is it is it ACADEMIC?

There is the sense in which academic is used to mean after the fact, and pointless. Us looking at the causes of the poll tax riots f'rinstance may be talked about as academic since it has happened, has had the required effect and now society has apparently moved on from there.

This dismissive, negative sense I think is particularly bad.

anyway...

college graduate mark s likes g. marcus becuz he's not really academic at all.

college drop out jess dislikes marcus becuz he's too academic.

see, peasy.

Idea of 'social initiation ritual' is also pretty vague: d'you mean that a/h disciplines simply provide some kind of entree to a 'civilized' elite? Or that they function to socialise people into a set of positions, make us into smug, unreflexive liberals? Cause more broadly, I'd say that all institutionalised knowledge systems are sutured into discursive systems that position individuals in terms of how they see the world, and how they value different kinds of informtion. Where's the neutral position here?

or use penultimate sentence above as indicative of what lib arts/humanities thinking does, and take your potshots at will.

i am neither tho bristle wiv pride when mista carlin stated i hav cultural pretensions - woohah!

DO we need to be taught this. Not necessarily. But codifying and collating techniques and the discussion allows the equally artistic job of criticism to move forward.

As a Maths graduate myself I do not see the eventual result being in any way more useful - and certainly about fifty percent of it involved rote learning (in lieu of in depth understanding) of certain proofs. Philosophy at least engaged me in a relatively free thinking way - though I always felt I was in a minority here (easy enough to produce a discussion of the ideas other people have had on the subject on as your work - and many tutors prefered this method anyway).

i can't actually imagine what it would have meant in my case to move beyond the"reproducible" area in maffs: yes haha like andrew wiles at age 14 i decided i would solve fermat's last theorem, unlike him i got bored (aged 14.000000000000001) and erm didn't...

But what about the urgent and key issue of Dave Q in the pub?

I think mark s is OTM with point 1. But there is also the transmission of knowledge -- which certainly implies something reproducible -- along with the means to ask 'what knowledge' and 'why knowledge' etc.

Drawbacks: teaching people not to think happens across the arts and humanities as much as everywhere else in the university (possible theory re: institutionalisation as such to develop here).

I am also revising my opinion re: cult stud. very rapidly since I have fingers crossed for a job application to teach med & cult stud...

(And off the point, why is Josh in such a reviving mood today?)

I like being able to situate myself and my society in some sort of larger narrative of human history. (For me this was always very close to home since discussions about, for instance, competing theologies, were normal dinner table conversation.)

Of course, considering how much it costs to go to college, I fully understand why people would want a degree with a practical financial pay-off.

*Something I didn't get, incidentally.

Its just the question of going into these things because you like it and want to learn more abt say, history. Just beacuse it might not help the economy as much as a deep understanding of mathemeatics it does not mean its any less valid.

The fact that I don't think of him as an academic doesn't mean I don't like him.

If you can figure out what this means, you get a prize:

Where my approach involves a departure from psycho-
analysis is precisely in my refusal to identify this economy as a psychic
one (although neither is it not a psychic one), that is, to return these rela-
tionships of difference and displacement to the signifier of “the subject.”
This “return” is not only clear in Freud’s work, but also in Lacan’s posit-
ing of “the subject” as the proper scene of absence and loss.8 As
Laplanche and Pontalis argue, if Lacan defines “the subject” as “the locus
of the signifier,” then it is in “a theory of the subject that the locus of the
signifier settles.”9This constitution of the subject as “settlement,” even if
what settles is lacking in presence, means that the suspended contexts of
the signifier are delimited by the contours of the subject.

it means that the "subject" is one nodal point in the economy, neither destination nor origin?

Specifically, can you explain what it means "that the suspended contexts of the signifier are delimited by the contours of the subject"?

haha I was being more than a little facetious. yeah that's the part where I got hung up on as well - I thought I was doing pretty well up until that point.

i think it means that if you view things (signifiers) as stemming from, or centered on the individual - the person - then the potential meanings or implications of those things (signifiers) are limited.

you're translating "suspended contexts" as potential meanings, but i'm not totally sure

Sorry - I was confusing signifier and signified - it would be things that we look at as meaningful, that we look to interpret, wouldn't it?

"suspended contexts" - i think the term suspended is related to the idea of settlement/settling - like a fossil or something chemical or geological - the contexts are molded in the form of the subject

Maybe a better translation would be:

If you view "this economy" as psychoanalysis does (like Freud and Lacan), you perceive everything in the context of the individual.

cardinal rule: if they can't write, i won't read.

This constitution of the subject as “settlement,”
even if what settles is lacking in presence,
means that the suspended contexts of the signifier are delimited by the contours of the subject.

I would interpret it as meaning:
Lacan & Freud see it as a psychic economy; [the writer] sees it as an economy, yes, but psychic?
however, [the writer] doesn't want to think of it as 'this is a psychic economy' or 'this is not a psychic economy' - because that means the qn of 'is it psychic or is it not psychic', and therefore the question of "the subject", is what we start from.

'settlement' and 'contours' makes me imagine snow settling on a hill: the surface of the hill is no longer apparent but the shape of the hill is? So the shape of the snow, and how various characteristics of this particular batch of snow have manifested themselves, has been defined by the shape of the hill? perhaps?

but without knowing whether this person is talking linguistics or what it's a little hard!

"suspended contexts" is a term of art, i think from lacan and having to do with "the chain of signifiers"

frankly it's not that surprising that it's difficult to read a highly specialized academic text without knowing too much about the subject!

http://retrothing.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/orbitz_drink.jpg

Where my approach involves a departure from psychoanalysis is precisely in my refusal to identify this economy as a psychic one (although neither is it not a psychic one)

not sure which economy is meant. but if you're going to precisely refuse that something is something, doesn't it mean that you have to say it isn't that thing? if you refuse to identify something as psychic, then you are saying it is not psychic.

that is, to return these relationships of difference and displacement to the signifier of “the subject.” This “return” is not only clear in Freud’s work, but also in Lacan’s posit-
ing of “the subject” as the proper scene of absence and loss.

i don't know what this means. freud wasn't interested in linguistics iirc. lacan was a quack so – eh.

As Laplanche and Pontalis argue,

oh! laplanche and pontalis argue it!

if Lacan defines “the subject” as “the locus of the signifier,” then it is in “a theory of the subject that the locus of the signifier settles.”

seems fair enough

This constitution of the subject as “settlement,” even if what settles is lacking in presence, means that the suspended contexts of the signifier are delimited by the contours of the subject.

nope, no idea.

i think you have to have bought into lacan to get with all this. i just have no idea what "the suspended contexts of the signifier" *are*, let alone what it means for them to be delimited.

i doubt the writer could explain it clearly either.

xpost

frankly it's not that surprising that it's difficult to read a highly specialized academic text without knowing too much about the subject!

not really true. there are plenty of disciplines, at any rate, where this is untrue. the problem with lacanians is that they actually put a premium on writing unintelligibly. you have to work at the text to get at its meaning. thus you are made to confront language as a problem. blah blah blah.

there are plenty of disciplines, at any rate, where this is untrue.

then they are not trying hard enough!!

if you're going to precisely refuse that something is something, doesn't it mean that you have to say it isn't that thing? if you refuse to identify something as psychic, then you are saying it is not psychic.

i don't agree - i think this is one point the writer makes that's pretty valid! If you say "y is not x" then you've immediately defined y in terms of x. In logic or twenty-questions this isn't a problem, but it is a problem when you're talking about something (for want of a better word) dialectic.

For Lacanians, or the Lacan-influenced, when they say "Freud" they mean a very specific version of Freud that exists in Lacanianism iirc.

I think even our friend Zizek says that there's no good reason for Lacan writing as unintelligibly as he does.

This constitution of the subject as “settlement,” even if what settles is lacking in presence, means that the suspended contexts of the signifier are delimited by the contours of the subject.

the subject is a kind of knot of frozen signifiers, and that particular configuration of signifiers puts limitations on what each individual signifier can signify? Dunno.

quite the reverse. i've slightly softened on this over the years, and recognize that a lot of things will be difficult for lay readers to understand. but at some point along the road, paraphrase must be necessary. lacan is well-enough established in academe for this to have happened. and i think at various points in the past i have read summaries that "make sense" internally, whether or not lacan's thought has any empirical basis whatever.

anyway, you can't say "i precisely refuse to identify this as a psychic economy" and then say "not that it isn't". can you? if this were quantum physics i'd be keener to accept impossible ideas, but this is a tendentious and basically unproven theory of subjectivity we're talking about.

"if you're going to precisely refuse that something is something, doesn't it mean that you have to say it isn't that thing? if you refuse to identify something as psychic, then you are saying it is not psychic."

i don't agree - i think this is one point the writer makes that's pretty valid! If you say "y is not x" then you've immediately defined y in terms of x. In logic or twenty-questions this isn't a problem, but it is a problem when you're talking about something (for want of a better word) dialectic.

no, you'll have to explain that further. the dialectic still has to obey logic.

okay i'm running away for a bit but i'll come back and try to explain this - it's something i've been vaguely thinking about for a while and very very unclear but--

if you say "i think badiou is wrong about x" you're putting your argument in a world in which badiou's arguments are relevant. You might even have to use badiou's terms in order to show how they don't fit.

if you say "this is not a psychic economy" you're putting your argument in a world in which there is possibility for this economy to be a psychic one.

(i use badiou as an eg because thinking 'i can't understand this article that says badiou is irrelevant because i haven't read badiou' was my starting point)

I agree with c sharp major here; the refusal to identify it is in itself one of the points the author is trying to make (albeit for what higher purpose?)

not sure which economy is meant. but if you're going to precisely refuse that something is something, doesn't it mean that you have to say it isn't that thing? if you refuse to identify something as psychic, then you are saying it is not psychic.

you don't have to say anything is the point here; language doesn't really work on a logical level

anyway going back to the original quote it seems to me simply that the author refuses to identify the economy as psychic (because naming things is bad in post-saussurian linguistics, you see) because she doesn't want it to tint/cloud the discussion; she wants to return the discussion back to the original use of the signifier

omg I somehow forgot that some ppl write like this jesus H christ

my refusal to identify this economy as a psychic
one (although neither is it not a psychic one)

its been a long time since i was smart about this stuff but these arent mutually exclusive movements to me--its not that the author is saying "this is not X; but it also is X"; i think he/she is saying, "i am currently refusing to identify this as X, but i am also holding in reserve the right to call it X later"

by which i mean--its as much a rhetorical cya tactic as anything else

and also, yes, as c sharp points out, its not even that he/she doesnt think its a psychic economy, necessarily, its that he/she wants to bypass that discussion because it will end up doing something he/she doesnt want it to do

xxp, but if that's what they meant, they should have said "my refusal to identify X as Y (although i do not claim X is not Y)". as it's written, they mix a clear statement of their opinion, which you can't really argue with, with a statement of what they believe to be objective fact. it's just a lazy, obscure sentence imo.

haha

science

would you be weirded out if i said, "I'd rather not talk about the economy as a political issue--though it's not NOT a political issue--because talking about it as a political issue requires me to make certain assumptions I'm not comfortable with."?

SCIENCE BEGINS TO HAPPEN

i mean, again, "mixing 'clear statements of opinion' with 'objective facts'" is... a pretty common thing for writers to do

ok, but do you disagree that if you're interpretation is correct (which I'm not even sure of), that sentence could be clearer?

(and less ambiguous)

well

its not that the author is saying "this is not X; but it also is X"; i think he/she is saying, "i am currently refusing to identify this as X, but i am also holding in reserve the right to call it X later"

― max, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 2:01 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark

doesn't say "currently"; does say (like most other lacanian dbags so far as i can tell) "precisely".

i'd be willing to expend more effort on it if i thought s.thing real was at stake.

would you be weirded out if i said, "I'd rather not talk about the economy as a political issue--though it's not NOT a political issue--because talking about it as a political issue requires me to make certain assumptions I'm not comfortable with."?

― max, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 2:12 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

that might be ok, but s/he says "my difference from x-discourse lies PRECISELY in my REFUSAL to identify blah as blah (not that it isn't)". so perhaps it's a "style point" -- but that's where we came in.

it reads pretty clearly to me

"Where my approach involves a departure from traditional political science is precisely in my refusal to identify the economy as a political issue (although neither is it not a political issue),"

vs.

"Where my approach involves a departure from psycho-analysis is precisely in my refusal to identify this economy as a psychic one (although neither is it not a psychic one)"

i'm out of here.

again i think youre focusing too hard on, like i said, a rhetorical cya. he/she just wants to make sure that someone isnt going to object by saying "but the economy IS a psychic one!" and/or "but one time you yourself claimed the economy was psychic!"

haha caek?? still think the sentence is clear enough.

like mordy i have a lot more trouble with the last sentence

though i like that lovely image of a hill covered in snow!

does cya stand for something or is it like 'see ya!'? i keep getting confused. :/

cover-your-ass

maybe i'm dim, but if you're interpretation is correct, there is no reason why that sentence could not have been written in a way i would immediately have understood.

aha. i was imagining, like, rhetorical 'i'm outta here' hand gestures.

hate to say it bro but the authors probably not writing it so that you, caek, can immediately understand it

n e way if that IS a precise departure from psychoanalysis, look where s/he goes next -- to that famous non-psychoanalyst freud.

Where my approach involves a departure from psycho-
analysis is precisely in my refusal to identify this economy as a psychic
one (although neither is it not a psychic one), that is, to return these rela-
tionships of difference and displacement to the signifier of “the subject.”
This “return” is not only clear in Freud’s work, but also in Lacan’s posit-
ing of “the subject” as the proper scene of absence and loss.

her return to "the signifier of “the subject”""is not only clear in Freud’s work" but also in lacan. so is this really a departure from psychoanalysis? cis says that when lacanians talk about "freud" they mean... lacan's reading of freud. so there's that. but bear in mind when i READ "freud" i don't.

could be saying "departure from psychoanalysis as traditionally understood today"

i think im reading it differently than you? she is departing from psycho analysis by refusing "to return these relationships etc.", a movement that is clear in freud and lacan

xxp, why not? it's not like the alternative is much less concise or something? we're not talking about throwing out jargon here.

sorry what is the alternative? i should be clear, the first "politics" sample sentence i provided is NOT the same thing that she is saying, just a rough rhetorical equivalent

caek, there was this essay, called "structure, sign, and play"...

i think s/he is saying im not identifying this ting as a psychic economy but as something to do with psycholinguistics?

haha if we can't nail this ambiguity down the par rly is fucked.

what is your reading of it max?

xpost

"I am departing from XX by not calling YY 'ZZ'—not that YY is NOT 'ZZ'"—that is, not engaging in practice AA. This practice is clear in practitioners BB and CC of XX."

fwiw i am not really defending her writing style

could be saying "departure from psychoanalysis as traditionally understood today"

― dyao, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 2:25 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

ehhh "traditionally understood today" is not exactly a model of clarity.

"I am departing from XX by not calling YY 'ZZ'—not that YY is NOT 'ZZ'"—that is, not engaging in practice AA. This practice is clear in practitioners BB and CC of XX."

― max, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 2:29 PM (23 seconds ago) Bookmark

that's what she said.

lol science and all, and i may not have any training in parsing this stuff, and i may not have read my french dudes, but i'm not the only one saying the style of this quote is obscure and ambiguous. (i have no idea or opinion about the content.)

haha yeah. the ambiguity/intentional obfuscation is part-and-parcel with this particular vein of the humanities

well isn't that silly

ok i have science to do

haha yeah. the ambiguity/intentional obfuscation is part-and-parcel with this particular vein of the humanities

― dyao, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 2:32 PM (3 seconds ago) Bookmark

yes. that's why they can get tae fuck imho.

i would guess that writer is in some kind of critical theory discipline where Lacan is kinda the popular face of psychoanalysis (nb i don't know that Lacan is all that popular in practical psychoanalysis). So Lacan is the psychoanalytical go-to person, and a person that the writer can expect their readers to have read or at least to know about.

you know, sometimes i suspect they don't even notice they're being wildly obfuscatory.

history mayne - of course, this being the first sentence starting this taken out-of-context quote, it's hard to know to what kind/flavor of psychoanalysis she is referring to. but it's clear she's set up some theory of psychoanalysis as sort of a sounding board or something to react/lean against in the paragraph we are discussing

my take is that as these things go its not particularly poorly-written, obviously not intended for the layman astrophysicist, which is neither a bad thing or a good thing, just common practice, and that a better writer could probably have made it somewhat clearer to the amateur--BUT that clarity can come at the expense of carefully chosen words and phrases intended to echo other essays and concepts.

you know, sometimes i suspect they don't even notice they're being wildly obfuscatory.

― lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 2:33 PM (2 seconds ago) Bookmark

in the 1970s they'd brag about it. now i guess it's practised by young people who know no better.

(nb i don't know that Lacan is all that popular in practical psychoanalysis)

well, yersss. if they could point to a thing that explained how jac-lac was "true", that would be a big tick in the win column.

the charitable reading of the 'obfuscation' is that the writer is shooting for some kind of derridean every-word-echoes-another-essay-or-body-of-work kind of deal

shit writing like that makes me embarrassed to work in the humanities

Makes me glad I work in an academic library, where there are other things to read.

essays like the one from which this graf is taken are constantly walking on the corpses left over from past battles - the intended audience knows those battles, may have even fought in them - and so the battles can be referred to via terms of art which to you and i are utterly opaque but to others conjure sudden gut memories of the moment the ramparts had been breached

^^ yah thats what i mean by "derridean every-word-echoes-another-essay-or-body-of-work kind of deal"

The... movement of affective economies is not contained within the contours of a subject, but moves across or between
subjects, objects, signs and others, which themselves are not locatable or found within the present.

I think this, from later in the paragraph (though maybe this i've just googled is a different version from the one Mordy put up there - the first sentence is different), is the clue to the meaning of "suspended contexts".

The writer has invented a concept called the "affective economy" which is like the "psychic economy" that psychoanalytically-inflected types like to talk about (eg check the opening of 'beyond the pleasure principle'), but crucially different in that it does not centre on the subject (the subject meaning e.g. a person rather than e.g. a part of speech).

The writer imagines the signifier as a kind of free-floating miasma that contains all kinds of referents and other contexts within it (like a suspension in water - mixed in but not dissolved). When the signifier settles on a subject, the parts of the signifier that become salient are the parts that the subject's contours allow to become salient. If we thought of this as a psychic economy, if we started from thinking about the the signifier as it appears in the subject, we would miss out on bits of the signifier that are not apparent only because the current subject does not provide for them to become apparent.

im aware of the idea, but - no. you can't use that as an alibi. the main battles that count in academia are institutional, not intellectual. this rhetoric about ramparts cannot disguise the nullity at the heart of the lacanian project. lacanians are incapable of defending themselves; if you try to ask them what they mean, they go all bob dylan on you (not in a good way).

xp

what year was the work this paragraph comes from published, Mordy?

xp to self actually, maybe the writer just imagines emotion as a free-floating miasma.

i didn't realise you had a dog in this fight, history mayne! now i understand somewhat. maybe she just lost your number.

...

The writer imagines the signifier as a kind of free-floating miasma that contains all kinds of referents and other contexts within it (like a suspension in water - mixed in but not dissolved). When the signifier settles on a subject, the parts of the signifier that become salient are the parts that the subject's contours allow to become salient. If we thought of this as a psychic economy, if we started from thinking about the the signifier as it appears in the subject, we would miss out on bits of the signifier that are not apparent only because the current subject does not provide for them to become apparent.

― lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 4:06 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

what could you offer in support of this? like, as evidence?

"When the signifier settles on a subject"

what process does this refer to?

it took me this long to realize the numbers were for footnotes

evidence of what?

empirical evidence? evidence that this is what the writer is talking about?

evidence that this is "right"?

what year was the work this paragraph comes from published, Mordy?

― horseshoe, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 11:08 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

2004 according to a google search

thanks, max. lol @ my laziness.

fyi to all--horseshoe wrote that article so dont be too mean about it

haha horseshoe by that i meant that at this point history mayne has sort of disqualified himself from the conversation - there is some old deep wound having to do with lacan that has enfestered him (which makes me think of the way old shunnings similarly cloud the think-bones)

i really grew to hate this usage of "economy" while in grad school

i don't know that you would have to have an old deep wound with lacan to discount his work. i confess to never having understood it, though i didn't try very hard, to be fair.

no i agree but mayne is discounting not only lacan but all those who write about him without getting spitting mad!

evidence of what?

― lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 4:12 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

empirical evidence? evidence that this is what the writer is talking about?

― lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 4:12 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

evidence that this is "right"?

― lords of hyrule (c sharp major), Wednesday, February 3, 2010 4:13 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

yep. i mean, you're using physical metaphors for a socio-neuro-physiological process of terrifying complexity, and i'm asking, what supports it?

The writer imagines the signifier as a kind of free-floating miasma that contains all kinds of referents and other contexts within it (like a suspension in water - mixed in but not dissolved). When the signifier settles on a subject, the parts of the signifier that become salient are the parts that the subject's contours allow to become salient.

what, irl, is the miasma? and the contours? *do* referents and contexts float like a suspension in water? are these metaphors valid?

haha horseshoe by that i meant that at this point history mayne has sort of disqualified himself from the conversation - there is some old deep wound having to do with lacan that has enfestered him (which makes me think of the way old shunnings similarly cloud the think-bones)

― Tracer Hand, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 4:16 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

hahaha well yes. this proves my point really -- great argument!

"what is the evidence for any of what lacan is saying?"
"you don't believe him, therefore there is no case to answer."

i just looked up 'economic' in laplanche and pontalis to check its technical-term meaning! ooh get me.

tracer, i think a lot of people are peeved and unimpressed w/ lacanianism without it being some deep personal grudge.

i like that enrique takes it personally! i take it personally too! its important to be invested in your beliefs!

everyone who writes about lacan is furthering the misguided legitimization of his take on things, in history mayne's view, i'd imagine

ding ding ding

and i know what he means about them getting all bob dylan on you--no lacanian could ever give me a straight answer about why lacan was necessary even if you thought he was wrong about a bunch of stuff (i got into this argument with feminist lacanians a lot)

~~the mirror stage~~

thats all i remember about lacan

~~psychoanalysis~~

im madder than glenn beck during a kleenex shortage (tm ed anger).

oh you crazy empiricist.

i will say that the people i got into arguments about this stuff with were smarter than i am but i just don't trust shit that doesn't make any sense

NOOOOO

that's what they always say!

"i would like evidence"
"EMPIRICIST"
"LOOK UP EMPIRICIST"

if you don't mind my asking, are you in grad school, history mayne? in what department/field?

heeeeee

but anyway i have no idea if the metaphors are valid, i made them up as a way of working out what the writer was on about.

sorryz

never post anything unless u have evidence to back it up

i would have thought that 'miasma' was a clue i was talking about made-up things!

if you don't mind my asking, are you in grad school, history mayne? in what department/field?

― twice boiled cabbage is death, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 4:27 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

oh, im into the hard stuff. movies. where all they know is lacan. (and walter benjamin's 'the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction', natch.)

but my username gives a clue as to my main allegiance?

mayne studies

he only write about lions.

sociology of lobster and vacation homes

But really, are you a historian? I'm just trying to dial in the disciplinary context behind the general bile / scorn you display on this board for, say, Zizek and Lacan. Whose work would you admit to admiring? Whose work inspires you, personally? Who do you think people ought to be reading instead of those two? I'm just curious about your intellectual persona, and apologies for prying. And are you a grad student or faculty?

I'm in a cabbage studies department, myself.

academics who write things i can understand don't impress me

that goes for poets too

of course in france there's supposedly no difference

between academics and poets, or between comprehension and bafflement

Fwiw, c sharp's explanation comes closest to how I'm kinda understanding it. I have broader problems with the piece beyond the syntax -- for instance I think it misuses it'd own ideas on an economy of affect. It wants it to simultaneously expand beyond the individual and be located within the body. Meh, too complicated to type about on Zing. Anywe maybe I'll make a Rolling Impenetrable Academic Texts thread since this was such a hit :P

Whose work would you admit to admiring?

lawrence stone, frank kermode, raymond durgnat, christopher hill, raymond williams (well...), jean mitry, e p thompson, david bordwell (well...). there must be others, but that gives an idea. i guess: the british marxist historians, divers literary and film critics/theorists. people can read what they like according to what they're interested in. i get nothing from lacan or zizek; but they don't really bear on anything i'm doing. (they could be made to.)

But really, are you a historian?

i'm a song and dance man.

I had to look up "tae fuck."

The thing that always bugged me about Lacan, as it was applied to film, and in some ways this seems to echo what I think the writer of that paragraph was getting at - is that everything was viewed through the lens (heh) of the "phallus" and the woman's lack of one, basically whether someone does or doesn't have a penis, going back to the mythical discovery that boys' and girls' (esp mommy's) anatomy differ. My first thought - total contrarian instinct, but hey, I was 17 - was that it was centered on the boy being horrified that his mom doesn't have a penis. What about the girl? What if she was horrified that her dad or some boy had this funny-looking thing sticking out, that it wasn't about "lack" but about "deformity"?

Afaik that's not Lacan -- sounds like Freud tho

It was Freud via Lacan, and we spent at least a month with it in the intro class to the major that included film studies.

xpost late to respond-

aight mayne, makes sense if that's your profile- I guess a commitment to the brit left historical tradition would make you impatient / uninterested in psychoanalysis and its derivatives- but that's a report about your interests, and not some demonstration that psychoanalysis is therefore empty/meaningless/pointless on its own terms. Some psychoanalytic writings and arguments are better than others, within the climate of their commitments- if you don't share those commitments, then you're under no obligation to bother to pursue what would make one example better than another, but by that very distance you're also no longer in a position to discredit an entire field of inquiry. (Or- you're always in a position to do that because that's what anyone can do at any time, but your critiques amount to someone just going "Yuck" or "Boring" or, in this case, "why isn't this more like a completely different field that I like better?") At any rate, the relationship of psychoanalysis to "evidence" as such looks like a major philosophical dilemma only to those who are hoping to bridge the gap from the unconscious to variously understood materialist\realist ontologies- but if those have been defined in advance in terms of a material ontology which excludes from consideration the very absences and gaps and silences and obstructions to knowledge that constitute what psychoanalytic symptoms are about, then the demand for "evidence" is rigged from the start to discredit what is supposedly being permitted to prove itself. Attempts to bridge such gaps have been made over the years- some have flopped or been beside the point, others have persuaded those already more or less persuaded in the utility of psychoanalysis as an interpretive practice (or a clinical practice), but that isn't going to permit some common conversation to emerge between psychoanalytically inclined folks and those who just aren't persuaded.

If people want a more scientifically "realist" take on how affect circulates across and between persons, try Theresa Brennan's "The Transmission of Affect"- it's a fun mix of affect theory and social science and neuroscience about the material/empirical basis of emotional transmission.

On a different note, it will be interesting to see what the fate of some of the recent 'expanded empiricisms' will be in this respect (I have in mind Graham Harman, Bruno Latour, Steven Shaviro, Brian Massumi, Isabelle Stengers et al)- will they be regarded as empirical *enough* for people of a more positivist / archivally based stripe, or only of interest to people who are already fellow travelers?

i haven't tried to discredit psychoanalysis -- it isn't much relevant to anything i'm interested in, though, and i think its importation into other fields (certainly film) has been pretty awful. zizek's attempt to use lacanian paradigms in contemporary politics are a bad joke. that goes without saying.

im not sure about the rest: i think your argument about evidence seems to be some althusserian science-defines-its-own object thing?

it would be interesting to see you answer the questions i raised above, though, rather than say it simply isn't necessary to provide evidence. that's not an acceptable or intellectually honest answer.

the bit at the end about "positivist / archivally based stripe", as if knowledge can be gained ex nihilo, without any kind of empirical basis, slightly alarms me.

i mean: i have no interest in your intellectual background. rorty-style, though, i think if you can answer a question, you should try to do that, rather than erect barriers around the precious psychoanalytic discourse.

I just wonder how much of it is about "knowledge" or "truth" - and just - "Hey, what if we looked at this thing in light of this theory, what would that imply?" It's more about intellectual experimentation for me - in the sense of conducting experiments in analysis - like on the Wire thread when I was comparing Marlo Stanfield's drug gang to Italian Facism. It's less about - this is exactly like this, and this is what it means - but does the comparison lead to any interesting insights about the object studied.

xpost

If, by "the questions I raised above" you are including a question like "are these metaphors valid?" then there's a basic disagreement that means that what I have to say won't satisfy you: if you think that metaphors are subject to criteria of validity that you are in some unilateral or special position to accept or refute on "empirical" grounds, then you have a different understanding of metaphor than I do. (I'm closer to Donald Davidson's account of metaphor than, say, Searle's).

I didn't say it wasn't necessary to provide evidence, but I did suggest that it all depends upon who is defining what does and doesn't count as "evidence" in the first place, and that if incompatible frames of reference about what kinds of things are in the world are producing distinct classes of what could count as evidence then my evidence won't ever satisfy you, or show up for you as "evidence" at all. This doesn't mean that "evidence doesn't exist", but it does mean that evidence takes place against a backdrop of competence, practices, habits, locales. If I read Spinoza's "Ethics" and then say to Spinoza: but what is your *evidence* that there is a conatus that cannot will its own nonexistence, I haven't really knocked down Spinoza's argument or shown that he's "precious", I've just disagreed. Axiomatic assertions such as the principles that drive Spinoza's claims aren't the sort of thing that can be proved or disproved by evidence. And if Spinoza's system constitutes a kind of knowledge, then it's a knowledge which is structural and formal, and not a set of claims that can be proved or disproved by reference to empirically specific local cases, examples or experiences. Which might just mean that empiricism isn't the only game in town. You can make more or less valid inferences from the axioms, and you can disagree or agree with the axioms. But worrying about evidence won't get you anywhere as far as understanding the system Spinoza has constructed on its own terms.

If I'm a mathematician and I pass a conversation about poetry and snort "well, if they can't symbolize the claims that that Ashbery poem is making then it's just nonsense, isn't it, and not REAL KNOWLEDGE" my announcement of fidelity to my own professional discipline says nothing whatsoever about poetry and everything about my own smug self-satisfaction at having landed in the one lonely preserve of authenticity, Right Thinking, Real Knowledge, etc. Your declarations that it "goes without saying" that Zizek's politics are a "bad joke" seems to be headed in that direction.

cabbage and c sharp major OTM itt

I have to admit I find hm's constant requests for 'evidence' to be very baffling - what kind of evidence are you looking for? brain scans? mris?

others have persuaded those already more or less persuaded in the utility of psychoanalysis as an interpretive practice (or a clinical practice)

freud is still used in clinical practice? honestly had no idea, thought it was all extinct.

I didn't say it wasn't necessary to provide evidence, but I did suggest that it all depends upon who is defining what does and doesn't count as "evidence" in the first place...

so, if we're going to talk about the signifier as a "miasma" that "settles" on the "contours" of the subject -- what is your definition of evidence? that is sort of bound up in my question, really. what limits are there on this, or is it simply possible to say anything so long as it's internally consistent?

you're very longwinded about this, while at no point trying to answer what i think is a fair question. so i suppose the metaphor stands, appropriate to its locale, habits, etc.

as for smug self-satisfaction at having landed in the one lonely preserve of authenticity, Right Thinking, Real Knowledge -- again, full marks for snide hyperbole, but given that lacan is dubious enough in his own field, i feel p confident in calling bullshit when zizek deploys lacanian ideas to amuse his moronic readership. ne way, very bored of talking about zizek on ilx.

I have to admit I find hm's constant requests for 'evidence' to be very baffling - what kind of evidence are you looking for? brain scans? mris?

― dyao, Wednesday, February 3, 2010 11:57 PM (37 seconds ago) Bookmark

you tell me. is the request for evidence in itself baffling?

you tell me. is the request for evidence in itself baffling?

pretty much - these are all very 'soft' disciplines! when I read any kind of critical work like the one discussed itt, I'm not looking for someone to prove to me that This Is How The World Works or This Is How Cognition Works - all I'm looking for is some kind of critical apparatus, some new way of thinking about the subject in question that will reveal for me new insights or relationships about the text. I thought that this was What They Did in film studies, or at least the m.o. of a lot of film critics.

Now I understand why this guy got sb'ed

i think it's not really wise to conflate psychoanalysis as interpretative practice and psychoanalysis as critical practice. they are very different things, the gap between them is almost unresolvable. Still, I'm not super against the use of psychoanalytically-inflected critical frameworks. People have done a lot of interesting stuff using Jung as a framework, and are doing a lot of interesting stuff using Lacan, and even if I personally think Lacanianism is basically an intellectual pyramid scheme that doesn't preclude something interesting resulting from its use.

"what limits are there on this, or is it simply possible to say anything so long as it's internally consistent?"

this is a really interesting question! I don't have any response to it but i wanted to repeat it for the record.

I think there is a way in which the request for evidence is not baffling but-- it's a pointless, grandstanding sort of action. The quote Mordy started with is, essentially, about how emotion acts. No-one understands how emotion acts. No-one has any concrete evidence of the reasons for emotion's movements. We've lived emotion, we've seen it in others, we all have a rough sketchy inchoate idea but this isn't even theoretically satisfying. Nevertheless emotions do something, they have an effect, they happen in the real world. This effect affects us: for a lot of us, if we have a way of understanding it we find it easier to deal with, easier to react to. This is the thing that clinical psychoanalysis can teach us: that, most of the time, it doesn't matter what critical framework you use, whether you're Kleinian or Jungian or person-centred. What matters is that you have a way of approaching the problem at hand.

If you say 'well as we have no evidence for how emotion acts we cannot think about it' you're shutting off a huge amount of stuff that desperately needs to be thought about. I'd rather we think and keep thinking about this stuff, even if in crude metaphorical terms that have to keep changing, than leave them unknown out of fear of being wrong.

sorry, guys, overlong.

conflate psychoanalysis as interpretative practice and psychoanalysis as critical practice

curious as to what your distinction is between these two kinds of practice?

sorry, i meant 'clinical', not 'critical'.

'Academic' Prose: A Brief Rant

Just to play devil's advocate here - isn't it (sometimes) the case that what seems like a "showy tour through theoryland" to a casual reader/passerby is actually an important, relevant, and necessary part of a complex and precise argument? This isn't really a reponse to that blog post (which is unanswerable since the author makes it impossible to look up the text he's reviewing so we could compare), but more to the general sense I have that, yes, a lot of "theory" is wankery in the hands of small minds, but also a lot of it is really useful if you're an expert in the particular thing being theorized.

I get this anti-"academic" anti-intellectualism from undergrads all the time and it's sort of exhausting. Sometimes it takes a lot of big words to make precise delineations between seemingly related things, y'know? If you take theory off the table, you can only approach things (texts, books, buildings, political actions, whatever) as isolated things, which you can maybe give a personal thumbs up/down...but you're left unable to contextualize them, connect them to other things, recognize subtle similarities and differences, basically everything that I'd want out of an educational system beyond the development of a base level of shared facts (world is round, articles of the Constitution, etc.). Gibberish wank-theory is certainly a mutant outgrowth of, or parasite upon, this entire enterprise, but it's obnoxious, trollish, and probably willfully ignorant to assert that "academia" as a whole is comprised only of that stuff.

(note, context for this is also hanging around graduate students who are proud of not knowing who Mao Tse-Tung was or when World War II happened - - - so I'm sort of associating "suspicion of academia" with "doesn't actually care about knowing important stuff," which maybe isn't quite fair.)

otm

hard not to get the impression sometimes that theory is to caffeine what bad beat poetry is to pot