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

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.

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

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?

It’s all very Pynchonian.

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

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

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.

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/

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

Who lased my cheese?

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.

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’.

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.)

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

What dsquared said.

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

Back to the re-education camp, I guess…

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

This.

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.

“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.

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?

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.

@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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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).

Oh, lighten up.

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.)

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.

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.

@107

Ouch! (How’s that?)

#109 to #112.

@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.)

#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!

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”.

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.

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.

“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!

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.

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.

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?

geo:
You and your Anglo-Saxon racism.

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

Best. Thread. Ever.

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.

This is all so 2010. Pfaugh!

@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?

Shorter Weserei on Zizek: iterative universalism (Walzer).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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

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

clearly not a good typing evening

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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”.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

“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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Henri, Marx was not fighting against free education.

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

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.

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).

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

@ 265:

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Shakespeare

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

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.

@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.

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.

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.

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

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

@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.

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

jch @297:
thank you for the reply

“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!

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.