Another take on science....

[Ralph Dumain]

Rather revealing of the uselessness of Lacan and of the cult-like nature of 
his work, and of the type of journalism that offers the likes of this as 
educational.  I've known Lacanians and just the type of people that they 
are, and I think it would be worth investigating the religious function 
that this concoction serves for its acolytes.  Freudianism just by itself, 
before either structuralism or postmodernism came along, served a 
quasi-religious function for the lay intelligentsia.  As an ideology it 
combines all the elements of a secular mythology, i.e. secularism + 
scientific explanation + mythology + symbolism + a meaningful universe + 
meaning in life + a simplified idealist ideology of social life.  In short, 
science plus religion plus cultism rolled into one.  Lacan adds even 
further hermetic ingredients: geometrical diagrams, quasi-mathematical 
structures, linguistic mysticism, kabbalism, the arcane and the hermetic--a 
concoction that combines all the desirable ingredients and serves all the 
ideological needs in one construct.  And if you ever knew any of the people 
who believed this stuff you would know they are all out of their fucking 
minds.  Can bourgeois theory get any more bankrupt than this?

At 05:20 PM 4/9/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>          ["]The field [of desire] that is ours by reason of the fact that 
> we are exploring it is going to be in one way of another the object of a 
> science.  And, you are going to ask me, will this science of desire 
> belong to the field of the human sciences?
>          Before leaving you this year, I would like to make my position 
> on the subject very clear.  I do not think, given the way that field is 
> being laid out, and I assure you it is being done carefully, that it will 
> amount to anything else but a systematic and fundamental misunderstanding 
> of everything that has to do with the whole affair that I have been 
> discussing here.  The fields of inquiry that are being outlined as 
> necessarily belonging to the human sciences have in my eyes no other 
> function than to form a branch of the service of goods, which is no doubt 
> advantageous through of limited value.  Those fields are in other words a 
> branch of the service of those powers that are more than a little 
> precarious.  In any case, implied here is a no less systematic 
> misunderstanding of all the violent phenomena that reveal that the path 
> of triumph of goods in our world is not likely to be a smooth one.
>          In other words, in the phrase of one of the exceptional 
> politicians who has functioned as a leader of France, Mazarin, politics 
> is politics, but love always remains love.
>          As for the kind of science that might be situated in that place 
> I have designated as the place of desire, what can it be?  Well, you 
> don't have to look very far.  As far as science is concerned, the kind 
> that is presently occupying the place of desire is quite simply what we 
> commonly call science, the kind that you see cantering gaily along and 
> accomplishing all kinds of so-called physical conquests.
>          I think that throughout this historical period the desire of 
> man, which has been felt, anesthetized, put to sleep by moralists, 
> domesticated by educators, betrayed by the academies, has quite simply 
> taken refuge or been repressed in that most subtle and blindest of 
> passions, as the story of Oedipus shows, the passion for 
> knowledge.  That's the passion that is currently going great guns and is 
> far from having said its last word.
>          One of the most amusing features of the history of science is to 
> be found in the propaganda scientists and alchemists have addressed to 
> the powers that be at a time when they were beginning to run out of 
> steam.  it went as follows:  "Give us money; you don't realize that if 
> you gave us a little money, we would be able to put all kinds of 
> machines, gadgets and contraptions at your service."  How could the 
> powers let themselves be taken in?  The answer to the question is to be 
> found in a certain breakdown of wisdom.  It's a fact that they did let 
> themselves be taken in, that science got its money, as a consequence of 
> which we are left with this vengeance.  It's a fascinating thing, but as 
> far as those who are at the forefront of science are concerned, they are 
> not without a keen consciousness of the fact that they have their backs 
> against a wall of hate.  They are themselves capsized by the turbulent 
> swell of a heavy sense of guilt.  But that isn't very important because 
> it's not in truth an adventure that Mr. Oppenheimer's remorse can put an 
> end to overnight.  It is moreover there where the problem of desire will 
> lie in the future.
>          The universal order has to deal with the problem of what it 
> should do with that science in which something is going on whose nature 
> escapes it.  Science, which occupies the place of desire, can only be a 
> science of desire in the form of an enormous question mark; and this is 
> doubtless not without a structural cause.  In other words, science is 
> animated by some mysterious desire, but it doesn't know, any more than 
> anything in the unconscious itself, what that desire means.  The future 
> will reveal it to us, and perhaps among those who by the grace of God 
> have most recently eaten the book -- I mean those who have written with 
> their labors, indeed with their blood, the book of Western science.  It, 
> too, is an edible book.["]
>
>Jacques Lacan
>The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960
>The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
>Book Vll
>pp. 324/5
>Norton, 1992
>
>(Originally published in French as
>L'ethique de la psychanalyse, 1959-60
>By Les Editions du Seuil, Paris, 1986
>
>
>They hang the man and flog the woman
>That steal the goose from off the common,
>But let the greater villain loose
>That steals the common from the goose.
>
>Constant apprehension of war has the same tendency
>to render the head too large for the body.  A standing military
>force with an overgrown executive will not long be safe.
>companions to liberty.  -- Thomas Jefferson
>
>
>"America is a quarter of a billion people totally misinformed and 
>disinformed by their government. This is tragic but our media is -- I 
>wouldn't even say corrupt -- it's just beyond telling us anything that the 
>government doesn't want us to know."
>
>Gore Vidal
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