Yes, precisely. It's this surplus stuff, which, when taught, seems to suggest a kind disgust with novel, film etc (but maybe is hiding their envy of creative people). How do people's interest in a subject develop into that and pretty much only that? I find that this sort of way of only working with those types of concerns can become disrespectful and sometimes offensive.


I don't think anyone should bother reading Lacan!

That's a nice solution.



That's just propaganda spread by the people who run the university to justify nurse training!! Don't listen to their lies!!!

Critical Theory is valuable but it has been given an outageously over-inflated status within the humanities, facilitated to a large degree by the endless construction of straw man arguments aimed at discrediting rival positions.

Lurker's point isn't one that proposes mere literary appreciation but a far more subtle (and difficult) excercise in trying to work out what's really going on in a novel, or film or painting, which is something that critical theory simply isn't able to do - atleast very well, anyway. To a critical theorist, Poe and Lovecraft would by synonymous in that they'd both be reproducing the same ideology in the same way. And yet anyone who's read both would understand that they're enormously different. That's where the great literary critics are absolutely invaluable. Which isn't to say that a lot of these critics are even anti critical theory. Someone like Frank Kermode was instrumental in supporting ideas like structuralism at a time when they were treated by British academia with a deep level of suspicion. He respects its place but hardly ever uses it, much to the benefit of his books (most of which remain scandalously neglected by most humanities departments).

ok, my friend told me that the nurses at his univeristy were all slags

They should also been forbidden to read Ayn Rand. She almost did in a business major friend of mine, that is until I gave him my critique.

the main purpose of universites/education should be to indoctrinate the populace against being right wing

and from what i understand up until the 90s universities (bar oxbridge) more or less did that

Thank you! You clearly have the clarity of thought and expression I lack.

Frank Kermode is great.

(I still can't rep you though, it's been so long.)

Thanks. Kermode's book 'A Sense of an Ending' is one of the most brilliant bits of litererary criticism I've read and is far more insightful than anything i've read in the name of critical theory looking at a similar topic. I think the great thing about Kermode is that he makes quite profound points incredibly clearly while most of the critical theory I've read seems to make quite simple points incredibly complicatedly, which tends to make me wonder whether a lot of it is trying to disguise a lack of actual insight with a wall of pseudo-sophisticated double-speak designed to fend off any potential criticism.

To be fair, I see this more as a misuse of critical theory, largely at the hands of young up and coming hot-shot academics, rather than a problem with critical theory itself. I'm sure someone like Walter Benjamin, were he alive, wouldn't approve of half the academic papers that use his name simply to give a bit of credibility to an otherwise quite meaningless essay.

I've read Kermode's 'Shakespeare's Language', It's great, very insightful and thorough.

I agree with that too. It does seem that that sort of verbosity is actually hiding the banality of the ideas or lack of ideas altogether. Have you read 'Intellectual Impostures' by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont? Although mainly attacking the (obfuscating) misuse of scientific and mathematical terminology, it's a fantastic and sometimes funny critique of a lot of those postmodernist philosophers/theorists (Not so much Benjamin, more Lacan, Baudrillard etc).

You might be right about that. I've read bits of Benjamin and didn't get it, need to go back to it. But someone like Foucault I think, despite writing pretty obscurely, has something to say, but because he's so fashionable a lot of bullshitters reference him.

I think the Sokal thing is the point where I begin to side with the critical theorists, to be honest. It was right to draw attention to a level of fraudulance within the humanities but feel it was a bit disengenuous in failing to look at why that should be the case. Academics are pressured into writing essays just to keep their jobs. I know a number of them that churn one out every semester just for that reason. Sokal would've been fairer in my opinion if he'd looked at the issues that cause the problems, rather than just attack those trying to keep their jobs.

My other problem is that while he's right in suggesting that academics in the humanities show little real understanding of science, his own criticism of critical theory hardly convinced me that he was particularly knowledgable about that, either. And to pick on Baudrillard is like picking on the slow kid at school, everyone knows he's an idiot - the dignified thing is to just let him be.

Benjamin is amazing, but very hard to really get a grip on - making him similar in that sense to Barthes. I'm a massive fan of both but would struggle to tell anyone what they're actually going on about half the time. I think where the academy goes wrong with both is in treating them as theorists when they were really creative writers in their own right. Everyone uses Barthes' 'Death of the Author' probably because it's his most straightforward and accessible essay, despite the fact that it's also his least interesting. The same with Benjamin's 'Mechanical Reproduction' essay. Meanwhile Barthes' 'Pleasure of the Text' and Benjamins 'Arcades project' are rightly treated as brilliant but utterly unteachable.

Bottom line for me though in terms of the academy misusing an author is Joseph Conrad. One the greatest writers of the English language and all university departments seem interested in is what Heart of Darkness has to say about colonialism. Which is like being confronted with a naked Nigella Lawson and being asked to concentrate solely on her kneecaps!

The Sokal hoax was attacking these smaller academics and yes he wasn't dealing with why this sort of thing might be happening. It's important that that gets done too, but that isn't much of a criticism. It's like saying people who criticise the Nazis should also explain why the Nazis are like otherwise they should keep their mouths shut.

'Intellectual Impostures' on the other hand isn't criticising these lesser academics who are just trying to keep their jobs, but rather the big names who are the most responsible for damaging the humanities, the origin of the problem.


The point is not that those working in the humanities show little knowledge. That it itself is irrelevant and unimportant. He is pointing out that these people who this scientific terminology don't know what they're talking about, and if the don't know what they're talking then neither will their reader, and yet they lap it up and are so impressed by as the theorists so incredibly erudite. And I don't think it's so important that Sokal doesn't know much about critical theory as his criticism focuses on the scientific terminology.

But people actually read Baudrillard, it affects their thinking! That's is something to take seriously!


See, here you're wriggling. You've basically said that you don't understand their texts.


It's tiring to hear that Joseph Conrad is racist. Quite clearly, in The Heart of Darkness, Marlow says that England was at one time just like place in Africa that the novel is set, the darkness was there too.

.rr

Middlesex University want to get rid of their Philosophy department, yet they are offering courses in 'Complementary Health':
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/courses/undergr...lth/index.aspx

And 'Housing Studies':
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/courses/undergr...g_Studies.aspx

And their 'Early Childhood Studies' degree says that it " is concerned with ideas and practices that are drawn from a range of disciplines history, psychology, philosophy" and yet they don't even teach philosophy anymore!
http://www.mdx.ac.uk/courses/undergr...ldhood_ba.aspx


http://www.mdx.ac.uk/courses/undergr...phy/index.aspx

haha, 'Early Childhood Studies'. They've got the kiddie fiddler market sewn up with that one, for sure.

i know here in Vancouver they took massive amounts of money away from the arts, social programs, libraries (they turned some of them into bars for the olympics) and education. with glowing hearts we fuck the arts.

And 'Housing Studies' is really lessons on how to break into people's homes.

demonrail & lurker-- i've read your arguments with great pleasure, so much so that if you were women i'd want to make babies with you. being that both of you are men and i'm not big on hairy bodies, if we ever meet in person i'll get you both drunk and the drinks are on me. and no worries, bro-rape won't occur if you're unconscious.

anyway, i'm not adding anything to this discussion because you two have basically covered most of what i'd have to say-- except perhaps to add that if the academic humanities hadn't dug themselves into a hole of social irrelevancy they'd perhaps stand a better chance to get financial support.

i use the words "academic humanities" because we still have a number of public intellectuals making a decent living at what they do-- love them or hate them, they often count for something. and yes, some work in academia too, but that's besides the point.

and if someone asks "what is a public intellectual?"-- it's a knowledgeable person able to present important ideas free of incomprehensible twattish jargon, and in a cogent manner, so that a reasonably educated person can understand them and actually acquire new knowledge from them. they usually publish books that sell well, articles in non-obscure magazines, and get interviewed by charlie rose (ha ha ha) (but seriously, they do).

who is charlie rose, you ask?

http://vimeo.com/3094302

The public intellectual is something that we really lack in the uk. Christopher Hitchens is about the only one that springs to mind, but I think he's taken US citizenship now. He certainly lives there, anyway.

For me, I always return to a certain point with this criticism - did anyone ever ask a dentist to not use technical terms? By which I mean - you can shout 'sophistry' at crit theory all you like, but ultimately, if a subject doesn't appeal to a broad audience, that's its audience's problem, not the subject. I'm not saying there's no frauds in crit theory, but the heavy emphasis on its alleged obscurity is ridiculous. If you don't get Derrida, it's because the subject isn't for you - no one is obliged to make sense to someone outside the subject. In this, I'd definitely take on board the point that Lacan probably shouldn't be taught to Sports Management studies students, but if you can't see the general value of Lacan to contemporary metaphysics (or even see the value of the extension of post-analytical metaphysics) then, well, fuck off out of my subject, basically (and I say this as a non-psychoanalyst).

Incidentally, the most lucid Derrida I've read was making that same point.

1. no matter how much jargon the dentist can spew, what matters is if he/she can fix your teeth or not, and no amount of sophistry can cover the results (pain, or its end). technical terms have their place, of course, in research, and technical papers, but they are not ends in themselves, except in humanities academic departments-- "let's talk obscurely and get tenure"

2. it IS the subject's problem, as the funding cuts demonstrate-- and i'm not saying appeal, i'm saying relevance. accounting is highly unappealing, yet very relevant. i detest neocon ideologues, but they have been relevant (unfortunately). marx has been relevant for over a century. plato and aristotle for a couple of millennia. lacan gave birth to a school of psychiatry that has you sitting there talking to yourself while the shrink watches in silence. a friend of mine went to one for 12 years. the first time the shrink opened her mouth was when the patient informed her she would no longer attend her sessions. the shrink said it was not a good idea. my friend told her to fuck off. 12 fucking years of talking to a wall-- fucking hilarious. i guess it makes for good absurdist comedy.




i'm not saying there's no room in the world for philosophy-- on the contrary, there should be more philosophy in everyday life, everyone should at least get a primer on the subject-- but whatever ideas of value are being produced these days get obscured by the tons of muck churned by worthless, clueless epigons-- parasytes who have actually taken over the system and taught their students to parrot little fragments of critical theory as if it was the highest dogma. truly pathetic, when you consider that the "critical" part is removed once the names of the grand ayatollahs are dropped-- oh, foucault said-- well you can't argue with that (especially because people don't read foucault, and the reason they don't is that they aren't provided the tools to actually comprehend it. so they parrot, to look clever, and get away with it)


...


academics should write and publish a lot less. demonrail already explained why the system is so fucked up so i won't bother with it. i'd rather someone wait 20 years to write a good book than churn crap articles every trimester. the humanities need more naturalists and less theorists. you know, someone who knows their subject like the back of their hand without having to come up with some bullcaca "theory" about it every time they open their mouth. my best literature teachers have been, of course, the writers-- they can't theorize for shit (and who cares?) but they know every little detail, the life and times of the authors and how the language comes together and who everyone was and you can sit in that classroom for 4 hours and you don't want it to ever end.

have you ever read auerbach's mimesis? it's a fucking beautiful book, based on some silly premise (that the evolution of literature follows a hegelian dialectic)--- but what deliciousness-- the guy wrote it while in exile during world war 2. he was in turkey or egypt or somewhere, i forget. he had no specialized journals, no colleagues (he was a philologist), only his memory and obviously some access to books, and he wrote one of the loveliest treatises on literature ever written. and it's fucking crystal clear.

and you know why it's so good? because he fucking read what he was writing about. so even if he's wrong at times, or if you don't agree with his premise, he's relevant to people who love to read literature and want to understand better what the fuck is going on whey they read something.





you can see it? then please explain it.

My tutor at University talked in academic speak constantly (he was the only one) and when I spoke to him I couldn't get Basil Fawlty saying "Why don't you talk properly" out of my mind.

As for the dentist argument, do you mean a dentist talking to another dentist? Because if my dentist spoke to me in technical jargon I'd be tempted to say "Why don't you talk properly".

i couldn't believe that, so i did a little search, and the name of a "prospect" magazine keeps coming up. i've never read it. so i have no opinion on it, but supposedly they have that function...

what about the times literary supplement? no good?

There's really not much to get. Fissure with reality. It's a return to the Cartesian cogito with a destabilised (but by no means absent or irrelevant) empirical truth. It's a logocentric theory that's oriented around contingency. I can't think of anyone who's produced a more workable, or plain metaphysics

Also, Lacan is all over film, as Zizeck has been diligently pointing out for some 30 years. Film is essential to popular culture. Hugely relevant to a very large part of most people's lives.

I get what you're saying about 'relevance', but it really isn't difficult to argue for Lacan, Derrida, Foucault, Butler or whoever's relevance. None of these people are particularly obscurantists, they just approach the world in a manner distinct from the norm (/normative) that makes better sense of it than the colonial mindset for the woolly liberal.

I think everyone's on the same page about the sheer number of fatuous, know-nothing turds within the humanities. But there's often a sense of attack the father for the son's misgivings. 1 Foucault (who I don't like) is worth 1000s of landfill academics. Within that landfill, there's naturally a lot of 'jargon', or technical terms. Those terms are meaningful when applied well.

Thanks! Means a lot!

We do lack public intellectuals but there are a few. There's Dawkins (though he's a scientist, if we're just talking humanities), Simon Schama, David Starkey and AC Grayling pops up on the radio occasionally.

Dawkins is precisely the last sort of public intellectual we need - insensitive, boorish, divisive and arrogant at a time when there should be greater dialogues between disciplines. I'm wouldn't say intellectual cunts don't serve a purpose for society - someone like Zizeck, on the periphery of the popular conscious, is brilliant for antagonising people, inspiring debate - but I can only see Dawkins as a deleterious antagonism to the world, outside of his actual discipline. You can't fix cars with rhetoric.

I've had one like that. On the few occasions I asked him a questions in seminars he just started talking almost nonsensically for about five minutes, and it would be impossible to tell at what point the answer to your question ended and when he started to talk about something else.

Maybe my problem here is just my ignorance of philosophy/critical theory, but what is a "Fissure with reality". And what does it mean to destabilise empirical truth?

I think its because we dont have a culture of vicious debate that cuts beyond the fault of Radio 4 and the editorial pages.

If you look at the US, they have a cable news tradition that creates things like Fox News, MSNBC, as well as a radio tradition with the Rush Limbaughs. Thats an environment thats fertile ground for combative and controversy-ridden discourse. If you ever watch American cable "news" half of it is devoted to how outrageous and reprehensible someone on the opposite side is. In the UK thats the region of the news that satire and parody controls, not "serious journalism"

Not wanting to sound provincial, but this is the UK, and we just dont do things like that, dont you know

Yes, I think you can call him insensitive and boorish but I'm not sure he's arrogant. He has strong opinions which he fights for those opinions. I do think he should widen his range of reading, he could benefit from reading some philosophy(though maybe he would be too arrogant to do that). His attacks on creationism/intelligent design have been necessary though.

I think Zizek is quite charismatic. But when I've see him tv, and the little bits I've read, I've responded first by thinking that I understand what he's getting at. Then, thinking about, I realise I don't. He does inspire debate though.

That's what we need, a culture of vicious debate, though somehow the American style (from the little I've seen) doesn't quite seem like the best way. That's something else I've been disappointed about in uni: the lecturers aren't interested debate, the students aren't interested in debate... everybody's right!!

We're a meek and mild people, generally.

This kind of feeds back into our problem with landfill academics - too many people who aren't asking precisely the question you've just asked, happy to be complicit in their own ignorance. But in that I'd maintain there is sense to be made (this doesn't mean I'm the person to make sense of it, as the following will likely demonstrate).

Fissure with reality - from the mirror stage of children's development, the child learns to identify themselves with the baby in the mirror - the mother says 'c'est toi'. The person in the mirror is a representation of the self, not the self 'itself', and from thereon our ontological notion of 'reality' is always representative, or rather, the 'I' becomes the 'other' of the reflection. I seem to remember Lacan calls this 'irreality'. The 'fissure' is a split, a cardinal break from a sort of 'pure' reality, a consciousness formed merely by existence; from after the mirror phase, reality remains the orientation of our consciousness, and it is reality as classically understood, but it ought to be understood as borne of this split.

'Destabilise empirical truth' - this is again related to Descartes Cogito - the 'proofs' of existence are no longer reified once we recognise the fissure. 'Destabilise' because it no longer has the power it once had; it isn't undermined, however, because there's no escape from the split (except for in hypothetical mirrorless societies). Empirical truth remains truth, but it's a truth within the contingencies of human understanding. That's not to say there's no 'alterior' reality, but that are understanding remains (in non-Lacanian terms) anthropo-centric.

I wouldn't necessary say I agreed with Lacan, I should add.

I agree with the point on creationism/ intelligent design; however, you'll find very few people who actually agree with creationism, in Europe at least. The Vatican officially approved of Darwin around the 1950s (although not without a bit of argey-bargeying).

I say arrogant and insensitive because he extends what religion is when it's bad to cover the whole of religion; he can continue to provide proofs which negate God's existence, and they will remain valid - however, he goes on to absolutely negates the value of a cultural practise (religion) which is abided to by most people on earth. It's intellectual fascism, to my mind. Criticise religion, by all means, say that people are deluded, certainly, but to negate the value of these cultural practises outright... well, when he's got Dawkinsian missions building schools, wells and so on in poor countries (and don't misunderstand me on this - the Christian mission is very different today to the Mission of up to the early-20th century) then he's got a fair point. However, what he actually does is make juvenile threats to arrest the pope, like a whinging teenager.

thats university lecturers mate, youre never going to get a George Orwell teaching you about anything. Theyre sustained by their scientific or academic research, not their teaching. To gain their interest you have to be an obsessive, or at least a trainee obsessive.

I think our politics can be quite vicious, its just that the British tradition is to roll our eyes or laugh dismissively. Especially now the right-left divide doesnt exist any more. The main differences in this election are "How are we going to save money?". Nothing ideological about it.

well... i'd have thought that there would be more since he's so important.


no shit-- i thought parmenides had started all that.




this reminds me of a brazilian song i can't recall the title right now. will post lyrics when i do.

anyway-- in english?


yes but why? your shorthand doesn't really make an argument. i'm asking (in earnest here, though i might not have been above) that you attempt an explanation. pretend we're your students who know nothing here.

also, correct me if i'm wrong, but lacan dealt in psychoanalysis, not metaphysics. can you explain a) what you mean by metaphysics, and b) how psychoanalysis connects to metaphysics, in his case?

also, have you read freud?

oh i found the song. "águas de março" (waters of march). it sounds better in portuguese:

É pau, é pedra,
é o fim do caminho
É um resto de toco,
é um pouco sozinho

i posted the english lyrics, but better now: here's the actual song with english subtitles

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3oNSFQVzNM


---

in my memory, it sounded like a coca-cola commercial. but it's much better.

oh shit, never mind my request for an explanation-- i started posting, then went to get breakfast, came back to finish, but missed your answers to lurker.

forget the above posts (around 11:10 my time)-- i'll reread & post accordingly.

I think he goes too far but I don't know if he completely negates the value of Christian cultural practices. If he does, fair enough.

But, if the Pope was part of some cover up of sexual abuse (I don't know if he was) then yes, he should be arrested. I think Dawkins was the wrong person to say that this should be done. Criticism of sexual becomes just yet another aspect of anti-religion rather than a serious crime.