Zizek’s positivist epistemology

[Knotted]

A comment on Zizek’s comments on Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism.
(see http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm)

In 1908 Lenin was fighting a group within the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democrats who were on the brink of splitting with the party to form an underground group. It is interesting that the split on a matter of strategy ran deep. Philosophical differences accompanied political differences. Leading members of the Bolshevik faction such as Bogdanov were highly influenced by the critical philosophy of positivist philosopher and physicist Ernst Mach. It is a curious fact that the eventual split had tendencies towards both hard nosed scientific rigour and mysticism – they including in their ranks a number of thinkers who wished make Marxism into a secular religion (Gorky and Lunarcharsky).

Both Lenin and Plekhanov took up their philosophical cudgels against the Bogdanov and co. and also their philosophical mentors, Mach and Avenarius.

Lenin follows Engels in elaborating a scientific realist epistemology as central to a materialist outlook in contrast to the positivist world where the world consists of phenomenon, of qualities and where knowledge derives from sensation and where theories are useful devices for prediction. Engels is much sneered at by fashionable philosophers, but really he was an excellent commentator on science, his views expressed in Anti-Duhring are robust and sensible.

Engels ridiculed Duhring’s attempt to find some sort of profound eternal truths. What really counts as an eternal truth would be a boring, uncontroversial fact such as, “Napoleon died on May 5, 1821”. Such a fact is true today and will be true tomorrow. Engels also goes on to explain how scientific theories are provisional and can be updated. He gives the example of Boyle’s law and how Regnault found that it didn’t hold in certain cases. What did Regnault do? He didn’t say that the law was absolutely false or that it was true but mutable, he simply updated the theory and gave the law qualifications. Boyle’s observations were not thrown out of the window.

Bogdanov liked this bit about the provisional nature of scientific theories (as everyone familiar with scientific matters should be). Following Mach declared that all truth is relative. He thought Engels was being inconsistent when he affirmed what Duhring pretentiously called “eternal truths”. Bogdanov gave Engels a relativist reading.

Lenin doesn’t do much except reaffirm Engels. He puts a gloss on how there is no absolute (metaphysical) difference between relative truth and absolute truth. But at really all he is saying there is that some things we can state with confidence and other things we need to be more careful, more provisional about and that the latter can become the former when the evidence is overwhelming. (See for example the fact of evolution in biology).

Lenin adds an odd wrinkle though. What we have so far is a perfectly common-sensical defence of the idea that there is a real world out there and that it is possible to know about it even if our knowledge is inevitably incomplete. Lenin goes on to say that the world is copied in our consciousness. That’s unnecessary and wrong in my opinion. The truth of a theory is not a matter of how useful it is as the Machians would have us believe, but the truth of a theory is not independent of how the theory is supposed to be used.

What does Zizek do? He seizes on this mistake but doesn’t correct it, he simply reaffirms the Machian “phenomenalism or pragmatic instrumentalism”. Most irritatingly he does so in solidarity with Lenin against the Machians and furthermore does not point out where Lenin went wrong, but merely compares him unfavourably to Popper. A false comparison if we notice that Lenin was following Engels and that Engels actually gives a positive example, in the case of Regnault, of a scientist shielding a theory from falsification.

Zizek stands in relation to Lenin in a similar relation to that which Bogdanov stood in relation to Engels. It is ironic that Zizek’s essay is entitled “Repeating Lenin” when he actually simply repeats Bogdanov.

What I find most interesting is the manner in which Marxist philosophy is effective. It’s extremely good at drawing out political/philosophical tendencies, it’s extremely effective at characterising a trajectory. Ideas combine with their opposites. The hard nosed empirical view of the world, which describes the world as it is, falls in to the trap of seeing the world as it is as how it should be. Alternatively this view will see that the world is wrong and needs to be changed. The philosopher of critique becomes the philosopher of the will, of the elite group changing the facts on the ground, the revolutionary militant who provokes the masses into action. The philosopher of phenomenon is not troubled by the unexpected, by the puzzling, there is nothing more to be said than what can be described systematised. Untouched by the real underlying mechanism which drive phenomenon the philosopher fills the gap with mysticism and religion. All this is covered most ably by Lenin and later Lukacs. (Here’s a quick blast of Lenin – isn’t it remarkable how Lenin shows how a positivist spin on “materialism” leads to fideism and how precisely this combination is realised by Zizek today.)

This is precisely Zizek. The 21st century positivist.

Does this sound odd? Isn’t Zizek really some sort of Hegelian? I think only superficially, but even then there is something of the positivist in Hegel. Hegel’s epistemology is more realist than that of the positivists, but the same phenomenalist complaisance runs through Hegel. Science for Hegel is systematisation. What is puzzling is left unresolved but is rather accepted and placed in its logical position with respect to the absolute idea. Hegel does not undermine the status of knowledge like a positivist but he gives the feeling that there is nothing more to be said. Zizek it should be said stands with the positivists against Hegel insofar as they differ.

If you are hungry you need to know more than the fact that you are hungry or that your hunger stands as a testimony for a critique of the system you live under. You need to understand the world with a view to changing it. The truth of your hunger is not a matter of scientific pragmatism in the face of a strange cryptic world, nor is your will to change the circumstance best served by being mere will ie. by being mere desperation.

 

[nosos]

"This is precisely Zizek. The 21st century positivist."

But he's just not though.

 

[Knotted]

Why because he doesn't realise it himself? Because he is the very opposite of positivism?

The positivist institutes a division of labour. The hard-nosed scientist and the poet. There are theories which predict and which have useful outcomes and then there is other, more frivolous talk. Zizek simply embraces being the frivolous other to the hard-nosed scientist.

Here's a small manifesto for Zizek (written by Adorno):

What is unbarbaric in philosophy rests on the tacit consciousness of that element of irresponsibility, of blessedness, which stems from the fleetingness of thought, which continually escapes, what it judges.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch02.htm

Adorno sees the positivist as wanting to close the gap between thought and reality. Adorno sees positivist precision as being ultimately self-defeating. The simple statement of fact loses its meaning.

Is it literally correct that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821? What do these words mean? Was it May 5, 1821 on the moon? Adorno is not wrong about positivism, but notice that he accepts it as the only way to conceive the world in an exact manner. He sees only dancing pithy thought as a way out. He sees virtue in putting distance between thought and reality.

But if I say that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821 then the matter of closeness or distance of my thought to reality doesn’t arise. I don’t know much about the exact circumstances of his death, the picture in my head is, to be honest, quite cartoonish. But that doesn’t matter when it comes to a simple matter of fact.

Adorno accepts the positivists division of labour between the scientist and the pithy commentator and extols the virtues of the latter. Zizek merely fulfils Adorno’s ideal. Neither escape the positivists’ assumptions – it is the very route of their philosophies.

 

[N_igma]

Marx would abhor a positive epistemic analysis of his works.

 

[revol68]

this thread is bollox, there isn't an argument to be found in it, it's just a daft claim that overlooks the fact Zizek is a dialectical materialist and that his epistemology/ontology sits very close to critical realism. He understands knowledge to be fundamentally created through active engagement with the world, that is as an active transformative process and not simply one of observation, at the same time he refuses to reduce the world to simply discourse and psychologism, instead insisting on something external.

His views on the role of philosophers and scientists is a pragmatic one, and he obviously takes pleasure in trolling smug philosophers by proclaiming/celebrating their relative uselessness.

 

[Knotted]

I'll admit that I haven't read Zizek. I'm just cutting to the chase. Here's the smoking gun:

So where are we to begin? In the present climate of the New Age obscurantism, it may appear attractive to reassert the lesson of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism: in today’s popular reading of quantum physics, as in Lenin’s times, the doxa is that science itself finally overcame materialism — matter is supposed to “disappear,” to dissolve in the immaterial waves of energy fields.4 It is also true (as Lucio Colletti emphasized), that Lenin’s distinction between the philosophical and the scientific notion of matter, according to which, since the philosophical notion of matter as reality existing independently of mind precludes any intervention of philosophy into sciences, the very notion of “dialectics in/of nature” is thoroughly undermined. However... the “however” concerns the fact that, in Materialism and Empiriocriticism, there is NO PLACE FOR DIALECTICS, FOR HEGEL. What are Lenin’s basic theses? The rejection to reduce knowledge to phenomenalist or pragmatic instrumentalism (i.e., the assertion that, in scientific knowledge, we get to know the way things exist independently of our minds — the infamous “theory of reflection”), coupled with the insistence of the precarious nature of our knowledge (which is always limited, relative, and “reflects” external reality only in the infinite process of approximation). Does this not sound familiar? Is this, in the Anglo-Saxon tradition of analytical philosophy, not the basic position of Karl Popper, the archetypal anti-Hegelian? In his short article “Lenin and Popper,"5 Colletti recalls how, in a private letter from 1970, first published in Die Zeit, Popper effectively wrote: “Lenin’s book on empiriocriticism is, in my opinion, truly excellent."6

Note that Zizek assumes that Lenin's theory of reflection is a necessary outcome of rejecting phenomenalism and pragmatic instrumentalism in science.

Zizek continues:

This hard materialist core of Empiriocriticism persists in the Philosophical Notebooks from 1915, in spite of Lenin’s rediscovery of Hegel — why? In his Notebooks, Lenin is struggling with the same problem as Adorno in his “negative dialectics”: how to combine Hegel’s legacy of the critique of every immediacy, of the subjective mediation of all given objectivity, with the minimum of materialism that Adorno calls the “predominance of the objective” (this is the reason why Lenin still clings to the “theory of reflection” according to which the human thought mirrors objective reality).7 However, both Adorno and Lenin take here the wrong path: the way to assert materialism is not by way of clinging to the minimum of objective reality OUTSIDE the thought’s subjective mediation, but by insisting on the absolute INHERENCE of the external obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself. The moment we concede on this point and externalize the obstacle, we regress to the pseudo-problematic of the thought asymptotically approaching the ever-elusive “objective reality,” never being able to grasp it in it infinite complexity.8 The problem with Lenin’s “theory of reflection” resides in its implicit idealism: its very compulsive insistence on the independent existence of the material reality outside consciousness is to be read as a symptomatic displacement, destined to conceal the key fact that the consciousness itself is implicitly posited as EXTERNAL to the reality it “reflects.” The very metaphor of the infinite approaching to the way things really are, to the objective truth, betrays this idealism: what this metaphor leaves out of consideration is the fact that the partiality (distortion) of the “subjective reflection” occurs precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in the process it reflects — only a consciousness observing the universe from without would see the whole of reality “the way it really is.”9

Notice that Zizek neglects Lenin's and Engel's insistence that there are "absolute truths" which can be known. He doesn't understand the work he is critiquing.

But aside from that, there is no reason to assume that "the subject is included in the process that it reflects". Maybe knowledge is not derived from pure observation, and maybe there is an "active" component. But why does what constitutes knowledge have to be phrased in terms of the subject at all? The short answer is Zizek's verificationism. What it means to know something is what it means to verify it. This allows him to invert the problem and phrase it as a problem of thought approaching itself - a la Fichte. I take it on trust that Napoleon died on May 5, 1821, I don't know how to verify it off the top of my head - my subjective perspective in no way affects the truth of this fact. The fact is neither distant to my consciousness nor far from my consciousness, there is no process to be included in or excluded from. It's just a fact I can say I know.

But notice that Zizek blurs the line between subject and external object. Just as sensation blurs the line for the positivist.

 

[revol68]

ofcourse Zizek blurs the line between subject and external object, that is a given within any critical philosophy.

I don'think you understand what a positivist is, a positivist would argue that there is an external world perfectly stable and knowable to the subject who is an objective observer of it, positivism makes no account between the dialectical relationship between the observer and the observed.

This is basic Sociology 101 for fucksake.

 

[Knotted]

ofcourse Zizek blurs the line between subject and external object, that is a given within any critical philosophy.

I don'think you understand what a positivist is, a positivist would argue that there is an external world perfectly stable and knowable to the subject who is an objective observer of it, positivism makes no account between the dialectical relationship between the observer and the observed.

This is basic Sociology 101 for fucksake.

You should put down your sociology 101 book then, because it's wrong. Often introductions to ideas misrepresent them horribly in order to give you the gist.

 

[revol68]

You should put down your sociology 101 book then, because it's wrong. Often introductions to ideas misrepresent them horribly in order to give you the gist.

No often they miss important nuances within schools of thought but I really don't think you can try and claim positivism is a model of epistemology that seeks to blur the line between subject and the external world or which is particularly interested in the dialectic relationship between knowledge and that which is known.

The fact that Zizek doesn't embrace Lenin's "absolute truths" is clear evidence of him being less a positivist. What Zizek is, is a theorist who engages positively with the serious criticisms and issues raised by post structuralism and in doing so he extends these criticisms himself, he is if you want a post post modernist, someone who seeks to show the ideological assumptions within post structuralism criticisms of the ideological assumptions within modernism.

I suggest you actually bother your arse reading something substantial of Zizek's before making retarded claims on a subject you don't have a notion about, try "The Ticklish Subject" for less than £13.

 

[revol68]

aren't you embarrassed that the basis of your claim is simply to reiterate someone else's reading of Zizek, one which makes alot of assertions with nothing in the way of quotes or even a logical extension of an argument? We aren't given anything that allows us to judge the value of the critics reading of Zizek as a positivist, which is bad enough for the author who atleast has read Zizek but becomes a joke when these criticisms are then repeated by a poster who freely admits having no engagement with Zizek's theory beyond soundbites.

 

[Knotted]

No often they miss important nuances within schools of thought but I really don't think you can try and claim positivism is a model of epistemology that seeks to blur the line between subject and the external world or which is particularly interested in the dialectic relationship between knowledge and that which is known.

Here's a bit of Mach:

Colours, sounds, temperatures, pressures, spaces, times, and so forth, are connected with one another in manifold ways; and with them are associated dispositions of mind, feelings, and volitions. Out of this fabric, that which is relatively more fixed and permanent stands prominently forth, engraves itself on the memory, and expresses itself in language. Relatively greater permanency is exhibited, first, by certain complexes of colours, sounds, pressures, and so forth, functionally connected in time and space, which therefore receive special names, and are called bodies. Absolutely permanent such complexes are not...

...After a first survey has been obtained, by the formation of the substance-concepts " body " and " ego " (matter and soul), the will is impelled to a more exact examination of the changes that take place in these relatively permanent existences. The element of change in bodies and the ego, is in fact, exactly what moves the will I to this examination. Here the component parts of the complex are first exhibited as its properties. A fruit is sweet; but it can also be bitter. Also, other fruits may be sweet. The red colour we are seeking is found in many bodies. The neighbourhood of some bodies is pleasant; that of others, unpleasant. Thus, gradually, different complexes are found to be made up of common elements. The visible, the audible, the tangible, are separated from bodies. The visible is analysed into colours and into form. In the manifoldness of the colours, again, though here fewer in number, other component parts are discerned - such as the primary colours, and so forth. The complexes are disintegrated into elements, that is to say, into their ultimate component parts, which hitherto we have been unable to subdivide any further. The nature of these elements need not be discussed at present; it is possible that future investigations may throw light on it. We need not here be disturbed by the fact that it is easier for the scientist to study relations of relations of these elements than the direct relations between them...

...Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth - nothing apart from their so-called attributes. That protean pseudo-philosophical problem of the single thing with its many attributes, arises wholly from a misinterpretation of the fact, that summary comprehension and precise analysis, although both are provisionally justifiable and for many purposes profitable, cannot be carried on simultaneously. A body is one and unchangeable only so long as it is unnecessary to consider its details. Thus both the earth and a billiard-ball are spheres, if we are willing to neglect all deviations from the spherical form, and if greater precision is not necessary. But when we are obliged to carry on investigations in orography or microscopy, both bodies cease to be spheres.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/mach.htm

Mach wouldn't use the phrase "dialectic relationship between knowledge and that which is known" to describe the above, but it's not a bad description.

The model of epistemology does blur the lines between subject and external world, hence, "Thing, body, matter, are nothing apart from the combinations of the elements, - the colours, sounds, and so forth..." ie. the object is nothing more than a combination of our subjective sensations of the object.

Also Mach stresses the non-permanent every changing character of the world and indeed the self.

Perhaps Mach was a dialectical materialist...

The fact that Zizek doesn't embrace Lenin's "absolute truths" is clear evidence of him being less a positivist. What Zizek is, is a theorist who engages positively with the serious criticisms and issues raised by post structuralism and in doing so he extends these criticisms himself, he is if you want a post post modernist, someone who seeks to show the ideological assumptions within post structuralism criticisms of the ideological assumptions within modernism.

This is not helping your case!

I suggest you actually bother your arse reading something substantial of Zizek's before making retarded claims on a subject you don't have a notion about, try "The Ticklish Subject" for less than £13.

I'm not that interested in Zizek, I'm more interested in showing how positivist assumptions remain embedded in modern philosophy long after positivism has been rejected. It's good to trace the degeneration of bourgeois philosophy.

 

[Knotted]

aren't you embarrassed that the basis of your claim is simply to reiterate someone else's reading of Zizek, one which makes alot of assertions with nothing in the way of quotes or even a logical extension of an argument? We aren't given anything that allows us to judge the value of the critics reading of Zizek as a positivist, which is bad enough for the author who atleast has read Zizek but becomes a joke when these criticisms are then repeated by a poster who freely admits having no engagement with Zizek's theory beyond soundbites.

Huh? I've read nothing about Zizek, except some stuff on urban. I've watched some videos and hunted out bits which cut to the chase of what I'm interested in. This is Zizek as I see him, I've no idea if anyone else has this view.

 

[articul8]

Knotted is getting Zizek so wrong it's hard to know where to start...his whole thesis is that Lenin failed to break with positivism *enough*! (which is why Popper can praise a critique of [logical] positivism!!)

 

[Knotted]

Knotted is getting Zizek so wrong it's hard to know where to start...his whole thesis is that Lenin failed to break with positivism *enough*! (which is why Popper can praise a critique of [logical] positivism!!)

You'd think he'd state it explicitly if this were the case. As a matter of fact Zizek sees Lenin as making a similar mistake to Adorno in putting a distance between subject and object contra the positivists. I think Zizek is wrong about this supposed similarity between Lenin and Adorno, but that's what Zizek claims.

By the way Popper isn't a positivist. Zizek is going on Colletti, but Colletti praises Lenin and sees a connection with Popper because of the cognitive status they give science. That is there is real world out there which you can know about. Popper and Lenin both oppose instrumentalism in science - ie. facts are more than useful ways to make predictions.

 

[articul8]

Popper disclaimed the term positivism but his philosophy is shot through with it. Anyway I'd suggest you read up on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism_dispute

Zizek claims that even Adorno - critic of the epistemology of "reflection" that Lenin falls back into - still doesn't quite take what Zizek considers to be the materialist core to Hegelian "idealism", whereas the avowed "materialism" shared by Adorno and Lenin actually depends upon the notion of a subject which stands irreducibly apart from the object-world. Classic dialectical reversal.

Non of which suggests Zizek is a positivist. Quite the contrary!!!

 

[Knotted]

Popper disclaimed the term positivism but his philosophy is shot through with it. Anyway I'd suggest you read up on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positivism_dispute

Oh but I have read up on it. Adorno's critique of Popper is quite muted if I recall correctly. He critices Popper for trying to create a unified language of science like the positivists. But this is precisely what Lenin rejects in Bogdanov - tektology (Lenin calls it empty phrases - perhaps it's worth comparing Bogdanov's scientism with Zizek's Lacanianism). Zizek's point about Lenin and Popper is a cheap shot as I demonstrated in the OP, but they do nevertheless share a common anti-instrumentalist position, an instrumentalism that Zizek adopts in his take on quantum mechanics.

 

[Knotted]

Here's Lenin attacking the importation of ideas of other discplines into social science:

Bogdanov is not engaged in a Marxist enquiry at all; all he is doing is to reclothe results already obtained by the Marxist enquiry in a biological and energeticist terminology. The whole attempt is worthless from beginning to end, for the concepts “selection,” “assimilation and dissimilation” of energy, the energetic balance, and so forth, are, when applied to the sphere of the social sciences, but empty phrases. In fact, an enquiry into social phenomena and an elucidation of the method of the social sciences cannot be undertaken with the aid of these concepts. Nothing is easier than to tack the labels of “energetics” or “biologico-sociology” on to such phenomena as crises, revolutions, the class struggle and so forth; but neither is there anything more sterile, more scholastic and lifeless than such an occupation. The important thing is not that Bogdanov tries to fit all his results and conclusions into the Marxist theory—or “nearly” all (we have seen the “correction” he made on the subject of the relation of social being to social consciousness)—but that the methods of fitting—this “social energetics”—are thoroughly false and in no way differ from the methods of Lange.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/mec/six2.htm#v14pp72h-322

The need to talk at an ultra-general level is characteristic of positivism as is the sheer superficiality of the results. The concrete conditions are left unexamined. Lenin could just as easily be talking about critical theory's empty psycho-analytic phrases. What's sauce for the energeticist goose is sauce for the Lacanian gander.

 

[Knotted]

Zizek claims that even Adorno - critic of the epistemology of "reflection" that Lenin falls back into - still doesn't quite take what Zizek considers to be the materialist core to Hegelian "idealism", whereas the avowed "materialism" shared by Adorno and Lenin actually depends upon the notion of a subject which stands irreducibly apart from the object-world. Classic dialectical reversal.

Zizek's position is that consciousness is implicitly seperated from the object-world in Lenin and Adorno. I think rather the point is that you don't need to consider that the subject is a part of the material world in order to resolve most questions about the world (excluding obviously questions about consciousness and the brain etc.) Maybe Zizek is right and as he would put it there is a blind spot we cannot grasp that derives from the fact that we are part of the world (that conclusion is by no means obvious), but Zizek's subjectivism and psychologism means he expresses this epistemic gap as an ontological gap ie. the world is incomplete. By the way this is straight out of Heisenberg's interpretation of quantum mechanics - the electron isn't real until it is observed and when it is we are uncertain about it's position with respect to it's velocity and vice verse because the subject is actively intervening in the process. Heisenberg was a positivist you know...

 

[articul8]

Adorno's critique of Popper is quite muted if I recall correctly..

You don't - Horkheimer and Adorno launch a thorough-going critique of the normative assumptions that underpin his very notion of objectivity.

As for Heisenberg, indeed but the truth which emerges from within the positivist framework only emerges in such cases when it undermines the foundations of its own assumptions - like Freud...!!!!

 

[Knotted]

You don't - Horkheimer and Adorno launch a thorough-going critique of the normative assumptions that underpin his very notion of objectivity.

That sort of reinforces my view that Adorno and Horkheimer were positivists at route.

As for Heisenberg, indeed but the truth which emerges from within the positivist framework only emerges in such cases when it undermines the foundations of its own assumptions - like Freud...!!!!

Maybe, but this only makes it all the more strange that Zizek would assume Heisenberg's positivist framework. It's interesting that positivism is revived from the dead in the name of anti-positivism.

 

[articul8]

That sort of reinforces my view that Adorno and Horkheimer were positivists at route.

you are making a right Charlie out of yourself here

 

[Knotted]

you are making a right Charlie out of yourself here

I could be wrong on that one, but since I pre-empted this Lenin=Popperian=positivist reply in the OP (you're nothing if not predictable), I hardly see why it matters if Adorno and Horkheimer were close to Popper or not. My provisional position is I think the difference is one of style not substance, but it's surely not relevant.

 

[Knotted]

I think there is a deep confusion being expressed here. The positivists seperated fact from value and value from fact. This doesn't mean they weren't prone to relativism in epistemology. The very way in which they reduced scientific investigation into a value-free exercise meant they exagerated the role of the senses and sensation and of private subjective experience.

The reason the critical theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer are positivists at route is that they simply accepted this norm in the realm of science and shifted to a mess of stacking up subjective opinion in order to capture reality.

Zizek simply roles critical theory back to it's positivist routes. Reduces the real to phenomenon, reinserts the self as a barrier to knowledge and sees the acquistion of knowledge as a result of the shift from one perspective to another. It's like a crap version of Bogdanov (at least Bogdanov was a committed revolutionary and intelligent scientific thinker).

 

[revol68]

Knotted you are all over the shop on this and from the start haven't made an argument, simply stated that blah blah and blah are positivists, which is particularly funny when you throw Adorno and co in.

I think the heart of the problem is that you are still working within the second international's notion of philosophy and science which sought a kind of unified theory and model of knowledge and so was hung up in trying to unify social theory with developments in the harder natural sciences, and on the other hand led to Popper thinking he had 'refuted' Marxist theory through his claims about refutation.

Thankfully such grandstanding about "the one true" scientific method has been given up and people recognise that different approaches are appropriate to different disciplines, modern Marxists have given up trying to put 'scientific marxism' on the same kind of footing as mapping the movement of stars.

If you read Zizek you would understand that his distinction between scientists and philosophers is pragmatic and contingent, it isn't an attempt to build some overarching metaphysical epistemological model

 

[revol68]

In short Zizek argues that there is an external world, it is only accessible through subjective perspective within it, therefore there is an inherent blind spot between the subject and and object, a gap or a distance, an incompleteness that is inherent to our experience of the world, and it is this very incompleteness that makes knowledge possible.

Zizek however refuses to therefore flatten all forms of knowledge into one equally faliable and socially contingent form, instead accepting that certain forms of knowledge are far more stable and "true" than others, hence his views on the differing roles of philosophers and scientists in everyday practical life and why stuff like Hume's radical scepticism is useless as a means of navigating the world, which as any decent Marxist knows is the foundation of all knowledge and idealist crap like Hume's is the product of a division of labour within society that allows "thought" the opportunity to cleanse itself of it's base roots and imagine it stands upon itself.

 

[Knotted]

I think the heart of the problem is that you are still working within the second international's notion of philosophy and science which sought a kind of unified theory and model of knowledge and so was hung up in trying to unify social theory with developments in the harder natural sciences, and on the other hand led to Popper thinking he had 'refuted' Marxist theory through his claims about refutation.

I may be very wrong about all this but the above is certainly not the reason. I thought I had already praised Lenin precisely for rejecting a unified social theory and hard science in posts 16 and 17.

Thankfully such grandstanding about "the one true" scientific method has been given up and people recognise that different approaches are appropriate to different disciplines, modern Marxists have given up trying to put 'scientific marxism' on the same kind of footing as mapping the movement of stars.

I don't think Marxists have ever tried to do this. Engels somewhere insists that the phrase "scientific socialism" should not be taken out of context in its contrast with "utopian socialism".

If you read Zizek you would understand that his distinction between scientists and philosophers is pragmatic and contingent, it isn't an attempt to build some overarching metaphysical epistemological model

Fair enough. It's his take on physical science that strikes me as positivist rather than his take on social science. I do think there is something overarching - he makes very general points about subjects and objects and knowledge and truth.

In all honesty though, what do you make of his theological stuff? Only an atheist can believe and all that? Have you ever read anything by the god builders in the Vpyerod group? The similarities are striking.

Bogdanov:

The attitude of the proletariat to all the culture of the past – of the bourgeois world and of the feudal world – passes through the same stages. In the beginning the worker takes it to be merely culture, culture in general; he does not imagine that culture in its essence can be anything other than that; he is all on a level with it. There may be blunderings in its science and philosophy, there may be false motives in its art, injustices in its morals and laws; but all this is not connected with the essence of it; these are its faults, deviations, imperfections, which further progress would improve.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/bogdanov/1924/religion-art.htm

Zizek:

Last but not least, the demonstrations show that Islam has a genuine liberating potential to find a “good” Islam. One doesn’t have to go back to the caliphs of the 10th century**we have it right here.

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/4559/iran_on_the_brink/

 

[revol68]

I think Zizek's theological stuff about the perverted materialism at the core of Christianity is pretty interesting and is an extension of Ernst Bloch's approach.

Regarding his comments about "good Islam" I can really say as I'd need to read the full context and I am about to rush out to the shops but I'd imagine it's simply a restatement that this "good" Islam is always latent even within "islam" as a whole, y'know the whole Marxist thing about religion being the heart of a heartless world and as such always contains something of a revolutionary impulse no matter how corrupt or misdirected.

 

[revol68]

Regarding his take on the hard scientists being positivist, I think that's more him trolling fuckwit theorists and philosophers whose heads went up their own socially constructive strong textualist arses.*

*that is if we accept the commonly used and socially contingent notion of head within a given symbolic matrix including the correct co-ordinates for the anatomy of an imagined singular body and it's rear and which is laden with a deep rooted contempt for bodily functions and organs that stand in opposition to those privileged with being the seats of cognition and the self.

 

[Knotted]

I think Zizek's theological stuff about the perverted materialism at the core of Christianity is pretty interesting and is an extension of Ernst Bloch's approach.

Oh, I agree it's interesting. But politically where does it lead?

Regarding his comments about "good Islam" I can really say as I'd need to read the full context and I am about to rush out to the shops but I'd imagine it's simply a restatement that this "good" Islam is always latent even within "islam" as a whole, y'know the whole Marxist thing about religion being the heart of a heartless world and as such always contains something of a revolutionary impulse no matter how corrupt or misdirected.

You should read the context it's an unqualified support for the unrest in Iran last year, including all sorts of tosh about Mousavi representing some sort of return to 1979.

I don't recognise this approach to religion as Marxist. It's as if we were talking about the English Civil War and I said the Civil War represented the revolutionary potential of puritanism. What's happened to historical materialism? What's happened to the bourgeosie and the land lord classes throwing off the shackles of feudalism? Why have we dropped Marxist theory and why are we discussing history in terms of ideological struggles? Isn't this a return to appearances over actuality?

 

[revol68]

I don't think Marxists have ever tried to do this. Engels somewhere insists that the phrase "scientific socialism" should not be taken out of context in its contrast with "utopian socialism".

Two words, Second International.

Also whilst Lenin does on one level reject a positivist approach his political approach regarding the working class and socialism was still one rooted in objectivism.