Why I am distrustful of French philosophers and theorists

I don't know if Derrida is a pop star at UCI per se, but by all accounts about the only thing they don't do at his lectures is hold up their lighters.

the fact that we are still circling the same problems suggests to me
i. he wz right (that he saying something new, which cd not be said in old language)
ii. he wz wrong (that the jargon he designed helped in any way to clarify the problem)

with the complicated exception of baudrillard — who has a deliberate provocateur-prankster dimension to his work — i think it's a big mistake to assume ANY of the french theorists are merely charlatans (in the sense of "pretending to something but secretly aware they're saying nothing"), and i'm also a bit suspicious of assuming they come in a kind of clump, all saying much the same sort of thing — they are certainly politically distinct, and therefore (i have to assume) philosophically distinct too

is a sentence which allows you to take it in in an instant better for you than a sentence which requires you to think hard while you're working out what it might be saying? which is more inclined to get you thinking for yrself? (ps i don't think there's an answer to this question, any more than i think that there's only one style of effective teaching...)

wittgenstein's philosophical investigations is rigorous in its exclusion of ALL philosophical jargon — and it spawned a sub-movement called "ordinary language" phils=osophy which wz arcane and seemingly beached and purposeless, which (in the university philsophy world of my youth) counter-spawned a hunger for bigger, better problems and solutions, which the french guys seemed to satisfy only too well

i'm REALLY glad i didn't read PI until now, bcz i'm absolutely certain i wouldn't have "got" it if i'd read it whole i wz studying kant and hume and all that, back then...

Re. M. Baudrillard, his writings on the Gulf War are incredibly objectionable and smack of the worst kind of academic provincialism. (I.e. the war isn't "real" to me so it must not be real at all! Baudrillard must know how ignorant is this idea--granted a reduction of his own writing but not an unfair one I don't think--which is where the charlatanism comes in.)

http://images-eu.amazon.com/images/P/2718605855.08.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

'Helene Cixous is today, in my view, the greatest writer in what I will call my language, the French language if you like. And I am weighing my words as I say that. For a great writer must be a poet-thinker, very much a poet and a very thinking poet.'

ack.

surely derrida is saying: "if yr reading this in english, you may find you disagree, mais c'est la fkn vie, me old china"

fuck chirac, punish him for nuclear testing in the pacific, that fucker. i like foucault, everyone else is a richard Dickwad.

I trust you mean these people: Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Zizek (by implication rather than nationality).

I've never read any Baudrillard.

I have read all the others and they are all fantastic. Exciting, even. I'm approaching this from a legal stance rather than any Film & TV or English Literature blocks.

Foucault roxx u r etc.

Yes, Zizek is definitely an honorary French intellectual for the purposes of this thread.

Foucault seems okay, though I haven't even read him either.

I think Cixous is probably bollocks.

I don't get this 'poet-thinkers' business re:Derrida. He writes like a 'poet-thinker'? Some dull-ass poet he is (that's directed at his writing, rather than has thinking).

Yeah, kinda, no, I lublublub Zizek. I like his alphabet.

I can kinda see one of the things that mark could possibly have against them - well from what I understand of mark's outlook - and I'm sorry if you already said this mark.

Is their 'pop star' status is also 'academic status' which also breeds a sort of legitimacy: legitimacy is also a value that generally stops thought short of it's normal course - whereas mark is (haha pomo fucker that he is; sorry mark) all about collapsing the distinctions between high and low which he goes about by setting up such distinction (ok, if this is 'off, mark, just transpose it on to me, and replace all the mark's in this post with 'cozen').

Their pop-star status also makes them exciting for young people like me and, admittedly, stops me from actually chasing their breadcrumb trail down and seeing where they came from (although I bluffed about this up there; ok ok I have read Kant, and Locke, and Hobbes, and, and, and in the original language but the French d00d's are all so much. more. sexy.)

So their pop-star status is also an everlasting thoughtstopper. (Sorry).

i tend not to cite them as authorities, bcz a. it causes a flurry of propomo-nopomo distraction, when this is entirely a debate i have no interest, and b. i don't believe in authority

i don't believe in authority is kinda what I was getting at with my 'legitimacy' quip.

I'm not sure I was saying you were against them, as such, just worried about their ascendancy obscuring other (more useful? insightful?) outlets of thought (you did 'famously' say that you thought ilm had provided more salient ideas than the whole cultural studies industry put together, which is these guys, right?)

mark do you mean this, or do you mean "I resist belief in authority"? It strains my imagination to think that there's someone, e'en yr good self, who has managed to buck what is essentially the One Great Fact of western society & perhaps Society Itself

I say publish.

Alain Badiou is

god U R all

[ellipsis]

mark s: i don't believe in capital punishment
disputant: but mark it happens every day

i. x is correct abt this does not meant that x is correct abt that
ii. all accounts agree that y is the case does not mean that y is the case
iii. if e = emmcee squared, this is not the case bcz einstein said
iv. accepting that z is thus-and-so for the sake of argument means only that you are postponing that discussion of whether z is thus-and-so
v. they know things we don't know = we also know things they don't know

knowledge is not a hierarchy, like russian dolls

what exactly do you mean RS and JD, when you say you DO believe in authority?

=Rare lucidity.

1: cf capital punishment (it exists but i consider it a Bad Thing)
2: !!!!

it's true mark while your points are all good ones that you mean authority in a rather strict (extraordinarily Catholic to my once-Catholic ears) sense - let's take Gaudiya Vaisnava i.e. Hare Krsna teaching about authority as an example of what you seem to mean: "The guru provides God unfiltered to the disciple. Since the guru is able to provide God, he is for the disciple nondifferent from God. He is not God, but nondifferent. Therefore his words are like sastras [=scripture] for the disciple." All well and good until the guru asserts that there are men living underneath the surface of the moon.

But! when I say I do believe in authorities all I mean is let's say I want to know what it's like to work for the W*re. I could ask my wife. She could probably paint a lovely & imaginative picture & I should love to hear her do so, but as she's only been to London once & we didn't visit the offices of that publication, her account would probably be lacking. Extrapolate this to philosophy: while one's ears should always be open to anyone's thoughts on a given idea (the worst student in class often surprises with the most insightful comment one bright day), not for nothing is Jacques Derrida's name sung by all the little schoolchildren, and so when Derrida speaks about hors-texte and whether there's anything outside it, there's merit in choosing to listen extra-hard.

nb it's early in the morning and this may be a bit scattered, sorry

you choose to decide he knows what he's talking abt in re the content of his own work viz ruskin on the nature of gothic, say

then you learn the story of ruskin and effie grey's wedding night (he had crushed on her since she wz 15 or less, finally persuaded the parents the marriage to a grown-up but much younger than him effie wz a good thing, GOT married, saw effie w.clothes on on their wedding night, had major screaming abdabs, marriage never consummated, humiliating divorce as a result, EG later marries the lover millais, ruskin's writing becomes more expansive, more political, more passionate, more widely read, ruskin goes mad and dies — probably still a virgin)

OK so ruskin is an authority on what he is talking about, yet there is clearly a lot of v.anxious stuff going on in there which he is NOT going to be wise or insightful or perceptive or self-knowing
abt

accepting that z is thus-and-so for the sake of argument means only that you are postponing that discussion of whether z is thus-and-so

In moments like this I see sth in your, let's say, 'epistemology' that I don't see in my own. Perhaps it is a kind of ultimate residue of Realism - or, no (since I also believe in that): an ultimate, residual belief in the need for Us to be true to the Real. I don't think I do believe in that: or even if I do, I am not (always especially) keen to follow it.

So my version of the above would be: if you want to postpone it indefinitely, and can get away with doing so, go ahead: it probably won't make any difference; and anyway, who has the Authority to tell you to stop postponing?

Your view seems to be that The Real has that Authority. My feeling seems to be that The Real is out there, but if we reckon we'd be happier not trying to track its every move, then we shouldn't bother doing said tracking - The Real is not (or not necessarily) the kind of entity that is going to chase us and enforce our fidelity with pink parking tickets.

I hope you'll take these thoughts in the appropriate spirit, eg: I don't know whether I believe what I just said (and I am certainly not very interested in 'defending' it: if anyone sees things differently, good); they just capture a slight niggle of difference I have when I see some of your claims.

I should say that when you say "authority" your definition seems rather inflexible: that is to say, I accept Jacques Derrida as an authority on his own books. Why not? He wrote them. But can he be utterly full of shit when talking about them? Can I be more right than he about what his books are about? (ok ok not "right" but more interesting, more productive, more insightful whatevah) sure absolutely, even probably: who is less qualified to describe the appearance of the whale than the man in its belly. But! is it not also silly to say: "I shall take what Derrida has to say about Of Grammatology no more seriously than what Robert Plant has to say on the same subject?" well but you see my point

That's Miss Euphemia Gray to you, Mark. Bit of respect, please.

ie Hegel's theory is wiser than Hegel himself. (or "trust the tale not the teller")

there's a great idea for a failed television series somewhere in this

But I have little to say about French philosophers. Sorry to interrupt, you can just ignore this one if it breaks the flow. Really interesting that "they" (I know I'm simplyfying in grouping) came to the conclusion that language as we know it is problematic, even though "deconstruction" may only be scratching the surface and not solving any problem whatsoever, as it only creates more circuitous intellectual pathways to run in. Er, imo on this topic, I find it illuminating that certain Tantric teachings are in congrunce with ancient Egyptian notions of current language (and by "current," I have to mean post-Fall of mankind, this-World Age) being insufficient and fractured in being able to fully express the thoughts of the human mind-psyche-soul [or rather of how our currents thoughts themselves are placed in a confining or limiting box due to our rudimentary contemporary, post-Fall language] and that previously, humans communicated ethereally with each other and spirits via telepathy, using a higher form of what can only be expressed with the current word of "language." Lots -loads - of presumptions there, of course, =) and will have to look it up later, but I naturally find it very interesting, and I seem to recall that there were three or four distinct forms of speech/language, and the words you are currently reading, thinking in, and will speak/hear later today/tonite, are only a fractured expression of one. Joan of Arc, et al, may have heard another. Our current method of communication, our language, which is one of the fundamental cornerstones of Thought, limits and shapes it, [allegedly] as long as our personal energies/prana/chi/shakti remains entwined within our lower chakras.

On the question of authority. Well. It's pretty moot, itsn't it, since doesn't it go back to the question of whether or not an Absolute Truth even exists in the first place? The shishya (student) of the shastras is certainly entitled to test his potential-gurus out before accepting him, his vidya (wisdom), his authority - and ideally, the guru is supposed to facilitate enough critical thinking within the shishya to let him intuitively arrive at the metaphsyical "truths" at his own pace, within his own consciousness, due to his own his own karmic timetable, through his own efforts. The guru only guides. One way to argue it.

Speaking of critical thinking, I guess Barthes's theories of semiotics (and Garbo's face) did come of some use for us critical-studies students in writing our film-papers, but we loathed him no less than the production students who absolutely abhorred the imminent impracticality of his ideologies regarding filmmaking.

(ts: heidegger vs ANYTHING EVAH)

But do you really think that if Barthes was never born that these films wouldn't have been filmed ? Of course you don't, but i was just wondering.

I think I'ma guilty of this: ii. all accounts agree that y is the case does not mean that y is the case here.

This is what I mean by authority. (No, I will try to comment later.)

(also i suspect blake's views on authority were sweeping)

which guys, cozen? barthes and foucault both wrote essays on that topic, i think

so it's a good riposte, bcz i have no objection really to the word used of artefacts (i think bcz there's an embedded paradox)

robot-monster vs. dragon oh NO! FITE! pic to thread

Names and forms through the analyzing function of the buddhi intellect, only bring more fractured divisineness of consciousness, doesn't it? Not that I'm saying intellectualism = dud. Anyway, sorry to everyone else.

I don't see how I can avoid accepting, say, scientific authority, since I don't have the know-how to test the claims made by scientists.

If you mean "authority" as some sort of ultimate, unquestionable source of of truth, then I don't believe in authority either.

I have to admit that for any expert who says that something or other is so, you can usually find a different one to contradict that claim. So ultimately, most of the time, you have to use your own inexpert opinion to decide which expert to believe in.

So it looks like I am making your point for you here, but I still believe in authority, in some forms, and I think J0hn Darnielle's example (of who would be a more reliable source of information about what it's like to work for the WIRE) is a good, down to earth, example. I don't think that the choice is between NO AUTHORITY or UNQUESTIONED AUTHORITY. When I go to the doctor, I accept that s/he has certain knowledge and know-how that I don't have, but I reserve the right to question what I am told (especially since I have some expertise on my own body).

admission: when i said "i don't believe in authority" it wz actually sort of jokily, bcz sweeping statements are generally sort of amusing ,and i wanted to finish the sentece with a big old comedy flourish and exit (always leave em larfing)

but i think my suspicion ties into my weirdness abt "influence" etc: the use of the word implies a model of how knowledge and culture and thinking all work which i dislike (shorthand for this: "idealism", possibly)

(anyway i' glad i said it bcz you guys then questioned it and i had to think abt the whole idea: also that blake pic is fantastic of course)

in other words, he was always already saying "art tells us stuff which [________] may obscure" = freudianism is a buried and
not-yet-formulated theory locked within Classic Literature, which he set free

zizek = hegel = lacan = freud in absolutely arguing that human consciousness, individually and socially, works by closely entwined opposites (so that classical logic is a very bad guide to the logics of feeling or of community)

I am disappointed to find the phrase "means only" on this particular thread. In any event, if you are faced with two incompatible and incommensurable premises z and y (say Ptolemaic and Copernican cosmology) - "incommensurable" meaning that there is no common ground to test them against - then the best way to test them is to accept one and see what happens, what its consequences are; then accept the other and see what its consequences are, and then decide which premise best serves your purposes. (This, by the way, is a good retort to someone who claims that when someone is faced with incompatible premises there is no rational way to choose between them.)

Example of someone testing a premise in this way: Wittgenstein on the second page of Philosophical Investigations saying "Let us imagine a language for which the description given by Augustine is right" (that the individual words in language name objects, and that sentences are combinations of such names).

Have any of the French writers on this thread done anything that interested you? If so, what was it? (You might want to include Hegel as proto-French and Zizek and de Man as post-French, and maybe toss in D&G and Lyotard, whose names I don't remember being dropped here.)

Have any of those writers inspired you to do anything interesting? If so, do it on this thread.

(I take this being in the spirit of Rockist's original post: he's willing to consider that these guys are interesting, but he wants you to demonstrate it rather than tell him to accept it on your or their authority.)

Much beloved by theoretitians of mathematics and science as well as these mushy humanities folks.

http://www.whirlybird.org.uk/cover.jpg
Out now, popfanz!
(It's Roland Barthes, sunbathing in 1926. The Foxgloves = me & da PF)

*bump*

Ugh, fuck a Sokal. Dude taught a relativity course I took at NYU - he started the first class by reducing every discipline to its order of scale (subatomic to universal), and basically concluded that Physics is the most comprehensive intellectual pursuit because it involves scales from 10^-35 m to 10^80 m, whereas the humanities only cover scales from the size of a human brain to the size of a society. Seriously, who the fuck thinks like this?

Obviously French theory can be prone to navel-gazing irrelevance sometimes, but almost every criticism I've read of people like Derrida, Lacan, etc. seems to work under the assumption that Continental theory and lit crit should have the same basic goals as the sciences, i.e. to directly produce concrete propositions about reality, when of course the humanities has always been more about creating new pathways for thought and ways of associating different ideas -- which can in turn lead to fresh perspectives on practical situations. Criticizing the statements that theory types make as unfalsifiable and not directly applicable to anything is sort of missing the point.

haha that's pretty damn funny about Sokal. he is a pretty expert point-misser in general.

fuck chirac, punish him for nuclear testing in the pacific, that fucker. i like foucault, everyone else is a richard Dickwad.

― di smith (lucylurex), Sunday, April 27, 2003 11:17 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
except pepe lepew, he's hawtt

― mark s (mark s), Sunday, April 27, 2003 11:24 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
pussies dig it.

― di smith (lucylurex), Sunday, April 27, 2003 11:27 AM (5 years ago) Bookmark

filthy french. one of my italian professors once said, "pfff, who needsa the french language?"

Where did mathematics fall in this grand order? Where did the makers of the rulers according to which physicists (or anyone else) measure things like particles or other academic disciplines lie, eh, eh, eh?

OK, Sokal is a dope, but he punk'd 'em good.

sokal is abusing science pretty bad himself, too

hooray, a scientist triumphed in a battle of academic one-upsmanship by being a petty fool ... and then went on to make a career of it ... I feel so proud to not be a liberal arts major

liberal arts are ultimately stupid in that they remain stuck in mid-late 20th century French thought. that's the reason why I never accepted any Ph.D. acceptances and went to law school. fuck yeah.

hooray for our side, we can stick this next to the maker faire as a high point of intellectual snobbery

with writing Hybrid IP-PBX systems brochures in between. that's even better than that.

burt_stanton takes the high road.