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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   24751 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

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Zizek's new piece in Compact: Happy Birthday Kant, You Lousy Sadist (paywalled, but you can read the whole thing on reddit here):

Is there a line from Kantian ethics to the Auschwitz killing machine? Are the Nazis’ concentration camps and their mode of killing—as a neutral business—the inherent terminus of the enlightened insistence on the autonomy of reason? Is there some affinity between Kant avec Sade and Fascist torture as portrayed by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film version of 120 Days in Sodom, which transposes the story into the dark days of Mussolini’s Salò republic?

The link between Sade and Kant was first developed by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the famous Excursion II (“Juliette, or Enlightenment and Morality”) of the Dialectics of Enlightenment. Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s fundamental thesis is that “the work of Marquis de Sade displays the ‘Reason which is not led by another agency,’ that is to say, the bourgeois subject, liberated from a state of not yet being mature.” Some 15 years later, Lacan (unaware of Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s version of the argument) also developed the notion that Sade is the truth of Kant, first in his Seminar on The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1958-59), and then in an écrit of 1963.

In typical Zizek fashion, he bounces between multiple different ideas in a rapid fire stream of consciousness style, so there are a lot of different threads here that you could grab and run with. Some of our resident anti-enlightenment posters and Christian posters may find something productive in Adorno and Horkheimer's diagnosis of the ethical situation of modernity:

Sade announced the moment when, with the emergence of bourgeois Enlightenment, pleasure itself lost its sacred-transgressive character and was reduced to a rationalized instrumental activity. That is to say, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, the greatness of Sade was that, on behalf of the full assertion of earthly pleasures, he not only rejected any metaphysical moralism, but also fully acknowledged the price one has to pay for this rejection: the radical intellectualization-instrumentalization-regimentation of sexual activity intended to bring pleasure. Here we encounter the content later baptized by Herbert Marcuse’s “repressive desublimation”: After all the barriers of sublimation, of cultural transformation of sexual activity, are abolished, what we get isn’t raw, brutal, passionate, satisfying animal sex, but on the contrary, a fully regimented, intellectualized activity comparable to a well-planned sporting match.

There is much that could be said about Kant's continuing influence on thought and politics. Putin has expressed admiration for him, for example. But probably the biggest point of interest to a general audience here will be Zizek's remarks on Trump near the end of the essay:

Things are similar with the new rightist populism. The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops up in his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners) tells a lot about our predicament: What sort of world do we inhibit, in which bombarding the public with indecent vulgarities presents itself as the last barrier to protect us from the triumph of the society in which everything is permitted and old values go down the drain? Trump is not a relic of the old moral-majority conservatism—he is to a much greater degree the caricatural inverted image of postmodern “permissive society” itself, a product of this society’s own antagonisms and inner limitations. [...] Trump’s obscene performances thus express the falsity of his populism: to put it with brutal simplicity, while acting as if he cares for the ordinary people, he promotes big capital.

I view this as one of a series of similar critiques coming out of the left in recent times, all of which center around the curious theme of rightists not acting rightist enough. There's been a growing concern on the left in the last few years that "the positions have switched", to a certain extent. Traits that used to be associated with the left - a general rebelliousness, experimentation with new ideas, a critique of established values and established authority (Covid is a big one here), and, yes, a certain willingness to engage in crass vulgarity from time to time, either as a political act or as simple good-spirited humor - have now become associated with the right. Meanwhile the left has become much more strongly associated with order, morality, and authority than they were in the post-war 20th century.

Reactions from leftists to this alleged reversal have been all over the spectrum: everything from panic ("they're stealing our bit! we have to get a handle on this!"), to Zizek's strategy here of denying the authenticity and veridicality of ostensibly rightist forms of rebellion and protest, to simple avowal ("yes, we are in charge, we are Justice, and that's a good thing actually").

Among commentators who believe this to be an authentic political phenomenon, the standard explanation is usually something like: well of course rightists were all for law and order when they were in charge. But now they're not so in charge anymore, so now they're learning the value of critique and skepticism, of free speech and civil liberties, and so forth. Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.

But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that. But it becomes rather boring if you're always just looking for the self interest behind everything. The much more interesting and radical project is to find the abstract ethical commitments hiding behind apparent self interest.

There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx - it's not something that they just happened to discover after attaining political ascendancy. It's reflected in how they govern their own private institutions, even when they don't have societal power. There was frequently internal strife at the Frankfurt school over this or that theorist not sufficiently holding to the party line. Leftist organizations at least as far back as the 80s were already using the progressive stack at group meetings to make sure that white men spoke last. Marxism itself claims that the end goal of the communist revolution is the dissolution of all antagonisms between individual and collective good - but the individual is right to be nervous about what processes the collective might institute to achieve this utopian vision.

Similarly, I believe in the possibility of a principled libertarianism that wouldn't immediately abandon all of its commitments as soon as it got hold of actual power. It's true that ideology always has to make affordances for reality at some point, but clearly, ideology has some impact on the reality of governance as well: I don't think you could, for example, explain the different political situations in the US and Russia entirely in terms of their different material and sociological conditions, with no reference whatsoever to the beliefs and motivations of the individual people who actually govern those countries.

Has Zizek ever put out any idea that had any tangible effect on the real world? i.e. some people read him and got influenced by his thoughts and imposed them onto some political structure with some non-significant effect?

His whole shtick seems to be to impress midwit social sciences students who don’t quite understand what he is trying to say but think he must be important because of this.

Also his jokes are funny once in a while

Has Zizek ever put out any idea that had any tangible effect on the real world?

You could ask the same question about the majority of academics in both the humanities and STEM and the answer would be "no". So it's not a very interesting question.

That being said, Zizek is reasonably well-connected and is e.g. friends with Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister of Greece, so I wouldn't be surprised if he influenced the thinking of someone in power at some point.

A lot of European leftist politicians will know of him and have read at least some of what he’s written. That’s not a huge amount of influence but probably more than most successful philosophers have in the 21st century.

The most influential modern philosophers among politicians will be neolibs with very mainstream books like Stephen Pinker. But that’s questionable ‘influence’ really.

Similarly, leftists were in favor of free speech and questioning authority when it was beneficial to them, but now that their institutional capture is more entrenched, they don't need those things anymore.

But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely; you will hold the views that you must based on your relational position to other political actors while taking into account your rational self interest, and that's that.

The nuanced version of this is less concerned with individuals changing their minds and more concerned with generational succession and coalitional realignment.

In essence: SJers were never liberals (they're clearly six-foundation rather than three-foundation), but while they were weak their immediate goals coincided with liberals' and they needed liberals' help to achieve them, so the coalitional rhetoric catered to liberals. Now that SJers are more numerous and powerful, and have already picked the low-hanging fruit, they have run out of common goals with liberals, and don't need the liberals to maintain a shot at power, so they kicked the liberals out of the coalition so that they could pursue their more illiberal goals. Meanwhile, the Moral Majority is no longer a majority and now needs the liberals, and also their most immediate goal of reversing SJ excesses is shared with liberals, so they've started including liberal things in their rhetoric.

In essence: SJers were never liberals (they're clearly six-foundation rather than three-foundation),

To poke slightly at this one aspect: perhaps the movement started in the 90s and early 00s with adult 3-foundationers, but because of institutional capture, a generation of 6-foundationer children grew up influenced by this ideology (instead of the more natural-to-them 6-foundation traditional conservatism), and they fleshed it out into a full 6-foundation system of its own.

I wouldn't call the 3-foundationers SJers; I'd call them "90s liberals" or something (and there were 6-foundationers earlier than the 90s, just not in large numbers). But yes, that's my working bulverism of SJ as well.

It reminds me of the theory that young children form a creole language based on an adult pidgin.

That's the definition of a creole, yes? A pidgin spoken as a mother tongue.

Last I heard, that was the generally accepted theory, but like pretty much everything in linguistics, it's always being poked at.

What are these foundations? Why are there three versus six? I'm not familiar with this terminology.

As the others said, moral foundations - care/harm, liberty/oppression, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, sanctity/degradation.

Everyone cares about the first three, but WEIRD (white/educated/industrialised/rich/democratic, and especially autistic) people care much less about the last three (while caring more about care/harm), which generates liberalism (and is why liberals frequently fail ideological Turing tests for conservatism, because it's harder to hypothetically add things to a moral compass than to remove them).

As @fishtwanger said, Haidt's book laying these out is dated because it predates SJ. My best working theory of SJ is that it's what happens if you try to cram 90s liberalism down the throats of people who are six-foundation-inclined; they will take superficial features of it, connect them to the missing foundations, and produce a bizarro-world morality that has all six foundations but lacks coherence and is divisive rather than unifying.

As I said above, this is a bulverism; it's an explanation for "why would people believe this crazy thing despite its craziness" rather than "what is the thesis of this thing and is it true". I don't like bulverism, and I don't like thinking of people as, well, morons susceptible to memetic effects. But it's the most sense I've managed to make of SJ.

Yes, moral foundations theory. It's not the most grounded theory, because the foundations were largely eyeballed from initial data and then expanded based on feedback and discussion, instead of being chosen by some sort of factor analysis. And if someone does enough research on this to put it on solid ground, "three" and "six" are probably not what the result will be. But they're good enough for a shorthand.

The original book is interesting. It's dated, because it came out shortly before SJ hit, and it didn't anticipate SJ at all. But it's prophetic, because its thesis explains exactly why SJ is the way it is. And then there's the last section, which isn't talked about much, but which strikes directly at the heart of the rationalist project. It suggests that our capacity for rational thought is actually a capacity for rationalization and rhetoric, evolved to help us form strong coalitions with other humans, to help in intergroup competition. And that it's entirely incidental that this also happens to allow us to think rationally about the world, although it might be inevitable (as long as the simplest model is also correct). Which has some implications about LLMs, too.

I'm pretty sure this is referencing moral foundations theory.

Recommended watching of Derrick Jensen with regard to the libertine (and Sadist) currents of anarchic currents of anti-traditionalism (leftism) from pre-modernity to the present here. This video goes into how there has always been sort of an ‘antinomian’ side of society seeking to transgress all normative cultural laws since the beginning, looking from Diogenes as an example from within the Greeks and then moving further through the Enlightenment era and into modernity. Zizek’s thesis is one that is interesting, since Kant separating the spiritual from baseline reality and the causal-nexus could lead to such a ‘break’ analogous to the libertinism of the Gnostics, with the gnostic-mindset separating the spiritual from the physical thousands of years earlier, subsequently participating in such debauchery that certain named sects have just been assumed to have not existed due to how much sadism would have been involved. The distinction here is that such debauchery is obviously inherently reactionary towards the nomology of society, whereas rightism taking the status of the ‘counterculture’ is not as remotely libertine, meaning that it’s not really appropriate to say that leftism supplanted the nomology of society but instead corrupted it, as some sort of industrially-facilitated auto-immune disorder as opposed to anything else, with rightism in modern society basically being the delayed and weakened immune response.

It’s not inappropriate to say that the death machine of Auschwitz was the immune response to the libertine nature of certain communist and anarchist movements in Germany as post-enlightenment and industrial projects. The whole ‘Weimar Germany was a haven for transgender people!’ is an example—it’s just that the traditional mode of history is that once the ‘tradition’ gets corrupted by antinomian currents the entire thing gets blown up and millions of people die on average, whether by starvation or shooting or sterilization, etc. The reason why there was no morality there in order to stop Auschwitz from happening was indeed because of Kant and the Enlightenment project at large, but in spite of what they had brought even though that spiting was in its context. This same ‘antinomian’ spirit was seen in a Jewish context too, through Frankism (essentially a form of Gnosticism), which has been related to the Frankfurt school by a few people. Modern accelerationists are symptomatic of this, too.

There's always been an authoritarian streak to leftism going back to Marx

And, you know, that other guy.

I think listening to a bunch of Marxists about Kant is an exercise in futility. Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.

EDIT:

But something about this explanation rubs me the wrong way. It paints a purely structural view of the formation of ideologies, and ignores the role of the individual completely

This is Marxism in a nutshell. The ideological superstructure is determined by the material substrate, not the other way around. If you find this disturbing....well, now you know why they find it so important to try to blame Kant for Naziism (you know, that famously individualist creed).

Everything is ego defense of Granddaddy Hegel, all the way down.

It's truly astounding how many bad ideas and practices Hegel is responsible for. His "influenced" list is a who's who of the worst of the worst in philosophy. @non_radical_centrist below rightfully bemoans the "difficult to parse" style of certain philosophers, and there is perhaps no greater offender than Hegel. Kant isn't particularly concise, but pull up The Phenomenology of Spirit next to The Critique of Pure Reason, and the difference is night and day.

Hegel

Seeing as you're conversant with what to me seems like insufferable turgid nonsense, what do you make out of the claims that Hegel is being misunderstood and misclassified ?

Thus far, however, the most influential English-language account of Hegel’s Hermeticism is Eric Voegelin’s. In his essay, “Response to Professor Altizer’s ‘A New History and a New but Ancient God’” Voegelin admits that “For a long time I studiously avoided any serious criticism of Hegel in my published work, because I simply could not understand him.” The turning point came with Voegelin’s study of gnosticism, and the discovery that, “by his contemporaries Hegel was considered a gnostic thinker:” Voegelin goes on to claim that Hegel’s thought “belongs to the continuous history of modern Hermeticism since the fifteenth century."’ Voegelin’s principal statement on Hegel’s Hermeticism is a savagely polemical essay, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” referring to the Phenomenology of Spirit as a “grimoire” which “must be recognized as a work of magic — indeed, it is one of the great magic performances.”

Voegelin’s claims are unique in that he does not simply claim that Hegel was influenced by the Hermetic tradition. He claims that Hegel was part of the Hermetic tradition and cannot be adequately understood apart from it. Unfortunately, however, Voegelin never adequately developed his thesis. He never spelled out, in detail, how Hegel is a Hermetic thinker. Voegelin has, however, encouraged other scholars to develop his thesis more systematically (and more soberly). David Walsh, for instance, has written an important doctoral dissertation entitled The Esoteric Origins of Modern Ideological Thought: Boehme and Hegel (1978), in which he makes strong claims about Hegel’s indebtedness to Boehme. Gerald Hanratty has also published an extensive two-part essay, entitled “Hegel and the Gnostic Tradition” (1984-87).

I don't have anything to say directly on the content, but writers like Zizek who seem to try to make their writing as difficult to parse as possible in order to show off their vocabulary have always annoyed me. There are times when a big, unusual word captures something that a shorter word doesn't, or is more convenient than using a string of shorter common words to represent the same concept. But when you're having to take a second to understand a phrase, time after time, it's irritating.

If you’re having trouble with the linked Zizek piece, that’s probably just due to unfamiliarity with the ideas (they’re largely remixed from earlier texts) or the writers cited, because on a word-by-word level it’s pretty clear.

Zizek’s big heroes Lacan and Hegel are much harder to parse than Zizek. So if he really wanted to make his writing more obscure, he’s intimately familiar with a good model to follow! But generally I’d say his writing is on the clearer end for continental philosophy.

...on a word-by-word level it’s pretty clear.

I didn't even finish the first sentence before finding "...his thought is more than ever enabling us to see in a new way the horrors of..."

What are your standards for unclear writing??

What are your standards for unclear writing??

Hegel can be unclear at times:

In self-sublating real possibility, it is a twofold that is now sublated; for this possibility is itself the twofold of actuality and possibility. The actuality is formal, or is a concrete existence which appeared to subsist immediately, and through its sublating becomes reflected being, the moment of an other, and thus comes in possession of the in-itself. That concrete existence was also determined as possibility or as the in-itself, but of an other. As it sublates itself, this in-itself of the other is also sublated and passes over into actuality. – This movement of self-sublating real possibility thus produces the same moments that are already present, but each as it comes to be out of the other; in this negation, therefore, the possibility is also not a transition but a self-rejoining. – In formal possibility, if something was possible, then an other than it, not itself, was also possible. Real possibility no longer has such an other over against it, for it is real in so far as it is itself also actuality. Therefore, as its immediate concrete existence, the circle of conditions, sublates itself, it makes itself into the in-itselfness which it already is, namely the in-itself of an other. And conversely, since its moment of in-itselfness thereby sublates itself at the same time, it becomes actuality, hence the moment which it likewise already is. – What disappears is consequently this, that actuality was determined as the possibility or the in-itself of an other, and, conversely, the possibility as an actuality which is not that of which it is the possibility.

The negation of real possibility is thus its self-identity; inasmuch as in its sublating it is thus within itself the recoiling of this sublating, it is real necessity.

I think the biggest issue is that he assumes all these 'great' thinkers of the past actually had a point. From my perspective it's all a tower of nonsense with more dung being flung on top and each successive generation just adding more nonsense to the pile.

Saying that Adorno or Horkheimer said something isn't a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place. You can't just cite each others claims as authoritative if those claims are bullshit in the first place.

Not that Zizek cares, his whole philosophy runs on vibes and free association. He is a clown and he likes it when you laugh at him. Trying to argue with a clown is like wrestling with a pig.

I go back and forth. Sometimes I feel exactly the same way as you, that it's all just a gigantic tower of bullshit pseudo-intellectualism using big words to intimidate normies while not actually proving anything. Other times I think... there might something to this. I think the way it's supposed to work is like a big aggressively-growing business. They can't possibly explain the entire market/all of society, and they know there will be a lot of mistakes along the way. Still, they do their best to make a coherent plan, and muddle along through, and as long as it's more right than it is wrong it will make progress. It's a way to deal with incredibly difficult problems that are just too massive to handle in a simple, rigorous, step-by-step "scientific" way.

But that does allow for a lot of bullshit to get through too... it's hard to tell!

There are plenty of philosophers like Hume, who awoke Kant from his dogmatic slumber, or the late Daniel Dennentt, who aren't building on this pile of nonsense.

There are also various social scientists, historians and other academics who just roll their eyes at this nonsense. There are prominent ones like Alan Sokal and Richard Dawkins who even poke the hornets nest from time to time.

It's not hard to tell, there is real stuff being discussed it's just not being discussed by this inbred movement within academia.

OK but the two philosophers you cite are both dead, who social science is really a different field. I thought we were talking about humanities and continental philosophy here? Do you just want to dismiss literally all of modern humanities as nonsense?

Continental Philosophy is, to a great extent, un-rigorous sociology and social psychology. Talking about social science in the same breath is just accepting that fact.

These philosophers are talking about stuff that overlaps with social science and science in general. Philosophy isn't some separate world where you can say whatever you like. It is bound by the same rules as everything else. If you are making a point about how humans operate you are making a point that overlaps with economics, sociology, history, psychology, etc. Continental philosophers often make claims about humans that go against what we know about those areas, not to mention claims about physics or mathematics. Sokal makes a big deal in his debunkings of post-modernism the ways that they used ideas from mathematics and physics incorrectly.

'I confess myself a worshipper of Mazda, a follower of Zarathushtra, one who hates the Daevas and obeys the laws of Ahura'

I think the biggest issue is that he assumed all these ‘great’ thinkers of the past actually had a point.

He read their works and found value in them. You can also read his work, look at the claims he cites, and decide if it makes sense to you or not. There’s no confession of faith required, just reading and thinking about what you read, same as you do in many other contexts.

Saying that Adorno and Horkheimer said something isn’t a valid argument if Adorno and Horkheimer were making bad arguments in the first place.

No one thinks that simply citing a claim from a canonical text makes it authoritative. Everyone who writes philosophy is acutely aware that, for every historical philosopher they admire, there are legions of other philosophers who think that guy was an idiot, all his arguments were trash, etc. No one has any illusions about anything being authoritative.

Citing a claim is just you telling the reader where you got it from, nothing more. It’s still on you to evaluate the claim, check the primary source if you want, etc.

In one hundred years your shitposts will be taken seriously by the intellectuals of the time.

If Derrida can do it, then anyone can. Post-modernism is the intellectual equivalent of a banana duct-taped to a wall.

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