So I guess I'm having drinks with the editor of Jacobin tonight if you guys have any questions or whatever I'd love to pass them along
REAL BASED SLOB wrote:after the javy home run WGN came back with an extended fan cam sequence soundtracked by meat puppets - up on the sun and i've just been doing bong rips and jamming meat puppets since
As someone who has dabbled in a pretty serious way in political philosophy, it's kind of puzzling to me that this group embraces figures like Zizek more readily than people like Raymond Geuss, or even Habermas. Why is this so?
Habermas is boring, his rendering of the speaking subject too anemic. No suffering, no compulsion, no resentment, no desire. All stuff Zizek works up to a lather.
That said, the stuff I've read before and after Theory of Communicative Rationality--the Transformation of the Public Sphere and the Nation-State stuff--has a satisfying tension between the empirical and normative dimensions of his argument.
Personally I'm all about Arendt, partly courtesy of Seyla Benhabib's phenomenal lectures on her. In some ways she's a kind of an interesting middle ground between Zizek and Habermas.
for social democracy Nick Rose writes the death of the welfare state in the register of political theory--the death of the 'social.' It feels a little dated now but its got its finger on something.
i mean all you have to do is look at media circus that is US politics, or Fortress Europe, or the baroque theater of African politics, or Islamist politics, or whatever, to see that populations very rarely approximate an ideal speech community. Better to think of European bourgeois coffeehouses and salons and letter-writing as a historical interlude in a much longer duree of what actually motivates subjectivity (and even back then of course there was a certain masculine thrill to exclusing women from the whole game). So, you can play the enlightened Habermasian card and insist people rise above those passions, or I guess you can play the very cynical card and reduce people to their passions, or you can figure out something in between.
I guess that works as an answer to my question, although I obviously disagree with those motivations pretty much to their core.
For what it's worth it was a genuine question and I just asked because it strikes me as an outsider that there are genuine academics (Habermas, Geuss) who do related work (not to mention Habermas being actually Frankfurt School) in a rigorous way and they tend to get shrugged off in favor of more bombastic / less serious work
well i really was trying to give a serious answer. You're asking why laypeople don't read professional philosophers as much as popularizers. The answer is usually that they're not professional philosophers.
But for those of us (in this thread?) who are somewhere in between, I'm also trying to suggest there is an analogue in the substance of Habermas's thought (haven't read Guess). His model of the political subject is eerily close to a disembodied mind in an ivory tower.
I guess I should say that I think that while those objections might make sense if Habermas were working with a Kantian notion of rationality, it's my understanding that in TCA he borrows the contemporary analytic notion of rationality, which is pretty foreign to rationality as something that is opposed to / enslaves the passions etc etc, but we don't have to have this fight; like I said it just seemed odd to me
Last edited by cooly on Mon Sep 03, 2012 2:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
I hasten to add that I just find a lot of the material in theory that Zizek is mixed up in just as difficult to read as Habermas, and certainly harder than Geuss, which is why I expected an answer that wasn't just philosophers vs non philosophers, but I think you answered the question well anyways
i'm no expert either. At the end of the day that is my reading of him, though I'm certainly ready to believe he retrofitted his theory of rationality with the analytic stuff you mention, especially after he got lots of critique for Transformation of the Public Sphere. Anyway, I do like Habermas, and maybe it'd be better if we were all listening to him more. But like I said upthread, Zizek speaks very fluenty to the language and pleasures of leftist-consumers, which we are (an idea also mentioned upthread). Habermas interpellates us as citizens (specifically in the civic-republican tradition), which is fainter these days. Certainly not the best state of affairs, and certainly not the only guy we should be reading (Arendt y'all!), but there it is.
Last edited by Destroyevsky on Mon Sep 03, 2012 2:34 am, edited 1 time in total.
Love all you guys. Sorry I haven't been posting. Didn't get Internet in my new apartment because I have a shitload of work this year and I needed to stop wasting time. Boarding from my phone cause I'm too drunk to work and watching some Beavis and Butthead
Bleh I feel like I board like a douche when I talk about philosophy and then spend 8 posts autistically trying to take back my horrible tone. What I meant to say was something like I feel like this movement deserves something better than Zizek and his associates, and although you're right that Habermas might be the wrong choice (I personally sympathize with his defense of Enlightenment ideals, but I can see why they might not jive with you and I take that point) it strikes me that the heirs to the Frankfurt School & some others in England think about these issues seriously and do work that help these sorts of causes. Anyways I'll bow out of this thread and let you guys go on
you know Zizek is regularly quite critical of Habermas but also regularly defends him on his defense of englightenment ideals. I could be mistaken but I don't think there are too many who identity strongly as hegelians as well as a marxists who see themselves as contrary or opposed to enlightenment ideals so much as an extension of it. I doubt I'm as well versed in philosophy as cooly or destroyevksy but that's my impression anyways.
Zizek may not be as sober nor does it appear he's as venerated or respected as Habermas on a 'lifetime accomplishment' plain but there seems to be a fairly constant push back (which naturally seems to be not infrequently led by liberals, some social-dems, and most of the self-avowed 'revolutionary left' hates him) based largely on his public persona and how his persona is received (and embraced). maybe we could do better than Zizek but there doesn't appear to be a wealth of people who can articulate fairly complex academic notions and revelations about Right Now in such a way that it can resonate and appeal to a wider semi-serious audience (of which I would include myself). It seems that some liberal types (and others, sure) think that its all a big parlor trick: a man trading in continental fluff (lacan not exactly having been embraced outside of western europe), contrarian provocations, seriously haphazardly organized prose and 'risque', crowd-pleasing jokes winning over halfway-engaged college students and the next echelon of people in respectability beyond malcolm gladwell and david brooks readers. all these things are true of course, to varying extents, but I think this is a telling flattening of a more complex figure whose popular appeal is reguarly held against him: so yeah, I think its very unfair to reduce him to just these conspicuous qualities. he may be perceived as a clown to some but that's a role zizek is evidently relishing while being wholly cognizant of its limitations.
I'm only echoing others (yeah, Zizek too) that the falling apart of the european project has hurt Habermas' approach, that it was easier to embrace Habermas in the long-period of relative stability and increasing prosperity in the post-war years. the way Habermas has commented on the conflicts (contradictions even?) over the past few years has basically been "no! you must try harder. its too important not to try harder", which is nice sentiment but is naturally not quite as thought-shifting or satisfying as ranciere (though there are some who think that's just a full throwback) or zizek/badiou. in lieu of the hallowing out of the respectability of the current power elite and the structures themselves, Habermas is almost put in a place where he almost has to make excuses while also passing blame.
maybe I'm reading things all wrong though, my focus is more on kinda that classically-defined political economy stuff (intersection of economics, politics and philosophy) than in philosophy itself. as much as I appreciate the philosophy talk in this thread I would hope that it doesn't come to dominate it: it doesn't exactly require high-level knowledge to identify or care about left of liberal politics, though it frequently comes off that way. you don't need to know about any of this stuff to participate in this thread.
It seems that some liberal types (and others, sure) think that its all a big parlor trick: a man trading in continental fluff (lacan not exactly having been embraced outside of western europe), contrarian provocations, seriously haphazardly organized prose and 'risque', crowd-pleasing jokes winning over halfway-engaged college students and the next echelon of people in respectability beyond malcolm gladwell and david brooks readers
To me it just seems that the dominant political questions of our day have exceedingly simple answers. Thus while I'm personally very drawn to some aspects of theory, I have a feeling that much of it is alienating and subcommunicates an anti-democratic idea (that you need to understand fucking Hegel, or even what "capital" means) even while it--the best stuff anyway-- tries to be pro-democracy/enlightenment/public reason. Anyway I'm sure there's a dense impossible chapter somewhere in Horkheimer and Adorno that elucidates this whole mode vs. content thing real well, but that's my point.
Edit: Missed this bit from Sean: "it doesn't exactly require high-level knowledge to identify or care about left of liberal politics, though it frequently comes off that way. you don't need to know about any of this stuff to participate in this thread."
archaic: what are the dominant political questions? are they the correct questions to be asking? what are the simple answers you're alluding to? i feel like you just pointed to the big void at the center of the thread that's ostensibly about radical politics...
cooly: i appreciate your skepticism of zizek after the first 5 pages of this thread but you haven't mounted an argument against him yet.
destroyevsky: could you say more about your interest in arendt? i read a few of her books but not her explicitly political writings, so i'd like to get a better sense of what you're reading when you say in particular that she could be a "middle ground" between Z and habermas.
“Short film, Long film, It’s ALL film!” - Walt Whitman
Geuss is a great writer, and as cooly said, he writes entre deux terres (Frankfurt-Analytic) which is pretty refreshing. Though he is not himself a committed Habermasian, and is actually pretty critical of, well, critical theory. I would recommend this as a great intro to his work: http://www.amazon.com/The-Idea-Critical-Theory-Philosophy/dp/0521284228/