/edu/ - Education

The irony of the history of philosophy is that the line of philosophers who struggle against the sophists’ temptation finishes with Hegel, the “last philosopher” who, in a way, is also the ultimate sophist, asserting self-referential play with no external support of its truth: for Hegel, there is truth, but it is immanent to the symbolic process—the truth is measured not by an external standard, but by the “pragmatic contradiction,” the inner (in)consistency of the discursive process, by the gap between the enunciated content and its position of enunciation.

Is not the way Althusser relates to philosophy one of the clearest cases of the gap that separates the position of enunciation from the enunciated (content)? At the level of the enunciated content, he is all modesty: he strongly opposes the idealist philosophical pretension to grasp the structure of the entire universe, to “know it all,” to reveal the absolute truth (or the truth of the Absolute). Against this idealist pretension, he praises accepting limits, openness to contingent encounters, etc., which characterize the materialist undercurrent from Epicurus through Spinoza up to Heidegger (although one might add here that it is difficult to imagine a more “arrogant” philosopher than Spinoza, whose Ethics claims to reveal the inner working of God-Nature—if nothing else, it can be shown that here Spinoza is much more “arrogant” than Hegel).

>Idealist philosophers speak for everyone and in everyone’s stead. They think, in fact, that they are in possession of the Truth about everything. Materialist philosophers are much less talkative: they know how to shut up and listen to people. They do not think that they are privy to the Truth about everything. They know that they can become philosophers only gradually, modestly, and that their philosophy will come to them from outside. So they shut up and listen.

However, in what Althusser actually does when talking about philosophy, his “process of enunciation,” his approach to philosophy, we can easily discern the exact opposite of what he characterizes as a materialist approach: brutally simplified universal statements which pretend to define the universal key features of philosophy, with no modest provisos. Philosophy as such is class struggle in theory, the eternal battle of two lines, “idealist” and “materialist”; it functions as an empty repetition of the line of demarcation idealism/materialism whichPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

For Lacan, modern science is defined by two concomitant foreclosures: the foreclosure of the subject and the foreclosure of truth as cause. A scientific text is enounced from a desubjectivized “empty” location, it allows for no references to its subject of enunciation, it is supposed to deliver the impersonal truth which can be repeatedly demonstrated, “anyone can see and say it,” i.e., the truth should be in no way affected by its place of enunciation. We can already see the link with the Cartesian cogito: is not the “empty” enunciator of scientific statements the subject of thought reduced to a vanishing punctuality, deprived of all its properties? This same feature also accounts for the foreclosure of truth as cause: when I commit a slip of the tongue and say something other than what I wanted to say, and this other message tells a truth about me that I am often not ready to recognize, then one can also say that in my slips the truth itself spoke, subverting what I wanted to say. There is truth (a truth about my desire) in such slips, even if they contain factual inexactitude—to take an extremely simple example, when the moderator of a debate, instead of saying “I am thereby opening the session!” says “I am thereby closing the session!” he obviously indicates that he is bored and considers the debate worthless. “Truth” (of my subjective position) is the cause of such slips; when it operates, the subject is directly inscribed into its speech, disturbing the smooth flow of “objective” knowledge.

How, then, can Lacan claim that the subject of psychoanalysis—the divided subject, the subject traversed by negativity—is the subject of modern science (and the Cartesian cogito)? Is it not that, by foreclosing truth and subject, modern science also ignores negativity? Is science not a radical attempt to construct a (literally) truthless discourse of knowledge? Modern science breaks with the traditional universe held together by a deeper meaning (like a harmony of cosmic principles—yin and yang, etc.), a universe which forms a teleologically ordered Whole of a multiplicity of hierarchically ordered spheres, a Whole in which everything serves a higher purpose. In the philosophical tradition, the major vestige of the traditional view is Aristotle: Aristotelian Reason is organic-teleological, in clear contrast to the radical contingency of modern science. No wonder today’s Catholic Church attacks Darwinism as “irrational” in comparison with the Aristotelian Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

The return of the traditional order in capitalism is thus not simply an indication that the logic of science is somehow constrained in capitalism, it is an indication that this containment is immanent to the universe of modern science, implied by the foreclosure of the subject. To put it bluntly: science cannot stand completely on its own, it cannot account for itself (no matter how much positivist accounts try to do so), i.e., the universality of science is based on an exception.

When and how, then, will politics be synchronized with modern science? It is not that the universe of modern science should directly impose itself onto the sphere of politics, so that social life will be regulated by the insights based on the cognitivist/biogenetic naturalization of human life (the tech-gnostic vision of society regulated by the digital big Other). It is simply that the subject engaged in politics should no longer be conceived as the liberal free agent pursuing its interests but as the subject of modern science, the Cartesian cogito, which, as Lacan said, is the subject of psychoanalysis. Therein lies the problem: can we imagine an emancipatory politics whose agent is the empty Cartesian subject? Jacques-Alain Miller’s answer is that the domain of politics is by definition the domain of imaginary and symbolic collective identifications, so that all that psychoanalysis can do is to retain a healthy cynical distance toward the sphere of politics—psychoanalysis cannot ground a specific form of political engagement. The wager of the Communist hypothesis is, on the contrary, that there is a politics based on the empty Cartesian subject: the political name of the empty Cartesian subject is a proletarian, an agent reduced to the empty point of substanceless subjectivity. A politics of radical universal emancipation can be grounded only on the proletarian experience.

OP Here, I cobbled together excerpts from zizek in an attempt at something like an entry point into his project. Something that connected the three different realms of hegel, marx, and freud. With any luck it generated some interest and/or understanding in you. It was based on this talk http://zizekpodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/surplus-value-surplus-enjoyment-surplus-knowledgepart1.mp3 and came from his book "incontinence of the void"

>>1195
Whoops here's the book. Although I'm not sure I'd recommend it as a starting point for zizek. That's part of how the whole idea for this thread came about.
While it's not a book, this short pdf he writes about different varieties of surplus might be better
https://problemi.si/issues/p2017-1/01problemi_international_2017_1_zizek.pdf
This starts through an introduction of object a. Which is a good thing to know about. But offers little in the way of a contextual introduction. That's what I like about this as a starting point, it starts with some relevant philosophical history.

It's a real struggle, where to begin with zizek. I thought about posting this to /leftypol/ but considering that the focus on this isn't explicitly on politics, and that this board is more likely to have a background in some of the more advanced concepts required to read higher level zizek, figured this was better.

Feedback, questions, etc.. welcome.

I read Late Victorian Holocausts by Mike Davis when I was just becoming a leftist and it was some hard hitting stuff for me.

>>1101
This looks fantastic, thank you for the recommendation!

(The epub you attached is corrupted, the chapters are blank.)

>>1098
To add to the other Anon's post, End of Empire is a pretty good overview of the end of the british empire, and while not terribly detailed in any particular area, it gives a pretty thorough overview of the bush conflicts and dirty wars that made up the Empire's death rattle after the Second World War

>>1119
Who would be the author for that?

>>1164
Brian Lapping

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire by Piers Brendon might be better though, covers from Yorktown to the end

>>1387
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/fourier/works/ch29.htm

I found the bankrupts, but not the cucks. I looked all over libgen, it's not there. I don't know where else you'd find it.

Bump
>Not on libgen
Then was it ever even real?

I've been looking for it as well, and it is indeed difficult to find online.

>>1065
It's real: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12400532-the-hierarchies-of-cuckoldry-and-bankruptcy

I've been looking further and it appears there isn't even a commercial eBook available for purchase. Honestly at this point I think the best route is to find a library that carries it. It's only 90 pages, so if you go that route, please consider scanning it for all of us.

>>1040
>How do you guys "use" sources?
By quoting them in the text, referring to them, and then listing them in the bibliography. The key here is to be true to the sources. It is bad historic writing to use a source that does not say what you want it to say, but pretend like it does.

>How should leftists approach primary and secondary sources when studying or debating?
Critically.

>How should we approach anticommunist ones?
Even more critically.

>How do you make sure sources are correct?
You don't. You can never know something for sure, but corroborating sources are usually a good sign. When reading historical works you have to be aware that a lot of it is conjecture. Not made up, but kind of pieced together to make sense, often by generalising what we know of the time. Like for example you can say a particular Consul in 50 CE Rome had a bath in his house without having evidence of that Consul having a bath, but having evidence that rich people in Consuls in Rome in 50 CE generally had a bath.

>Say you have 2 books on the Russian revolution, the first one is more left wing and the second is more anticommunist. How do you prove who's right and wrong?
You don't "prove" anything, but you can do two things: 1) attack the book you disagree with, which can be anything from attacking the sources, criticising the way the author uses sources, criticise the author himself (ad hominem, despite its bad rep is a legit argument, e.g. Ancient aliens guy has no business speaking about aliens cause he has a bachelor in communication, not history or something relevant); 2) find sources that corroborate an opposing view.
Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>1041
Much appreciated, comrade!

>>871
Anybody have any thoughts on this? Seems really neat just to get a different perspective. The way it reconciles marxist thought and the individual seems fascinating.

http://blogs.law.columbia.edu/critique1313/10-13/

>>880
I guess being head of the Italian Communist party doesn't count.

>>921
>He claims that they seek to draw a distinction between the theory of Marx and that of Engels.
Lukacs points out some differences between Marx and Engels in History and Class Consciousness (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/), for example:

>The statements of Marx and Engels on this point could hardly be more explicit. “Dialectics thereby reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion – both in the external world and in the thought of man – two sets of laws which are identical in substance” (Engels). [5] Marx formulated it even more precisely. “In the study of economic categories, as in the case of every historical and social science, it must be borne in mind that … the categories are therefore but forms of being, conditions of existence ….” [6] If this meaning of dialectical method is obscured, dialectics must inevitably begin to look like a superfluous additive, a mere ornament of Marxist ‘sociology’ or ‘economics’. Even worse, it will appear as an obstacle to the ‘sober’, ‘impartial’ study of the ‘facts’, as an empty construct in whose name Marxism does violence to the facts.

&ltend notes: 6. _A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy_ , (my italics). It is of the first importance to realise that the method is limited here to the realms of history and society. The misunderstandings that arise from Engels’ account of dialectics can in the main be put down to the fact that Engels – following Hegel’s mistaken lead – extended the method to apply also to nature. However, the crucial determinants of dialectics – the interaction of subject and object, the unity of theory and practice, the historical changes in the reality underlying the categories as the root cause of changes in thought, etc. – are absent from our knowledge of nature. Unfortunately it is not possible to undertake a detailed analysis of these questions here.
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/history/orthodox.htm)

The other work I see mentioned (although I haven't read it) is Marx and Engels: The Intellectual RelationsPost too long. Click here to view the full text.

>>974
Thank you anon! I will be taking a look at those.

>>810
Based. Tank you anon.

>>802
Knowing the formal rules, though processes, steps to take, fundamental principles conciously is not the same as being able to apply those things on autopilot.
The former makes a good teacher, being able to explain exactly why and how, through concious effort, the latter makes a skilled person.
You can have the former without the latter or vice versa. Often people who are very skilled have internalised the rules to such an extend they cannot seperate the rules from the whole and are thus unable to teach. Also often the people with the theoretical knowledge spend most of their time formalising those rules than applying them in day to day work, and as such aren't as skilled.

So no you don't have to be a good mathematician to teach maths, you don't need to be a good programmer to teach coding. Being a good programmer is applying all those rules instinctively, quickly, without effort, you have to feel instinctually that a piece of logic is "not nice". But teaching requires the ability to apply all these steps conciously, out loud, step by step, formally, not quickly. Same for a mathematician, same for an artist, same for any job.

Skill is not neccecarily knowledge and knowledge is not neccecarily skill.

>>813
Does everything have to be explicitly said for the student to learn? You can learn a lot about good programming by carefully reading good programs, you can learn a great deal about dancing by carefully watching experts dance. In workplaces a good deal of training is often done simply by observing more experienced colleagues working.

>>816
You can learn by trying to decipher what makes other works good but that is not what you pay a teacher for. It takes many times longer to get a feel for good code, and even then it's total bs to think you can learn good code from experience alone.
Good code is build on strict principles, database designs have hyper formalised definitions to ensure it meets all qualities of good design. Solid dry and other quasi buzzwords have to be explicitly taught in order to be applied, even if the programmer later forgets which of the 20 buzzwords made him consider that choice.

You could try to learn to draw or learn to code just by watching other people draw or other people code, but in reality that is not what happens. In businesses were programming happens, new colleagues are corrected with explicit mentions about why a certain choice is better than others. When drawing, or any other skill, trying to decipher the reason behind a choice will just lead you to 20 wrong ends. The total accumulated decisions obscure the reasoning and in trying to immitate it you end up with people who exhibit cargo cult mentality.
Just look at people who for no reason try to apply certain coding patterns everywhere because "he saw someone else do it" or all the artists drawing horrible shaded drawings because "they saw other artists put in highlights".

You can't learn well from just observing the end result. You have to know the reasons for all choices, so you know why it's there, so you know when to break the rules. That is what a teacher is for.

>>872
Relational databases have well-understood mathematical properties but even those can't tell what a good database design is, only pinpoint some obviously bad ones. For example, you can calculate how much redundancy you store, but some extra redundancy may actually be desirable to speed up critical queries. It's not as black and white as you make it to be. There are some similar metrics for code but I don't think anyone actually makes use of them, since blind conformance to metrics is a sure way to ruin your code. Programs are written to be read, not to satisfy "cyclomatic complexity" targets.

Design patterns are a good counterexample, because often they are taught to be a silver bullet for good programming when in fact they are not. They are just common solutions to common problems. Students will mindlessly try to apply them to every problem they come across even when there is a much better solution, because they were taught that this is what they should be doing. I never heard of this actually happening because "they saw someone else doing it", like you claim, but I can recall many cases where they did it because they were taught to. Maybe in drawing it is different, but I am sceptical. The problem with teachers is that they become the sole arbiters of what is considered good/desirable/acceptable and thus rob the student of their confidence in their own judgements. In industry if every code review you give ends up in a small lecture of coding practices, there's a good chance your poor colleague will forever remain a junior programmer because you don't even give them the chance to explain their reasoning. Anyway, they are going to learn a lot more from reviewing your code than from your code reviews.

> You can't learn well from just observing the end result.
Experience says otherwise.

>>754
Based

One that I hate. The Legión Española, the Christ… and the famous goat. A fascist remnant in the army of Spain, certainly ridiculous.

>>285
that emblem is very Juche.

>>424
I loled overall, but in particular at how they had to accentuate the Bulge. I wonder if the put some socks there too if they don't have the goods necessary for the parade…