In recent discussions here and elsewhere surrounding neurology, I get the sense that many approach neurology with a highly specific set of assumptions that very much color their reaction to this field. Turn the television to the Discovery channel on any given evening and you will find documentaries dominated by the theoretical orientation of psycho- and socio-biology. Within this theoretical orientation, any particular human practice, psychological phenomenon, or form of social organization is explained in evolutionary terms as a biological adaptation that promotes reproduction and survival. As a result, this form of psycho- and socio-biology ends up naturalizing and essentializing human practices, social organizations, and forms of subjectivity in ways that can only be described as reactionary.
Those of us who have developed intellectually in the milieu of the last century’s revolution in the social sciences– whether in fields like ethnography, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, linguistics, etc –cannot but encounter this form of theoretical explanation profoundly ignorant by virtue of the way it is commonly unaware of both the findings of ethnography where we discover that if you can imagine it there is probably some group of people somewhere or somewhen that have organized their social, exchange, and kinship relations in this way, and, as a consequence, ideologically debilitating as it ends up naturalizing the contingent forms of subjectivity, social organization, amorous relations, etc., that characterize our contemporary historical and cultural moment.
read on!
Like the Kantian that begins from the current state of knowledge and then essentializes its conditions, thereby naturalizing that knowledge and foreclosing future developments (in connection with phenomenology Deleuze called this the formation of “Ur-Doxa”), the psycho- and socio-biologist begins with the way humans in our current historical and cultural setting do things and then locating this way of doing things in our biology (here “biology” is, in these discourses, the new “innate”, just as orange is the new “pink”). Implicit in this thesis, then, is that one risks monstrosity, chaos, profound psychic suffering, should they dare violate the wisdom of natural selection and heritability. By contrast, the approaches of ethnography, Critical Theory, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, semiotics, sociology, structural linguistics, etc., have a deep emancipatory dimension. By revealing the cultural and historical contingency of how we do things through, for example, comparative studies of different cultures, it becomes possible to, as Foucault so nicely put it, to “imagine otherwise”. Sexual identities, gender roles, forms of social organization, the various goals that we’re taught as we grow up, etc., are now rendered contingent and, as a result, new possibilities that might be more just, more fulfilling, more harmonious, etc., become available. Heidegger, in Being and Time, famously declared that where the phenomenological space of Dasein’s lived experience is concerned, the book that one is reading is far closer than the glasses upon his nose. The glasses on your nose fall, as it were, into the background becoming invisible. They function as a condition for that reading, but one that becomes an invisible, obvious, second-nature. These various social sciences render visible our own invisible conditions for encountering ourselves, others, and the world. And in doing so, they open new possibilities.
The situation with neurology is often similar to that of psycho- and socio-biology. On any given day we can open the newspaper and read about how such and such a hormone, neurotransmitter, or failure of wiring has been discovered to cause such and such a psychic malady. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, Dennett describes the genome as an algorithm which he describes as being independent of its material instantiation (i.e., that it could be instantiated in a variety of different media), and which he suggests unfolds according to its own immanent and inexorable principles. Psycho- and sociobiology thus explains our nature and characteristics on the basis of this programming in the genes. The ideology of neurology often falls prey to a similar set of assumptions, treating the brain as a self-enclosed universe functioning according to its own “programming”, independent of the world about it. That depression we experience, the story goes, has nothing to do with our life history or social conditions, but is rather simply a “chemical imbalance”. In other words, our brain is thought in a way detached from our cultural world and life.
Not surprisingly, the theorist steeped in cultural studies has the knee-jerk reaction of rejecting fields like neurology and evolutionary biology tout court. We can see such a reaction implicitly at work in a comment responding to my post on Catherine Malabou. There Bryan writes:
I also don’t think Malabou’s book refutes Mikhael’s point at all, but it does put into question the kind of scientific positivism you’ve been espousing lately (from the idea of our finer and finer instruments approximating the truth of the universe, to the discussion of pharmaceuticals and anti-depressants as a substitute for psychoanalysis–reaffirming some of the basic tenets of today’s ideology).
In the end, I think this debate over science is predicated largely on a misunderstanding, and the ongoing rhetorical conceit of your recent entries (”A realist would say [blank], against the correlationist who says [blank] about the world…”) is, I think, a little bit distasteful–especially for someone who was once a Lacanian analyst.
I think Bryan’s reference to my Lacanian background as contrasted with my recent “distasteful” forays into neurology betrays a fundamental misapprehension of what it is that I’m up to. For those who are longtime readers of this blog, it will be recalled that for a number of years I have been obsessed with questions of process, mixtures, and individuation. When I refer to individuation, I am not referring to the classical problem of how one entity is distinguished from another entity, but rather the process of ontogenesis, the process of the genesis of entities, whereby individuals come-to-be. Central to accounts of individuation or ontogenesis deriving from Simondon and Deleuze, is the thesis that the genesis of individuals is never that of the instantiation of a pre-existent model or plan, but rather ontogenesis, individuation, is a process that involves a highly complex and creative interaction between the internal milieu of the entity in becoming and the world about it.
As Alberto Toscano has observed in his brilliant Theater of Production, the school of biology known as “developmental systems theory” (sometimes referred to as “interactive constructivism”), is an excellent example of individuation or ontogeny. Unlike schools of biology centered around the gene as an inexorably unfolding gene program in the production of phenotypes, DST has focused on its research on the ontogeny of organisms, emphasizing phenotypic plasticity for one and the same genotype. Where the genecentric biologist asserts a unilateral ontogenetic processes from genes as “master programs” presiding over the ultimate outcome of the phenotype or developed organism, DST underlines bidirectional causation at all levels of scale and development between genes, proteins, cells, networks of cells, organs, and environment. As Richard Lewontin puts it in his brilliant article, “Gene, Organism, and Environment”,
Individual development is not an unfolding, and evolution is not a solutions to present problems. Rather, genes, organisms, and environments are in reciprocal interaction with each other in a way that each is both cause and effect in a quite complex, although perfectly analyzable, way. (Cycles of Contingency, 61)
If the organism is not a solution to a problem posed by its environment, then this is because it constitutes its environment. The snake and the tit mouse might be in the same general region of space, but they have, as it were, different environments (as von Uexkull argued so well in his work on ethology). However, the organism is also constituted by its environment. The relationship here is dialectical, and indeed, Lewontin refers to DST as “dialectical biology”. The biologist Gilbert Gottlieb expresses this point in slightly more technical terms,
The unidirectional S-F [Structural-Function Development] view assumes that genetic activity gives rise to structural maturation that then leads to function in a nonreciprocal fashion, whereas the biderectional view holds that there are reciprocal influences among genetic activity, structural maturation, and function. In the unidirectional view, the activity of genes and the maturation process are pictured as relativity encapsulated or insulated, so that they are uninfluenced by feedback from the maturation process or function, whereas the bidirectional view assumes that genetic activity and maturation are affected by function, activity, or experience. The bidirectional or probabilistic view applied to the usual unidirectional formula calls for arrows going back to genetic activity to indicate feedback serving as signals for the turning on and off of genetic activity. The usual view, as in the central dogma of molecular biology… calls for genetic activity to be regulated by the genetic system itself in a strictly feedforward manner. (ibid., 46)
Gottlieb first began to formulate these claims in response to research into chicks they had done where they varied the environment of bird embryos in the egg producing variations in their phenotype and behavior. Prior to this it had been thought that chick development was a unilateral developmental process independent of environment, but this research disconfirmed that thesis. We can thus see why these theorists refer to developmental systems, rather than the ontogeny of organisms. If this hypothesis is true, then it follows that we cannot locate ontogeny at the level of the organism, but rather must look at the bidirectional feedback relations at all levels of the system, ranging from DNA, RNA, proteins, cells, networks of cells, organs, and environment.
Now, these issues might appear remote from the debates surrounding gene centrists and culturists, but in fact, DST goes straight to the heart of these debates. For while sophisticated theorists such as ourselves hate to hear it put in such stark terms, these debates ultimately boil down to the debate between nature and nurture. The gene centrists look down their nose at the cultural theorists as they have massive bodies of empirical research at hand, based on careful observation and experimentation (yet oddly this doesn’t prevent them from proposing highly speculative theses that aren’t merited by their actual research). The culturalists look down their nose at the gene centrists because they have massive bodies of cultural research indicating the fundamental plasticity of humans and human social formations.
Go back and read the passage from Gottleib carefully. In asserting the primacy of developmental systems and the bidirectionality of causal relations between different levels of these systems ranging from DNA to the environment, Gottleib is pointing out the manner in which the environment (not to mention RNA, cells, networks of cells, and organs) can actualize and activate DNA in a variety of ways producing very different outcomes. Pause and consider that for a moment. Rather than an inexorable unilateral development from DNA to structure and function, we instead get bidirectional feeding forward and backward producing an aleatory outcome that can only be described as a genuine creation. Factors such as environmental temperature, light and darkness, the presence or absence of particular nutrients and chemical substances, the presence or absence of dampness, the presence of various predators, altitude, caregivers, etc., all make important differences in the final actualized individual or phenotypical outcome. But to speak of a phenotypical outcome is already to speak poorly, for ontogenesis is a lifelong process for the organism that doesn’t simply end with maturity. But in addition to all of this, all things being equal, cultural formations, social relations, social encounters, etc., as environmental factors, feed back all the way to the genetic level as well. I am not simply a product of my culture at the level of my mentality, my subjectivity, but at the level of my cells and my DNA as well. Were I born in the 18th century, my DNA and my cells would be actualized differently as a result of a variety of different environmental factors ranging from diet to how I am brought up. My phenotype, my mature organism, would not be the same.
And so too with the plasticity of the brain or our synaptic self. What we have at the level of the brain is not a unilateral determination of self by neurology, but rather we have a highly complex developmental system that includes our DNA, our cells, our basic biology, but also the world about us, our experience, our culture, and so on. If including something like bidirectional developmental systems in our social ontology is an important, even vital move, then this is because our best social theories have encountered an internal deadlock and theoretical pessimism on par with the sort of reactionary pessimism found in psycho- and socio-biology. While the pessimism of our best cultural theory is not reactionary as in the case of psycho- and socio-biology, there is nonetheless a sort of fatalism that haunts these theoretical orientations. As evidenced by theoretical moves we witness in Badiou with his theory of the subject, the event, and truth-procedures or Zizek in his account of the subject and the act, cultural theory today finds itself in an impasse where it has explained things too well. It wonders how it is ever possible to escape subjectivization through power, signs, discourse, and the social if the subject is conceived, after the fashion of Foucault, as a mere fold of power.
What the DST approach affords is an emphasis on the aleatory and creative nature of bio-cultural development that allows for the production of a subject that is not simply a mobius fold power or biology. Bryan worries that I, as a former Lacanian analyst, have given up on the history of subjects, the signifier, signs, relations to the Other and others, and so on. Nothing could be further from the truth. What, rather, I search for is a more expansive material semiotics that is capable of embracing the physical, the biological, the technological, the neurological, the economic, the social, the signifying, the chemical, and all the rest without striving to reduce the organism to one of these dimensions. In addition to this, I look for a social and psychological theory that is strong enough, that is well founded enough, to respond to the smug and superior glance down the nose on the part of the psycho- and sociobiologist… That is, a theoretical framework capable of meeting the material cause with the material cause rather than simply trying to explain it away.
Larval Subjects . 
April 16, 2009 at 3:23 am
I think the way you’ve quoted me above is really misleading, since it cuts out the most important part of what I said: that last bit is, as far as I’m concerned, more the commentary of a person who follows your blog than a real theoretical critique (perhaps why it was excerpted…).
Anyhow, I think you’ve misinterpreted what I meant by “distasteful.” I think you tend to assume that any criticism you receive is automatically because everyone else is so immersed in their false consciousness qua correlationism that they can’t understand the true depth of your insights. For one, I’m not “immersed in cultural studies”: I’m an undergrad history major with some knowledge of Lacan and German Idealism–I’ve never really cared for anything related to cultural studies and it always struck me as ideologically suspicious and mostly self-indulgent.
Second, my point was clearly directed at your rhetoric, not the fact that you’ve begun to discuss neurology. Personally, I find neurology really fascinating–something of my best friends in college are neuroscience majors or neuroscientists, and all of what they say is very intriguing, so much so that they’ve gotten me to read quite a bit of research related to the field.
What I find slightly repugnant is your shift into language like “The Kantian says…” (as you use even in this post), or “The correlationist says…” As if all these positions are so self-evident and clear. I don’t think this is the case, and I think that this kind of rhetorical gesture suggests something deeply troubling about your recent “conversion” (maybe in the religious sense?) to object-oriented philosophy. In other words, in the past several months, your way of describing your positions and communicating with other bloggers strikes me as deeply Christian: you have the true faith, we’re all left out of heaven, banished into the limbo of correlationism. It’s a little bit arrogant. I only decided to post because I thought it was worth pointing out–it’s a kind of rhetorical disposition that is, in my opinion, deeply unsuited for an analyst.
April 16, 2009 at 3:51 am
Bryan,
Thanks for the comment! Of course you are correct in identifying certain rhetorical and textual strategies at work in my discussions. These are designed to produce certain disidentifications and open alternative possibilities of thought. Moreover I’m eulogizing these alternative approaches as a rhetorical technique of seduction. As I described myself in a recent post, I am a fundamentalist evangelical atheist materialist, so your charge of being Christian is largely correct. I apologize for not quoting you in full, though I did link to your original quote. I’m perplexed by your remark about cultural studies. Certainly Zizek falls into the domain of cultural studies. All of this aside, vis a vis your criticisms of the manner in which I’m simplifying the Kantian and the correlationist, would you level a similar critique against Lacan’s discussions of ego-psychology, Piaget, or Chomsky?
April 16, 2009 at 4:31 am
1. I’m not sure you’ve succeeded at that goal of disidentification. Generally speaking, any position that requires the construction of an entire universe of strawmen is suspicious and suggests a huge amount of libidinal investment in what its attacking, rather than the critique itself. Thus, for example, Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel reveals less about Hegel’s philosophy than about the need for Kierkegaard to have a strawman who goes by the name of “Hegel” (there’s an excellent book on this by Prof. [not comedian] Jon Stewart, but anyhow…). Basically, I think you’re on the wrong track as far as rhetoric goes.
2. I disagree that Zizek is cultural studies, although your language is ambiguous (“falls into the domain…”). This is usually the reading of Zizek that people come away with when they’re not at all deeply engaged in his work and become distracted by the flashy pop culture examples. The fact is, the pop culture analyses are all subordinated to making Lacan and German Idealism understandable. Adrian Johnston’s book, *Zizek’s Ontology*, provides probably the best case of elucidating this point, but even a brief encounter with Zizek’s *Tarrying with the Negative* makes it clear that his main focus is not cultural studies. A much better description would be the reactualization of German Idealism through Lacanian psychoanalysis.
3. I don’t think Lacan simplifies ego psychology (would you honestly claim otherwise?), and as for Piaget and Chomsky, I’m not familiar enough with either. The difference between your argument about correlationism and Lacan’s is that, despite all of the name calling, Lacan’s criticism of ego-psychology is actually quite rigorous (as in Seminars I, II, and III), and also really damning because he gets it right. The same is true of Kant’s critique of Hume and Leibniz. All in all, we may forget exactly who Kant or Lacan or even Marx were criticizing in their texts, but we’ll never forget the critiques, because their critiques are invaluable and will stay with us for a long time.
On the other hand, I don’t think you get Kant right–I think he’s more of a strawman for you.
April 16, 2009 at 5:17 am
Man, I love this post!!
April 16, 2009 at 5:50 am
As Adrian Johnston once said to me in a conversation as he was undergoing his training, there is a lot of good stuff among the ego-psychologists. In that discussion he was actually passionately defending the jewels in a number of these so-called ego-psychologists. I absolutely think Lacan simplifies ego-psychology and turns it into a strawman to develop his own position. You localize and isolate the key claim on which the position is based and develop it from there. Certainly there’s very little sophistication in Kant’s critique of Hume, for example… In fact, the secondary scholarship will tell you that it’s not even clear he even read Hume.
That’s par for the course in any debate between differing positions. For example, you are currently turning my claims into strawmen, and there is not a page of Zizek where he has not caricatured some competing position. Usually the battle cry “you haven’t read x carefully enough” is really another way of saying “you’re not identified with what I’m identified with!” This for example is the sort of complaint you hear from a Christian apologist when confronted with the vulgarity of their movement: “But if you know the tradition and you read Scripture more carefully then you would know…” Translation, “you don’t share a transferential relation with my objet a!” Or, alternatively, “you don’t share my sublime object, damn it!”
There is a more nuanced point here that can be illuminated by reference to Zizek’s analysis of Hitchcock’s film Rope. There Zizek carefully analyzes the reaction of the two young men’s professor— as I recall, the analysis is in Tarrying With the Negative –discussing the professors elaborate Nietzschean philosophy. Zizek’s thesis is that the actions of the student in the murder of their friend represent the truth of their professor’s philosophy. In other words, if you want to know the truth of the professor’s philosophy, you don’t look at the details of that philosophy itself but what it produces. Incidentally, this is a thoroughly Hegelian thesis. There is thus, on the one hand, the letter of a philosophical position, and, on the other hand, the spirit of that position. The spirit of a position is found in what that position produces. You find the spirit not in the text as a sublime object hiding a forever receding truth like Kafka’s door of the law, but rather in its product. That is why Zizek, in his caricatures of a variety of postmodern positions, is nonetheless capturing something fundamental in these positions. The point is that any critique of another position necessarily simplifies that position. It is naive to think otherwise or that somehow one speaks from a position that is otherwise. The call for the person critiquing the position to do otherwise is just a call for them to enter into your transference. Again, giving this thesis a Zizekian flourish in terms of Schelling, it is this sort of distantiation or separation in an act of freedom that allows anything to be produced at all. Now you’re more than welcome to critique my rhetoric and call for more careful reading of Kant or whatnot, but really it doesn’t address anything I said in this post or that I argued. It’s fine that you have a fetish object, but arguing from that fetish doesn’t really go any way towards persuading or producing an argument. If anything it functions as a confirmation of exactly the tiresome attitude I outlined in my previous post.
April 16, 2009 at 5:57 am
I admit I don’t understand the argument about rhetoric – every single philosopher has created some form of straw-man against which to portray their own work. And there will always be defenders of the target of critique who claim that the criticizer gets the target wrong. This isn’t anything new, or particularly deplorable.
April 16, 2009 at 6:09 am
The charge that one is not occupying the position of the analyst is equally bizarre, as it seemed to be premised on the highly mistaken reading of Lacan that somehow the position of the analyst is a privileged position among the four discourses that one ought to occupy. First, there is the genuine question of whether it is possible to occupy the position of the analyst outside of the analytic setting. What would it mean to occupy the position of the analyst, for example, with respect to a text when that text is not addressing the reader, cannot respond to the remarks of the reader and therefore the reader cannot occupy the position of objet a? Such has always been the problem with applied psychoanalysis, and which is one reason I was led to introduce the “discourse of critical theory” in my development of the discourse structures that characterize our historical moment (http://www.zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/view/163/257). But more fundamentally, Lacan himself shifts between the various structures of discourse in his teaching, as can be aptly seen in his dialogue on the steps of the Parthenon in Seminar 17. There Lacan performs each of the four discourses, exemplifying them in practice. Throughout his teaching, however, Lacan alternately occupies the position of the master, the hysteric (when criticizing, for example, ego psychology), and the analyst. The discourse position that is notably absent in most of his work is that of the discourse of the university. Yet to call for a more careful reading of, say, Kant, is to fall into precisely that discourse, where the only possible outcome is the production of a split subject. The charge of falling into the “discourse of the hysteric” is the oddest claim of all. Certainly you recognize, dear “reader” of Lacan, that if there is a privileged discourse in Lacan it is not that of the analyst but of the hysteric… For it is only the discourse of the hysteric, according to Lacan, that produces knowledge in its challenge to the master! The discourse of the hysteric is the discourse that causes the fixed discursive structures to move.
April 16, 2009 at 7:01 am
“Hence, all great ‘dialogues’ in the history of philosophy were so many cases of misunderstanding: Aristotle misunderstood Plato, Thomas Aquinas misunderstood Aristotle, Hegel misunderstood Kant and Schelling, Marx misunderstood Hegel, Nietzsche misunderstood Christ, Heidegger misunderstood Hegel… Precisely when one philosopher exerted a key influence upon another, this influence was without exception grounded in a productive misreading – did not the entirety of analytic philosophy emerge from misreading the early Wittgenstein?”
-Slavoj Zizek, Organs without Bodies, ix
I don’t intend this to be solely directed at your argument about rhetoric, Bryan. Every one of us has been making claims about whether others have misread an author or not. But I think Zizek is absolutely right here, that misreadings are not intrinsically bad insofar as they are productive. Which entails that we should grapple with the actual arguments put forth, and not about whether someone is misrepresenting another.
April 16, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Nick, read closer. “Precisely when one philosopher exerted a key influence upon another, this influence was without exception grounded in a productive misreading.”
The key word there is *productive*.
Also, I still don’t buy that claim, unless maybe you or Levi consider yourselves the next Aristotle. But so long as you’re not, it probably helps to get the people you’re reading right.
April 16, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Bryan, for someone who calls for careful reading, you seem to give some pretty peculiar readings of things. You’re really suggesting that Aristotle’s critique of Plato’s theory of the forms was simply a nice influence, or that Kant’s reading of Hume was just a nice influence or that Nietzsche’s analysis of Christ and Paul (!) was just a nice influence? You’re making yourself look silly and stubborn, rather than making sense here. The idea that one has to be the next Aristotle in order to criticize another philosopher is even more ridiculous. Do you really believe that Aristotle occurred in a vacuum, emerging ex nihilo like some immaculate conception? You really believe that Aristotle’s brilliant thought wasn’t also the product of many conversations among other philosophers critical of Plato, leading to Aristotle’s breakthrough? C’mon, for a history student this would be a completely bizarre claim. Moreover, your idea of how critique proceeds is strange as well. You seem to believe that prior to any critique of another philosophers position it is necessary for the would-be critic to proceed like Borges’ Pierre Menard, rewriting all of Don Quixote exactly as it is. Perhaps you’ve never taken a basic logic course, but you seem unaware that philosophical positions are based on premises and that you can attack those premises and call into question the remainder of the conclusions. This is why Aristotle, within the space of a few sentences, believes he is able to overturn Plato and doesn’t bother with an extensive engagement with the rest of his thought. He goes for the heart and that’s enough. By contrast, you seem to be proposing something like the thesis that in order to kill a body one must destroy every organ. At any rate, why not just stick to the actual claims being made rather than bitching about how people express themselves?
April 16, 2009 at 4:23 pm
Here is everything that I am saying in a nutshell. At the level of rhetoric there are two problems:
1. After your argument with Mikhael, your post immediately goes into a biographical narration of your childhood about how hard it was growing up in a religious community, hence we should sympathize with your efforts to oppose it at all costs, even in the form of scary “things-in-themselves.” Here your argument takes place entirely at the Imaginary level of identification–it isn’t the strength of your arguments we should respect, but only your personal circumstances, which somehow condition them.
2. Your whole “Kantian correlationist says [x]” conceit is ridiculous, not because rhetoric isn’t bad–it’s amazing how this got twisted around above. I’m perfectly fine with “rhetoric”–but the fact is, you have REAL Kantians making REAL claims here. Nevertheless, your posts remain “dialogue-as-monologue.” You misquote and misrepresent other fews in favor of monologue.
Next, I take back my immediately previous post: if you you admit that you’re actually referring to “Kant” and not Kant, or “Malabou” and not Malabou–which is to say, basing your arguments on a misunderstanding/strawman–then I’ll be perfectly happy.
April 16, 2009 at 5:25 pm
Bryan, I really think you need to work on your reading comprehension skills. My recent post on naturalism and Spinoza does not advance its argument by reference to my experience of the circumstances under which I discovered Spinoza. If you read on beyond that anecdote, I go on to discuss Spinoza’s theses about the mind/body relation and the role that affects play in normative judgment and overturning particular commitments. There I do not misportray the Kantian position. Kant everywhere and always, in his ethical writings, tells us that we must exclude anything pathological (i.e., affective) in following and applying the categorical imperative. That’s just the facts, buddy. In that post I attempt to explain why I think this simply doesn’t work. In addition to this, I wrote four very detailed and careful posts on Meillassoux’s arguments against correlationism, one of which engaged the key premises of Kant’s argument at a textual level. How many times does one have to repeat an argument? But again, you just seem to be whining about rhetorical styles, rather than making any substantial claims. If you have a specific argument to put forward that pertains to real claims, by all means do so.
April 16, 2009 at 9:13 pm
I think I DID put forth a coherent argument in your previous post (https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2009/04/15/this-is-how-its-done-catherine-malabou/#comments), yet YOU–yes you, Levi–chose to single out only the part of my comment pertaining to your use of rhetoric in THIS post, instead of my more substantive argument regarding your absurd reading of both Kant and Malabou and your failure to grasp my response (hence your comment on my reading skills is totally ridiculous), to which your reply seemed to basically be an admission that you misunderstood Malabou’s distinction between neuronal and mental, as well as Kant’s notion of “thing-in-itself.” Perhaps this is why you excerpted it to begin with–if you left it in, you’d have to deal with my claims about antinomy!
Instead, again, you decided to single out only the part of my comment on your use of rhetoric, and then, in a perverse twist, blamed me for only arguing about your rhetoric and not putting forth a substantial argument. I seriously hope this isn’t the way in which you lead your class discussions.
April 16, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Yikes Bryan! Take a deep breath and let it go. First, I responded to your interpretation of Malabou in the original post and still think you’re mistaken as to what she’s claiming. Second, the post you’re responding to here was only tangentally about your comment, and was devoted to how I understand the relationship between biology, neurology, and culture. In my discussions with others on these issues, I have gotten the sense that they immediately associate biology and neurology with what I outlined at the beginning of this post. Your comment struck me as reflective of those assumptions and so I quoted it. I apologize if that’s not what was lurking in your mind. I’m not, after all, a mind reader. If anything, given your truculent tone, I thought the reference to you was rather magnanimous as it acknowledged a legitimacy to what I took to be your worries about neurology and pharmacology vis a vis Lacan analysis. For this reason, I carefully developed a critique of these positions in neurology and biology and why I reject these positions. I then went on to outline what I believe to be both the analytic strengths and the political strengths of culturalist approaches, but also where I think they run into problems. Finally, I discussed the promise I see in DST and how I see it as offering the possibility of both unifying both positions without requiring culturalists to adopt the untenable position of rejecting the biological and neurological out of hand and how it promises some possible avenues of escape from the deadlocks that currently haunt continental culturalist political theory. The post wasn’t really about you!
April 17, 2009 at 12:14 am
Bryan, read closer. I wrote, “But I think Zizek is absolutely right here, that misreadings are not intrinsically bad insofar as they are productive.” (emphasis added)
Which is exactly what you say I missed…
And no one ever claimed that a misreading had to reach the level of Aristotelian greatness! My very simply point is that misreadings can be productive. I don’t think that’s a particularly controversial claim. And again, my comment wasn’t focused solely on your remarks – your remarks were only the most recent manifestation of what I think is an empty argument (“you haven’t read philosopher X right!” or “you’re misrepresenting X!”).
April 17, 2009 at 12:32 pm
Based on your recommendation, Dr. S., I’ve been reading about Developmental Systems Theory in Cycles of Contingency,, including the articles by Gottlieb and Lewontin you cite in your excellent post. Some of this work has been around for quite awhile now — Gottlieb’s first research on hatchlings dates to the early 60s. The summaries of this empirical work suggest an interaction between theory and methodology. Old-school genetic determinism proposes that an organism will develop according to the genetic blueprint unless something goes wrong in the environment. This sort of theory fits with classical linear cause-effect experimental technique: hold the genetic variable constant, systematically manipulate very specific features of the environment, observe differences in resulting phenotypes. DST proposes a more interactive, ecological model of development in which randomness rather than error affects the life course in varying ways and degrees. This kind of theory is best tested empirically through naturalistic observation, multivariate statistical analysis, and more stochastically-nuanced causal modeling.
Did DST’s ascendancy cause biologists to start learning these statistical techniques, or did acquisition of the techniques prompt shifts in theory? I’m not a biologist, but I’d bet that a developmental systems explanation works best here too.
I suspect non-biologists get a skewed picture of developmental biology because the linear determinative cause-effect theory is easier to describe to a lay audience. It’s true in most fields that amateurs are exposed to an archaic caricature rather than the real thing.
December 18, 2010 at 1:57 am
Hey thanks for the article :)