Zizek: seems like a nob

[Knotted]

Stalinism was most certainly, amongst other things. the result of bad philosophy.


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.

I think the above is what happens when you think ideas drive history and you see history as the product of great/terrible men.

To my thinking philosophy is something that can do actual harm to the individual. You and revol68 are prime examples. It can be something which confuses and more seriously can mask that confusion with a sense of sophistication. Your comments and revol68's comments on this thread have been clumsy and reactive. Philosophy can be like political propaganda it tends to fuse certain ideas together - where does this fusion of "instrumentalism" and "mechanical materialism" and "Stalinism" come from? At first sight this fusion is bizarre, but it's merely a bucket in which you place everything that's bad (remember I pointed out how Zizek uses the amalgam earlier in the thread).

So the question is if you are philosophising like a political propagandist - we have to ask whose political propaganda you are pushing and what cause it serves.

 

[revol68]

Lol you complain of amalgam and then speak as if me and articul8 are one and the same.

Youre a tedious simple minded fuck dressing their ignorance up as hard hitting political pragmatism. If articul8 and tendencies of western marxism have tended to bend the stick to far away from materialism towards a kind of cultural or textual idealism it can atleast be partially understood as a reaction to the kind of crude bastardisation of Marxism as championed so hilariously by you on this thread.

The irony of course being that Zizek is quite ardent in his criticism of much of what is loosely called western marxism, but he also quite rightly rejects the simplistic objectivism of the 2nd international and co. Both of which he regards as two sides of the same undialectical coin, and which whilst starting from seemingly opposing positions end up proclaiming the death of the subject.

as for your "self indulgence" comment, id suggest you read Marx on such matters he had nothing but contempt for such utilitarian bollocks.

 

[Knotted]

Lol you complain of amalgam and then speak as if me and articul8 are one and the same.

The irony of course being that Zizek is quite ardent in his criticism of much of what is loosely called western marxism, but he also quite rightly rejects the simplistic objectivism of the 2nd international and co. Both of which he regards as two sides of the same undialectical coin, and which whilst starting from seemingly opposing positions end up proclaiming the death of the subject.

You don't understand how the amalgam works.

 

[articul8]

I think the above is what happens when you think ideas drive history and you see history as the product of great/terrible men.

Anything to back up the claim i "see history as the product of great/terrible men", other than my use of the term "Stalinism", by which of course I don't mean that Stalin was a bad philosopher (I wouldn't even grant him that status!), but that a degenerate philosophy was a material determinant of the corruption of the workers state which he happened to preside over (if not him, it would have been another)?

Ideas have an active material presence in the world. People like Korsch and Lukacs got called "idealists" by jumped up bureaucrats with a hatred of philosophy too.

To my thinking philosophy is something that can do actual harm to the individual.

Mental hygiene comrades! Avoid philosophy!

You and revol68 are prime examples. It can be something which confuses and more seriously can mask that confusion with a sense of sophistication. Your comments and revol68's comments on this thread have been clumsy and reactive. Philosophy can be like political propaganda it tends to fuse certain ideas together - where does this fusion of "instrumentalism" and "mechanical materialism" and "Stalinism" come from? At first sight this fusion is bizarre, but it's merely a bucket in which you place everything that's bad (remember I pointed out how Zizek uses the amalgam earlier in the thread).

So the question is if you are philosophising like a political propagandist - we have to ask whose political propaganda you are pushing and what cause it serves.

This fusion, this amalgam is a historical actuality - from the 2nd international through to the dogmatism of the Stalinists. Why are you so keen to defend it, even after seeing its effects. First time as tragedy, second as farce?

 

[articul8]

If articul8 and tendencies of western marxism have tended to bend the stick to far away from materialism towards a kind of cultural or textual idealism it can atleast be partially understood as a reaction to the kind of crude bastardisation of Marxism as championed so hilariously by you on this thread.

evidence for me tending towards "a kind of cultural or textual idealism"? It's true I think there can be no immediate access to reality that isn't mediated conceptually. But I'd be critical of a concept of culture that swallowed everything into itself.

The irony of course being that Zizek is quite ardent in his criticism of much of what is loosely called western marxism

Why? On what grounds? Where?

 

[Knotted]

Anything to back up the claim i "see history as the product of great/terrible men", other than my use of the term "Stalinism", by which of course I don't mean that Stalin was a bad philosopher (I wouldn't even grant him that status!), but that a degenerate philosophy was a material determinant of the corruption of the workers state which he happened to preside over (if not him, it would have been another)?

A degenerate philosophy? What are you on about? The degeneration of the Soviet Union occured in the 1920's when art and philosophy were anything but degenerate.

Ideas have an active material presence in the world. People like Korsch and Lukacs got called "idealists" by jumped up bureaucrats with a hatred of philosophy too.

Lukacs at the time of History and Class Consciousness retained idealist concepts. And it was proper to jump on that. But Lukacs was never of the Western Marxist mold that I'm talking about. The section on Antimonies of Bourgeois thought is classic.

Mental hygiene comrades! Avoid philosophy!

No, just treat it like the bourgeois propaganda it is. Especially Zizek.

This fusion, this amalgam is a historical actuality - from the 2nd international through to the dogmatism of the Stalinists. Why are you so keen to defend it, even after seeing its effects. First time as tragedy, second as farce?

Why are you so keen to lump all Marxist thought into the 2nd International and Stalinism (by the way, you aren't far from Mao with your anti-mechanicalism). There is more to the Marxist tradition. I've already mentioned Pilling, but there's also Lenin and Trotsky obviously. There's Lukacs, there's Hook, there's Ilyenkov, there's Dunayvskaya, there's James. There is plenty of serious work done by serious Marxists which does not fall into the pitfalls of 2nd International style diamat (and by the way Plekhanov is well worth reading). Just because the 2nd International existed does not mean I have to tolerate anti-Marxist bourgeois philosophers such as Adorno or Zizek.

 

[Pickman's model]

Anything to back up the claim i "see history as the product of great/terrible men", other than my use of the term "Stalinism", by which of course I don't mean that Stalin was a bad philosopher (I wouldn't even grant him that status!), but that a degenerate philosophy was a material determinant of the corruption of the workers state which he happened to preside over (if not him, it would have been another)?

do you agree with nordau on degeneration? simple question, y/n

while you're about it, you could let us know what you mean by 'a degenerate philosophy'.

 

[Knotted]

Lukacs (Preface to H&CC):

THE collection and publication of these essays in book form is not intended to give them a greater importance as a whole than would be due to each individually. For the most part they are attempts, arising out of actual work for the party, to clarify the theoretical problems of the revolutionary movement in the mind ,of the author and his readers.
...

For it is our task — and this is the fundamental conviction underlying this book — to understand the essence of Marx’s method and to apply it correctly. In no sense do we aspire to ‘improve’ on it.

Can you imagine Zizek saying this?

 

[Pickman's model]

Lukacs (Preface to H&CC):


Can you imagine Zizek saying this?

no, it would take zizek 30 pages and 18 examples and no one would understand it.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

For it is our task — and this is the fundamental conviction underlying this book — to understand the essence of Marx’s method and to apply it correctly. In no sense do we aspire to ‘improve’ on it.

Dangerous. This is setting Marx up as some kind of religious text. In the end, this makes challenging the orthodoxy impossible - you saw this in the universities of the old Eastern Bloc, and still see it in the universities of Cuba. And of course, the orthodoxy is defined by those in power.

 

[Knotted]

The problem isn't in the utilising of philosophical efforts the problem is on whose behalf they are utilised - the bureaucracy and the state or for the democratic movement. If we are looking at philosophy in such an instrumental fashion, then yes it is going to be conservative. If you have an adequate tool for the task then you don't need to go hunting for a new tool. Of course the essence of academia is to publish novelties and innovations. The contrast between an activist philosopher such as Lukacs and an academic philosopher such as Adorno is stark even when the latter is borrowing from the former. The work of the philosopher is predicated on the social conditions of that philosopher.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Who decides that the tool is adequate, though? That's not merely conservative - it is necessarily authoritarian.

 

[Knotted]

The adequacy of the tool should be decided in the normal way - as a matter of judgement for the individuals involved. The point is the importance of the values involved in order to make that judgement. If you read the prefaces (1922&1967) to H&CC you will see those values come shining through.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/preface-1922.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/lukacs67.htm

 

[littlebabyjesus]

I'll give them a better read later, but a cursory glance reinforces my suspicions. I spent some time at a Cuban university many years ago, and the attitude there was exactly this - Marx is right; we proceed from there. Our work is merely that of exegesis - explaining the text and explaining how it can be applied to today's conditions. It is not permissible even to suggest that Marx might have been wrong. I would imagine universities in, say, Iran are very similar - but for Marxism, read Islam. It reminds me of Egyptian universities, in which it is forbidden to philosophy students even to suggest as a thought experiment that god does not exist.

 

[8ball]

Bit like questioning the all-knowing benificence of capitalism at Nottingham Uni, then.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Bit like questioning the all-knowing benificence of capitalism at Nottingham Uni, then.

I don't doubt that there are courses in UK unis where such questioning is frowned upon. There are also courses where it is not frowned upon, though. It is not a matter of top-down policy that the goodness of capitalism should not be questioned. There's a big difference.

 

[revol68]

Lukacs, such a party hack he disowned his own writings, what a perfect illustration of Knotted's line of argument.

Zizek has a very good critique of Lukacs as it is.

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.23...id=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=47699116221787

I don't have a jstor log in but you can get this off isohunt from a bigger compilation of philosophy texts.

 

[Knotted]

1967 preface:

If I now regard this disharmonious dualism as characteristic of my ideas at that period it is not my intention to paint it in black and white, as if the dynamics of the situation could be confined within the limits of a struggle between revolutionary good and the vestigial evil of bourgeois thought. The transition from one class to the class directly opposed to it is a much more complex business than that. Looking back at it now I see that, for all its romantic anti-capitalistic overtones, the ethical idealism I took from Hegel made a number of real contributions to the picture of the world that emerged after this crisis. Of course, they had to be dislodged from their position of supremacy (or even equality) and modified fundamentally before they could become part of a new, homogeneous outlook

There's couple of things that are worth pointing out here. Firstly there is this business of taking from Hegel. Lukacs like Marx in 1845 was moving from (post)-Hegelian philosophy into communist activism. There is value in the picture offered by Hegelian idealism, but note also that there is still a need to fundamentally modify Hegelianism. There is the difference between the philosophical worth and the technical worth. It is not about preserving Hegelian positions. CF the 1st Thesis on Feuerbach.

The other thing worth noting is that the class character of the work is hard to characterise. The author's contradictions are not necessarily resolved and were in fact heightened at this point. However it is possible to characterise Lukac's direction. This is why bourgeois philistines always try to rescue Lukacs from revolutionary Marxism - they see in him what he had to say at that point in time, they don't see where he was coming from or where he was going (note the genteel distaste for ad hominen - something Lukacs didn't spare himself from). It is a question that you are not supposed to ask of acadmeics such as Zizek. When I point out Zizek's fascination with theology in general and Chesterton in particular, it is not about discussing the theoretical value of Zizek's (other) work (which is minimal in any case) but rather about indicating the direction he is headed in. Zizek is more interested in pilfering various baubles from Marx for his own purposes than he is in providing clarity about Marx. Where Zizek explains Marx you should ask yourself for what use he is about to put these little explanations...

 

[revol68]

Was he a communist activist when he worked for the Hungarian Communist Party?

I think our understanding of communism is somewhat at odds.

 

[articul8]

do you agree with nordau on degeneration? simple question, y/n

n

while you're about it, you could let us know what you mean by 'a degenerate philosophy'.

I meant degenerate in the sense that it was a "Marxist" philosophy that had regressed back much further than Marx methodologically speaking.

 

[articul8]

Lukacs (Preface to H&CC):


Can you imagine Zizek saying this?

FFS - this is Lukacs trying to cover his back from arseholes like you saying, "but Marx was a MATERIALIST - we needn't talk about the bourgeois idealist Hegel being any kind of serious influence on our great Marx". He thought he needed to say that I'm not advocating anything other than Marx himself. Sadly, it was Lukacs willingness to bend to this kind of crude bureaucratic diktat that compromised him in the end.

It would've been extraordinary if Marx hadn't fallen victim on occasion to 19th C discourses that were dominant in his own day. The idea that we should treat Marx like holy writ is totally antithetical to the project of a critical historical materialism. Daniel Bensaid wrote very well on this in his book "A Marx for our Times".

 

[revol68]

It's just quite obvious that Knotted hasn't bothered reading Zizek to any extent, I mean his earlier claims that Zizek replaces class struggle with a disembodied ideology and notion of "oppression" proved that.

He's a joke.

 

[articul8]

1967 preface:

The other thing worth noting is that the class character of the work is hard to characterise. The author's contradictions are not necessarily resolved and were in fact heightened at this point.

Jesus, listen to yourself. No wonder he tried to cover his back from people like you.

When I point out Zizek's fascination with theology in general and Chesterton in particular, it is not about discussing the theoretical value of Zizek's (other) work (which is minimal in any case) but rather about indicating the direction he is headed in.

If I talk about Fifty Shades of Grey does it mean I'm heading in the direction of sado-masochism?

 

[revol68]

Jesus, listen to yourself. No wonder he tried to cover his back from people like you.




If I talk about Fifty Shades of Grey does it mean I'm heading in the direction of sado-masochism?

if you're reading that shite you're already there.

 

[revol68]

Is Knotted actually trolling us with his rewarmed Party rhetoric?

He sounds like a fucking Weekly Worker article.

 

[articul8]

If you have an adequate tool for the task then you don't need to go hunting for a new tool.

but you want to make philosophy 100% instrumental (you said) - so by that token you prohibit further thought on the ends of this activity. The working class is a tool, and the party/leader will set them their task(s).

 

[revol68]

fuck i really hate those tool analogies, such bourgeois shit.

 

[articul8]

Is Knotted actually trolling us with his rewarmed Party rhetoric?

Jack Conrad? Maybe...it's depressing if he's serious..

 

[articul8]

fuck i really hate those tool analogies, such bourgeois shit.

He's talking the language of the working man. Tools and shit.

 

[revol68]

nearly as depressing as your labour party membership, but atleast it helps your career.

[fuck the popular front, class war on all fronts]