Post structuralist anarchism

Hi

Post of the year.

By the way, you'd better be working class or there is going to be trouble.

Love

LR

i have no life.

that is wonderful.

Human nature is a product of structuralism, Human consciousness requires language qhich is the primary structure which holds us all.

Just because signs produce meaning in relation to each other does not mean that meaning is not stable. For if one sign loses its meaning then all other signs that define themselves in relation to it will lose a part of that.

Signs may seem less stable as they are constantly in negotiation with each other, however as sign a requires sign b to remain sign b in order to remain sign a itself although sign a may seem to question sign b it does not in practise do so as this is too difficult.

As you refer to Lacan then you must agree that Language is the Symbolic Order, as entry into this order is a condition of humanity then human nature is forged within the symbolic order.

Zizek is interesting but he isn't really an academic. He can't use sources, he is shockingly cavalier and inconsistent and deliberately obscure. It may be fun to read if you know a bit about Lacan and sometimes you can have an interesting train of thought but Zizek is really smoke and mirrors designed to hide the fact that there is nothing but a void behind it(although that in itself is fairly lacanian)

yes. however, the Symbolic of course has its inherent point of failure, the Real, which necessitates endless renegotiation and reconstitution of human nature.

heh, if there's one thing i learned from Zizek, it's to pull out the Real when you're in a bind.

yep, it's also what allows him to avoid the complete idiotic relativism of the post modernist swamp.

I also think your dismissal of Chomsky's universal grammar is a tad over egged, Chomsky may let slip some essentialist rehtoric but there is no reason why his theory of language having a basis in a material brain and this materiality being structured in a certain way is essentialist, well anymore than someone saying there are certain structures to the heart.

I mean the brain is afterall a product of evolution and not something that has grown from societal discourse.

it's true, but i can't see the common factors being concrete enough to be of much use to linguistics - after all, there are some wondrously strange languages in the world, and doubtless have been many more through time, that died out before they could be recorded. it strikes me as more a matter for cognitivist brain science type stuff, really.

i mean, you could say that there's a basic logic to how communication develops, and call this a basis for human nature, but as far as i can see that would have to be so vague that you couldn't really draw any conclusions from it, least of all political ones.

no i think chomsky's argument for a universal grammar is fine as long as one doesn't abstract it to some kind of "human nature".

Infact i think the idea of a common structure to language is just a sensible materialist position. I mean it didn't fall from the sky, and language is a universal human trait.

The idea of a common structure to language is an interesting one and its beyond my analysis but I don't think that from what I know you can place a structure onto languages, asiatic languages such as japanese are structurally very different to indo-european languages.

The Real is always the way out, that's true. I tend to look on it as "the elephant in the corner" language desperately tries to circle it.

I just have a thing about Zizek after reading the crap he wrote on courtly love, butchering the sources because he assumes that no one will read them.

Dear cmdrdeathguts

what an excellent depiction of the bourgeois view and structuralist view of the subject. But surely what we're missing - and the one I don't understand - is one of the post-structuralist view of the subject.

can you do another nice picture, please?

in all seriousness, if there's one thing that no two schools of poststructuralism can agree on, this is it. Foucault, i believe, adhered to a more generally structuralist view. the one i've drawn is actually a bit like Lacan's except replace "baudelaire" with the "symbolic order", ie society, upbringing, the paternal Law, and imagine it's all gravitating towards an empty space in the middle with a big question mark over it - ie, the Real. and ignore derrida's head. Derrida himself, as far as i can tell, was less interested in proposing a new model of the subject as getting his fangs into the attempts of others to do so. the little minx.

anyway, this is why i'm changing course to english. so i can one day make a couple more ms paint subjects, only knowing what i'm on about.

really? i thought that was alright. perhaps it's just the way he says that in courtly poetry, the woman is elevated to the status of a "monstrous Thing", which made me chuckle, because it's sort of true.

besides, anyone that can send ernesto laclau into a five year hissy fit deserves your money and mine.

'Human nature' is the the product of language, which in not a stable system thankfully.

meaning is produced by a process of constant deferral. Signifiers are produced by the interplay of many signs; infact, signifiers ( refered concepts) are signs themseves.

For example: look up the meaning of any word in a dictionary, and you will find another sign and so on... there is no terminal point to this process.

...that meaning is not fixed is very good news for class struggle: it allows for dispute.

If there was a primary structure, what is its origins... God? the State? The notion of a primary structure is oppressive and authoritarian:

Yay!

I havent read lacan or zizzek, but doesnt the real stink or Kant and phenomenology?

What does that mean? also which pomos?

I take it you mean that the bourgeois view is the post- structralist, from that opposition?

as far as i can understand it, the post- structs were just following saussures linguistic theories through to their logical conclusions...

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

eh? eh? eh?

oh, you know...

all that "thine eyes are blue as the sea..." type bullshit...in courtly love poetry, the lady is treated as absolutely anything but, y'know, a woman.

the primary p/s break with saussure is that saussure still thought signs had referents.

well, zizek more or less says as much, he's big on Kant and Heidegger. see: the ticklish subject. except that's pretty much the toughest book he's written, especially the stuff on Kant and Heidegger. also his mate Alenka Zupancic did a book on Kantian ethics called "Ethics of the Real"...nuff said, i guess.

what's wrong with Kant?

It is largely true but as most of his good points come from Lacan and he butchers his sources I get frustrated with him. But as Lacan had a thing against specialists I suppose he could argue that he is commenting upon that tradition...

Change courses? Are you doing French or Psychology?

I think that your diagram is far to somplistic to equate to any of Lacan's

well, Kant and the others, Husserl, Heideggers', theories are rooted in the idea of the nomenal/phenomenal, which places language in the position of describing the real indead of constituting it.. as posited by marx-barthes-foucault.

The notion of a nomenal dimension shares the same problematics as Saussures sign. I rekon that somewhere down this track we get the authoritarian-liberal/lennist notion of the vanguard know best.

.... that sounds alright to me. I'd quite like to have a go at the ticklish subject, but have tried to read lacanian stuff before.. (The Artifice of Abjection:Julia Kristeva) and found it really impossible,

Julia Kristeva is pretty good, Powers of Horror is well worth reading.

LAcan is deliberately obscure so not understanding him is kind of the point

Within courtly poetry the Lady (Domna) is a masculinised feminine ideal, one who is carefully separated from actual women. She is also elevated to a position of power that is so constrained that it is impossible to hold.

If she does not grant merces to the singer then she is uncourtly, of course if she does she is merely a woman and loses her status as domna, it is an untenable position.

that last one was a pisstake. well, more of a pisstake. and i'm switching from philosophy.

Philosophy is definitely less fun than Englsih and there are shitloads more women in English.

philosophy's fine. red-blooded analytic garlic-hating Anglo-Saxon philosophy departments...not so good. but what do i know? i might be a brain in a vat. let's talk about quantum physics.

you never replied .. . whats right about kant..?

fucking garlic haters.. they're the worstest

sorry to ask but since your studying philosophy and metioned physics and kant etc.. have you done stuff to do with time? anyone?

had i been to more than two of my metaphysics lectures (10am, fat fucking chance), i would have done.

as for kant...you can have some fun with kant, contrary to his reputation. he has a rather natty theory of freedom, once you do the good marxist thing and divorce it from all that noumenal idealist rubbish. (oh yeah, that reminds me - he came up with the whole fetishism thing as well. which has become more and more useful for we reds over the years.)

erm.. am having that 10 problem myself ( is 12 and at home with a hangover on the internet)

anyaway.. I dont understand all that time evaporates, and everything becomes non linear stuff at all... Lyotard, Del and Guat..

I alawys end up really fucked off feeling slightly stupid and sulking..

how the fuck can time be non-linear? nevermind... i had enough of it anyway... I've had enough irratate me for years

haha, i have Anti-Oedipus, i got as far as "Judge Schreber has sunbeams in his ass - a solar anus." so now it pretty much just hangs around the flat making me feel guilty.

if it helps, Deleuze (as far as i can tell) inherits his views on time and movement and so on from Bergson, which basically means he considers movements and flows to be continuous, rather than a sequence of discrete 'events'.

these people should study "science for complete idiots" or something.

thanks cmd, i think that event stuff fucked my essay- i just handed it in, that and the rant about the spanish civil war.. fuck it you cant really write an essay on those jokers anyways.

i thought anti-oedipus was supposed to be the sane one.

hey who said i was compleate?

Amen

is that rhyming slang

ps essay is doomed

Hope it wasn't as bad as all that, it probably wasn't.