with local control over schools) as a preferable model. Perhaps American liberals have gotten so used to right-wing anti-government rhetoric that they can’t fathom that sentiment coming from the left.

256

zamfir 11.26.10 at 6:49 pm

Bianca, it may be humorous, but there is more truth in it than you might think. The Cia actually had covert programmes to fund leftist intellectuals and artists all over the world, if they showed no sympathy for the Soviets or labour movements.

Of course, they didn’t create art movements from whole cloth, but they were worried that leftist art could give status to politically active socialists, and they actively tried to prevent that.

Irving Kristol for example started his career as a cia-paid concern troll. Humorous, but true.

257

bianca steele 11.26.10 at 6:57 pm

zamfir, I’m aware of the history, but I have trouble figuring out what is so troubling about the government giving MoMA funding to have a show of American artists overseas. The objection seems to be specifically that the critics and curators of the time were led to write ideologically objectionable things because they were in the pocket of the CIA–not simply that it is better for artists and thinkers to be “pure” and dissociate themselves from government and power–or that it was sneaky, or that it subverted the wishes of the non-Americans who were drawn in–but that the CIA set itself to ensure that nobody would any longer think Socialist Realism was the best kind of art, and generally to push out artists not clearly copacetic with the sensibilities of the wealthy and powerful.

258

bianca steele 11.26.10 at 7:22 pm

And in any case re. @226, I don’t believe the artistic avant-garde has been the political avant-garde in any straightforward sense since near the beginning of the nineteenth century, except in the sense that being a bohemian puts you in touch with proletarian sensibilities; but I recognize that this is not universally accepted.

259

Hidari 11.26.10 at 7:40 pm

#252

It’s quite well known that the CIA sponsored post-war ‘Modernism’. They had good reasons to do so. At the time, Soviet art was, essentially, ‘Socialist Realism’, and thus the sponsorship of Abstract Expressionism, indicated the ‘superiority’ of American Freedom (in this case, the freedom not to be realist) over Soviet propaganda.

Also, as Saunders makes clear, the CIA guys at the time were heavily influenced, intellectually, by T.S. Eliot and (to a lesser extent) Ezra Pound. In other words, they had a strong feeling that the ignorant masses were too stupid to understand Modernism, and that it should be subsidised by the State (i.e. them), because it had a moral and aesthetic worth that only elites (i.e. they) could understand.

As a result of this, incidentally, they were keen to promote only a depoliticised or reactionary version of Modernism. Artists who did not toe the line didn’t get the subsidies, didn’t get the grants, didn’t get the fancy exhibitions in Paris.

In terms of ideas and philosophy, all the censorship battles in Encounter indicate this.

260

zamfir 11.26.10 at 8:04 pm

Bianca, sorry, I misread your post. I don’t think the point here is that the CIA was particularly bad in this affair, compared to paying the Mafia to shoot decent people or whatever else they were up to in those days.

It is more evidence against the idea of art as a political vanguard: the most cynical experts on that topic, the cia itself, decided that avant garde art was not a threat but worth sponsoring in the fight.

261

john c. halasz 11.26.10 at 8:10 pm

geo @246:

Aside from missing a small allusion, you lopped of the qualifying second part of the sentence. The very old-fashioned way to put it, is that animals, unlike humans, lack a spiritual life. Heidegger would say that animals, lacking (an understanding of ) Being, are “world-poor”. Animals have minimal or no symbolic capacities, hence don’t live in a symbolically mediated world at the other side of which is the other, which evokes the struggles over desire and recognition. The basic point is that humans, in assuming or acceding to their desire, ( which in its demand, exceeds any object of gratification), “necessarily” undergo a trauma of separation-individuation, as distinctly bounded, situated, finite, mortal beings, an experience of suffering that animals are excluded from, (which is not to say that humans are not also animals). Otherwise put, though animals might well experience pain, fear, rage, perhaps even sorrow or something like depression, they don’t quite experience anxiety, which accompanies human “identity” and its uncertain possibilities in its splitness or self-dividedness. So to eliminate an other’s suffering at the expense of his/her “identity” and the “necessary” struggle of bearing its peculiar desire is scarcely to do a good.

Singer, (as limned by Zizek), reduces the world to the givenness of the status quo and conceives that the only ethical vocation or imperative is to reduce or eliminate suffering from that status quo, with the implication that that is somehow increasing quantitatively the balance of pleasure or “happiness” in the world. Further, that alleviating or eliminating the suffering of others is itself the only true happiness or fulfillment of an ethical life, (which is vaguely reminiscent of Mother Teresa). There is some question as to what the source of such an injunction would be and whether it is not, in fact, rather paternalistic, (in some gender-neutral sense), and condescending. Or, otherwise put, just what sort of super-ego such a view at once implies and denies. But the main objection is that such a world-view forecloses the possibility that human beings can project beyond the given order of the world and their mere adaptions to it toward a world that would be quite otherwise in its prevailing arrangements and relations, in which unnecessary suffering would not merely be subtracted from the very prevailing relations and arrangements which sustain and reproduce it, but in which people could realize different relations of acknowledgment of their respective desires from without the disavowals that the current order imprints and imposes on them,- in which, as it were, their sufferings would not be subtracted from, but added to their “happiness”. Zizek, then, is pegging Singer as an advocate of TINA, as a piece-meal reformist emending a world of ever diminishing, contracting possibility. I’d guess the reason that Zizek picks on Singer in particular, in surveying the contemporary “landscape” as a symbolic/ideological analyst/critic, is that Singer seems to be a boundary-shattering anti-conventionalist, when he’s actually a stolidly self-limiting thinker.

As to ethical consideration of animals and the natural world, I would think that, aside from the paramount consideration of sustaining viable ecologies in that most part of the world where humans intervene and dominate, a main aim would be to preserve wild areas, in which animals could live in accordance with their natures and habitats. But that would entail the recognition that wild nature is not an ethical domain, from which suffering is to be eliminated.

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Substance McGravitas 11.26.10 at 8:22 pm

Animals have minimal or no symbolic capacities, hence don’t live in a symbolically mediated world at the other side of which is the other, which evokes the struggles over desire and recognition.

Therefore rats-and lasers anecdotes.

263

Adam Kotsko 11.26.10 at 8:27 pm

I’m pretty sure this thread is the turning point when history starts repeating itself as farce.

264

bob mcmanus 11.26.10 at 10:57 pm

263: Naw, its still tragic, Kotsko, as much as in the old days at The Valve. They’re laughing, we despair.

265

piglet 11.26.10 at 11:46 pm

jch, I appreciate your comments. I have to say I often often find your comments excessively long but these were worth it ;-)

266

john c. halasz 11.27.10 at 2:06 am

@ 265:

Thanks, sort of. But it’s still @254 FTW!

267

John Holbo 11.27.10 at 3:03 am

bob mcmanus: “They’re laughing, we despair.”

But you were going to do that anyway, bob. So it was overdetermined.

268

LFC 11.27.10 at 3:28 am

zamfir @256:
Irving Kristol for example started his career as a cia-paid concern troll.

I hold no brief at all for Irving Kristol, but this would be true only if Kristol deliberately misrepresented his own views in the course of doing whatever the CIA was paying him, however wittingly or unwittingly on his part, to do. I looked up a definition of “concern troll” b/c I’ve seen it used a lot and didn’t know what it meant, and it’s fairly clear that a concern troll is someone who, among other things, pretends to hold views that he does not in fact hold. Irving Kristol IIRC was a Trotskyist as a young man, and unless he was misrepresenting those views (or whatever views he held at the time) in his CIA-funded interventions, he wasn’t a concern troll. Maybe something else, but not that.

269

John Holbo 11.27.10 at 6:10 am

I may as well say what I think is wrong with Zizek’s argument against Singer: he gets Singer wrong, so his criticism misses the target.

In the “Plea” essay, Zizek makes the same mistake that john halasz makes: “it was Singer who had reduced humans to bare life, denying any marker of the distinctively human in terms of the assumption of desire.” This isn’t an even approximately accurate gloss on on Singer (geo already pretty much pointed this out.)

Singer doesn’t deny that various distinctive features of humans make for distinctively ‘human’ values. So far as we know, humans are the only animals that enjoy Shakespeare. So enjoying Shakespeare is a distinctively human value. (Multiply this case by however many more Heideggerian-style cases you please.) Singer only denies that the fact that only humans enjoy Shakespeare justifies or excuses cruelty to creatures that can’t enjoy Shakespeare (animals, mentally retarded humans, so forth).

It may help to compare the case to slavery. It used to be that defenders of slavery accused abolitionists of anti-humanism, in effect. The highest human values – i.e. the right sort of civilized, aristocratic existence – is, by hypothesis, only possible if there is slavery to facilitate the requisite leisure of the aristocratic class. (American slave-holders argued so. So did Aristotle, more or less.) So you object to abolitionism on the grounds that abolitionists reduce all human beings to mere animals, not acknowledging their higher, civilized capacities. (It’s a kind of tu quoque: abolitionists accuse us of treating our slaves like animals. But the truth is that abolitionists treat all human beings as animals, and it is only we slaveholders who uphold the dignity of the the fully-developed, fully-virtuous human life.) This is, to put it mildly, not a good argument against abolitionism. The abolitionists can make two excellent responses. First, they can say that they are not oblivious to the advantages of aristocratic living, say. They just deny that the pursuit of certain higher values, gives anyone the right to violate certain basic rights of other creatures. Second, they will express skepticism that pursuing the higher values really does require slavery. Isn’t there some other way to facilitated meaningful human life than treating other humans as chattel? This is how Peter Singer feels about animal rights. Basically, you don’t need to eat a ham sandwich in order to enjoy Shakespeare, so the fact that you can enjoy Shakespeare, whereas a pig cannot, does not entitle you to eat a ham sandwich so long as you can also enjoy Shakespeare. (Whether this is a good argument or not, the point is that Singer does not, and is under no logical obligation to, “reduce humans to bare life”, on any plausible interpretation of that phrase.)

Let me add two more responses that are very characteristic of Singer’s position (and also, plausibly, to the abolitionist/anti-abolitionist argument, but we can leave it aside from here on out). First, it is a mistake to object to his position on the grounds that it is blind to the higher sorts of values that truly make life meaningful. Therefore, he – Singer – must be an ‘anti-humanistic’ sort of person. Consider a passage from Zizek’s Looking Awry, in which he argues against democracy much as he argues against Peter Singer in this “Plea” essay.

““Democracy” is fundamentally “antihumanistic,” it is not “made to the measure of (concrete, actual men),” but to the measure of a formal, heartless abstraction. There is in the very notion of democracy no place for the fullness of concrete human content, for the genuineness of community links; democracy is a formal link of abstract individuals. All attempts to fill out democracy with “concrete contents” succumb sooner or later to the totalitarian temptation, however sincere their motives may be.” (p. 163)

You can see the problem if you substitute, say, ‘don’t murder’ for ‘democracy’.

““Don’t murder” is fundamentally “antihumanistic,” it is not “made to the measure of (concrete, actual men),” but to the measure of a formal, heartless abstraction. There is in the very notion of a stricture against murder no place for the fullness of concrete human content, for the genuineness of community links; a ban against murder is a formal link of abstract individuals. All attempts to fill out ‘don’t murder’ with “concrete contents” succumb sooner or later to the totalitarian temptation, however sincere their motives may be.” (p. 163)

This is confused because it accuses a narrow, negative prohibition – a stop sign – of failing to be a broad, positive proposal – a road map to the good life.

‘Don’t eat animals’, or ‘animals have rights’ is much like ‘don’t murder’. It is not an attempt to provide a positive road map to a full human life. But that does not mean it is wrong.

But doesn’t Singer, in fact, try to fill in ‘don’t eat animals’ so that it becomes a sufficient vision of the ethical life, in itself? I don’t really think he does. What he does, instead, is criticize typical formulations of ‘humanism’ as misleading.

Here’s the only example of this argument I can find on the web, although Singer makes it in various forms in various places:

http://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/200410–.htm

I won’t try to summarize it. It’s fairly short. Basically he thinks that talking in terms of “markers of the distinctively human” is more likely to lead us wrong than right, because it is more likely that people will fail to treat animals well enough than it is that they will forget that Shakespeare is pretty good stuff. Not that there’s anything wrong with Shakespeare.

At any rate, it’s quite wrong to think that Singer is in the business of reducing humans to ‘bare life’. He is concerned to establish a floor of rights and respect. He does not, and is under no obligation to, make that floor do double-duty as a ceiling on possible human achievements.

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Henri Vieuxtemps 11.27.10 at 10:29 am

He is concerned to establish a floor of rights and respect.

So, does he merely object to cruelty to animals (which seems rather uncontroversial), or does he, indeed, go so far as “better to kill an old suffering woman than healthy animals”? It’s not clear from the link.

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John Holbo 11.27.10 at 10:40 am

“So, does he merely object to cruelty to animals (which seems rather uncontroversial)”

Well, it’s not uncontroversial to say that eating animals that are raised in factory conditions is ethically unacceptable. Singer thinks accepting something that people really do tend to accept really ought to drive them to conclusions that, in fact, they resist.

Singer is a utilitarian, which means he is, in principle, subject to all the usual trolley-type trouble-making. That is, add up enough chickens and eventually they add up to an old suffering woman, such that it would be better to send the trolley down her line if doing so would mean that the chickens get to be free-range instead of factory farmed. (I dunno.) But the point definitely isn’t to settle on an exchange rate of happy chickens for suffering old women or anything like that. That sort of thing is always silly, if not silly on stilts. The point isn’t to find the exactly right ethico-mathematical answer to all questions. The point is to convince people that the answer we have settled on, implicitly, is obviously wrong. So we ought to shift to some position that isn’t obviously wrong, even if we can’t solve for old women vs. factory-raised chickens to three significant moral-mathematical decimal places or anything like that.

It isn’t Singer’s style to try to answer patently unanswerable trade-off questions.

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John Holbo 11.27.10 at 10:55 am

It is true that Singer will be controversial for frankly admitting that, in some cases, we should be willing to sacrifice human lives for greater welfare for animals. He will be too smart to try to settle a proper exchange rate, but he’s too principled to deny that something of the sort will be right. He will just point out (if he is smart) that we already regard it as morally insane when someone advocates exterminating all the grizzlies because they sometimes kill humans.

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/social_conservative_bryan_fischer_its_time_to_get.php

All that Singer will add is that the reason it is insane is not just that grizzlies are charismatic megafauna, i.e. we aren’t just interested in saving them as a means to our spectatorial ends. The reason grizzlies shouldn’t be driven to extinction, to prevent any humans from ever being eaten by a grizzlies, is that grizzlies themselves are deserving of a degree of moral consideration. It gets complicated, of course. Because a lot of our intuitions about animal rights and preservation are, more plausibly, attitudes towards the ‘sacredness’ of nature. Singer really can’t be helping himself to any of that. But he would emphasize that it is hardly outside the mainstream to conclude that some degree of trade-off animal/human lives-wise seems acceptable.

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Henri Vieuxtemps 11.27.10 at 11:07 am

Fair enough, thanks. I get the impression, though, that Zizek’s objection to Singer is not based on anyone’s ability to enjoy Shakespeare, but on humans being a part of social environment and all that.

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Henri Vieuxtemps 11.27.10 at 11:12 am

…and not just to Singer, but any advocate of individual rights, animal or human.

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John Holbo 11.27.10 at 12:04 pm

“not based on anyone’s ability to enjoy Shakespeare, but on humans being a part of social environment”

I actually think the Shakespeare example is better, for Zizek’s purposes, because it’s quite uncontroversial that only humans enjoy Shakespeare. Whereas it’s not uncontroversial that only humans are social. What about dogs and cats and pigs and elephants and apes and dolphins and whales and etc? Suppose there were a human being who, because of some brain injury, was unable to interact socially? Would you regard it as ok to torture that person, just because they can’t socialize? Obviously not. Sometimes the achievement of some ‘higher’ value entitles you to special treatment. Maybe it’s ok to raise animals for slaughter as long as they don’t know it’s going to happen, for example. They just live in the now. Maybe that means they can be treated differently. Just give them a good ‘now’ until the day when there’s no more ‘now. Might be a good deal for the animal. But a lot of time these differences, although real, don’t prove it’s ok to hurt them or eat them or confine them, etc. That’s the idea.

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Henri Vieuxtemps 11.27.10 at 1:43 pm

Well, a human being who, because of some brain injury, is unable to interact socially – I think he or she is, for all intents and purposes, a non-person, a creature of no importance, what they call “a vegetable”. I do agree, though, that pet dogs often are real persons.

I imagine, for those who focus on the concept of “society” (“society” as an (sort of) organism with its own life) – the idea of paying a lot of attention to individual interests – and not just of small blocks of the society – but of some particles that don’t even belong – I imagine, it should feel totally absurd.

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John Holbo 11.27.10 at 1:56 pm

I don’t agree with the first bit. I think we can imagine someone who we thought was unable to communicate but whom we were reasonably sure could feel pain and suffer. (Maybe because we can see brain activity that suggests as much.) I don’t think we would say it was more ok to cause that person pain and suffering, just because they can’t communicate, or even because their personality has substantially disintegrated, than it is to cause any other person pain and suffering.

As to your second point: I’m not getting you. Lots of people ‘focus on the concept of society’, and regard humans as essentially social – and regard our sociality as among or perhaps our most ethically significant quality, in many ways – who are still interested in individual interests and individuals. I think most social theorists probably fall into this category. Most political philosophers. So what are you saying, exactly?

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Guido Nius 11.27.10 at 3:56 pm

If he would be genuinely ‘locked in’ (or if we could imagine that he is genuinely ‘locked in’), i.e. if there is a potential of seeing him (or her) as potentially communicating but unable to express it – or as communicating ‘in herself (or himself)’, sure: he or she is by definition not vegetative. But the problem with inflicting pain and suffering comes apart from the problem of vegetative state as it’s not a problem of the state of the receiving side but one of the transmitting side. Whenever somebody inflicts pain on something that is seen by that somebody as capable of experiencing a pain we can speak of cruelty. This does not privilege the insensitive as there are broad ranges of things that are seen as capable of experiencing pain. These ranges may vary over time, as times become, in a way, more sensitive but these ranges don’t, as far as I can see, vary with how much one person is more sensitive to another.

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JP Stormcrow 11.27.10 at 3:59 pm

to try to answer patently unanswerable trade-off questions.

Postulate that Shakespeare never lived. Calculate the effect it would have on today’s world. Give your answer in rat* orgasms per fortnight.

*Assume un-laserbotomized rats.

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geo 11.27.10 at 5:06 pm

Not that there’s anything wrong with Shakespeare

Though of course he’s not as great as Bunyan. :-)

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Substance McGravitas 11.27.10 at 5:06 pm

My brain has been lasered!

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Henri Vieuxtemps 11.27.10 at 5:35 pm

Lots of people ‘focus on the concept of society’, and regard humans as essentially social – and regard our sociality as among or perhaps our most ethically significant quality, in many ways – who are still interested in individual interests and individuals.

Interested in individual interests on the basic level, like avoiding physical pain? I doubt it. They are interested in interactions.

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bianca steele 11.27.10 at 6:33 pm

Hidari, was there really no Modernism in England? I guess I can’t think of anyone who fits that description (maybe Auden in poetry?). I assume it’s well known, however, that Modernism was a Continental movement, not an American one; and, in fact, the Americans were trying to do Modernism because they were trying to keep up with “Europe.” I also assume the reverence for Paris as the center of the 20th century art world is pretty widely shared–I would be sorry to have to lower my opinion of English judgment in any matter, but maybe not?

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john c. halasz 11.27.10 at 6:44 pm

@269:

Well. it’s obvious that Singer and Zizek work from much different conceptual sets, so commensurable translation isn’t easy. But, of course, Zizek is citing and using Singer for his own purposes and reading him “symptomatically”, so, yes, maybe Singer is distorted and caricatured, (though, from the example you provided, that’s easy to do,- besides which John Coetzee treats these sorts of issues so much more supply and subtly), but that doesn’t obviate the point at issue, nor the matter of reading/interpreting Zizek, rather than Singer, accurately, in terms of how his text “works”. (The essay ranges over a the contemporary ideological “landscape” and its pluralism of various “causes”, anti-racism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, etc., not exactly to oppose or denounce them, but to point out how readily they accommodate themselves to absorption into the status quo that they ostensibly oppose, because they supposedly are lacking in the “totalization” of a cause, with that superordinate dialectical irony, whereby there is truth in the false and falsity in the true, which manages to have both ways). And the point of criticism of Singer that Zizek was making concerned the adaptionism,- ( a standard Lacanian point originally aimed at “ego-adaption”)- ingredient in the sort of naturalism that renders humans continuous with animal nature. (which, in Marxian terms, might be called a “pre-mature” naturalization of the human). So it’s not just a matter of honoring the nobility of Singer’s intentions or the reasonableness of his argument in his own terms, but of making a point that doesn’t occur to Singer as a consideration, of which he is “unconscious”. (Which is why the rat experiment was a reductive joke with a point, which doesn’t involve any neuro-physiological evidence: you might side with Singer on the grounds of a commitment to naturalism, against Zizek’s “anti-naturalism”, but then you might also have some overlaps with Zizek: say, externalism with respect to mental/conceptual contents? That’s why there was that sneaking suspicion voiced that, after all, you really didn’t not understand Zizek. Once one realizes that Zizek holds to such an externalist view, the rat joke, in its very irrelevancy, becomes obvious). To put the point to a more “proper” account of Singer’s views, it’s not enough to say “cruelty is wrong” or “don’t be cruel!” without asking why humans desire cruelty, (as they often do). Something crucial is left out of account, whereby the denunciation of cruelty or the exhortation to expand the bounds of “humanity”, (an all too undefined and question-begging evocation), becomes just empty moralism and ambitious sentimentalism. And to abolish cruelty by renouncing or suppressing desire is just badly religious, (when part of the not-so-esoteric message of the founding prophets of religions concerned the transformation and expansion of desire). I suppose the point could be made this way: can the identification of cruelty and the experience of compassion really be abstracted from the dynamics of recognition and made into an abstractly intellectual principle of moral “calculus”?

But then you’ve also badly misconstrued the point about marking a boundary between the animal and the human, (which is not denying the animality, nor the material conditioning of humans). It has nothing to do with superior intellect, nor with “higher” goods, let alone with any appeal to aristocratic “virtue”, (even if a mandarin elitism might be all too much in evidence with Heidegger or Lacan). Humans are only distinctly “human” because they bear a symbolic language and participate in the world as mediated through a symbolic order, which entails a horizon of otherness, by which they relate to one another and the world, (by which they can become “interior” selves in the first place), such that various beings, including, however privatively, animals, can become objects of their care or concern. That is, they exist fundamentally in terms of the relational nexus of a community, as “political animals”, which is also the bearer of a knowledge, which entails relations of inclusion and exclusion. That’s not a matter of some august or privileged status, nor of superior intellect or practical mastery, nor is somehow normative, rather than a fact about how humans are, but simply a matter of relatedness to a horizon of otherness, to which only humans, not animals, are exposed and reveal. And that is the condition by which humans can be said to be “free”, to dispose over some capacity for volitional or intentional agency, however limited, which animals, mercifully, lack. Only of beings who are somehow, notionally, “free” can norms and values be predicated. Hence there is an asymmetry involve: humans can reasonably be said to have obligations toward animals, but not vice versa. But, by the very same token, animals can not be said to be bearers of rights, (which is a legal-political notion anyway), which just amounts to a category mistake. Otherwise put, recognizing and preserving the otherness of animal nature is an “ontological” rather than an ethical issue, which is what Singer mis-recognizes: he reduces humans to “bare life”, (already an ironic allusion), not because he fails to acknowledge “higher” human interests, but because he fails to acknowledge the political boundary involved and the elementary distinctions it imposes. It’s not Singer’s “anti-humanism”,- (which would be Zizek’s position, no?),- but his excess of “humanism”, his over-reach, (which ironically mirrors what is happening anyway), that flattens out the “human” by failing to acknowledge its limits, resulting in a tendency toward over-adaption. (It’s also a good example of the de-politicizing effects of overly extended liberal moralism).

But your argument by analogy to slavery does quite work anyway. In the first place, before the systematic development of machine technology, the vast mass of humanity was consigned to lives of hard labor to provide for the productive surpluses that sustained the civilization of the “educated” class., which is not something peculiar to slavery. And the scandal of human beings as property was a distinctly political one: the conflict between “free labor” and the slave power was actually historically largely a dispute over land tenure and the political economy of constitutional power, with the rights of blacks being a secondary issue to those of whites and mostly elided. Nor is the Whiggish assertion that the abolitionists were simply and self-evidently right without qualification, since they were a small minority, and many were narrowly religious moralists without much of a political clue or program, and the claims for the obvious humanity of slaves ran up against the contentions over status among whites. But it was equally that obvious, but excluded and largely unwanted humanity of black slaves that rendered the issue politically disturbing, (in a way that the slaughter of the buffalo was not, though that was also a strategy for subduing the Indians), because the prevailing compromised political order rested on that denegation. So the polemics of the southern apologists were not simply based on upholding the “necessity” an “aristocratic” way of life, (since, among other things, they had to appeal to poorer whites), but rather they argued,- (not without some “justice”),- that Yankee capitalists treated their own workers as little better than slaves, indeed, with cold calculation, as mere appendages to machines, whereas slaveholders were obliged to paternalistically take care of their slaves. It was only by defending the “organic” way-of life of the South against the “predatory” commercial anomie of the North that they could make their case “humanistically”. They were lying, of course, (or telling a bad joke, like the one Freud recounts of giving a set of mutually inconsistent excuses in reply to returning a cracked borrowed kettle), but then so were the Northern capitalists in tying their interests in commercial expansion to the cause of “free labor”, a nice little tu quoque two-step. But it was only the pressure over the (mis-)recognition of “humanity”, (presumed to be divinely ordained by all sides), and the defence of collective “identities” that gave to the dispute its irreconcilable virulence, which wouldn’t have arisen if it were merely a question about animals, (for all that agronomic manuals operatively treated slaves so). At any rate, in the event, the abolition of slavery was not the same as the full and equal inclusion of blacks into the political community, just as nowadays advocating for emendation of the unequal condition of blacks without recognizing the way that the reproduction of capitalism depends (obsoletely?) upon the reproduction of inequality amounts to little more than re-shuffling a all too limited set of “meritocratic” rights.

For the rest, I’ll leave aside your reading of that passage on democracy, except to remark that it seems to be about the ideological operation of the concept than a denunciation of the “thing” itself. He’s obviously not just repeating Plato.

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engels 11.27.10 at 6:45 pm

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engels 11.27.10 at 7:07 pm

Also I’m still looking for evidence that abb1 knows the first thing about Zizek, or Marxism for that matter. His thinly veiled defence of social Darwinism in #276 does not inspire confidence, or, indeed, any positive sentiments at all.

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rosmar 11.27.10 at 7:35 pm

“Humans are only distinctly “human” because they bear a symbolic language and participate in the world as mediated through a symbolic order…”

I’m confused about why you are so confident that this is only true of humans, given what we know about the multiple, various ways animals communicate with each other (and sometimes with us).

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Substance McGravitas 11.27.10 at 8:16 pm

Also I’m still looking for evidence that abb1 knows the first thing about Zizek

I don’t know the first thing about Zizek either. I find you, engels, funny, smart, clear and mean in about the right proportions, so your endorsement of Zizek is the only thing in the thread that makes me think I’m missing something. If you provide me with a link to some of Zizek’s writing that you think is good I promise to shut the hell up for the rest of the thread.

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LFC 11.27.10 at 9:34 pm

I am inclined to agree with rosmar @287. A number of people have made the argument about symbols being definitive of what is distinctively human, including IIRC the sociologist Dennis Wrong, in his book The Persistence of the Particular (in a chapter called “The Symbolic Animal”). I’m not completely convinced.

I also don’t quite understand (among various things I don’t quite understand) halasz’s assertion (upthread) that a rat cannot desire anything because it has doesn’t have symbols (i.e., that desire is distinctively human). Unless you are a behaviorist disinclined to use ‘mentalistic’ language and to impute anything like ‘mental’ states to any animals, including human ones — and halasz is obviously not a behaviorist — I see no compelling reason to avoid saying that a rat desires food. I’m not sure that halasz’s disquisitions, though interesting in some respects, are doing Zizek any great favors. But what do I know? I’m just one of engels’s “anonymous people with an internet connection.”

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LFC 11.27.10 at 9:38 pm

correction: “because it doesn’t have symbols” (strike “has”)

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Chris 11.27.10 at 9:44 pm

All that Singer will add is that the reason it is insane is not just that grizzlies are charismatic megafauna, i.e. we aren’t just interested in saving them as a means to our spectatorial ends. The reason grizzlies shouldn’t be driven to extinction, to prevent any humans from ever being eaten by a grizzlies, is that grizzlies themselves are deserving of a degree of moral consideration.

But we did exactly that to smallpox and I dunno about Singer, but I for one don’t regret it. So it *is* about the grizzlies being charismatic megafauna, for some value of “charismatic” and “mega”.

But the point definitely isn’t to settle on an exchange rate of happy chickens for suffering old women or anything like that. That sort of thing is always silly, if not silly on stilts. The point isn’t to find the exactly right ethico-mathematical answer to all questions. The point is to convince people that the answer we have settled on, implicitly, is obviously wrong.

ISTM that the whole exercise of trying to reduce moral thinking to mathematical precision is fundamentally wrongheaded: it irreducibly involves subjective value judgments and the answers you get out will depend on the assumptions you applied to the problem. And the currently settled-on answer is only ‘obviously wrong’ to people who have already accepted evaluative assumptions divergent from the ones that produced the accepted answer.

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engels 11.27.10 at 9:58 pm

Just to be clear, I don’t know much about Zizek either. I haven’t read any of his longer books. I’ve read quite a few of his shorter pieces in (eg.) the London Review of Books or the New Left Review, all of which are aimed at a general readership so might be worth looking up, I guess. Based on what I do know I don’t endorse his views on everything. Adam Kotsko’s website has a lot of good links, I believe. I remember liking this piece on the Obama election:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/2008/11/14/slavoj-zizek/use-your-illusions

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engels 11.27.10 at 10:01 pm

But what do I know? I’m just one of engels’s “anonymous people with an internet connection.”

Erm, so am I. I didn’t say there was anything wrong with posting comments anonymously, or that doing so casts doubt on your knowledge of anything.

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john c. halasz 11.27.10 at 11:31 pm

@287:

Symbolic language and communication are not tightly overlapping notions. Animal communication systems are relational-analog. Only humans bear a digitally encoded, syntactically organized, semantically self-stabilized natural language. There needn’t be an absolute boundary rather than a gradient between the two, since, under plausible naturalistic assumptions, natural language emerged in evolution from a prior analog system of communication, which it was built up over, (likely through structural breakdowns and re-differentiations to deal with increasing social and cognitive complexity), and natural language remains both an analog and a digital system. I am aware that ethologists and cognitive psychologists have been studying the semantic and proto-symbolic capacities of primates and the question has be raised in reverse through considering the experience of autistics, but the gap remain empirically quite steep.

But the issue is not just empirical, but conceptual. Animals constitute a metabolic causal organization that delimit themselves from their environment and intervene in environmental causal states-of-affairs on that basis, but they live in a specious present and only respond to environmental events or cycles of events. Only when there is recombinant symbolism independent from environmental events and direct behavioral interaction, can environmental events be interpreted against a background of counterfactual possibilities and a deliberate selection of one such possibility for causal intervention in the environment be effected. Which is the rudiment of intentional agency, “freedom”.

Then again, some caution about anthropomorphizing is due: one doesn’t do animals “justice” by assimilating them to the human.

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fish 11.27.10 at 11:45 pm

Chris @291: I’m fairly sure that Singer would say that one reason grizzlies are deserving of a degree of moral consideration is that they are capable of feeling pain. This isn’t a consideration for smallpox. I think JH’s comment about charismatic megafauna was intended to emphasise that (in Singer’s view, at least) grizzlies are entities that deserve moral consideration in themselves, not merely because they are meaningful in some way to humans.

As far as ethics and mathematical precision goes, I largely agree (and I’m a mathematician by trade). But, as JH was saying, Singer’s project is not about doing this at all. In fact, a lot of his writing aims to show that if one accepts even very very approximate utilitarian ideas then much of our conduct is obviously wrong – certainly no mathematical precision is required.

For instance in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” he argues that very stringent duties to charitable giving follow from accepting the statement “if it is in our power to prevent something very bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything morally significant.”

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fish 11.27.10 at 11:47 pm

oooops – tack “we ought, morally, to do it.” on the end there…

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john c. halasz 11.28.10 at 1:01 am

@ 289:

“Desire” was being used in Hegel’s sense, (which with further twists and qualifications is taken over by Sartre, Lacan, etc.). Hegel distinguishes between animal appetite or craving, in which, as he puts it, both it and its object are consumed and disappear in its satisfaction, and human desire, as a desire for recognition, in which each consciousness desires recognition by another such desiring consciousness of its own desire as desire. Which thus leads to a persisting world of both desire and its objects. He then goes on to stage the primal scene in which each such consciousness tries to force the other consciousness into recognition through a struggle unto death, which initiates the “master-slave” dialectic, by which self-consciousness only exists through its mediation with other such consciousnesses. Hence desire is always the deisre of the other. Hegel stages the matter in traditional philosophical terms, with and against Descartes, as a relation between two consciousnesses. But subsequent philosophical development results in the consideration that such self-consciousness and its attendant desire for recognition is underpinned by the condition of language, which, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, is always a relation to an other, as addressed to or from. So it’s symbolic language that opens up that haunting and persistent horizon of otherness, by and toward which human beings exist in the provoked excess of their desire over its objects. To be sure, without conscious experience and its mental contents the processing of language wouldn’t be possible. But, equally, language is not reducible to such mental intentionality, but rather sustains it. (Cf. Wittgenstein’s PI and the so-called “private language argument”).

Which is why, for Zizek, at least, a rat can’t have desire, even if it pursues objects of satisfaction, whether innate or learned.

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LFC 11.28.10 at 1:25 am

jch @297:
thank you for the reply

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John Holbo 11.28.10 at 2:28 am

I think you’ve pretty comprehensively misunderstood my points about Singer, john.

Partly the problem may be that you are operating with wrong assumptions about Singer himself, apart from the bits I discuss. You fault him for not explaining cruelty, and for peddling ‘don’t be cruel’-type injunctions, without having done much in the way of a diagnostic or therapeutic device, to make them efficacious. But Singer does not believe the main problem is an impulse to cruelty. The problem is indifference. I do not fail to give money to charity, to alleviate world hunger, because I am cruel. I do so because I am indifferent. Wrongly, so, according to Singer. I think he’s right about that. If you challenged him to explain how his argument could diagnose and treat positive cruelty, as a motive, I think he would say ‘my argumenst are pretty much all completely useless for that purpose’. And that would be quite reasonable.

“But then you’ve also badly misconstrued the point about marking a boundary between the animal and the human, (which is not denying the animality, nor the material conditioning of humans). It has nothing to do with superior intellect, nor with “higher” goods, let alone with any appeal to aristocratic “virtue””

Sorry if this was unclear. I was trying actually to improve Zizek’s point just a bit, on his behalf, before knocking it down. (On the grounds that it’s best to address the strongest version of an argument rather than a version that suffers from unnecessary weakness.) The problem with Zizek’s point is simply that all the stuff you say past the point that I quoted above is quite controversial. Someone might reasonably question whether all this is fully meaningful and whether it indeed marks the line between humans/animals Whereas the Shakespeare point is fairly clear and not controversial. Apart from that, the Shakespeare point is neither better nor worse than the stuff you have to say. Namely, we have here an alleged difference between humans/other animals. It’s not clear why it’s a morally relevant difference. Consider two sentences.

1. It’s ok to inflict burns on this creature because it doesn’t get Shakespeare.

2. It’s ok to inflict burns on this creature because it is not ‘a bearer of a symbolic language and/or participant in the world as mediated through a symbolic order, which entails a horizon of otherness, by which it relate to others and the world, (by which they can become “interior” selves in the first place), such that various beings, including, however privately, animals, can become objects of its care or concern.’

You are right that there is a big difference between 1 and 2. My point is that, for Singer, it’s not a morally relevant big difference, permissibility of inflicting burns-wise. If you think it is a morally relevant big difference, then you explain why you think it is, and I will try to argue back, on Singer’s behalf.

If you prefer me to keep the burning out, because I’ve already said that cruel motive is not the issue, then change the case to: ‘it is permissible to raise these creatures in cruel factory settings and slaughter them inhumanely, for food, because ‘they are not bearers of a symbolic order’, etc.’ Let it be that the motive for constructing the factory is profit and a desire for cheap, tasty food, not industrialized cruelty as an end in itself.

As to the argument from analogy to the abolitionism/anti-abolitionism case, I fail to see the relevance of the (obviously correct) point that the anti-abolition argument I gave was not the only one offered by Southerners. (Indeed, I succeed in seeing the irrelevance of it.) Why is my point affected by the consideration that other (bad) arguments were offered by Southerners to defend slavery? I think it is not.

“But, equally, language is not reducible to such mental intentionality, but rather sustains it. (Cf. Wittgenstein’s PI and the so-called “private language argument”).”

This isn’t really relevant but I take Wittgenstein’s point to be the opposite. He is opposed to reductionism in both directions: language to intentionality, and intentionality to language. Neither ‘sustains’ the other. There is no sense in which either is primary.

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john c. halasz 11.28.10 at 3:10 am

“This isn’t really relevant but I take Wittgenstein’s point to be the opposite. He is opposed to reductionism in both directions: language to intentionality, and intentionality to language. Neither ‘sustains’ the other. There is no sense in which either is primary.”

OMG! An actually Hegelian argument in defense of poor Wittgenstein! I’m getting ready for beddy-bye now, but Adorno would be proud!

For the rest, see ya leda, allegada!

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John Holbo 11.28.10 at 3:25 am

Well, first of all, it isn’t an argument at all. It’s a statement. Second, I don’t think it’s a Hegelian statement. I think it’s a Wittgensteinian statement. Let me turn it into a very sketchy Wittgensteinian argument. ‘A language requires a form of life.’ That’s a Wittgensteinian sort of sentiment, I think you would agree. What’s the point of saying stuff like that? To discourage the view you think is Wittgensteinian. Wittgenstein wants us to remember that, although one might be tempted to think language ‘sustains’ (underpins, explains) intentionality, one could as well say the opposite. Intentionality ‘sustains’ (underpins, explains) language. He concludes that one cannot really explain either in terms of the other. Neither is primary. Hence his hostility to explanations. This does not really seem particularly Hegelian to me. Hegel is pretty big on explanations, after all.

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rosmar 11.28.10 at 4:57 am

I still am not convinced that we know whether or not all other animals live in a “specious present.” How exactly would one know that about some other being’s consciousness? It isn’t anthropormorphizing to point out that we can, at best, guess about what other animals think and feel, and that much of our guessing is based on the ways they remind us of ourselves, or fail to. I’m not trying to assimilate non-human animals to the human, I’m just saying that, while there are obviously differences between humans and other animals, having a sense of time isn’t necessarily the boundary.

I’m also not sure how you know whether other animals have the ability to tell counter-factual stories. Do you speak whale? They, in any case, appear to have syntax, though again this is a guess based on patterns that appear similar to human language patterns. http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn8886–whale-song-reveals-sophisticated-language-skills.html Also, do you think it is possible that the only language humans recognize in other animals is that which we see as having a direct connection to some current activity in which the animal is engaged, and so we have no way of knowing if animals communicate about the present or past, or about abstract concepts like freedom or happiness or hatred?

But, as John Holbo is showing, this is irrelevant, in any case, to Singer’s point.

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Alex 11.28.10 at 11:35 am

But we did exactly that to smallpox and I dunno about Singer, but I for one don’t regret it. So it is about the grizzlies being charismatic megafauna, for some value of “charismatic” and “mega”.

The difference is that far more harm has been done to humanity by smallpox viruses than by bears. Even in the distant past, you would have been very likely to die of smallpox, but really unlucky to get killed by a bear.

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