The plurality of big Others vs. the concrete Other - Lacan, Levinas, Bataille, Nick Land
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 10 сен 2024
- Micro-doing jouissance.
Micro-dosing the face of the Other.
ABOUT
Theory Underground is a research, publishing, and lecture institute. TU exists to develop the concept of timenergy in the context of critical social theory (CST). CST is the umbrella over critical media theory (CMT), critical doxology and timenergy (CDT), critique of libidinal economy (CLE), critique of political economy (CPE), critique of gender and sex (CGS), and critique of psychiatry and therapism (CPT), critique of science and religion (CSR), and many more. To get basically situated in this field you will have to know a handful of important figures from a bunch of areas of the humanities and social sciences. That would be a lot of work for you if not for the fact that Dave, Ann, and Mikey are consolidating hundreds of thousands of hours of effort into a pirate TV-radio-press that goes on tours and throws conferences and shit like that… It’s a crazyfun experiment, and you can enjoy a ton of the content here for free.
GET INVOLVED or SUPPORT
Join live sessions and unlock past courses and forums on the TU Discord by becoming a member via the monthly subscription! It’s the hands-down best way to get the most out of the content if you are excited to learn the field and become a thinker in the milieu: theoryundergro...
Pledge support to the production of the free content on RUclips and Podcast / theoryunderground
Fund the publishing work via the TU Substack, where original works by the TU writers is featured alongside original works by Slavoj Zizek, Todd McGowan, Chris Cutrone, Nina Power, Alenka Zupancic, et al. theoryundergro...
Get TU books at a discount: theoryundergro...
CREDITS / LINKS
Missed a course at Theory Underground? Wrong! Courses at Theory Underground are available after the fact on demand via the membership. theoryundergro...
If you want to help TU in a totally gratuitous way, or support, here is a way to buy something concrete and immediately useful www.amazon.com...
Buy Dave and Ann a coffee date: www.venmo.com/... paypal.me/theo...
If Theory Underground has helped you see that text-to-speech technologies are a useful way of supplementing one’s reading while living a busy life, if you want to be able to listen to PDFs for yourself, then Speechify is recommended. Use the link below and Theory Underground gets credit! share.speechif...
Follow Theory Underground on Duolingo: invite.duoling...
See Theory Underground memes and get occasional updates or thoughts via the Instagram :
/ theory_underground
MUSIC CREDITS Logo sequence music by olliebeanz.com... creativecommon... Mike Chino, Demigods • Mike Chino - Demigods ...
This was so so good. May this comment contribute to TU's micro project of gaming the algorithm in favor of things that are irreducible to the status of mere content.
I don't know if this was the intended take away but I really liked the point about how when we interact with ppl we act as if we know everything, when someone says something to us we take whatever they said and make it a part of our worldview as if we always knew what they were saying. And that we can perhaps be aware of this tendency and overcome it somewhat by realizing that every other person is an infinite source of alien information, an infinite source of knowledge... This whole video is boggling my mind and I fear most of it went way over my head, but I love that, I love theory underground!! You guys are beautiful.
@@GiggleBlizzard thank you so much for the thoughtful comment. That is definitely one of the intended takeaways when it comes to Levinas especially but it goes so well with the idea that we also all have a plurality of contradictory big Others!
Micro-jouissance is a fantastic concept!
But I wonder if we might hazard a different term: it seems this is more on the order of "stimulation"... Maybe stimulation is what you can do on your work break, to get you through the day--full jouissance as such, on the other hand, is enjoyment that incapacitates you and requires you to call in sick.
Also -- Is Kant's sublime a form of micro-jouissance, given that it involves enjoying the spectacle of of nature's overwhelming power from a safe distance, where terror is converted into a little thrill. Perhaps 19th century landscape paintings are already stimulating simulations, in the sense that they conceal the fact that nature as such ceases to exist, once humans view nature as an object which can be completely mastered and dominated via human technology and science.
Loving the discussion of the fractured Big Other / Russian dolls / code switching, I was actually really wanting to hear how Mikey thinks about this particular issue.
Oof I might just have to work an extra hour to fit this in, good stuff 🎉
Will listen when I have time!
Really excited I finally have time to go through this one!
In regards to going back over your old lectures, it's not at all narcissistic: the best jazz musicians record themselves practicing every day and then take notes on things they want to improve. I think there is a kind of learned skill of being able to evaluate your own performance in a partially detached and objective way, which one can also draw from in the midst of a performance (lecture or music) when you notice something that can be improved about your performance and adjust it on the fly.
I think that it's really cool that like Jaspers, you emphasize the importance of lectures as such. However, I think Jaspers tends to mystify the fact that lecturing is in fact a skill that you can practice and get good at, as well as the fact that this is another area where there are going to be differences of talent.
And btw after watching some of the earlier courses, the early lectures were good, but all that practice is paying off because in more recent videos I think you are definitely on another level with your lecturing skills!
If we frame things in terms of the moebius strip of SuperEgo and Big Other, then the question that becomes really crucial for me is: how does technology fit in? For me technology is clearly part of the social unconscious but I struggle with theorizing tech within the Lacanian conceptual framework--for me it seems to cut across the Real/Imaginary/Symbolic as it weaves them all together within the human lifeworld. But possibly the Digital Order as such needs to be theorized alongside the Real/Imaginary/Symbolic.
Baudrillard distinction between value and symbolic exchange was mentioned but in relation to technology if we follow his lead we end up precisely in hyper-reality where those distinctions no longer function in a traditional way, given the way that models and statistical procedures play essential roles in producing material reality.
Hypothesis: In the Digital Order SuperEgo / Big Other distinction is no longer relevant. Why? Because algorithms manipulate behavior at a more granular level, beyond guilt and enjoyment, towards a direction statistical realization of desired behaviors.
In other words: What matters is that 3.5% of all visitors buy the product, and that by making a small change to the checkout process, we can optimize this so that 3.6% of visitors buy the product. Questions of subjectivity tend to become irrelevant when marketers can directly manipulate behaviors to get desired outcomes. But also there is no more issue of expelling things "outside" the social order. In fact in this case we might say that there is an attempt to expel the Real itself, in terms of anything that cannot be manipulated or controlled by TechnoScience. So maybe we could say that THE ACCIDENT that is the obscene underside of the Technical Order.
Amazing lecture on Levinas -- this is all new to me.
@@TheCyborgk holy shit man that's awesome
@@TheCyborgk you should have an email I sent yesterday with another Levinas lecture just for subscribers if you wanna go deeper
@@theory_underground Sweet, yeah I'm gonna check it! I will probably also try to at least watch Nance's exegetical readings so I can slipstream a little until I have time to look into Levinas more deeply.
Least Common Denominator is how you get to fit your factor into the sum of another's big other...once in to a sufficient degree (from observation and intuitive evaluation), you can fault test gently and perhaps subtly crack the egg from the inside and they will be unaware that it's been broken by you. If all goes as best as it possibly could, they will not discover it is broken until they are done smashing it out (as if they have done it themselves)...this has a nice fortifying effect as it springs from integration through natural law...aaand, by the act of necessary investment to get to know eachother, you may both simultaneously gain capital from the experiences and learning from eachother. 🙃 P. S. dOTS don't STOP...unless there's 4....
🔥🔥🔥
Question: the example with the ingenuous women who want to protect their sacred land, might the solution be: a woman from a different tribe or from the western world volunteers to be accepted in the sacred community, so she can infiltrate in their society, so she could be revealed the secret of the sacred land? And then she opens up the "secret" to the judge and get to a far more honest conclusion? For the better good for everybody?
After some consideration I wonder if "absolute deterritorialization" could be the foundation of any actually existing social order. Whether we are talking capital or fascism, it seems that reterritorialization is always the other side of the coin of deterritorialization. From one point of view "all that is solid melts into air" -- and surely traditional forms do melt, but do they melt into air? Or is it more like metal being melted so that it can be thrown back into the forge and shaped into new forms?
And if these invisible new forms of control are invisible algorithms transmitted through the air via wifi, that does not mean that we have escaped from control and prohibition.
Could we say that in the situation where we have a responsibility or obligation towards the Concrete Other, invoking the norms of the Big Other to evade our responsibility ("I won't help because that's not what one does") is a form of bad faith?
And then a question that comes to mind here is: What would happen if we think about our dependence on the biosphere, which brings some obligation to a nonhuman Concrete Other in the form of planetary life? To what extent do we justify our relation towards the environment in terms of some set of already existing norms promoted by a Big Other (which could be "drill baby drill", "green new deal", "science will save us", "let them rot", or "collapse is good actually")?
And to what extent do these socially approved beliefs function as forms of bad faith, allowing us to evade the traumatic confrontation with the disaster of what is actually going on in terms of species extinction and the biosphere?
@@TheCyborgk there's a really great book about phenomenology and environmentalism actually... I personally bracket that all out as a lost cause and assume we'll have to go live in space soon and that most people won't be included in that move resulting in the worst genocide ever, and I'll probably be a part of the Mad Max world left behind... Because I'm not convinced politics can save us ... And then I wonder if it's all just propagandized info and everything will more or less be fine and the left just does environmentalistic hysterics because it gave up on working people a long time ago and now turns to the non human because it finds actually existing humans detestable... Idk. Either way, environmentalism opens a genuine set of questions and I've got a short course on the topic in the works.
@@theory_underground One idea here from traditional cultures is to view animals as part of "the ancestors" to which we owe an obligation as a whole in terms of existing at all -- and from this point of view, based on the little of gleaned about Levinas, perhaps "the animal" and even "the earth" could function like the orphan, widow, and stranger in Levinas in terms of arousing some kind of sense of open ended responsibility, a responsibility which cannot be reduced to any available determinate position within environmentalist discourse.
I think that the fundamental framing of climate change as a "problem" that needs to be "solved" already contains a technocratic bias which does not get at a more fundamental question of what our ethical relation should actually be in terms of nature as Other.
In terms of ethics my suspicion is that as long as the nonhuman world is viewed in terms of reserves of raw material available for exploitation by the human, then the possibility is always open that some humans will be demoted into the nonhuman category. Thus, the way we treat the Animal and the Earth is not divorced from the way we treat the Orphan, Widow, and Stranger. (I believe this line of thinking is more or less aligned with Adorno's thinking.)
Whether we can actually do anything on a collective level in terms of climate change, etc, I think is a secondary question and perhaps we are rushing to answer this question too quickly without really living with the difficulty of the ethical question of how we relate to the Earth and the Animal as such.
@@theory_underground PS. I just found a really interesting essay contrasting Adorno and Levinas, and it seems that Levinas himself explicitly rejected any concession to nature along these lines, according to C. Fred Alford, summarizing Levinas: "To see nature in any terms but as means to alleviate human suffering is to turn nature into an idol."
That position seems extreme, and hard to justify without explicit reference to theology and Judaism. I'd be curious to get deeper into Levinas at some point and see if it is possible to construct an immanent critique, because that position on idolatry seems to imply accepting some kind of creationism. Levinas also seems to consider most art to amount to "idolatry".
I guess the question for me is how well the arguments Levinas is making would stand up, if we did not accept his theology. Can there be transcendence and infinity without this figure of God in the background as the ultimate source of transcendence?
So Mark Fischers Acid Communisim wouldnt work according to Zizek because even limit experiences are a part of capital?? Landian left idea vs zizekian left ideas is dope
at 2:00:05 ×× whoa so the beyond being... for Levinas and Land...😮
there's that quote, " One must go beyond God, into the Desert... " i was reading ? was it, Silensius? i need to go check.... such a super quote.... maybe related. / i got a book of aphorisms by that person but the translation was lousy :( ...anyway, Silensius i think was also in that tip🎉
Angelus Silesius 🌌
yeah; i learned about him.. he was a german mystic , valued by Heidegger
Excendance : must go beyond god, into the desert 🛸❤ Levinas being read into that old mystic ♡yez, i was feeling the total need to escape existence like just the other day ⛄️☄️ was so extreme/ never knew there was a term for it
ffs RUclips is simply not allowing me to comment what I wanna share here
@@Somereasonstolive nothing has been held for review either 🤷🤔
@@Somereasonstolive nothing has been held for review either 🤷🤔
@@theory_underground i guess the human psyche likes to have a common place to congregate and exchange ideas but at this point RUclips is beyond compromised. we need to be supporting platforms based on peer-to-peer connection where our data isnt stored in any central server which allows that it can be censored. Bitchute, Peertube, Library Network are decentralized platforms operating in the way the internet was literally structured to work, we've been trained to rely on controlled servers owned by billionaire silicon valley tech nerds it's only up to us to break out of that spell. Unfortunately this message can only get traction on RUclips.
Divide your comment into multiple parts to find whatever phrase or word is offending google's filters
Social class died in the 1980s.
someone ought to read Endnotes! I recommend 'the history of subsumption' and 'a history of separation' on the rise and dissolution of class programmatism, I think you'd find it interesting
@@teleblisters I'll investigate it. Thank you for the suggestion.
"Christianity has really gone out of its way to separate sensuality and religion"
Not in Orthodox Christianity.
could you expand on that?
@@matthewfuller9760 There is no Orthodox life that doesn't include participation in the Divine Liturgy. During the Divine Liturgy we sing (hearing), light incense (smell), venerate icons and light candles (touch, sight), we prostrate (action), and we eat the body and blood of God (touch, taste) and all of these are actions. Orthodoxy engages all of the senses and calls the body as well as the spirit to action and movement. Unlike Gnosticism and Protestantism, which is detached and intellectual, Orthodoxy is immediate and centered on the here and now and unifies the body to the spirit rather than body and spirit being in opposition.
True, It does use sensuality in a limited sense as a counterbalance or tool of control, a substitute to, and "holy" version of the sensual "vices" it is against, which I think is made clear by the discussion after that quote...(context - text (out of context) = con)
@@ZephyrAvoxel "Tool of control". Opinion discarded.