Another take on science....

[Neil McLaughlin]

I have to admit that I agree with a fair amount of what ralph says on this
list,
even though I would dissent from his style of discourse. Style and civility
issues
aside (and these are not unimportant issues!), I must say that I also find
the Lacian approach to psychoanalysis and critical theory unhelpful.   I am
involved in an interdisciplinary research team at my university on the topic
of globalization where social sciences meet humanities scholars, and as part
of that, I made a confession and a new year's resolution. The confession is
I don't really fully understand a lot of the post-modern critique of
modernity that i read, and in particular I really don't fully understand the
Lacanian perspective. My new year's resolution is in two parts: first, I am
going to try to open my mind to these new ideas without assuming they are
stupid (either the ideas or the people!), and secondly I am going to ask
people directly to explain what they mean when they speak in language that I
don't follow.  So I am asking. Could someone explain what the Lacian
perspective has to offer for understanding the present dilemmas of modern
society, the war, the social psychology of modernity and capitalism.  What
can we get from Lacan, that we could not get from Fromm, say?
As a matter of historical interest, I have seen letters exchanged between
Fromm and the American liberal sociologist David Riesman, where Riesman was
offering to set up a meeting between Lacan and Fromm. Fromm had no interest
in meeting Lacan, by the way...
What did he miss out on, if anything? Can someone suggest an answer here,
without simply repeating the tired old cliches about American ego psychology
and the Americanization of psychoanalysis by Fromm, Horney and Sullivan...

On the issue of science, I personally think that we need to think far more
sociologically about science than Horkheimer did. Stephan Fuchs's new book
Against Essentialism: A Theory of Culture and Society (2001) raises valuable
questions about how we think about science in ways that, for me, make many
of the old positivist debates uninteresting...


Neil McLaughlin



dumain@igc.org>
To: <frankfurt-school@lists.village.virginia.edu>
Cc: <marxistphilosophy@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 09, 2003 6:44 PM
Subject: Re: Another take on science....


> 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
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>