This is the thread where we talk about Slavoj Zizek...

Amateurist if you dislike all Theory then having a debate specifically about Zizek seems kinda pointless? Like "I object to the notion of chilli chocolate ice cream. BTW I hate chilli, chocolate and ice cream."

lol

Amateurist if you dislike all Theory then having a debate specifically about Zizek seems kinda pointless? Like "I object to the notion of chilli chocolate ice cream. BTW I hate chilli, chocolate and ice cream."

― Tim F, Monday, July 29, 2013 5:15 PM (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

but zizek is read (and, apparently, appreciated) by people who aren't devoted only to Theory. and I don't recall where I said I object to everything Theory--I just don't enjoy the conflation of theory and Theory.

depends on the field, obv in humanities there`s a good reason for focus on primary & secondary texts but in anything technical u can get really far without looking at anything other than textbooks. but yeah

― flopson, Sunday, July 28, 2013 3:36 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

eh, if you want to understand technical things at all well, there are textbooks written by the people who also wrote the papers. they tend to be good, often contain new material themselves, and be well regarded as works in the field in their own right. often they are assigned to grad courses. then there are lots of terrible textbooks written by other people, and those are mainly not going to be very good, and they will teach you things that aren't true, often. those are more the "intro texts" that i imagine the author is speaking of. after reading those you can sometimes pretend you know things, but only in the company of people who don't know things themselves. the problem is they don't want to tell you a vision of a field of study, they just want to tell you what you need to pass the course.

― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Sunday, July 28, 2013 7:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't what technical fields you're referring to but i know some undergraduate math textbooks that are straight up masterpieces of exposition that give a rich vision of a field of study, if not as up-to-date in terms of current research as you'd expect in a grad textbook. sometimes they are even almost valuable as literature, like gouvea's p-adic numbers for example, which has this really friendly kinda gregarious jewish uncle tone, so readable and perfectly sustained. i used to work at my campus bookstore in the textbook dept and would read other science textbooks and they were usually pretty cool. i think your post is a good characterization of a lot of arts textbooks though. like a prof at my school literally puts out a textbook called "dinner-party economics"

Amateurist if you dislike all Theory then having a debate specifically about Zizek seems kinda pointless? Like "I object to the notion of chilli chocolate ice cream. BTW I hate chilli, chocolate and ice cream."

― Tim F, Monday, July 29, 2013 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

of/in the end result*.

huh

chilli chocolate ice cream not equal to the sum of its parts, basically

is zizek a big deal among Theory ppl, or he is more, like, niche with disproportionate rep among outsiders?

iirc, he was pretty high on that "most cited" list that was circulating a while back.

we need to pause for a moment and ask ourselves, "why are we avoiding diacritics?"

the name is Žižek, people.

but zizek is read (and, apparently, appreciated) by people who aren't devoted only to Theory. and I don't recall where I said I object to everything Theory--I just don't enjoy the conflation of theory and Theory.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Monday, 29 July 2013 22:25 (56 minutes ago) Permalink

is there any that you like?

eh, if you want to understand technical things at all well, there are textbooks written by the people who also wrote the papers. they tend to be good, often contain new material themselves, and be well regarded as works in the field in their own right. often they are assigned to grad courses. then there are lots of terrible textbooks written by other people, and those are mainly not going to be very good, and they will teach you things that aren't true, often. those are more the "intro texts" that i imagine the author is speaking of. after reading those you can sometimes pretend you know things, but only in the company of people who don't know things themselves. the problem is they don't want to tell you a vision of a field of study, they just want to tell you what you need to pass the course.

― stefon taylor swiftboat (s.clover), Sunday, July 28, 2013 7:34 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i don't what technical fields you're referring to but i know some undergraduate math textbooks that are straight up masterpieces of exposition that give a rich vision of a field of study, if not as up-to-date in terms of current research as you'd expect in a grad textbook. sometimes they are even almost valuable as literature, like gouvea's p-adic numbers for example, which has this really friendly kinda gregarious jewish uncle tone, so readable and perfectly sustained. i used to work at my campus bookstore in the textbook dept and would read other science textbooks and they were usually pretty cool. i think your post is a good characterization of a lot of arts textbooks though. like a prof at my school literally puts out a textbook called "dinner-party economics"

― flopson, Monday, July 29, 2013 6:26 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

see something like gouvea's book is, i'd imagine, the sort of "good" textbook i was describing: "textbooks written by the people who also wrote the papers. they tend to be good, often contain new material themselves, and be well regarded as works in the field in their own right. often they are assigned to grad courses". i don't know the field well enough to talk about gouvea's book in particular, but the dude has papers on the topic with barry mazur, so his credentials seem pretty top-notch. and obviously its assigned at a grad level. this is the sort of textbook a mathematician who works in a different field might be recommended, i imagine. p-adic numbers also are appear to me to be really open to a straightforward exposition because they're just a special construction with special properties as i understand it, not a field unto themselves. (you can correct me here!)

i was thinking about e.g. the way maclane's algebra or feller's books on probability theory tower above other books ostensibly on the same topic. and those are particularly strong examples because 'algebra' and 'probability theory' are the sorts of things you can get a really trimmed down 'intro' textbook for advanced undergrads for.

math is an interesting field in this regard to because textbooks of the right sort are so essential to it. notation, conventions, etc. change so much that you almost need a translator's guide to delve into lots of the original stuff -- it becomes an exercise in history of science as much as anything. but think of something like the bourbaki group -- writing a 'systematic' account often becomes a way of redefining the questions you're asking in the field and wrestling it into a new shape. along the way, often new questions are asked and answered, new results are systematized, etc. and now bourbaki, like maclane or feller, _is_ considered the "classic" source, as opposed to the "intro" textbook. or consider something like "sketches of an elephant" or EGA. (not that i'm laying claim to owning/understanding them, but by reputation, etc...) an element here is that while people might think they're engaging in "proof irrelevant" math where you can throw away the proof and keep the result, once you're past a certain level, what you care about, maybe even more than the results, _are_ the proof techniques, overall architecture of knowledge, etc.

in my reading of that article though, i really can't imagine that those were the sorts of "textbooks" he had in mind. rather i think he was encouraging readers to learn the results and throw away the work that went into them -- the exact opposite of what one wants to do in math!

sorry for the lengthy reply. this is the sort of thing i actually spend much more time thinking about than zizek.

"just a special construction"

"just" in the mathematical sense obv, not the usual one.

bourbaki are fucking impossible to read

finney, i don't know if this fits into "theory" for you, but there's plenty of interesting stuff in barthes, althusser, etc.

(understatement of the year award there)

flopson, what are the names of some of those textbooks? they sound interesting.

xpost

i mostly come at this via interests in film/literature/poetry. the formalists and structuralists are important to me. again, not sure if that overlaps with your understanding of Theory (or theory).

also the idea that i can't or shouldn't critique Zizek (however sophomorically) if I don't already admire/accept all of the intellectual underpinnings of his work is kind of o_O honestly.

i mean, that just reinforces my notion of Theory as this kind of self-reproducing thing that only substantively engages itself

whoa xposts.

i love the topic, sterling. not exactly textbooks, but: i really get into how-to books that are "masterpieces of exposition", to use flopson's phrase.

these are underappreciated genres, imo. and one of the reasons i always loved the whole earth catalog, with all its utopian utilitarianism.

amateurist, c'mon man, now you're playing the victim a bit.

nobody's saying you can't critique z. b/c you haven't read his heavier tomes. what i was responding to wasn't the fact that you were critiquing him, but the fact that a major point of your critique was that you saw in zizek a lot of hot air and posturing without substance, and i'm saying, well, there are these books of his where, um, i do think there's a lot of substance.

but i will concede that we could use more diacritical marks.

"not a field unto themselves"

except of course for the field of p-adic numbers given rise to by any prime p. whoops!

finney, i don't know if this fits into "theory" for you, but there's plenty of interesting stuff in barthes, althusser, etc.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, July 30, 2013 12:50 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I would definitely put both of those in the camp of Theory for the purpose of the conversation - at least to the extent that, if someone was going to object to Theory outright on the basis of it being a whole lot of obtuse hot air, I would imagine Barthes and Althusser as being among the first 100 against the wall.

When I was first really getting into post-marxist theory, and before I realised that I'm basically an Adorno stan, I really liked Althusser, but subsequently found that my favourite Zizek (specifically The Sublime Object of Ideology) felt like a smarter* and funnier version of him.

("smarter" in the sense of having smarts, not in the sense of intellect or profundity or etc.)

I would definitely recommend both TSOI and Contingency, Hegemony, Universality as both incredibly thoughtful and highly readable (though with the latter the credit is as much with Laclau and Butler).

Also this nice little book I found really squared the circle for me b/w Zizek as serious worldbuilder and Zizek as the popular Socrates figure:

http://books.google.com.au/books/about/Conversations_with_Zizek.html?id=ExMYKdVRjHIC&redir_esc=y

also the idea that i can't or shouldn't critique Zizek (however sophomorically) if I don't already admire/accept all of the intellectual underpinnings of his work is kind of o_O honestly.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Tuesday, July 30, 2013 12:54 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

To be clear, this wasn't my point.

A critique in the sense of "this falls short of (insert)" is difficult to decode if it's not clear what (insert) is - self-evidently, someone who likes some Zizek but feels he mostly doesn't live up to his best work (or the claims he wants to make for it) will have a different take from someone who admires Zizek's influences but finds him to be a shallow blend of them, who will have a very different take from someone who dislikes those influences but likes other vaguely related modes of thought, who will have a different take again from someone who dismisses that whole field.

Any one of those takes might be quite reasonable, but the more the vantage point of critique zooms out, the more those levels of disappointment become conflated with each other.

But then in basically any area of critique I'm a zoom-in-ist so am probably biased towards what I tend to do reflexively.

flopson, what are the names of some of those textbooks? they sound interesting.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Monday, July 29, 2013 8:51 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i've really enjoyed armstrong basic topology, munkres topology, kolmogorov intro to theory of functions and functional analysis, gouvea p-adic numbers, needham visual complex analysis. you need a pretty solid foundation of algebra & analysis to read any of those though, like the equivalent of a standard first year course. also a really fun thing to read is proofs from the book

http://critical-theory.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/perverts-guide-to-ideology.jpg

i don't even know what these 104 new answers are about, i just wanna post this https://twitter.com/zizek_ebooks/status/362997937116160000

thanks for the list!

zizek ebooks is prob one of my favorite feeds tbh

np! (xp)

nobody's saying you can't critique z. b/c you haven't read his heavier tomes. what i was responding to wasn't the fact that you were critiquing him, but the fact that a major point of your critique was that you saw in zizek a lot of hot air and posturing without substance, and i'm saying, well, there are these books of his where, um, i do think there's a lot of substance.

r. pippin sez 'srs book is srs', writes ginormous review to demonstrate

http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/back-to-hegel

interesting review. funny how it seems Zizek has sorta come around to Sartre's notion of consciousness as a "hole in Being."

Hasn't he been saying something along those lines since at least Tarrying With The Negative?

https://twitter.com/angstravaganza/status/381110626632085504

damn

www.youtube.com/embed/bRTdDyXM3VM

http://critical-theory.com/zizek-vice/

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/11/who-responsible-us-shutdown-2008-meltdown-slavoj-zizek

They reject the concept of fruit

uh he's doing a lot of interviews

i just found a bunch more

shocking for a man who seems pretty prominent most of the time and also has a movie out lol

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/06/mandelas-socialist-failure/

And was this also not the truth about the whole of the Mandela memorial ceremony? All the crocodile tears of the dignitaries were a self-congratulatory exercise, and Jangtjie translated them into what they effectively were: nonsense. What the world leaders were celebrating was the successful postponement of the true crisis which will explode when poor, black South Africans effectively become a collective political agent. They were the Absent One to whom Jantjie was signalling, and his message was: the dignitaries really don't care about you. Through his fake translation, Jantjie rendered palpable the fake of the entire ceremony.

This article was amended on 16 December 2013 to comply with our editorial guidelines

hahahaha <3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQsZMzcfYa0

brotherhood, unity, etc.

omg that doctor story at the end