Hyperlinked Theory Bibliography!

jaybob

Member
um, sorry don't know how to do the quote boxes, but xpost

"Whilst I agree with you about theoretical fanaticism, this is just anti-intellectual bollocks. The reason people talk in the 'riddled language' is that the stuff they're talking about is difficult and requires a certain amount of training and discipline to engage with properly. Do you whine about chemists talking about stuff you don't understand? What about mathemeticians with their equations it takes years to master; are they deliberately excluding you with their secret codes?"

Hmm, i still would single out theory as an area in which vagary, of the the emperor's new clothes kind, is positively encouraged. If not the book, then the whole debate around Sokal etc's Intellectual Impostures (which exposed precisley the lack of "training and discipline" betrayed by a huge amount of contemporary theory, particularly that which appropriated scientific terminology) see http://www.nous.org.uk/Sokal.html

So you learnt French to read Deleuze. I think that says quite a lot about the outlook of the would-be theoretician. Perhaps learning French to experience the culture, the literature or the people would provide you with a more rounded outlook. I am not being anti-intellectual by arguing that devoting your life to a small, entirely abstract area of academically constructed theoretical debate might not be particularly interesting to anyone other than the small clique you would surround yourself with as a result.

Chemists make drugs that are used in hospitals. Mathemeticians work with equations which feed into technology that improves people's everday lives. Like it or not, there is not an equivalent in the case of the Deleuzian academic.

I'm all for the idea of the public intellectual; a figure who positively engages, criticises and interrogates contemporary society. People like Foucault or Said who were prepared to write for a wider audience without the need to constantly coin mystifying neologisms or resort to hiding behind secondarily received terminology. But the onanistic k-wank that's being spawned around here are ideas which scarcely ever manage to transcend the egos of those that formed them.
 

Rambler

Awanturnik
jaybob said:
Mathemeticians work with equations which feed into technology that improves people's everday lives.

It's not as simple as that. For about 200 years, between the Napoleonic wars (when leading mathematicians were all employed to work for the miltary, on ballistics, etc.), and about 20 years ago when the security applications of advanced maths for the internet suddenly became apparent, a great deal of high level maths was pure theory, practiced entirely for its own sake, and for the sake of advancing knowledge and learning. The Gottingen school of maths, which ran until the Second World War and was the world leading centre in the discipline, was pure, cliquey theory, written according to a rigorous set of codes that only a tiny proportion of people could understand. No Gottingen mathematician was working because he could see a practical application to his work, yet each of us on this board is benefitting right now from that work. What was discovered then only became of international importance decades later. While I agree that lit theory and philosophy probably don't have the same tangible 'value' as drugs, bridges, security protocols and the like, your own examples show how difficult it is to predict to what high-end theory of any sort might be put.

Public intellectuals, who turn their work to something more practical, such as Foucault's writings on madness, say, may seem more useful, and thus more valuable, but, the whole nature of intellectual exploration is that some things fail, some things succeed. All new research is valid; Foucault wouldn't have got anywhere without some pretty sturdy 'pure' theory opening the doors before him.

And anyway, if we're going to dismiss anything from the world that has no tangible value, aren't we venturing down a particularly dull utilitarian path with no novels, poems, music, drama or art to light the way?
 

Grievous Angel

Beast of Burden
jaybob said:
So you learnt French to read Deleuze. I think that says quite a lot about the outlook of the would-be theoretician. ... But the onanistic k-wank that's being spawned around here are ideas which scarcely ever manage to transcend the egos of those that formed them.

FFS stop whining, if you don't like the ideas discussed and the links being posted then stick something better in instead of this mindless carping.

Go on -- get on with it.

Now.

Or be forever condemned as being full of piss and wind.
 

johneffay

Well-known member
jaybob said:
So you learnt French to read Deleuze. I think that says quite a lot about the outlook of the would-be theoretician.

Oh yes, that's right son. The fact that I can read French only gives me access to Deleuze and not all the other wonders of the French language. My point is that, according to you, anything that allows some people to understand things that others don't is a 'secret code'.

jaybob said:
Chemists make drugs that are used in hospitals. Mathemeticians work with equations which feed into technology that improves people's everday lives. Like it or not, there is not an equivalent in the case of the Deleuzian academic.

Some chemists make drugs... Some mathematicians feed into technology; many do not. I wonder if everybody who works on, or has worked on, Deleuze (or whatever else takes your fancy) is an academic?

I don't need to defend people who made fools of themselves in the light of Sokal because, as I already mentioned in another thread, they are fools. I wonder why you would want to tar everybody with the same brush?

Here's a link to a Popperian philosopher of science kicking the shit out of Sokal and Bricmont.

Oh yeah, and the only reason you think that Foucault and Said didn't spawn 'mystifying neologisms' is that the neoligisms they spawned have entered common currency (Orientalism anybody?)
 
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&catherine

Well-known member
Regarding onanism and freedom in relation to theory

Rambler said:
Public intellectuals, who turn their work to something more practical, such as Foucault's writings on madness, say, may seem more useful, and thus more valuable, but, the whole nature of intellectual exploration is that some things fail, some things succeed. All new research is valid; Foucault wouldn't have got anywhere without some pretty sturdy 'pure' theory opening the doors before him.
Without wishing to tacitly endorse this whole "if I can't build roads or cure diseases with it, I don't want it" charge levelled against so-called 'obscurantist' philosophy and theory, it is interesting to note that the work of Judith Butler and Michel Foucault both get incorporated into the teaching of Law at a number of universities here in Melbourne. The study of these societal critiques will presumably see some 'practical' effect in the practice of law, even if only manifested in the changed/broadened perspectives of a handful of potential lawyers. In other words, I think there is a sort of 'trickle-down' effect even from the most seemingly abstract philosophy.

This is somewhat ironic, given that Judith Butler was given some sort of smart-arse mock award for 'Worst Academic Writing' a few years ago. In fact, Butler has a few words to say about the sorts of comments that jaybob makes (describing theory as "arcane, riddled language which effectively acts as a secret code between carefully chosen interlocutors") in the Preface to the 1999 edition of Gender Trouble. If you'll excuse the length of the quote, I'd like to include some of her words on the subject:

"... neither grammar nor style are politically neutral ... As Drucilla Cornell, in the tradition of Adorno, reminds me: there is nothing radical about common sense. It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself. But formulations that twist grammer or that implicitly call into question the subject-verb requirements of common sense are clearly irritating for some. They produce more work for their readers, and sometimes their readers are offended by such demands. Are those who are offended making a legitimate request for "plain-speaking" or does their complaint emerge from a consumer expectation of political life? Is there, perhaps, a value to be derived from such experiences of linguistic difficulty? If gender itself is naturalized through grammatical norms, as Monique Wittig has argued, then the alteration of gender at the most fundamental epistemic level will be conducted, in part through contesting the grammar in which gender is given.

The demand for lucidity forgets the ruses that motor the ostensibly "clear" view. Avital Ronell recalls the moment in which Nixon looked into the eyes of the nation and said, "let me make one thing perfectly clear" and then proceeded to lie. What travels under the sign of "clarity," and what would be the price of failing to deploy a certain critical suspicion when the arrival of lucidity is announced? Who devises the protocols of "clarity" and whose interests do they serve? What is foreclosed by the insistence on parochial standards of transparency as requisite for all communication? What does "transparency" keep obscure?"

Which I believe goes along way to stoush those claims that philosophy and/or theory are inherently onanistic.

And anyway, if we're going to dismiss anything from the world that has no tangible value, aren't we venturing down a particularly dull utilitarian path with no novels, poems, music, drama or art to light the way?
Absolutely. The 'useless' / 'useful' binary gets kind of sinister after awhile.

And in response to the Zizek quote included by Infinite Thought:

Zizek said:
the first step in liberation is that you perceive that your situation is unjust. This already is the inner freedom.
The dilemma that I often ponder, is what if 'perceiving your situation to be unjust' is nothing more than a condition of (pathological?) dissatisfaction? What if the disposition to change the world is just an inability to be satisfied, so that even 'after' things have been changed, you're still not content? I know this sort of viewpoint would lend itself undeniably to conservatism, but it does bug me from time to time. (It stems from my reading the Nietzsche piece "Desire for Suffering" in The Gay Science, which can be found here at Desire, Rage, Liberation.) Particularly seeing as though it implies that those who see 'injustices' everywhere are, in truth, simply ill-adjusted to or mistaken about what being part of a human community actually involves :confused:

(On second reading, however, the Nietzsche looks to lend itself to a Spinozist-style liberation from bondage. Perhaps it was only my former idealistic liberal-socialist eighteen year-old self that it scared the pants off ;) )
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
&catherine said:
The dilemma that I often ponder, is what if 'perceiving your situation to be unjust' is nothing more than a condition of (pathological?) dissatisfaction? What if the disposition to change the world is just an inability to be satisfied, so that even 'after' things have been changed, you're still not content? I know this sort of viewpoint would lend itself undeniably to conservatism, but it does bug me from time to time.
A couple of points. First, depending on how you slice and dice it, Socrates did "corrupt" the youth, and true philosophy must always do so. Philosophy is disease, putting minds at un-ease. Philosophy is medicine. All medicine is poison . . . . Philosophy is madness . . . . And so forth ad nauseam . . . . Second, all philosophy in the manner of Rousseau, philosophy that aims at radical revolution, must initiate what is at first a destructive movement -- negation of the existing order. Accordingly, people who are attracted to such philosophy are perhaps often "pathological" in their "condition of dissatisfaction." They're angry and they want to destroy . . . . Yet it's worth saying in their defense that their "dissatisfaction" is clearly not attributable to a simple lack of talent and social recognition, i.e., it's not narrowly subjective. Say what you will about philosophers and top students of philosophy, but they know how to read and write and think, and they've been praised their entire lives for it . . . . Therefore, their "dissatisfaction" must have some validity . . . . Third, as for the dissatisfaction of persons with this peculiar disposition "even 'after' things change," is it not the case that revolutionary moments are not bound to last, that routine politics as usual soon take hold, that the administering of things replaces collective action, etcetera, etcetera -- such that joy is followed by disappointment and, eventually, reemergent dissatisfaction. And should it be that no revolutionary moment has transpired at all, then the "change" has merely been in the nature of gradualist reform -- and why should anyone disposed to radical revolution be satisfied by reform???


That said, it's good to question yourself, your sanity, your motives. Otherwise, your not in conversation with yourself, that is, not thinking dialectically
 
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dominic

Beast of Burden
&catherine said:
It would be a mistake to think that received grammar is the best vehicle for expressing radical views, given the constraints that grammar imposes upon thought, indeed, upon the thinkable itself.

Did Nietzsche not use "received grammar" for expressing his views? Plato? Machiavelli? Rousseau? Or would Butler consider these thinkers "not radical," somehow superificial?

More generally, I would say that when a thinker resorts to "difficult language," he (or she) had better deliver on the promise that the thoughts so expressed are profound . . . .

Kant, Hegel, Heidegger, Foucault -- all very difficult, all deliver the goods

not sure if the same can be said for others . . . . of course, until a person invests the time and effort to read a difficult work, his skepticism is perhaps more in the nature of resentment
 
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mms

sometimes
http://scholar.google.com/

useful this.

thanks for those lynx infinite thought,
i'm a total layman about this kinda stuff but it's good to read it again when i get the time, it's very shaping when you read it as a tool. i think that's what k-punk get's at, he takes a view as a train of discipline and a subject outwards, plenty of people get upset about it but that get's boring, as he's constantly saying it's not personal, but it's being talked about so that's good eh?

i've been wodering recently about the history of club/concert bouncers and private security in general, i wonder how this could fit into some of foucault's stuff, and if anyone knows of any studies of this kinda thing.
 

jaybob

Member
you should only write a history of private security if you do it in medieval french and include the suffix ur-ismicity at the end of every second word. Seriously, it sounds like an interesting project.

Monsieur Effy, you're knowledge of Deleuze doesn't give you the right to call me 'son' and it doesn't lend much grandeur to your position. the term Orientalism wasn't Said's neologism, btw. It was already being used by Napoleon's team of historians and archaeologists when he invaded Egypt in 1798. My point about Said and Foucault was simply that they tried to make their language more generally accessible, perhaps to allow their work to become more public polemic and less fusty, abstracted debate.

I fully support learning for learning's sake and I would never advocate utiliitarianism as a principle in academia. I was simply observing that the particular brand of 'learning' which is being so laxly indulged round these parts is often directionless, masturbatory nonsense.

that's all i'm going to say. feel free to have the last word, son.
 
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