No philosophy of political or social institutions can be complete without articulating the philosophy of the subject. In what follows, I hope to rectify this shortcoming.
There are many fearful and wonderful things, but none is more fearful and wonderful than man. He makes his path over the storm-swept sea and harries old Earth with his plough. He takes the wild beasts captive and turns them into his servants. He has taught himself speech and wind-swift thought, and the habits that pertain to government. Against everything that confronts him he invents some resource – against death alone he has no resource.…
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— go to most recent comments76 - Cindy
“The earliest speech of the child is ... essentially social. ... At a certain age the social speech of the child is quite sharply divided into egocentric and communicative speech ... Egocentric speech emerges when the child transfers social, collaborative forms of behaviour to the sphere of inner-personal psychic functions ... Egocentric speech, splintered off from general social speech, in time leads to inner speech, which serves both autistic and logical thinking. ... the true direction of the development of thinking is not from the individual to the socialised, but from the social to the individual.” [Thought and Language, Chapter 2]
Roger, did you see this bit? I think it is worth looking at if you wish understand my view on cultural indoctrination. I think he has something very good here and it is at odds with the typical theoretic construction.
77 - roger nowosielski
There are two parts, Cindy. I linked only to the first. And since I've been posting for quite some time now today, perhaps we can resume our session tomorrow. You name the time. I want to be in my best form, and I'm afraid my energies are running low.
OK by you?
78 - roger nowosielski
U buy the idea in #76. The Wikipidia article Mark linked to is even more succinct.
79 - Cindy
Roger,
My friend John comes every weekend. We will all be going to my niece's 21st birthday party tomorrow.
If we get home early enough and the two fellows go to bed early, I will pop on. If I can stay awake. :-)
80 - roger nowosielski
If not Saturday, then Sunday perhaps.
81 - Cindy
(Sunday eve, after dinner, would be perfect.)
82 - roger nowosielski
OK then, let's plan on it. I need you to help me flesh out my article. An hour should do it.
83 - roger nowosielski
Cindy, here's a link to a full two-hour uninterrupted video of the Assange-Žižek event.
84 - roger nowosielski
First As Tragedy, Then As Farce, pdf.
Žižek on private and public use of reason.
85 - roger nowosielski
Cindy, you've just got to read Žižek's book. His understanding of the capitalist system with all its paradoxes is beyond compare.
86 - Anarcissie
I would characterize narrative as something with story-like, sequential structure. There are other possible descriptive structures, such as a map (ordinary meaning, not mathematical meaning) which may have no particular implied sequence of reading. Of course one can take a route through a map and thereby make it into a narrative, and correspondingly transform a narrative into a map.
Animals with short memories and some ability to communicate would tend to convey maps ('There's a hawk overhead!') rather than histories, I would think. Nevertheless, the way in which a bee communicates the location of desirable flowers through 'dance' is unquestionably a narrative; it's a low-resolution model of the experience of flying the route.
Perhaps even genetic sequences are narratives.
87 - roger nowosielski
You must be a follower of E. O. Wilson, Amarcissie, and Richard Dawkins perhaps.
88 - roger nowosielski
Anarcissie, I hope you're at least skimming through Žižek's manuscript.
89 - Cindy
Roger,
I am on my way. Back in about 20 minutes.
90 - Cindy
Anybody home?
91 - roger nowosielski
Yes, been waiting for you.
92 - Cindy
Am I too late?
93 - roger nowosielski
It's OK. Have you glimpsed at Žižek's manuscript, linked to earlier?
94 - Cindy
Not much. But, it looked great.
95 - roger nowosielski
Powerful staff, Cindy. You have to read it.
96 - Cindy
Yes, I will. I am looking for a program that can read it too me while I work.
97 - roger nowosielski
Like what, for example?
98 - roger nowosielski
"Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent." Mao Zedong
p. 75
99 - Cindy
Roger,
Are you trying to make John Lennon roll over in his grave? ;-)
100 - Cindy
I'm falling asleep. Will try again another day. Couldn't get here early enough. Sorry, about that. Maybe tomorrow. I'll check back in.
101 - roger nowosielski
After 5pm your time.
102 - roger nowosielski
Well, Cindy, finally done with this difficult text.
Your turn.
103 - tro ll
...noted the parallelism with Zizek's focus on included/excluded as a fundamental and uniquely productive antagonism - you dogs're sniffing up similar skirts
...but then when I read Zizek I can't help but imitate his thick accent and nervous run-on spoken style so I'm never sure what he's writing about
104 - roger nowosielski
parallelism with what? I'm at a loss here.
I find this work disturbing. Can you think of a good Communist with anarchistic leanings? I'd love to read him or her.
105 - roger nowosielski
Get you now! Of course, the excluded are the invisible, the part of no part. Or they become highly visible in the extreme case if for political or other reasons it's convenient for us to re-present them as threatening. Then they become virtual bin Laden (vis-a-vis the community).
106 - roger nowosielski
... bin Ladens ...
107 - troll
you write: "...one’s membership in the community, or non-membership, as the case may be, appears the decisive factor: non-membership makes perfection possible while membership seems to preclude it."
Zizek writes: "..it is only...reference to the Excluded that justifies the use of the term communism." p97
108 - roger nowosielski
Even a "Utopian," anarchistic community is tainted (short of perfect) with respect to both, those whom it excludes as well as includes. Communism's aim is to leave no one excluded, which still falls short of a "perfect" political community. Only individual persons can be "perfect."
109 - roger nowosielski
Just skimmmed through R.P. Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism, a very laborious and tortured text. It reads like a 19th century manuscript. I have no patience for these guys.
Again, can you think of a good communist with anarchistic leanings? Zizek is very unhelpful here, not so much for what he says but what he fails to say. In particular, his account of the "dictatorship of the proletariat," presumably the near-final stage of a communist community/state, is lame.
110 - troll
sorry for the hesitation...I'm not clear on what a good communist would look like
111 - roger nowosielski
I suppose it remains for me to bridge the gap.
112 - roger nowosielski
Interestingly, Chomsky's dated (1970) article, "Notes on Anarchism," raises the chicken and egg question.
113 - troll
...Emmett Grogan?
114 - Anarcissie
I think TAO Walker's early comment in this thread, and my response to it, explains why most anarchist texts are dreary. Bob Black's famous rant is fun, but then they say Bob Black is bad. Or was. Fictions like Ursula LeGuin's and fantasies like bolo'bolo are fun, though.
115 - roger nowosielski
I think they're dreary because anarchism, as a philosophical-social platform (as opposed to a depiction of a lifestyle or personal philosophy) is not taken seriously; most of it's exponents are amateurs. Marxist tests by contrast, especially the one exemplified by Zizek's, are anything but dreary; they're dynamic, in fact.
There must be a way of imbuing anarchist writings with the kind of energy and a sense of emergency that is present in the former.
116 - roger nowosielski
Bob Black.
117 - Anarcissie
E. O. Wilson is the one who's on about ants, isn't he? Or is he Mr. Consilience? As for Dawkins, I find him dull. Attributing intention to molecules is a bit of a stretch, unless one is playing mystic, which I thought Dawkins was against.
I read an article by Žižek which asserted that anarchists have 'secret masters', unspecified of course, which caused me to push him back in my must-read queue just a bit. Also I knew a fellow who always ended his emails with this quote from Ž.: "The true ethical test is not only the readiness to save the victims, but also - even more, perhaps - the ruthless dedication to annihilating those who made them victims." This principle turned out to make it okay for him to deride and punch out his girlfriend.
118 - roger nowosielski
Do you have a link to the article by Žižek? I see why such a statement can be a turn-off. Still, the text I linked to has merits. His analysis of current events is uncanny. Some of the terms of his analysis are Lacanian, and therefore dense, but one can't altogether dismiss Freud and Lacan, can one? In any case, the first part, dealing with the nature and the workings of ideology, is definitely worth a read.
E. O. Wilson, ants it is. The founder of socio-biology.
119 - roger nowosielski
As to Dawkins, yes I agree. I find the whole concept of "meme" on the obscurantist side. But that's the scientism taking over philosophy in this day and age. Cognitive sciences move in the same direction (mind-brain identity thesis, reduction of mental to neural events, neurophilosophy, etc.).
Nowadays, even electrons are assumed to have consciousness.
120 - roger nowosielski
BTW, Žižek's weakness, as best as I can surmise, derives from having spent too much time under the Communist boot. It's also, at moments, is his greatest strength.
I was fortunate enough to have left Poland early enough more or less unscathed and therefore relatively free of the need to react.
121 - Anarcissie
I don't know where either of the Ž. quotes came from. The 'secret masters' thing was published on Usenet and much derided at the time; it may have been suppressed. The other thing may be fictitious, for all I know. I was not critiquing Ž., just explaining how I could so unhip as to have omitted reading etc. I do intend to watch the video (with Assange) but that is more an attraction to the dramas of Mr. Assange than anything else.
122 - Anarcissie
Marxism is wrong and anarchism is right; hence, Marxism is much more interesting. It's like 'Milton was of the Devil's party without knowing it.' (William Blake -- speaking of whom, Blake is a good example of an interesting (quasi-)anarchist, but we don't call him an anarchist.) That which is right is finished, completed, dead. That which is wrong is full of life. That's what makes science interesting: it's always wrong.
If it weren't for error, we wouldn't be here.
As for Bob Black arguing with Murray Bookchin -- Bookchin is dull, so naturally Black became dull. One must choose one's opponents wisely because one will become like them.
123 - roger nowosielski
Hence the impasse, intellectual stagnation, the end of the road - results I anticipated the least.
May I be spared in the future from Greeks and their gifts!
124 - roger nowosielski
Not to force your hand, Anarcissie, but I'm going to highlight some of the key ideas from Žižek's paper. Whether communism is all wrong and anarchism all right, I'm not ready to say. As presently articulated, both have their strengths and weaknesses (I'd venture to say) and stand to learn from one another. Žižek is one of the most dynamic philosophers around, so why not use him for a springboard?
The New Enclosure of the Commons:
-the commons of culture, the imediately socialized forms of "cognitive" capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, the postal system, and so on;
-the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself)
- the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect
In this connection, he speaks of four antagonisms:
the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called "intellectual property" ; the socioethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. There is a qualitative difference between this last feature - the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included-and the other three, which designate different aspects of what Hardt and Negri call the "commons;' the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should, where necessary, be resisted with violent means. (pp.90-1)
Again, the first three concern the matter of the species survival; only the last is ultimately concerned with justice (presumably only the communist' concern, not the anarchist's).
Also note Žižek's priorities: before we can concern ourselves with the potential problem of anarchistic communities not being able to provide for some of their needs other than through centralization, the first order of business must be to make certain that we don't blow ourselves first.
125 - Anarcissie
'... Again, the first three concern the matter of the species survival; only the last is ultimately concerned with justice (presumably only the communist' concern, not the anarchist's). ...'
If we take The Cunning Of History seriously then Exclusion is also a problem for survival. Part of the process by which the bureaucratic state feasts on its victims is by making non-citizens, non-humans, unpersons of them. Presumably once one set of unpersons was identified and consumed, the state would have to go on to the next.
We haven't quite observed this in history. The Soviet and Nazi states consumed many millions of (un)persons, whereas the present chief imperium has knocked off only a few million in the last 30 or 40 years. A slowing-down or merely a breather?