Marxism and Lacan - Incompatible Theories

[cactusflower]

Originally Posted by Cael on Politics.ie Current Affairs - Politics.ie ... ss-13.html

As the French philosopher and psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan might have put it, The Republic is a site of lack – but no less real for that. Like any lack it creates an imperative – a law. If I lack food, that lack orders that I look for some food. An empty space has been created which demands to be filled. The Irish people are bound by the Law of the Republic, not because the CIRA AC says so, but because we lack fully living in the Republic. The British government created the 26 and 06 county states to fill this space, but they have not wholly succeeded. The AC is the signifier of this lack. This is the signifier which holds the space open and ready to be filled with positive content.

This is the significance of the 1938 Proclamation of Dáil Éireann. When the Dáil dissolved it ceased to be the signifier of this lack. Declaring that the AC is now the signifier was merely a statement of fact, not a choice. There was no other signifier available or even possible. So those who claim that a small group of people made an arbitrary choice couldn’t be more wrong. There was no more choice in this than choosing to breath air.

In 1922 most Irish people lost their nerve in the face of English terrorism. They lost their will to create their own destiny and regressed back into an infantile dependant state. Today that infantile dependency has largely been transferred to the EU. But the Law of the Republic still stands in its severe imperative: that Irish people be thinking citizens – not mindless slaves.

cactus flower said

Thought you were a Marxist Cael. That French semantic stuff is pure idealism. What's wrong with Anti-Duhring?

Objective conditions have to be there for national liberation or revolution, not just an abstract "lack". Declaring something or wanting something doesn't make it real.

Cael wrote

A chara, I would be glad to answer that, but I have promised Merle not to divert the thread from the 32CSM statement. If you wish to start another thread on the subject of lack , or Lacan and Marxism, Ill be glad to join you on it. By the way, there is nothing abstract about a lack. For something to be lacking, there has to be a sense that there exists a place which that thing should hold/fill.

[SIZE="1"]An Ginearal Liam Ó Loinsigh: “The Army has to hew the way to freedom for politics to follow.” "The transition from Capitalism to Communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." V.I. Lenin. The State and Revolution[/SIZE]

There is a lot I disagree with in your post and that I would like to discuss with you. The lack that you describe is a thought - an abstraction. The fact that something is needed or wanted doesn't mean it will ever happen, or that it can only happen through one particular chain of events. If you lack food, that does not mean you should plant potatoes in a bog or rice in a desert.

I don't agree that the people of Ireland bottled out in 1922 and that they regressed. On the contrary, I think that only an exceptionally revolutionary/radical people could have pushed the British Empire back to the degree that has been achieved, on the doorstep of the Empire. The establishment of the Republic was a blow to British Imperialism, even on the terms that prevail. I think the objective conditions for achieving national self-determination were adverse and that the achievement in the face of the difficulties was enormous.

Knowing how to read and take advantage of changing conditions requires ongoing study of global development and use of a scientific theory of knowledge. I think a political movement that is not driven by a clear, scientific, socialist analysis will end up being driven by the dominant capitalist/subjective idealist ideology.

I don't know much about Lacan, but would you explain his theory in terms of how it complements and develops Marxist theory, if that is how you see it? I've had a look at the Wikipedia entry and his view of The Real seems to be very similar to Berkeley -

Thus the Real is that which is outside language, resisting symbolization absolutely. In Seminar XI Lacan defines the Real as "the impossible" because it is impossible to imagine and impossible to integrate into the Symbolic, being impossibly attainable.

He seems to be saying that the real is ultimately unknowable, and that thought has primacy.

Marx, Engels and Lenin wrote extensively against this theory, which they categorised as Idealist.

[Garibaldy]

"As the French philosopher and psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan might have put it, The Republic is a site of lack – but no less real for that. Like any lack it creates an imperative – a law. If I lack food, that lack orders that I look for some food. An empty space has been created which demands to be filled. The Irish people are bound by the Law of the Republic, not because the CIRA AC says so, but because we lack fully living in the Republic."

This is the most amusing and impressive piece of sophistry I've seen in years.

[cactusflower]

That's one way of describing it.

[pete2]

Was hoping this thread would be started, what Cael was saying in that other thread was pretty interesting.

[20000miles]

I've heard Cael mentioning Henry George and Land Value Taxation many times on this site. For the uninitiated George and Marx hated each other...

[cactusflower]

As we don't seem to have Cael here to explain his views on Marx and Lacan, your thoughts on George and Marx would be very welcome.

[Cael]

Go mo leithsceal, a chara, I just saw this thread now. There is really a lot in what you have asked, so I will take it bit by bit. In the first place is the question of lack. If we take the universe as a whole, then there is clearly no such thing as lack. Nothing is missing. Lack can only come about where there is some measure of subjectivity - be it animal or human subjectivity (I know I have opened another can of worms there). Some sort of subjectivity that can generate expectation. If I write the series of numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, I immediately feel that something is missing or lacking, something has not been named, or has been named incorrectly. What we have is five spaces/slots in series. I have either left out the fourth slot or I have filled it with an unexpected signifier, i.e. 5. This really is the kernal of the concept of number, that there is a series of spaces/slots to be filled with concepts, which we give the names 1,2,3, etc, to. You might be familiar with the work of Frege on the subject.

If you take the discovery of transfinite numbers by Cantor, despite the outrage at the time, once they had opened their own space in the sum of all human expectation, there was really no closing that space again. To take them away would be to cause lack.

[cactusflower]

Number only has any meaning because it is a form that can be filled with content that reflects material reality. It's a conceptual tool that describes quantity of things.
I not sure what exactly you mean by "filling spaces". Numbers are sequential because things can be added to each other one by one.

What does Cantor mean by transfinite numbers?

[Cael]

How much of a Marxist Lacan was personally, I dont know, I certainly know that Structuralism/ post Structuralism was heavily influenced by Marx, and Lacan refers to Marx quite a lot. The most famous Lacanian Marxist is, of course, Slavoj Zizek. The Real you mention is similar to the "thing-in-itself" of Kant and idealism, except that it is extented to include the impossibilities created by language itself (the trauma created within language), rather than only neumenal raw nature. The concept of the thing-in-itself is not in contradiction with the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels, and nor is the Real. Where they "turn Hegel on his head" is in rejecting the idealists claim that the phenomenon we percieve are determined by our human perceptive processes, ultimately our thoughts (Kant believed that space and time were functions of our perceptive process, rather than existing seperate from them). Marx and Engels claimed that our thoughts are determined by the natural world. That we have concepts of time and space because they really do exist outside of us. Particularly, that our concepts of society are not the result of any internal perceptive structure, but by the actual relations of production between human beings. This is very important distinction, as idealism provides plenty of cover for anyone who wants to maintain a system based on greed and injustice (thats just the way we were made, its foolish to go against human nature), whereas dialectical materialism says that our concepts are the result of the state of technological development we have reached, and its impossible to hang on to a social system that belongs to relations of production which have already past.

[Cael]

Number only has any meaning because it is a form that can be filled with content that reflects material reality. It's a conceptual tool that describes quantity of things.
I not sure what exactly you mean by "filling spaces". Numbers are sequential because things can be added to each other one by one.

What does Cantor mean by transfinite numbers?

Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" is considered the most influential work of art of the 20th century precisely because it demonstrates the concepts of space and lack so elegantly. He simply took an ordinary urinal, put it on a podium and entered it in an art exibition. What he demonstrates is that it is the frame which creates the expectation, the frame creates a space that we expect will be filled by some signifier. Not only that, but the frame itself creates the expectation of what will fill the space. In that art gallery in New York of 1917, people expected to see paintings inside frames and sculptures on podiums. What they saw on one podium was a urinal. This was like the missing four in our example above, filled with an unexpected signifier, the 5.

Frege showed that numbers count concepts, not material objects. There is lots on the net about it, if you are really interested. The basic idea however, is that, say we line up several girls. If I ask you to count the girls, I have specified a concept that I want counted (human females) rather than all the objects that are there. I could just as easily have said count all the pretty girls that are there, and you might give me a different number to the one I counted.

Cantor is a really big subject for this time of night, but it centers on the idea that one infinity is bigger than another. Thats really the only reason I mentioned him, he introduced a very counterintuitive idea, that, once understood, demands that it be taken into account, no matter how disturbing it might be.