Marxism and Lacan - Incompatible Theories

[Cael]

Nothing when it's so labelled. When it's mislabelled 'established scientific knowledge' things start getting dishonest. Freud was a master at that type of dishonesty.

Really thats not true. Freud revised his work constantly as did Lacan.

[cactusflower]

[quote]

Let's take the colour example. Suppose you have a language that does not have words to distinguish between two particular shades of green - I'll call them forest green and jungle green (wiki has a helpful article that will illustrate the difference). Suppose I show you a vase that is forest green and ask you what colour it is - suppose you say it's green. Suppose I later show you a vase that is jungle green and again ask you to identify its colour - suppose you again identify it as green.

Next, suppose I put the vases side by side and ask you which I showed you first, or even just asked you whether or not they are the same colour. I think that even if your language doesn't distinguish between the shades of green, you'll be able to tell the vases apart. It's possible to imagine you understanding the latter question in such a way that you reply that they are the same colour - if you ask me whether Sienna Miller and Marilyn Monroe are both blonds, I'll answer in the affirmative, but it's not that I fail to perceive their hair as being different colours, it's that the colours fall within a range that I've learned to identify as 'blond'. Given the green vases, you might start saying that one green is 'lighter' than the other, or that one is closer to blue than the other - these are ways of distinguishing between things you perceive to be different when your language doesn't have words to directly express the difference.

Now, you might want to push back, and say that the reason you can distinguish between the vases is that you have words for 'lighter' and 'darker' and for 'more blue' and 'less blue'. If I took away those words as well, and all other substitutes, you may say that you'd perceive the vases as being indistinguishable.

Let me stipulate a difference between 'brute sensory perception' and something like 'apprehension'. When photons hit your retinae and set off electrochemical signals to your brain (or whatever it is that happens), I want to call that 'brute sensory perception'. When your brain interprets those signals as 'green', I want to call that 'apprehension'. I think I want to say that brute sensory perception occurs without any conceptual involvement, and hence without language. Different electrochemical signals don't go from the retinae to the brains of people with languages that distinguish between forest green and jungle green, though once the signals get to the part of the brain where cognition of some sort occurs things may change. So, when I say that it's possible to receive sensory information without any interpretation going on, I mean to refer to brute sensory perception - the data are received by the eyes and encoded as electrochemical signals; they are then transmitted to the brain. At some point in the brain, 'apprehension' (or interpretation) occurs.

This is a good description of the process of action of the world on our senses.

A couple of things, then. First, I'm using 'heuristic' in a slightly different sense - something like: "involving or serving as an aid to learning, discovery, or problem-solving by experimental and especially trial-and-error methods" (with props to Merriam-Webster for the precise phrasing). [B]Second, I neither affirm nor deny that 'all of this' is either thought or information from the material world.

Your first paragraph says it is information from the material world. Where does your agnosticism come from?

My view is addressed to the status of such affirmations or denials. To be explicit, I do not deny that the mental states I experience are the result of my physical brain interacting with my physical senses interacting with a real, thought-independent external world. I just deny that there's any way to know whether that claim is true or false.

To paraphrase, you say that the world may be really reflected in your thoughts and sense perceptions, but that you don't know whether it does or not because you are sceptical about the existence of everything except your own thoughts.

Are you suggesting that studying Marx makes one an expert on Marx?

I'm clearly saying that dismissing Marx while admitting to not knowing his work is the opposite to being expert.

This scepticism/idealism is directly descended from Berkeley, who ended up selling tar water as a cure all. It was a philosophy aimed at counteracting the Enlightenment. With another two hundred years of development of science and increased knowledge of the nature of the brain and the processes that take place in it, it is even more reactionary now than it was then.

[Toland]

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[cactusflower]

Speculation is a good starting point for developing a hypothesis. The job then is to test it scientifically.

[Toland]

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[cactusflower]

Which is what both Freud and Lacan signally fail to do.

Exactly so. There is some useful stuff there in Freud, but an awful lot of garbage too. Lacan on the other hand seems to be out to confuse, in the interests of religion and against science.

[Geekzilla]

I have to agree, I spent a year wading through the Ecrits and try as I might to make sense of it I just couldn't shake the feeling that I was the victim of an elaborate hoax. Some good ideas in there, but nothing original enough to set him apart from hundreds of other thinkers. If it's a 'return to Freud' you're after, why not just...return to Freud.

There are undertones of religious fervour amongst Lacanians that I find disconcerting to say the least. More like a cult than an intellectual school.

I suppose his insane lecturing/prose style is somehow designed to 'blood' practicing analysts or introduce them to a liberated manner of approaching language but the concepts don't really seem revolutionary enough to warrant it.

I am also highly suspicious of his 'mathematical' schemas.
I have a dirty feeling that it's just another case of a French 'intellectual rockstar' who doesn't know how to say no to himself.

I think Sokal and Bricmont took him to task in Intellectual Impostures (also published in English as Fashionable Nonsense) for his bizarre pseudomathematical writings.

[cactusflower]

I think Sokal and Bricmont took him to task in Intellectual Impostures (also published in English as Fashionable Nonsense) for his bizarre pseudomathematical writings.

Is he a concious or unconcious Intellectual Imposter, do you think?
I've only read what Cael has posted here, in which he completely misstates what Lenin and Marx say, in a rather brazen way, I thought.

[Christel]

I've just read the last pages here, and I have to say I don't find the questions whether our perception of the world matches it, or whether an unknowable world apart from it exists not as interesting as I did when I was younger. I feel I've come to my personal conclusion, without having tried to put it into words.

But, and sorry to interrupt the discussion with this (you can ignore): I have a serious problem with money and its cognitive/reality status. I don't know where to put it in my cognitive perception or framework. It doesn't really interest me, it's not something I aim for. It is nothing I can perceive, like I feel I can perceive the material world. But I experience lack of it, not out of sensory experience, just indirectly, because of the of the social framework I am dependent on. I experience how powerful it is, yet it is nothing material. I know I need some of it, yet it consists basicly just of numbers. There is nothing interesting in it, no pleasure, no joy, no beauty. It disturbs me, it takes freedom, it forces people to do certain things, it is so powerful to influence local, national, global societies, but apart from that it is...nothing.

How do you explain the reality of money philosophically?

[Cael]

I think Sokal and Bricmont took him to task in Intellectual Impostures (also published in English as Fashionable Nonsense) for his bizarre pseudomathematical writings.

But, of course, others took them to task for this book.