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Stupid theory (or politics) questions

  
  

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grant
18:02 / 25.06.04
I believe that would be The Miracles, who in 1975, after parting ways with Smokey Robinson, put forth the proposition that "I'm a love machine, and I won't work for nobody but you."

Around 10 years later, Felix Guattari stole this concept and, mingling it with ideas from Antonin Artaud, introduced it to the world of critical theory.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
12:26 / 27.06.04
I *heart* you, Grant.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
16:08 / 27.06.04
Ah, *except* that before 1975 we had Iris Murdoch's "The Sacred and Profane Love Machine" and the David Bowie lyric "a love machine lumbers through desolation row", both of which, I think, were inspirations to the Miracles sound. Not to mention the Jackie Susann classic, which was turned into a film released in 1971, along with the Dionne Warwick theme song of the same name...

(Slightly more serious note - the "love machine" was apparently the name given to Robert Butler's experimental device for fucking up monkeys. Box, window, monkey. Hours of fun. I think that was sometime in the 50s)
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
13:15 / 28.06.04
Thanks chaps for your v. helpful suggestions - I will investigate them further - v. much appreciated...
 
 
sdv (non-human)
14:59 / 28.06.04
Ah... but Toni Negri rather interestingly (on saturday) argued that D&G's 'desiring Machines' are the theoretical structure on which 'love' can be considered the practice. (Eric Alleiz did not argue against this...) So I'm inclined to think that arguing for a dependency between 'desire machine' and 'love machine' is a mistake.

There are not the same machines...

steve
 
 
Jackie Susann
04:42 / 30.06.04
What are the conventions, if any, for capitalising the 'state', meaning like governments and that. Some writers capitalise it and some don't, and I'm wondering if this has to do with different schools of thought or just differing emphases or personal preferences, or if there is a correct answer in political science or something.

Will be really impressed if anyone manages to connect the answer to a Jackie Susann novel.
 
 
grant
17:26 / 30.06.04
I think that kind of capitalization rule is something that changed gradually over time, and varies from language to language. In German, for instance, they capitalize their Words will-he, nill-he, to the Left and the Right, until the Innocent Visitor is forced to surrender to Confusion!

In modern, standard English, I think the lower case is technically correct, but sometimes writers like emphasizing things in strange ways (especially when translating).

Sorry, can't connect to Jackie Susann without contortion.
 
 
Jackie Susann
00:12 / 08.07.04
Thanks. Also worth noting there's a forthcoming Girls Aloud! single called 'Love Machine'.

Next question: in cultural studies everyone talks about 'articulation', meaning, roughly, things that are connected for contingent historical (i.e., not natural or essential) reasons. This comes from Stuart Hall I think but can anyone tell me where he introduces/develops the concept?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
07:28 / 08.07.04
In German, for instance, they capitalize their Words will-he, nill-he, to the Left and the Right, until the Innocent Visitor is forced to surrender to Confusion!

German capitalises nouns. It's quite simple.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:39 / 08.07.04
On articulation - I think Hall says he gets it from Althusser... I think further that it crops up in "Policing the Crisis". Hang on - quick google.

Ah. in this interview, Hall says the most important piece he wrote about it was an essay on Marx's 1857 introduction to the Grundrisse. Buggered if I've ever read that.

On state/State - is it not rather like king/King? If you're talking about a common-or-garden state, lowercase, but if you're talking about the one unitary (and in this case conceptual) State, then capital? So, Israel's state-controlled industries, but the rise of the State? I think that's probably breaking down now, though.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
10:27 / 08.07.04
I agree on state/State, but it is the opposite with king/King - king when talking about the general idea 'king', or a general 'king of X country', or many kings, but King Charles I, and therefore 'the King' when referring to him without using his name. But you knew that anyway.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
10:30 / 08.07.04
Actually it's not quite the opposite, is it? Duh, sorry.
 
 
grant
18:53 / 08.07.04
(Quick, blame it on the Germans!)
 
 
Jackie Susann
01:52 / 12.07.04
I am starting to worry I'm turning this thread into 'Shane's stupid theory questions', but anyway, here is today's. I am trying to give myself a crash course in anthropology/ethnography, so I am putting together a reading list of anthropological stuff and need suggestions. The three kinds of texts I'm looking for are, roughly:

Some kind of basic introductory 'this is what ethnographic methods are' kind of textbook.
More reflexive and interesting theoretical texts around method.
And interesting examples of (especially urban) ethnographies.

So far I've read Esther Newton's Mother Camp, Eric Michael's Bad Aboriginal Art, and Michael Taussig's Defacement, but crave more...
 
 
grant
20:04 / 12.07.04
Theory of method? You might try cruising some journals of social work, but only if they seem very contemporary and have a good search function.

There's a journal called Urban History Review that might have useful material. One footnote from one article in that journal (on Nexis, so I can't offer a link to it) yields: See, for example, Gordon Brent Ingram, '' 'Open' Space as Strategic
Queer Sites,'' 'No More Shit': The Struggle for Democratic Gay Space in
Toronto,'' Anne-Marie Bouthillette, ''Queer and Gendered Housing: A Tale
of Two Neighbourhoods in Vancouver,'' and Betti-Sue Hertz, Ed Eisenberg,
and Lisa Maya Knauer, ''Queer Spaces in New York City: Places of
Struggle/Places of Strength,'' in Queers in Space: Communities, Public
Places, Sites of Resistance, ed. Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter,
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1997), 95-125, 127-45, 213-32, 356-80.


So there might be some space in there to explore. Howard Gillette Jr. seems to be a prominent name.

(Note: my main exposure to this stuff is because my better half is getting an MSW, and I'm her researcher. This is filtering my experience -- especially since social work as a discipline has apparently only recently discovered that there's such a thing as "post-modernism").

You might also find some worthwhile stuff here, in an article about feminist methods in social research. It's well linked.

There was another journal called Human Ecology that might be worth investigating. It's out of print (as of 2002) and specialized in city planning stuff, but seemed to have some interesting questioning about ethnic categories and cultural analysis in it.
 
 
Perfect Tommy
04:46 / 15.07.04
Here's an extra-special stupid question: Once in a while we discuss gendered pronouns; so far as I can recall, it usually ends up splitting into a ze-camp, an anti-ze camp, and a couldn't-care-less camp. I'm taking French now, so I am confronted with the zany world of gendered nouns, and I've become curious as to what kinds of theory bitchery happens with respect to language in languages other than English. In particular, I would expect that many gender warriors' heads exploded upon learning that the French word for 'victim' is feminine regardless of the gender of the victim; but on the other hand, it's a language in which 'beard' is also feminine, so maybe it's considered a completely uninteresting avenue.
 
 
Cat Chant
08:49 / 15.07.04
Someone told me recently (I don't have the references but I may be able to find them for you) that they've done experiments in various language groups (in Europe, I think) that have gendered nouns - like, they took a noun that was feminine in French and masculine in German, and got a group of French speakers and a group of German speakers to write down the qualities they associated with a key - and they found that in general, the item was given qualities culturally associated with its (grammatical) gender. (So, I don't know, the French speakers said that a beard was soft and silky and clung to a man's curves, or something.) So that's interesting, n'est-ce pas?

Another interesting consequence of grammatical gender is that in Ancient Rome, divinities that were personifications (which a lot of Roman divinities were) had to have the same gender as the noun that named them, and since almost all abstract nouns in Latin are feminine, that meant that, for example, the divinity of Manly Courage (virtus) was a goddess.
 
 
Lurid Archive
12:57 / 16.07.04
That experiment sounds interesting, Deva, though I am a little sceptical and would be wary of reading too much into it. That is, while it seems plausible that the dominance of grammatical male gender when applied to groups of people is significant, I think the relationship between grammatical gender and actual gender or gendered characteristics is not clear cut. Germans don't think of young women as neuter, I'd wager.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:34 / 21.07.04
What's an episteme (with accents over the last two e's, so that it's the Greek word not a word formed on the model of 'phoneme', but I don't know how to put those in with html - other mods feel free to fix this)? Derrida uses the word a lot and I think Foucault does too.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:52 / 21.07.04
Germans don't think of young women as neuter, I'd wager.

Heidegger makes a philosophical argument based on young women being neuter somewhere, so it's not entirely without significance,* but I agree that the experiment (especially as reported third-hand by me) isn't immediate proof that grammatical gender of nouns determines cultural attitudes to the entities named by those nouns.

*I'm not going to read too much into that, either: it was just a nice coincidence that I happened to know something that went against the specific example you gave, so I couldn't resist posting it.
 
 
Ex
13:02 / 21.07.04
I thought it was a particular era of knowledge. With the body of the systems that operate inside that era, and a hint of the idea that it's a kind of horizon of thinkability - if you're inside one episteme, then you'll have certain ways of understanding things.

But I wasn't sure, and I checked the OED and the sweathearts actually have Foucault cited there. They say it's Scientific knowledge, a system of understanding; spec. Foucault's term for the body of ideas which shape the perception of knowledge at a particular period.

So Foucault does his archeology on the shifts between different epistemes - what is thinkable when, how is knowledge operating in a given period.

I think.

I don't know how long or short or big they are - can anyone tell me if they last centuries (the Enlightenment, empiricism) or if you can have more of a mini-episteme?
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:04 / 22.07.04
Heidegger makes a philosophical argument based on young women being neuter somewhere, so it's not entirely without significance

Drat. Given the example I gave is so well known, I should have guessed that you'd have a counterexample.

Still, the topic is pretty interesting and I'd be interested in a more in-depth discussion, though I am not sure I know enough about languages to start a new thread myself.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:33 / 26.07.04
Ex - thank you, that's lovely! (With your explanation in mind, it becomes clear to me - I think - that Derrida uses "episteme" to mean, like, the closure of knowledge by Western metaphysics, viz., as he puts it in the title of The Post Card, "from Socrates to Freud and beyond", so his episteme would be Quite Long. I don't know about Foucault, because I have only read the History of Sexuality.)

Now I have another question, which is: what is the logic of ressentiment? I have a vague memory of it being one of those psychoanalytic/political crossovers where political agency is determined by psychoanalytic structures of... something-or-other... in maybe a sort of Wendy Brown "it is boring to be always wounded", "mourning revolution" sort of a way, but I could very easily be wrong.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
11:43 / 26.07.04
Well, the usage there, along with the connective tissue of the argument, is a take from Zizek's leftist appropriation of the European legacy, but I think more broadly the Wendy Brown gig is good - that the logic of ressentiment is a process whereby groups identifying as oppressed conceive an ideal of revenge against an ideal of the oppressor - so, genuine and progressive action to improve matters is lost in self-construction of oneself as an eternal enemy of the eternal controlling force - opposition becomes the aim rather than resolution - the argument is always couched in the logos of the oppressor-who-must-be-resisted rather than the pragma of the situation-that-can-be-resolved. Is that about right?

I think, although I'm no expert, that what worries me about the application of the phrase "the logic of resentment" sometimes is that it kind of does duty for "political correctness gone mad"...
 
 
Jackie Susann
07:56 / 27.07.04
The term comes from Nietzsche, and it's something like what Bourdieu calls 'the choice of the necessary'. It's a logic where subordinated groups become convinced that being-subordinated is in itself a positive good - as when Christians imagine the weak inheriting the earth, etc. For Nietzsche, things like morality, religion, and political ideologies are generally ressentimental.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
08:42 / 27.07.04
I think Deva has ressentiment - I was reading it as a question about the specific phrase "the logic of ressentiment", which seems to turn up in 20th Century considerations of identity politics...

Oooh! But I have a related question! In Gotzendammerung, doesn't Uncle Friedrich talk about "the ressentiment of Rousseaiu"? I know v. little about Rousseau, so I just sort of let this lie, but tacitly assumed that that was where he got the word. So, for ten points, what *is* Rousseau's model of ressentiment?
 
 
Cat Chant
09:43 / 29.07.04
I think Deva has ressentiment

Actually, I didn't, so thanks to both of you - that's very helpful. And I have little Rousseau and less Nietzsche, so I can't help you in return, Haus, sorry...
 
 
Jackie Susann
22:15 / 03.08.04
Haus, I don't have the text handy but I think he was describing Rousseau as someone with a lot of ressentiment, rather than a theory thereof. From memory it's in the 'Expeditions of an untimely man' bit and he claims Rousseau's ideal of equality is (basically) just ressentiment. Or was there another bit you were thinking of?
 
 
unheimlich manoeuvre
23:55 / 03.08.04
The slaves' revolt in morals begins with this, that ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those who are denied the real reaction, that of the deed, and who compensate with an imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant affirmation of oneself, slave morality immediately says No to what comes from outside, to what is different, to what is not oneself: and this No is its creative deed. This reversal of the value positing glance - this necessary direction outward instead of back to oneself - is of the nature of ressentiment: to come into being, slave morality requires an outside world, a counterworld; physiologically speaking, it require external stimuli in order to react at all: its action is at bottom always a reaction.

Portable Nietzsche p.451 (from Toward a Genealogy of Morals.)

...

My impossible ones. Seneca: or the toreador of virtue. Rousseau: or the return to nature in impuris naturalibus.

Portable Nietzsche p.513 (from Twilight of the Idols: Skirmishes of an Untimely Man)

...

Rousseau is the model of ressentiment in my opinion because he idolises compassion and feeling.

(The italics are as the text, any spelling mistakes are my own.)

Rousseau and Nietzsche on the Politics of Suffering. The reading list could be useful?
 
 
Jackie Susann
01:21 / 30.11.04
Which reasonably high profile feminist theorist argued that what lesbians have in common (i.e., contra any essentialist conception) is an understanding of how homophobia works? (Or something like that?) Wittig? Butler? And where?
 
 
coweatman
14:26 / 30.11.04
"I have a question, (which I am not even quite sure how to phrase), about creating institutions around anti-establishment theories and doctrines, ie: an "Anarchist University" or "Discordian Government". For now, I suppose I would just like to be directed to some information on this type of subject matter if anyone knows of any, online or otherwise."

well, anarchism is more about the rejection of hierarchy and coercion than about not being institutionalized - eg if you look at NEFAC< they can be downright bureaucratic. and you have things like the institute for social ecology and the institute of anarchist studies around too.
 
 
Ex
16:30 / 02.12.04
Dread Pirate Crunchy:

"These efforts have only and always produced a set of contests and refusals which should by now make it clear that there is no necessarily common elements among lesbians, except perhaps that we all know something about how homophobia works against women - although, even then, the language and the analysis we use will differ."

It was indeed Judith Butler - Wittig (I think) has a much more cohesive idea of what being a lesbian is all about.

Imitation and Gender Insubordination (reference upthread and mispelled) - penultimate paragraph of second section.

(Butler fails to comprehend that all these 'contests and refusals' would be sorted out by the establishment of an International Lesbian Standard. I have taken it upon myself to build one, and when finished it will be locked in a bank vault, and settle all future disputes.)
 
 
Jackie Susann
21:23 / 02.12.04
Thanks!
 
 
jbsay
00:32 / 03.12.04
In regards to the capitalism v. socialism (government) question, I think the austrian school of economics has the best grasp of the issues involved. The austrian school is (in my mind) the economic equivalent of gnosticism or any of the individual-minded religious/spiritual pursuits discussed on Barbelith.

the best places to start your exploration of free-market theory and libertarianism is mises.org and the sister site of lewrockwell.com.

There are both practical and moral reasons why the free-market (private ownership of means of production) is vastly superior to socialism (public ownership of the means of production, namely centralized planning by government).It would take some time to fully lay out the theories (and others have done a better job than I) but I will try to summarize. The moral reason is that socialism (government) is coercive and violent whereas pure capitalism is neither. The practical reason is that socialism is impossible.


Moral Reason:
Property rights and the free market are essential to individual liberty. All transactions are done voluntarily--each party to the transaction is better off otherwise they wouldnt have made the transaction. No one is holding a gun to your head making you buy a caramel macchiato at starbucks or endorsing walmart over the local mom & pop.
Marxism/communism/socialism/capitalism/fascism/totalitarianism/Statism and modern liberalism/democracy uses the coercive (violent) force of the State to make people do things against their Will--this is at best a zero sum game (someone wins, someone else loses--compare with capitalism in that capitalism makes BOTH parties better off). Always remember that at the other end of any governmetnal law/regulation/edict there is a gun (in the hands of the police force/army/etc) there to enforce it. Imagine the government holding a gun to your head making you buy coffee at starbucks. Now examine taxation, conscription (draft), national ID cards, etc. You have no choice but to follow their rules.

for more on this read:
The Road to Serfdom, FA Hayek
Socialism, Ludwig von Mises

Practical Reason:
von Mises proved that a mixed economy (public/private property) cannot exist in the long run so the choice is between capitalism and socialism. There is no "third way", or "hampered market economy", or "interventionism". Likewise, he proved that there can be no economic calculation without private property and the free market system and that socialism as a large-scale method of socio-economic organization is impossible in the long run (socialist/governmental central planners are economically blind).

The best works to read:
Socialism, by Ludwig Von Mises
Human Action, by Ludwig Von Mises
Man, Economy, and State, by Murray Rothbard
any other works by Mises or Rothbard
 
 
jbsay
00:47 / 03.12.04
Orr,

You have several misperceptions about economics (this is not intended to be a wise-ass response). Even if you had taken economics at the universities you still would not understand these issues since they are taught from a socialist ("leftie") perspective which is just plain wrong as applied to economics.

Your first misperception is that money comes from the government. THis is an understandable viewpoint as nowadays, all major economies use paper/fiat currencies (money by decree of the government) as opposed to "real" money such as gold which is NOT issued by the government.

Government itself has no money. Economically, it is parasitic. It has 3 options to raise money. 1) issue taxes (coming out of your pocket) 2) print money (inflation) which is economically equivalent to counterfeiting or a tax (it comes out of your pocket in that you pay higher prices and your standard of living falls) 3) issuing debt (which is again, backed by the taxing power of the government, so it is coming out of your pocket or your children's pocket).

A private company does not pass its costs along to the government (under pure capitalism). A private company has to meet a profit/loss test (which the government does not). The companies that best serve the consumers (you) in the most efficient way will be profitable and thrive. Those that don't go out of business. If you buy from the business voluntarily (no government forcing you to), it has added value to you otherwise you wouldnt pay for the good/service. Likewise, they will not sell something to you unless your money (or whatever you are bartering) is worth more to them than the good/service they are offering for sale. Under this scenario, value is added to both sides of the transaction and the total pie to society is enlarged. Both parties are now wealthier (from their viewpoint). Under a government regime (socialism), it is a zero-sum game (the pie has not been enlarged, you have just changed the distribution of the pie).
 
  

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