deconstruction, dysgenics, hegel and stem cells
the audience member crept up to the question mic and said, profoundly, "all men are sisters." zizek paused for a moment. he responded "the only thing i would add is all postmodern men are sisters." and so it went. zizek doesn't really come out punching at postmoderns--he's too aloof for that and he'd rather us spend time listening to HIS theories. but, more and more, i'm realizing that he's accusing them of something pretty harsh. he called bush a symptom of the left. and when the idealistic girl asked him about "getting rid of the bush regime" he cautioned her against neglecting what got bush there in the first place.
his characterization of ideology feels correct. and this is old news, but worth recapitulating. belief, in the old sense, almost subsumed it's 'object/ive' in the ritual itself. for example, one takes communion so that they don't have to go home and worry about god or their personal relationship with him. it's the new post-enlightenment believer that has to bother with that. after these new kinds of believers say that "organized religion" is all meaningless ritual, that the institution is corrupt and that god is an abstract being, who is too complex to apprehend, but who they nonetheless believe in or 'hold the option open'--after they say all that, they are the ones left to really worry about god. zizek says he's asked most of the big po-mo guys and gals (and it would be fun to speculate who, but he assures us they are the 'really big names') whether or not they are really atheists. because they all claim to be. but he's right to ask them, precisely how can you believe in the materialist worldview? if the world is a text, it's fluid, socially/linguistically constructed, relative, perspectival, multiplistic, etc. etc.--how? he says they tend to give dodgy answers that, in effect, show the direct correlation i have long speculated--they are in league with the new mysterians. though new mysterians are just obstinant. they say, "the brain and consciousness is simply a mystery and we still believe in mind-stuff." postmoderns are more dangerous. they are new mystics, basically. mystical intellectuals, giving elaborate schematics equivalent to the astrologers of centuries ago. they are updated, pseudosense and pseudoscience. and this in itself is dangerous. but it's true, everything's inverted...
and here is why i'm glad i took the course in bataille. on the back of his book 'inner experience' somebody writes: "whereas bataille may be the acknowledged forefather of such figures as barthes, foucault and derrida, this centrality is often not appreciated by american admirers of the latter." bataille is a post-god religious thinker. nobody has any problems saying this. he uses all kinds of terms: sacred, ritual, ecstasy, blah blah. his writing is utterly symptomatic and absolute nonsense. freud told the story of the woman whose husband wasn't able to deflower her on their wedding night. this infuriated her and embarrased her but she couldn't yell at her husband. so, to SUBSTITUTE in her brain for the missed experience, she would knock the RED wine over on the WHITE tablecloth everyday and then scream at her maid as if it had been the maid's fault. such is the case with bataille. after removing god from the picture, he simply re-represents the whole framework. the positive content of what is hoped for is removed, acknowledged to be gone. but the desire to replace it with something resembling it is filled in with the most elaborate, nonsensical negative content. and i see much of the same with the antirationality of post-structuralism and critical theory. and from there we get rational anti-rationality. like bataille's anti god god. like his pages and pages of non-knowledge. like david kilpatrick introducing his project as an avoidance of pursuing discursive knowledge and the proceeding to read us his 20 minute long paper on bataille discussing 'ontotheological' things. umm, hasn't this stuff started to strike anybody as just humorous yet? hi, my name was jaques derrida. i studied husserlian phenomenology and all kinds of philosophy for years and years. but there is no truth, and rationality is a suspect. hmmm....can't anybody in the academy muster even a snicker?
well, the answer is, they have. and people like derrida and barthes are rightly taught in literature courses and applied to literary theory. but they're basic project disseminated just like so many other larger philosophical movements do, gradually, gradually, into the public consciousness. now everybody's pretty po-mo, whther they know it or not. we don't generalize, we don't stereotype, we don't condemn anybody for anything because it's their perspective and it matters. in other words, we don't make judgments. ah, but we do--just like postmoderns suspiciously do. because we do judge people whenever they stereotype, generalize, condemn soembody's perspective, because it's culturally specific or whatever. and this kind of thinking is most well assimilated into the left and into counterculture which mostly leans toward the left. i always wondered why left-wingers seemd so much more like a sect, so much more dogmatic and zealous.
just look at adult swim. there is nothing in it resembling wit. non-sequitrs are the rule of the day. we laugh helplessly at the disjunctions in knowledge, we don't craft sly plays on words and situations. we'd have to believe in them too much to do that. just like we'd have to believe in judgment calls in order to do anything resembling a political act. (a million people standing in the middle of the street is no kind of political act--it's cowardly narcissism and bush was right to ignore them). post-structuralists wanted to do something humane by pointing out the violence of normalization, generalization, final judgments, etc. but if you are going to get rid of a fascist, you better be ready to do a couple of things. number one is judge him/her. number two is to make a final judgment that you're right, because you better be if you're gonna start getting bloody. generalization and stereotyping are basic ways of knowing the world. the world of radical subjectivity is a world of shizophrenia. so is bataille's world of ecstasy. and, to turn liang on his head, i'm am going to be headstrong in saying that accepting a culture of shizophrenia is not something i'm particularly interested in. neurosis is far better...
culture itself is a matter of exclusions and normalizing. postmoderns are, actually interested in the same thing. certain things they want to prune, certain things they want to flourish. they aren't interested in a world full of genocide, last i checked. but they're interested in not being able to be accused of eugenics. but cultural criticism and politics could be considered memetic eugenics (the problem here is that there is no word for cultural eugenics--eugenics refers to genetics and memetics refers to selective processes among replicating cultural information)--it's just eugenics of intercultural inheritance mediated by reason!! now, this isn't an argument for censorship and fascism. quite the contrary--if one follows this darwinian track, the algorithms of selection operate best in conditions of strong diversity. creating healthy culture involves pruning unhealthy bits. it is intelligent selection on our part. so the way to do that is not a retreat from culture as that which excludes, judges, etc. it is simply to make better judgments. culture, as dennett says, is a good deal. i'm into it. so are they, but they've driven a wedge in-between what they want and how they could get it.
the good news is, it shouldn't be such a hard revolution to shake. it shouldn't be too difficult because the people who have been up to this are rational, intelligent people. maybe they think that, in the ritual of being rational--writing, speaking, etc, they don't have to worry about the content. but zizek's point was not to laud this kind of ideology--to the contrary, he was talking about real acts and facts, if you wanna fight. the real task is to get people on the left talking sense again. conservatives are exciting to people because they talk sense. their arguments just aren't very sound. i think that, in the end, the leftist argument is simply more sound. people need to make it. show that it's BETTER. believe in it.
the good news for the future, contrary to scient-o-phobes, is that we are entering a future where selection, a previously ignorant process, is becoming intelligent. memetic selection grows as intelligence and information multiplies (and is mutated by disinformation, hence the pressing importance of left critiques of media control). genetic selection now has certain kinds of scientific foresight in it's favor. far from being afraid of this, we should welcome it. because, whereas we tend to think of nature as having the ultimate intelligence in design (let's not meddle, man couldn't possibly know), it actually has none whatsoever. to be at it's mercy is not a situation i would work to maintain. such a phobic condition is christian science with a secular face--although i'm sure much of the phobia regarding this major step comes from people who believe that nature has been intelligently designed. in fact, last year in my 'evil in the 20th century class, a position much like this was advanced. let nature take it's course. very strange.
but here, i will take up with the critics of the relationship of science with certain kinds of power (not of science itself). in light of this, critiques of power relations in present-day capitalist conditions is of the utmost importance. the benefits of this, we can all too easily see, creating a new kind of class division--and very quickly becoming a morlock and eloi society. it already exists, to a degree, because medicine is little other than a more crude form of this intelligent selection. genetics just makes it a more precise science. as medicine exists today, critics of science should remember that they are fundamentally critics of capitalism and class stratification. the rich have better health care and higher life-expectancy, can afford surgeries and medicines. when genetics, as it surely will, starts making the better designed human, this division will be frightening. so there is reason to panic and reason for excitement. most of all, there is reason to make clear the distinction between critquing science and critiquing power relations and economics. because science offer hope for a better world, a fitter life, while gross imbalances of power threaten to change the species altogether.
hegel lives very much with us today. the last man? maybe. but the master and slave relationship is one to learn from. the masters aren't creative--and this bodes terribly for the masters themselves if they decide to advance themselves into another phylum. in this future, creativity creates diversity, bio and memetic. the masters, as a rule, still hock the creativity of the slaves. one can almost imagine a new historical materialism. elite capitlaists are able to modify themselves into a more fit, basically new species. but power gives them this, not creativity. they increase pressure on the slave and the slave's diversity in the field of selection eventually wins out over strength. but what a dark period this could all be. it doesn't have to be. a recuperation of the relationship between science and the left is very much in order.
his characterization of ideology feels correct. and this is old news, but worth recapitulating. belief, in the old sense, almost subsumed it's 'object/ive' in the ritual itself. for example, one takes communion so that they don't have to go home and worry about god or their personal relationship with him. it's the new post-enlightenment believer that has to bother with that. after these new kinds of believers say that "organized religion" is all meaningless ritual, that the institution is corrupt and that god is an abstract being, who is too complex to apprehend, but who they nonetheless believe in or 'hold the option open'--after they say all that, they are the ones left to really worry about god. zizek says he's asked most of the big po-mo guys and gals (and it would be fun to speculate who, but he assures us they are the 'really big names') whether or not they are really atheists. because they all claim to be. but he's right to ask them, precisely how can you believe in the materialist worldview? if the world is a text, it's fluid, socially/linguistically constructed, relative, perspectival, multiplistic, etc. etc.--how? he says they tend to give dodgy answers that, in effect, show the direct correlation i have long speculated--they are in league with the new mysterians. though new mysterians are just obstinant. they say, "the brain and consciousness is simply a mystery and we still believe in mind-stuff." postmoderns are more dangerous. they are new mystics, basically. mystical intellectuals, giving elaborate schematics equivalent to the astrologers of centuries ago. they are updated, pseudosense and pseudoscience. and this in itself is dangerous. but it's true, everything's inverted...
and here is why i'm glad i took the course in bataille. on the back of his book 'inner experience' somebody writes: "whereas bataille may be the acknowledged forefather of such figures as barthes, foucault and derrida, this centrality is often not appreciated by american admirers of the latter." bataille is a post-god religious thinker. nobody has any problems saying this. he uses all kinds of terms: sacred, ritual, ecstasy, blah blah. his writing is utterly symptomatic and absolute nonsense. freud told the story of the woman whose husband wasn't able to deflower her on their wedding night. this infuriated her and embarrased her but she couldn't yell at her husband. so, to SUBSTITUTE in her brain for the missed experience, she would knock the RED wine over on the WHITE tablecloth everyday and then scream at her maid as if it had been the maid's fault. such is the case with bataille. after removing god from the picture, he simply re-represents the whole framework. the positive content of what is hoped for is removed, acknowledged to be gone. but the desire to replace it with something resembling it is filled in with the most elaborate, nonsensical negative content. and i see much of the same with the antirationality of post-structuralism and critical theory. and from there we get rational anti-rationality. like bataille's anti god god. like his pages and pages of non-knowledge. like david kilpatrick introducing his project as an avoidance of pursuing discursive knowledge and the proceeding to read us his 20 minute long paper on bataille discussing 'ontotheological' things. umm, hasn't this stuff started to strike anybody as just humorous yet? hi, my name was jaques derrida. i studied husserlian phenomenology and all kinds of philosophy for years and years. but there is no truth, and rationality is a suspect. hmmm....can't anybody in the academy muster even a snicker?
well, the answer is, they have. and people like derrida and barthes are rightly taught in literature courses and applied to literary theory. but they're basic project disseminated just like so many other larger philosophical movements do, gradually, gradually, into the public consciousness. now everybody's pretty po-mo, whther they know it or not. we don't generalize, we don't stereotype, we don't condemn anybody for anything because it's their perspective and it matters. in other words, we don't make judgments. ah, but we do--just like postmoderns suspiciously do. because we do judge people whenever they stereotype, generalize, condemn soembody's perspective, because it's culturally specific or whatever. and this kind of thinking is most well assimilated into the left and into counterculture which mostly leans toward the left. i always wondered why left-wingers seemd so much more like a sect, so much more dogmatic and zealous.
just look at adult swim. there is nothing in it resembling wit. non-sequitrs are the rule of the day. we laugh helplessly at the disjunctions in knowledge, we don't craft sly plays on words and situations. we'd have to believe in them too much to do that. just like we'd have to believe in judgment calls in order to do anything resembling a political act. (a million people standing in the middle of the street is no kind of political act--it's cowardly narcissism and bush was right to ignore them). post-structuralists wanted to do something humane by pointing out the violence of normalization, generalization, final judgments, etc. but if you are going to get rid of a fascist, you better be ready to do a couple of things. number one is judge him/her. number two is to make a final judgment that you're right, because you better be if you're gonna start getting bloody. generalization and stereotyping are basic ways of knowing the world. the world of radical subjectivity is a world of shizophrenia. so is bataille's world of ecstasy. and, to turn liang on his head, i'm am going to be headstrong in saying that accepting a culture of shizophrenia is not something i'm particularly interested in. neurosis is far better...
culture itself is a matter of exclusions and normalizing. postmoderns are, actually interested in the same thing. certain things they want to prune, certain things they want to flourish. they aren't interested in a world full of genocide, last i checked. but they're interested in not being able to be accused of eugenics. but cultural criticism and politics could be considered memetic eugenics (the problem here is that there is no word for cultural eugenics--eugenics refers to genetics and memetics refers to selective processes among replicating cultural information)--it's just eugenics of intercultural inheritance mediated by reason!! now, this isn't an argument for censorship and fascism. quite the contrary--if one follows this darwinian track, the algorithms of selection operate best in conditions of strong diversity. creating healthy culture involves pruning unhealthy bits. it is intelligent selection on our part. so the way to do that is not a retreat from culture as that which excludes, judges, etc. it is simply to make better judgments. culture, as dennett says, is a good deal. i'm into it. so are they, but they've driven a wedge in-between what they want and how they could get it.
the good news is, it shouldn't be such a hard revolution to shake. it shouldn't be too difficult because the people who have been up to this are rational, intelligent people. maybe they think that, in the ritual of being rational--writing, speaking, etc, they don't have to worry about the content. but zizek's point was not to laud this kind of ideology--to the contrary, he was talking about real acts and facts, if you wanna fight. the real task is to get people on the left talking sense again. conservatives are exciting to people because they talk sense. their arguments just aren't very sound. i think that, in the end, the leftist argument is simply more sound. people need to make it. show that it's BETTER. believe in it.
the good news for the future, contrary to scient-o-phobes, is that we are entering a future where selection, a previously ignorant process, is becoming intelligent. memetic selection grows as intelligence and information multiplies (and is mutated by disinformation, hence the pressing importance of left critiques of media control). genetic selection now has certain kinds of scientific foresight in it's favor. far from being afraid of this, we should welcome it. because, whereas we tend to think of nature as having the ultimate intelligence in design (let's not meddle, man couldn't possibly know), it actually has none whatsoever. to be at it's mercy is not a situation i would work to maintain. such a phobic condition is christian science with a secular face--although i'm sure much of the phobia regarding this major step comes from people who believe that nature has been intelligently designed. in fact, last year in my 'evil in the 20th century class, a position much like this was advanced. let nature take it's course. very strange.
but here, i will take up with the critics of the relationship of science with certain kinds of power (not of science itself). in light of this, critiques of power relations in present-day capitalist conditions is of the utmost importance. the benefits of this, we can all too easily see, creating a new kind of class division--and very quickly becoming a morlock and eloi society. it already exists, to a degree, because medicine is little other than a more crude form of this intelligent selection. genetics just makes it a more precise science. as medicine exists today, critics of science should remember that they are fundamentally critics of capitalism and class stratification. the rich have better health care and higher life-expectancy, can afford surgeries and medicines. when genetics, as it surely will, starts making the better designed human, this division will be frightening. so there is reason to panic and reason for excitement. most of all, there is reason to make clear the distinction between critquing science and critiquing power relations and economics. because science offer hope for a better world, a fitter life, while gross imbalances of power threaten to change the species altogether.
hegel lives very much with us today. the last man? maybe. but the master and slave relationship is one to learn from. the masters aren't creative--and this bodes terribly for the masters themselves if they decide to advance themselves into another phylum. in this future, creativity creates diversity, bio and memetic. the masters, as a rule, still hock the creativity of the slaves. one can almost imagine a new historical materialism. elite capitlaists are able to modify themselves into a more fit, basically new species. but power gives them this, not creativity. they increase pressure on the slave and the slave's diversity in the field of selection eventually wins out over strength. but what a dark period this could all be. it doesn't have to be. a recuperation of the relationship between science and the left is very much in order.