Is this worth the read? anyone?

i see what youre saying and if i say i cant explain it it is because it is not a matter of a better or true explanation replacing a fake or wrong one.

what you say is true and right because it gives sense to a certain practice or at least a certain vision that has sense and place in your own context.

but it is a practical truth, ie it enables action. such a thing can only be seen when you are on the field seeing the actions and practices such visions allow.

theyre just tools. if you someone invented them for something specific it doesnt mean other people cant use them otherwise for their problems. but these problems are practical problems, only seen by those inside the whole context where they take place. i think if one is out of it this remains incomprehensible from the outside and useless unless you are engaging in an anthropological reflexion based on ethnographical work.

*if someone

>and useless unless you are engaging in an anthropological reflexion based on ethnographical work

So this is the context you place French theory in? As a reaction to the works of Levi-Strauss, perhaps, as concrete reference?

Also, which are the more exciting paths you took?

when i speak of a context i dont mean something that you can define specifically in a phrase. it is an ensemble you begin to see after some first hand familiarity . levi strauss is part of that context as a whole and the little differences taking place within it are not my point.

let me put it this way: when americans use 'french theory' and use it to face their lives and its problems, what counts is not the supposed fidelity to what this or that author said or intended but the new possibilites of action these tools open. and such a thing is not different than what french people in academia do when they study chinese or indian civilizations, or when chinese or indians use european philosophies. it is not different than what levistrauss did when studying his nambikwaras through the lens of the prague structuralists and so on. it is all about the new tools you acquire and that enable a new take on the old data. ie it is not a matter of a certain content but about how you find it and then use it.

>to understand the context and the project that the author is embedded within.

Isn't this exactly what he says not to do in Death of the author?

>barely backing his bombastic delegations with empirical evidence.

If seen through the lenses of “usefulness” (a very American thing to do), then French theory is almost utterly useless, since no one takes their theories seriously — thankfully.

Going by Foucault, we should have abolished all our power structures, going by Deleuze rejected capitalism. And going by Baudrillard simply lament how purposeless everything is, with melancholy.

bare-backing is best backing

precisely, that is because those philosophies emerged when what was in question was not action itself but a reframing of past action, and where the present was more or less solved in its fundaments. outside europe however, everyone is still trying to digest modernity/industry while preserving some sort of social organisation that is transmissible, and so those philosophies that have no pragmatic aspect and take the world as a given to merely interpret, will seem like useless abstractions for academics.

But many French theorists do not see contemporary Capitalism as “civilization complete” at all, they view it as heavily flawed and often repressive.

There are apolitical French philosophers, such as Lyotard or Barthes, who simply contemplate, but the work of Althusser or Foucault, for example, is heavily political.

well of course from a theoretical pov there will always be something else to say specially when there are no fundamental practical issues

but the ground on which those purely theoretical debates can take place has to be fix enough

So from your pov, French theory is basically a docile contemplation of a finite state of civilization?

not exactly. it is its pretension. and the intellectual products are just the academic aspect of a whole movement that is much wider than academy.

Which movement?

naming it would make it sound as if it were something tangible or intentional, which it is not. it is just the course thing are taking. id call it the industrialization of the world and its social/human consequences, which can be seen all over the place from africa to asia passing through the americas. but this is taking us a bit too off the thread i guess.

Its not off the thread, its basically what Baudrillard wrote about as well. Its basically a melancholic contemplation of the post-Enlightenment World, wherein everything seems to be perfect, but something lacking.

>melancholic contemplation

not quite. we might be speaking of the same phenomena but seen from different positions. that is my point i guess, that if you read the contemporary situation, the facts we face will take that melancholic allure if seen through the intellectual tools these people deviced, and so it will add to the its passive acceptance. but if the same phenomena are seen using other tools you will end up with different possibilities of action as an outcome.

they dont need action for such are the results of what they have done, that is to what they arrived as a civilization. but other tools night open paths to follow. that is what is in question, imo.

and what might some of these other tools be? Imo, the whole world accepted the Western paradigm. Even the countries initially opposed to it, such as Russia or China, are heavily influenced by Western values.

i didn't even know Baudrillard had a book or essay called death of the author, always associated that with Barthes. but anyone who says that is making the point clear, when you read theory you get something new whether or not you understand it.

that is an effect of perspective. it is not that everyone has accepted the western paradigm but that the west reads everything through its paradigm and speak of everyone using it. it will therefore seem as if everyone were following it because you speak of the whole world in terms of politics economics etc. but the everyday life of the people is quite different, that which organizes society and maintains it is still far from what the west does and people are still attached to it and wont just change it like that. in fact they cannot, for reaching something like the individualism that europe invented is something that is an incredible exception in how humans live.

it is impossible to speak of those other tools a priori for they can only be discovered as you shape them in action

I see vastly different places, such as Vietnam, Romania, China, Colombia moving towards the Western paradigm

yes it seems so, but what is actually taking place is a tradition preserving itself by hiding behind a facade of technology and political institutions. but again, what lies at the base of the western paradigm is not its visible results but the social organization that made them possible. abd those places you mention, if not to say all the world but a few eropean countries, are still organized ina collectivist way, or at least not in a truly individualist one. abd that is normal, for that is the normal way humans live. the few truly modern ones can remains so by living on the rest. and that rest will just have to adapt to the situation.

What made the West so different that it enabled individualism?

Also, is it not apparent that immigrants in the West also adopt the individualist way of life fast, instead of bringing collectivist to the West?

it was basically what made science possible. the dualism of modern philosophy is its base. taking it seriously is what enabled such explosion of technique. but everyone else solved that riddle by knowing it is just a perspective inherent to the human organism and so no to be developed but just understood (for we cant change it either). you see that from the smallest tribe in the amazon or the pacific to huge civilizations like china or india.

immigrant in the west remain incredibly attached to their original culture, in the anthropological sense: not the folk they inherited, which they can change, but the way they relate to other people, what it means to be human for them. that is something you learn as you learn language and you cannot change it for one is not even conscious of it. it is actually what allows any consciousness, it is its ground.

individualism is not consumerism or free choice, it is something much more fundamental concerning how the newborn members of a society become part of it and so preserve it as such.

>it was basically what made science possible. the dualism of modern philosophy is its base. taking it seriously is what enabled such explosion of technique.

Fascinating. Is there any book that elaborates upon this? On how Western philosophy became the basis for our worldview?

>that is something you learn as you learn language and you cannot change it for one is not even conscious of it. it is actually what allows any consciousness, it is its ground.

Here, you every much argue in the tradition of Heidegger and other language-forms-experience philosophers. But I do not really get the gist of it. Because, I, for example, know both German and Russian and I do not see such a difference between them.

Again, a book that elaborates upon this would help me a lot.

>book

mm not really as such. not directly at least. im not sure it could truly be made into a book, for it is something you distillate out of different encounters with other traditions and from the rereading of your own after that has been done. the choices here are wide, and its results will only sprout a long time after youve dived into only one of them. i mainly speak from psychollogically oriented anthropology and more recently sinology. maybe bateson is a good reference.

>language

when i mentioned language i didnt just meant language. language is not learnt as such but as a tool in the adaptation process, that is above all social. language is just a tiny tool in there, and a quite late one. what we learn could be called the social language that is spoken with gestures in interaction. that is the base. the way actual language then comes to integrate that system is nothing determining it, just a practical tool to make things easier.
and a book about this idk... maybe wittgenstein but not read as a philosopher but focusing on the anthropological side of his work. gunter gebauer has a good book exposing this perspective.

Thanks a lot for these references, I have a lot to read. Sinology is a broad field, which authors or fields are especially worth addressing?

I am, however, still skeptical about the implication that Western philosophy of all things may have influenced our antrophological psychology of all things to the extent it transformed a million-years-old mechanism of tribal integration.

Is Mimetic Theory relevant to all of this? Afaik, Gadauer wrote about Mimetic Theory.

no problem, and thanks for the stimulation, conversation is always a good way to organize ideas.

concerning sinology, the thing is indeed vast. theres currently a quarrel in french sinology, getting attention from other fields, that touches this point. it is that between f.jullien and j.f.billeter. of this last i think theres a german translation of his 'contre francois jullien' where the issue is touched explicitly. i think there are also some articles in english about the quarrel.

and what you say about the modification is clear, such thing in reality is not possible for that is how human being live, but the point is not that but the awareness one has of the fact, which then allows a conscious managing of it. people in individualist societies dont relate to each other less than in a tribe, but the point is about how those relationships are organized to be lasting.
in a word, in a collectivist setting people become psychologically formed and socially integrated in function of their memberships to different groups. it is by them that they are identified by others and how they get a sense of self in order to act. in individualist societies however this is what is broken, at least in intention: the identity does not come from the groups you belong to but you have to somehow make one identity as an individual, and only after this has been achieved can you integrate society or different groups in it. social existence in one is thanks to your relationships, in the other you can only have relationships after becoming and individual on your own.

this is very roughly put. and about mimetic theory idk, i did read some time girard's take on it, but didnt go deep into it so i wouldnt know.

now, i think ill go read for some time, thanks for the talk and see you later or some other time maybe. ill have to re read this thread

I'm sorry user, you're right, I'm a moron.
And I agree with you for the most part, things get confusing when some words can be interpreted with different meaning. For instance I was once reading a Derrida book with my gf, she was reading it in Italian while I was reading it in English. In her edition the word was translated as 'blinds' while in mine it was 'shutters'. In her translation the word in context made so much more sense and we interpreted the chapter in two completely different ways, but when we compared, it was clear her interpretation was close to what he really meant.
So yeah, I did get something new but I was still wrong.

derrida would honestly fucking love that

>But the point is not that but the awareness one has of the fact, which then allows a conscious managing of it

How does this happen?

Just look at his photographies. You might get more out of them than from his books.

He is a talented man, but his philosophy is mostly sentimental drivel

ah you touch the core of the issue. that is what modernity is, realizing this human condition and doing something consciously and deliberately to give it a certain chosen shape. of course the thing itself is debatable and can be judged as negative or whatever, but what matters is the attempt, reaching that state where this is collectively explicit and society is built from there. whereas the rest take for granted the social and its impositions just to look for a way to manage them, in europe they (claim to) be able to change these givens by the way they organize society.

reality is of course not so simple, but the starting point is what is central. and how does such a thing happen? well it is quite impossible to answer that in a definite way, only conjectures can be made a long time after the consequences have settled.

Absolute complete nonsense.

Have you read it though

no

Is Simulacra and Simulation even worth reading if I've already read Society of the Spectacle? I read part of the former and it seemed to be nearly a 1 to 1 copy of SotS, but slightly less obscurantist and with different terms. Did I just not dig deep enough, or is it a waste of time to read both?

He recycled Debord, yeah. But he is also more radical in his conclusions and comments upon more and more modern events.

And yet, despite this uncertainity, you suspect that it has got to do with development psychology and/or neurobiology?

I Prefer The Simulacrum Umbrosus, Myself.

Patrician Tier : Authority, I.