Phenomenomenomenology (zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzboring)

That said, I do feel bad for having failed at Hegel. I'm gonna try again some time.

That's probably the same reason I give up on Sartre, I just can't be bothered, and Derrida, and most of Deleuze's books. 2 pages max, and then you're out.

Critical theory on the other hand.

If you want a Phenomenology book, then the phenomenology of perception by Merleau-Ponty is grand, although I couldn't tell you where it fits in with other phenomenologists or the such like. And I started that Hegel book, reached half the way through the introduction, and went in to hospital*

I'd be prepared to bet that any half-way decent anarchist writer makes more sense than most major philosophers and is better written.

* this may be just a coincidence

reading Reason and Revolution by Marcuse BEFORE reading the phenomenology really helps. Then while you're reading use Hippolyt's Genesis and Structure along side it. Then read Lukacs the Young Hegel. Oh and being familar with Fichte, Schelling, and Kant can't hurt. Read it all the way through. You're not supposed to understand everything. He tells you that inthe introduction, you have to understand the movement as a whole first. So Read it all the way through, Then go back and read it again. Then read it with the hippolyte book. Then read it one last time. There, you're done. Now you can be pretentious.

Heidegger? NOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooooo!

Mon Adorno! Stick it to the Nazi bampot!

reading through Kojeve is the worst possible idea EVER.

Oh.

Oh and Chris I dont disagree with you but to take Marx. When I first read Marx I tried to understand him and read him really slowly. But I didn't get him. The trouble is that I don't think there is anything to get. You read a text as you read a text. There is no right or wrong way.

Or rather the only right way to read a text is for yourself, to give food for thought and to help you think.

I really believe in reading primary sources and original texts and not exclusively commentaries. But I dont think there is a through meaning behind a text that can be accessed by impartial reading devoid of the influence of other commentaries.

And I know you're not saying this but I've heard to many people do the whole "oh you haven't read the primary text therefore you're opinion isn't worthy of my engagement" thing. And it pisses me off cos its really elitist. Although i know you're not saying this.

edit: revol got there first.

IME I am far too dense to read just primary sources, and find them useful to get enough confidence to actually tackle the workk, to some extent. I think saying you can't get enough out of them to apply any ideas to life, think about in general, is a misnomer(?). Its better than nothing is what I mean.

Fuck man, i hope that pretentious pomo crap you spouted is just for laughs. Damn, guess not...

Fuck no. It takes me hours of conversation to sort stuff out, I can't type it out. It would be hard if you took a paragraph, but it would be much better as a place to start. One of the advantages of close reading and staying to the text is that it helps to stifle the over-hasty generalizations so common in intellectually untrained or lazy discussions. Left groups are one long session of such over-hasty generalizations. So I'm making one last stab here...

Revol:

“A) nothing is there that some other cunt hasn't teased out.”

Horseshit. You may as well claim that no one has ever said anything new and go back to Platonic forms. Not to mention that the connections someone makes are as important as any isolated idea. You show me one other text that achieves what Capital does, if you are serious, btw. What is the replacement for that?

“B) you can take a wide variety of sources on them, meaning that when you do engage with them you are aware of the issues and read it critically.”

Thanks Revol, I already say that in my little article on getting more out of reading. So some things have been teased out by some cunt before.

“C) texts are there to be looted and vandalised, who cares what the cunt was trying to say, we can never know, nor is it that important, whats important is the conceptual tools you can take from it, how it gets you thinking about things from different angles.”

Pomo, irrationalist, and subjective in every way. Debord was correct in our need to plagiarize, to be as close to the text as possible. Once you open the way to that “we can never know” you open the way to limitless “equally valid” interpretations and you can’t keep out Stalin anymore than you can keep out Pannekoek.

Also, I hate the metaphor of ‘tools.’ It is the opposite of Hegel and Marx’s method and part of what distinguishes it from bourgeois thought, with its focus on “method” abstracted from content (and therefore its fascination with formal logic.) It is treating culture like a department store and ideas as discreet commodities you can mix and match to make your intellectual Ikea dream home.

“D) Trying to read something like Hegel without a basic understanding of what he's trying to get at would be akin to walking into the Amazon and seeinh how you get on, it's crazy, you need some form of structure to engage a text from, i'm guessing most of us would be using Marx as that base.”

Well this is the old “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” The importance of a good general education cannot be sniffed at. At the same time, those things we learn that no formal education can grant (and which it may even stifle) come into play. Most of these people who are worth reading had more than a passing acquaintance with the intellectual history of what they were reading. It is hard to read Hegel without a knowledge of classical Greek, Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment philosophy, with theology, with classical political economy because Hegel formed himself in and against these ideas as much as in and against his world. My point was that for most of us without that training and background, and that is most of us, you can’t try and read all of the sources that inform them and you can’t hope to pick out all of the influences unless you intend to become a Hegel scholar. You therefore have to read closely, use secondary sources carefully, and bring your own experiences into the reading, which none of you have talked about. When I read Hegel, I bring in my accumulated personal experiences and knowledge, regardless of its immediate connection to the text.

________________________

In general, its not that secondary sources aren't useful, but they have to be handled as critically as the text they comment on. And frankly, there is something being said with a certain intent. I don't buy the relativist argument re: truth and meaning at all. There are better and worse ways to understand, say, Marx, even if there is no one. Some are productive and others are not. Otherwise, how would it be possible ot claim that Stalin or Mao or whoever knows balls about what Marx was saying? Not that they care because its just a means to an end, but I absolutely disagree that you can read Open marxism and Aufheben and World Revolution and Engels and Lenin and somehow get Marx. I don't buy, its pomo hosrseshit.

The other problem with commentaries is that if you are looking to them for knowledge about what you don’t know, how do you know when they are wrong? Again, short of becoming a scholar, you have to trust the relationship between a close reading and your own experience and some good people to read with more than secondary texts and commentaries. Secondary texts don’t replace the patience and suffering of intellectual discipline.

Also, as I apparently less than clearly stated, while Adorno is a great way to get a better understanding of Marx, Adorno is worth reading in his own right. You learn more about Marx reading Adorno for Adorno than as a commentary. Of course, Adorno or Zizek or Debord or Lukacs will illuminate certain things for us that maybe we had never considered before, about Marx or Hegel or Weber or whoever. But I don’t read them for that, I read them because they illuminate a lot of things, they bring something to my life, to my politics.

I also don't prescribe one way to get at what Marx was about or Hegel or Descartes or Bakunin. I’m talking about how to use and relate to secondary sources and commentaries, not whether or not to use them. Reading other people, including people you don't even necessarily like, can be informative and insightful, but with no grasp of the author or text under discussion, you don't have any way to sort bullshit from sophistication, and it gets worse as the work is more sophisticated and less crude. If you read someone interesting, it should inspire you to seek other people's commentary, but those things have to be dealt with absolute skepticism, on the very grounds you claim: by definition they claim to understand the meaning. Why would they fight over it otherwise?

Lenin, Mao, Pannekoek, Bakunin, Ernest Mandel, Ayn Rand, Slavoj Zizek, World Revolution, your high school history text, etc are all valid in your view because its all about what Marx meant 'for them'. The text itself has no intent or its intent is irrelevant, right?

Reading an author directly is not an antidote, because there is no antidote. We read someone through ourselves, not just our politics or our philosophy but also all of the unconscious history we are. That's one reason why reading with other people is a good thing. But it is exactly that that means there is no replacement for the work of reading someone directly.

You say my approach is elitist. I say the other way around, pretending that the Cliff Notes and various acolytes are the kitsch approach to culture and ideas, which entirely dominates the Left, even more than it dominates academia.

Well that should piss everyone off….

Chris

hmmm did i say you shouldn't read the primary sources, what i'm saying is that everything is in itself a kind of secondary source, Marx on Hegel, Cleaver on Marx, Adorno on Marx, Debord on the frankfurt school and Lukacs.

When I read Marx, I am assuming so many things about other authors, I have to take these as granted unless i want to go fucking mental. I have read Marx as a primary text, in particular his early stuff, and have found them very very illuminating, my readings of them have backed up my disgust for leninism etc, but I didn't approach MArx as a tabla rosa, I came with an agenda, a subjective viewpoint, and so I interpreted him within this schema. If i had came from another viewpoint I'm sure I would have found stuff to reinforce such a viewpoint. And this is because Marxs texts are extremely unstable, they contain contradictions, contradictions Marx had in his own head, one can find passages in the German Ideology that would give birth to the crudest theories of the subject/object relationship, and yet there is also a deeply humanist streak, one which which has great relevance to existentialism, and which would choke on the idea that tools make men, rather than men making tools.

When we are approaching Marx we come to him through a secondary source, anyway, unless we lived on the moon, we could not help but approach him with a viewpoint, we interpret Marx in light of our own culture, the words marx use have not stayed the same, they convey different meanings to us, even if only in emphasis rather than qualitive. We can dream of finding out what "marx really meant", and it can be an interesting game, but ultimately we can never know, we can have a fair clue, but so what. I mean I don't need to know exactly what Marx thought, I want to see what knowledge his wiritings can give me, how they can link ideas in my head, give concreteness to the fuzzy thoughts and inklings I haven't fully developed.

Which gets to my point, even the author doesn't fully have the correct interpreatation of their writings. Not cause they are just automons to a "structure" transmitting signs but rather because the thoughts we have and aim to get across are not even stable in our own heads, they are always contested, not just between subjects but within subjects. We don't have some special acess that allows us to always know what we are aiming at, it isn't just that words fail us, but rather the thoughts themselves can be unreliable. I mean most of the time, this doesn't really matter, we are able to communicate. Which is why i get pissed off at some "post structuralists" and Foucaudians engaging in fucking banal deconstructions of pasta preparation or some other shite that justifies another research grant. I'm sorry I don't want to know the micro politics of pet ownership!

But in terms of analysising texts, I think it's important to understand that there is no "correct" interpretation, there are arguably "better" interpretations, more useful ones, and even ones which that are closer to what the author meant, but unfortunately, even the author doesn't have a skeleton key to their writings. This is not of course to argue that anything goes, that Stalin should be allowed to bastardise Marxs thought without contest, but thats exactly what it is a contest, a struggle, with changing boundaries. What we would have argued as the best interpreatation of marx in 1904 would be quite a distance from what we would see now, of course now we are here the interpretation appears "as always there", but it wasn't it is the product of history and subjects, the text is as much written by us as by the author, because without the reader, the text is nothing, it may as well be gibberish. All this is not to say the author is unimportant, they are, because to overegg reader reponse is to deny the subjectivity of the author and gives us a world of contemplation rather than of activity.

I don't think i'm postmodern, because whilst I do not believe in "Truth" as an eternal object or form, but rather as a product, a process of struggle, that is never fully formed, I still do not deny that things can be "true". I just find more hope and inspiration in the fact the truth is something we make and is open to contestion. I mean I still accept the existance of black versus white depsite the fact their is no clear cut off point, i just recognise that it is up to us to debate the boundaries.

Anyway this is rambling and probably not on the point, but I just wanted to make clear i'm not against the reading of primary sources at all. Infact maybe it's better to view secondary sources as primary sources of their own, I mean is Marxs Critique of Hegel Philosophy of the Right, a primary source or a secondary source on Hegel?

Of course maybe youse are talking of secondary sources as in "introducing Marx" or some other balls, in which case they generally are utter balls in that they ironically seek to give the "true" interpretation, and brush over debates about the primary text.

yeah my first post was abit less nuanced.

but anyway i still owe you a cocking for claiming I hadn't read any Marx.

And i found capital so much easier to grasp because I approached Marx with a vaguely humanist libertarian perspective, from reading Marx's earlier stuff on alienation and also from reading other peoples development of this concept.

I don't think i'm some genuis who would have been able do what Kautsky, Engels and Lenin failed to do in their readings of capital, but rather my past readings of marx and my own experiances allowed me to interact with the text much more critically, to understand that the examples he gives and the circuits of production and circulation are "idealised", that he is projecting a frozen capital, one that must suspend the subjective interactions, like a photo.

Therefore I think it's vital to have some secondary sources before approaching Marx and ultimately I don't think any of us here could approach Marx without secondary sources.

I don't get what you mean about me reading him as a philospher?

I accept that what interests me most is arguments about the subject and struture, but i think these are inherently political, they are at the root of politics.

If you mean I don't read capital as economics, your right, economics is the shadow cast by social relations.

yeah i'm not denying this at all, but what i'm interested in is what gives birth to these "laws" and structures, and for me that means looking at the interactions of subjects, classes. I'm not arguing that the subjects are somehow free to just waltz away from the "spectres" they have summoned, that if we all just fuck off and live in a squat or just kick it hard enough the walls will break.