Re: Forwarded from Paul Dillon

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Dillon:
> But the real smelly fish is calling this or that "scientific" as opposed to
> "that" or "this". Is there anyone who will defend, without some
> qualification, that Marx's analyses in Capital are "scientific"; that the
> notion of "surplus value" is somehow more scientific than Freud's theory of
> "eros/thanatos" that stands at the center of Lacan and Zizek's
> preoccupations.

An interesting side-by-side comparison. Marx bases himself on earlier work
by Ricardo and supplies data to support his theories. For example:

"The Factory Act of 1850 now in force (1867) allows for the average
working-day 10 hours, i.e., for the first 5 days 12 hours from 6 a.m. to 6
p.m., including 1/2 an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner, and thus
leaving 10 1/2 working-hours, and 8 hours for Saturday, from 6 a.m. to 2
p.m., of which 1/2 an hour is subtracted for breakfast. 60 working-hours
are left, 10 1/2 for each of the first 5 days, 7 1/2 for the last."

By contrast, there is no "data" that can support Freud's theories. For
example, take one of the cornerstones, namely that dreams represent
repressed desires. Modern science has pretty much cast that theory into the
ashbin. Neural scientists have discovered that REM periods during sleep
coincide with specific brain activity that suggest that dreams are in
progress. These spontaneous mechanisms are responsible for dreams, not
repressed desires. Adolph Grunbaum, the author of "The Foundations of
Psychoanalysis: a Philosophical Critique", has a telling observation. He
says that if psychoanalysis had the ability to cure, even on a partial
basis, the amount of dreaming activity should decrease as repressed desires
are identified to the patient and resolved. In fact, there is absolutely no
measurable correlation between dreams and psychoanalytic "cure". In
general, psychoanalysis has disappeared as a therapy from the world of
medicine, although it continues to have a kind of afterlife in the milieu
that Zizek and other Lacanians operate in.

>  Personally, I feel that word "scientific" in itself
> should be stricken from our discourse since it is precisely what Zizek calls
> and "empty universal" just waiting to be filled with one or another
> ideological content and at the present has no agreed upon or fixed meaning
> (go from Popper to Feyerabend by way of Kuhn and then come back to Carnap
> and tell me what science is. Like Leslie White said: science is what
> scientists do). The contrast of scientific quality in Freud vs. Marx is
> ludicrous at best and downright embarrassing in general coming from people
> who I had begun to respect highly..

I don't think we should fetishize the word science either, but I have found
Marxism to be a deeply useful tool for understanding bourgeois society.
Freudian theories, on the other hand, are useless. Although I have not read
any of Zizek's large-scale works, I have read plenty of Deleuze-Guattari.
In "Anti-Oedipus", capitalism is seen in terms of schizophrenia: "What the
schizophrenic experiences, both as an individual and as a member of the
human species, is not at all any one specific aspect of nature, but nature
as a process of production." Not only is the book completely innocent of
recent research into the brain chemistry underlying the disease, it is
virtually useless as a guide to understanding society even if based on
unscientific notions. Basically, it amounts to a kind of 1960s vision of
personal transformation along the lines of "One Flew over the Cuckoo's
Nest". By allowing one's repressed desires to be expressed, capitalism will
be subverted. In their conclusion, they specifically state that no
political program can be derived from their theories.

Since Deleuze-Guattari figure prominently in the autonomist current, I am
leery of the effect that this kind of Freudianism has on the left. Zizek is
a little bit of a different story. Frankly, I generally don't view his
impact as negative as other Lacanians since he is so idiosyncratic that it
is unlikely that he will ever spawn a current based on his ideas. The stuff
he writes about popular culture I find easy to ignore as well. My only
complaint is when he meddles into areas that he knows little about, like
the revolutionary movement.

> Leaving aside the show trials for a moment, (I also think the comparison of
> Zizek with Koestler is simply appalling and nothing more than an attempt to
> discredit by analogy although there is really nothing analogous between
> their analyses once you go a couple of millimeters beneath the surface. I'm
> sure we've all seen that kind of approach before and have a faily clear idea
> of who uses it and why.

I don't think that Zizek is an anti-Communist in the "God who failed" mode.
I compare him to Koestler only as follows. They both believed that Bukharin
remained an acolyte of Stalin until his death. Not only can you read my
refutation of this nonsense in the piece I wrote on Zizek, but in my Swans
review of Bukharin's novel "How it all Began" as well.
http://www.swans.com/library/art9/lproy01.html

>  That's what makes it so surprising, for me,
> especially coming from Louis whose positions on most other things I've come
> to respect). Why not take on Zizek's analysis of fascism which is one of
> the major targets in his appropriation of Badiou.

Because I am not familiar with it. I only write about Zizek within the
context of specific articles that I stumble across on the net or in print.


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