Anyway, not trying to psychoanalyze you :) I'm glad you're happy with the status quo; I'm not even demanding an immediate revolution. Just careful thinking about what it means that society is organized the way it is, what that means for ways of thinking and living and feeling.
@Cerberus so I have to admit I feel like this question about the past seems to have some blackmail dimensions; are you trying to trick me into loving corporate nationalism and the repressive global capitalist regime? :)
My point is not that our time is good in absolute terms: it just is. There are good and bad things about it, and we must strive to change the bad things. But I think there were tons of bad things in the past as well.
I'll certainly concede that many are prosperous and happy today -- but I definitely wouldn't want to take a global lottery on which social-economic situation under modern conditions I'd end up in.
If any of you wouldn't mind, I'd really appreciate if someone would take a brief look over the English part of e-mail one of our clients is about to send out: haseke.de/fileadmin/newsletter/request.html
@Cerberus This is one of my worries with science today, especially humanities and human sciences -- that they're quickly becoming "expert systems" used by technocratic administrations to more effectively "manage" the population
(The morbidly depressing end result: they don't get to decide their problems themselves. They're formulated and framed from the effectively reactionary point of view of the state.)
The repetition of "in case" to begin the last two sentences is also somewhat jarring. Alternate it somehow -- I might rewrite the last as: "Please let us know if you have any questions! Feel free to get in touch with us at <contact-info>"
@JosephWeissman Hmm how are they becoming repressive instruments of the state? I am rather afraid of their becoming instruments of capitalism, i.e. of commercial interests.
Zizek makes a really good distinction between the violence that occurs as an everyday part of a repressive social-economic order -- and the violence that shatters this system, that makes some other kind of order possible.
I'm pessimistic, for sure. Things are pretty discouraging in a lot of ways.
I am optimistic enough to be angry, if that helps :)
It's a plane -- a landscape. Pushed in different directions by subterranean forces.
History is in fact the entire cosmos -- I worry about reduction to pure geometry here :)
Thought thinks against the time in which it arises, against history and its givens. It makes something else possible to be thought, and so at long last felt.
It fights against all the stupid fictions reactionaries endlessly fall for -- including the messianic hope of progressives that history "progresses," tends towards infinity
Again, a very beautiful dream. It's most powerful in Marx; this faith in the general intellect...
Can we maybe explore this a bit? I'm curious about what happens if we unpack this rich and subjective sense of historical progress -- I think there are important complications almost immediately.
One point that might help connect this back is the one about the psychoanalytic problem of knowledge.
Science as subject-supposed-to-know, but more generally...
Consider again all those "problems" we face today: global warming, intellectual property, genetic manipulation.
We know very well what we are doing is pushing various complex ecological systems (whether physical or psychic or social) towards collapse, but nevertheless we act as though we did not know.
I rather mean that we had so many problems in the past: why should our current problems be so very different, so much worse that we are suddenly facing total collapse?
We have solved or contained so many problems in the past.
Hmm I'd rather classify it as "our current problems don't seem especially dangerous" and "why should our time be nay different than any time in the past?".
Certainly. Technology is one easy way to see this.
Our very techno-scientific approach to solving problems limits the range, scope and quality of the problems, their ability to connect with other problems.
Basically, it's that first point I was making: about the "meaning" of science, which is invisible to progressives -- since it figures as the necessary messiah which will save us from problems.
I'm not trying to attack progressivism; I just want to point out the piety I think necessary attaches to science (and in particular cybernetics) as a concession to the deification of technological progress
Isn't it rather that we use this approach because we don't think we have the power to try any other approach? That is, a researcher can devise technological solutions, but he cannot change the mentality of a billion people.
That science cannot solve even all the problems it creates, is another way of stating Heidegger's insight with respect to Western civilization here.
I would bring up Adorno -- this conversation is so far from being a fully-formed critical discourse that asking "what should be done?" is a little lit being a cop, demaning your papers, in other words: to make the conversation confess its sins, and come back to thinking "clearly" -- which is to say, to think like everyone else...
Which brings us back to images of thought. Let's talk about stupidity here briefly.
We can definitely go that direction, and maybe come back via the Republic to forms of social organization.
I mean anyway the triplet isn't the important thing. The point would be that social organization as such is problematic to some degree; similarly for psychic and biological and so on.
Ecological systems endlessly generate problems. The "problematizing" of a situation is difference itself, it is learning or a life.
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…
English Language & Usage: Multi-Layer…