Zizek: seems like a nob
- Thread starter el-ahrairah
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articul8
Dishonest sociopath
This for example sounds like a classic piece of bureaucrat speak...
Why was Geoff Pilling infinetly superiour to Zizek and Althusser and Adorno and all the rest? Because he was part of a revolutionary workers movement. Even Gerry Healy's grotesque SLL/WRP at least had the pretences of a revolutionary workers party. The point was not to do soul searching about the meaning of life and the meaninglessness of existence under capitalism. Nor was it even to strip bear the workings of capital. Nor was it to perform some sort of critical criticism. It was to see capitalism as an historical entity based on historical predicates and limited by it's own creation of a revolutionary proletariat. How could bourgeios academia not fail to look down upon it? Who, for example, takes Engels seriously in academia? You will never hear of it in a university.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Thanks to academic marxists. Price well worth paying.
audiotech
wav, aiff, mp3, ogg, flac
One academic on a Social Policy degree course I was on raised a criticism of Marxism for it not touching on the subject of the environment. I responded by suggesting he read Engels 1844 work: Conditions of the Working Class in England as a starter. He was notably dumbfounded at this suggestion.
This is just what you get from dull academic specialisation. Engels talks about mechanisms because he was in part concerned by natural science which is mechanistic by nature. If anything he wasn't mechanistic enough - trying to find a dialectics of nature meant he ended being flowery and vague. If you read the sections on political economy in, say, Anti-Duhring, they are anything but mechanistic. His pamphlet on Ludwig Feuerbach is a classic.
You judge philosophy by narrow egotistical standards - how it matters to you and your outlook. You judge it by its personal worth to the individual and their personal relation to capital. Hence your distaste for anything mechanistic or instrumental - it reminds your petty soul of how you are treated mechanistically or instrumentally.
Another thing always ignored about Marx (to be fair it is in part because it is very dated) - Marx wanted to combine education with industry. Every petty bourgeois academic and teacher wants education for education's sake. No academic wants their work to be held accountable to industry. Every academic loves Chomsky when he talks about the campus as a precious space for free speech. The academic's worst nightmare is to be proletarianised and they cherish their status as an intellectual and an outstanding member of the community. Hence the rejection of anything not flowery enough in Marxism - instrumentalism, mechanism, the order and ingenuity of industry and of course the great unwashed.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
Haha - see you next Mayday with your 6ft banner of Geoff next to Stalin, Mao and Ho chi minh!
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
You will be engineering the next wave of gulags comrade. Liquidate the academics!
Mad4ziz
Member
Agreed: at the end of the day, that is what Zizek does for me: offer a perspective. Whether its a useful perspective depends on one's aims, the tools at hand etc. In fact in a sense he argues that is what any subject is: simply a perspective that at moments of breakdown of the smooth running of things (whether practical matters; political or the intuitions of common sense as one imagines travelling on a light beam a la Einstein) works to suture the gap.
So the criticism many posts back that he forces things into Lacanian boxes: he does: its part of his perspective. Why does he do it; to what ends, is a different question. If I were to advise him I'd be tempted to tell him to make clear that the department for practical political action is to be found further down the corridor.
love detective
there's no love too small
or in a completely different building
petee
no gods, no malarkey
are you speaking on your own authority here?
revol68
what, fucking what?
Yeah like if he cant tell us what to do, whats the point...
How come david harvey doesnt get this shit despite the fact he offers little beyond fluffy platitudes when it comes to concrete responses to capitalism or overthrowing it?
And chomsky actually has a well drawn out critique of academia so i dont know why knotted is dragging him into it. Seems to me some people are frustrated that they have difficulty getting Zizek and the reaction is hence akin to lots of activists who find. Marx difficult, that is they whinge about what is the point in all his waffle about dialectics, Hegel and negation.
Knotted in particar has came out with some of the most crude instrumental crap ive ever read on these forums, and no Marx's idea of praxis is not the same as the shit you are proposing, it was incomplete contrast to it. Marx was trying to overcome both the scholastic idealism of germab philosophy whilst rejecting the crude mechanical instrumentalism of contemporary materialism.
How come david harvey doesnt get this shit despite the fact he offers little beyond fluffy platitudes when it comes to concrete responses to capitalism or overthrowing it?
And chomsky actually has a well drawn out critique of academia so i dont know why knotted is dragging him into it. Seems to me some people are frustrated that they have difficulty getting Zizek and the reaction is hence akin to lots of activists who find. Marx difficult, that is they whinge about what is the point in all his waffle about dialectics, Hegel and negation.
Knotted in particar has came out with some of the most crude instrumental crap ive ever read on these forums, and no Marx's idea of praxis is not the same as the shit you are proposing, it was incomplete contrast to it. Marx was trying to overcome both the scholastic idealism of germab philosophy whilst rejecting the crude mechanical instrumentalism of contemporary materialism.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Another sentence from you that I don't understand. My problem in this thread hasn't been that I don't get Zizek. It's been that I don't get you. One of the mistakes you seem to be making is a conflation of 'idealism' with 'dualism', which causes you to set idealism up in opposition to materialism. I don't think any of this is correct. Perhaps this is your point above, but what exactly does 'crude mechanical instrumentalism of contemporary materialism' actually mean? What would be an alternative to it?
If anything instrumentalism is incompatible with crude mechanical materialism. If you see things as being for a purpose then you are assuming the existence of a subject...
In what way was Marx not a mechanical materialist? Well if you look at political economy in terms of mechanisms and cause and effect then you have the law of supply and demand and you have the market and you have money and you have capital and labour etc. But you don't have the social relations underlying these categories or the historical conditions that predicate these relations. I think a lot of the time when people attack "crude mechanical materialism" they usually have little idea of what these terms mean and little idea of what sort of materialism they prefer instead. There's too much idealistic fluff maskerading as sophisticated materialism.
In what way was Marx not a mechanical materialist? Well if you look at political economy in terms of mechanisms and cause and effect then you have the law of supply and demand and you have the market and you have money and you have capital and labour etc. But you don't have the social relations underlying these categories or the historical conditions that predicate these relations. I think a lot of the time when people attack "crude mechanical materialism" they usually have little idea of what these terms mean and little idea of what sort of materialism they prefer instead. There's too much idealistic fluff maskerading as sophisticated materialism.
revol68
what, fucking what?
That post doesnt make sense. Marx was critiquing political economy for reifying social relations into static categories like the market etc He went beyond standard materialism however by showing how this inversion is materially produced, that is what he took from Hegel, that went beyond Feuerbach.
I don't think that's quite right. He didn't merely critique political economy - Das Kapital isn't merely a critique, it's a worked system of political economy in its own right. And it's even more than that - it's a presentation of the problem which doesn't reify the social relations. Marx wasn't merely critiquing but showing a way out. The proof is in the pudding not in various jargonistic declarations. So what Marx took from Hegel was method not any theory or contention or something "beyond Feuerbach" - he took a method which he applied. There is no particular lesson or form of materialism involved because Marx creatively applied the method.
This is the task of Marxist philosophy - to create an environment for such clarity of thought from the perspective of a working class movement. This last is extremely important to understand - I think you and a8 are judging Marxist philosophy on the wrong terms. Your values are screwed up.
As to mechanical materialism - this something that's been dead since the 18th century. It relates to predominantly French ideas about materialism, empiricism and post-Cartesian rationalism and takes an encylopaedic form. Engels makes clear that the rejection of this older form of materialism stems from scientific results such as the discovery of cells and the science of embryology, the theory of energy in physics and evolutionary biology which have the result of unifying various fields under certain paradigms so that various topics are not isolated dynamical systems but all encompassing theories where things that seem radically different can change and transform into one another.
There's this tedious thing when ever Western (academic) Marxism gets criticised we hear yelping of mechanism and instrumentalism and barely any coherence on what these terms mean. To be honest I don't think there is anything particularly sophisticated about the ideas of Zizek or Adorno, there is just a great deal of snobbery towards (if you like) instrumentalising philosophy for the purposes of class struggle.
revol68
what, fucking what?
The fact you think Adorno and Zizek are equivalent is only highlighting your ignorance. Honestly youve spent most of this thread making empty claims regarding Zizek's writings, time you might have better spent reading up on him.
And Marx was not writing an alternative political economy, he was writing a critique and one in which the only way out of it was its negation.
I cant even be arsed to post more cos im unemployed and drinking all day in wetherspoons.
And Marx was not writing an alternative political economy, he was writing a critique and one in which the only way out of it was its negation.
I cant even be arsed to post more cos im unemployed and drinking all day in wetherspoons.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
the dole must be significantly more than it used to be if you can afford a few jars each day in a wetherspoons.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
monday is cheap shit day
revol68
what, fucking what?
where did you read each day?
and yes it was like 1.70 a pint, I also had a mexican burger but don't let the daily mail know.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
"i'm unemployed and drinking all day in wetherspoons"
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
i thought every day is cheap shit day on wetherspoons
sunnysidedown
caput mortuum
John Gray on Zizek: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jul/12/violent-visions-slavoj-zizek/
Zizek answers: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1046
Zizek answers: http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1046
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
What? Where is the positive alternative vision of political economy sponsored by Marx? At most certain qualities can be inferred from the critique of bourgeois political economy. But the idea he has a fully articulated alternative ready to go - madness.
Once you instrumentalise philosophy it's only a baby step from instrumentalising the working class itself in the name of some pre-conceived ideal of 'socialism', and then from instrumentalising the class in the name of the party, and instrumentalising the party in the name of the leader. - you might as well argue for the total instrumentalisation of art. What good is any amount of formal innovation? Just depict a nasty boss, a heroic worker and a tractor comrade!! Stalinism all along the line....
love detective
there's no love too small
a worked system of political economy is not the same thing as an alternative system to a particular mode of production articul8
the former is an analysis/understanding of the later, not a replacement of it
the former is an analysis/understanding of the later, not a replacement of it
I think we're talking at cross purposes.
articul8 said:
That's a really bizarre contention.
articul8 said:
The most striking thing about the above is that you think socialist realism is the worst thing about Stalinism and not the bureaucratic disenfranchisement of the working class, forced collectivisation and the gulags. I think when it comes to political matters - and marxist philosophy is political or it is nothing - then any form of self-indulgence should be frowned on. If you think that's Stalinism then you are quite confused about Stalinism. Perhaps you think Stalinism was the result of bad philosophy? Some sort of instrumentalising original sin? This illustrates the problem with abandoning historical materialism for bourgeois philosophy - you end up very confused.
articul8
Dishonest sociopath
Stalinism was most certainly, amongst other things. the result of bad philosophy.
I think socialist realism is the logical conclusion of an instrumentalisation of thought, as is the rise of bureaucracy, forced collectivisation and the gulags. Ultimately, you are trying to pre-empt the ends to which the class struggle is waged and to deny everyone (including the working class as a whole) their participation in the full rational determination of ends.
Your thinking is that of the worst kind of bureaucrat.
Never was a more small minded, petit bourgeois puritanical load of codswallop ever spoken.
I think socialist realism is the logical conclusion of an instrumentalisation of thought, as is the rise of bureaucracy, forced collectivisation and the gulags. Ultimately, you are trying to pre-empt the ends to which the class struggle is waged and to deny everyone (including the working class as a whole) their participation in the full rational determination of ends.
Your thinking is that of the worst kind of bureaucrat.
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