zizek's understanding of anarchism is the kind of thing you hear from a first year student with a circle-A hat that they bought at a corporate rock concert, or hot topic or something. or, it's like rooted in the term "anarchy in production" or something. yikes.
it's every stupid mistake you'd find on a reddit message board.
the difference, in context, is just whether you let the state whither away or you actively take it out, and what that means is removing the class at the top of the hierarchy. "the state" is really just another word for "the aristocracy". like, that's marxism 101 that zizek is failing, here.
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it's one thing to point to different measures of different truth and realize they exist, but it's another to throw your hands up in the air and decide you're stuck with relativism because of it. given two different systems of truth, we should be able to compare them and determine which is a better way to understand truth than the other - we don't have to just see them as equally useful, or interchangeable, or whatnot. in fact, we have a system of mathematics that can help us systematize and work something like that out; this was worked out primarily by godel, in the middle part of the last century. we can, consequently, evaluate how useful a system of truth determination is, and whether a system has value or does not. and, of course, the great scandal in mathematics is that our system of arithmetic has some problems, and that kant was consequently pretty much dead wrong.
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you know, you don't need foucault to follow this discussion, you just need to ask the question:
if a tree falls in the forest, and there's nobody around, does it make a sound?
you can bring in this naive concept of the observer effect, and a bunch of quantum woo, which is what zizek is doing; it sounds like he got that from deepak chopra, or something. or, you could point to the fact that sound is energy being released by the motion of the tree, and the gravitational force ending with the *thump*.
tuberculosis is, of course, a bacterial infection, and while the bacteria has no doubt evolved , we can trace it's genetic history back. it would probably be more correct to say the pharoah died of a bacterial infection that is ancestral to tuberculosis. or, maybe you don't think that tree makes a sound.
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"the time will come when we will realize that co-operation is in our self interest".
well, there you go, slavoj.
that's kropotkin. perhaps via dawkins.
atta boy.
it's even hegelian, too. right?
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no, i'm going to repeat the point - comparing tuberculosis to a perception is of course a basic category error. what he's saying about rape is true enough, but it doesn't make sense to apply that kind of language to tuberculosis....except regarding what i previously said, namely the fact that bacteria changes so dramatically and so quickly that the tuberculosis of thousands of years prior would really only be an ancestor of the tuberculosis of today. and, so, he's managing to accidentally make a valid point, but he should be appealing to actual darwinian evolution via natural selection, rather than this kind of dawkinsian thing, which is sort of about memes, really - to try and salvage a sciency-ness in a topic that should be approached purely empirically, not using this goofy theory he's citing. and, i haven't read the paper by latour. maybe i should take a look at it and post something to my blog about it...
and, just to be clear - it's just a question of approaching specific questions with the right tactics. you can talk about perception with rape; perception is the only thing that matters with rape, as two people could experience even the most violent types of sex consensually or nonconsensually. but, how tuberculosis changes over time rather clearly reduces to an evolutionary question, and you need to be using the language of science to approach it; otherwise you're just being dumb. but, i'd like to see what latour actually said - did he talk about the tuberculosis strain evolving over time?
ok, he doesn't, and that's a shame, because he'd almost have a point if he had approached the question with the right tools. but, the article seems to really be as dumb as chomsky implies....
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i watched that twice to make sure i didn't miss something worthwhile the first time.
nope.