Edited by graphicalUSSRinterface ()
liceo posted:i think the best quality of lacanian/freudian theory is that they refrain from becoming completely and perversely obsessed with classification. classification is only a practical, socially acceptable way to put the ideology of oppression onto the ground. a somewhat interesting person that writes about the pitfalls of classification is Ian Hacking. Hacking is a Hack in many ways, i.e. he is a terrible fucking writer, he does not acknowledge class struggle whatsoever, and is happy to pander to psychiatry/pop-neuroscience when it suits him.
i have not heard the name ian hacking in probably ten years, yeesh. back when i was a baby and just getting into philosophy. i read "the social construction of what?" which yeah looking back would appeal to a sixteen year old who had just heard of foucault and thought the thing to do was become a litcrit person, and of course thought calling yourself "post-marxist" was uhhh the correct opinione. anyhow thats how i remember him and i think that says a lot hahahhahahaa
classification can serve that purpose but to point out the most braindead obvious point its also just important in order to orient yourself intellectually. psychoanalysts definitely make that critique but naturally even they have their own varied diagnostic schema. if you are interested in that discussion with some cool criticisms of the dsm verhaeghe's "on being normal and other disorders" is a good read. nancy micwilliams who in many ways is a very american model of a progressive psychoanalyst wrote a book on this as well. it's not as good of course but i liked it. she wrote two papers on working with people with schizoid dynamics that are very dear to me. analysts who work with clients with psychotic-level issues tend to be insanely compassionate and dedicated to it. their level of insight into those issues reflects a very deep level of empathy that i admire. i dunno. here is one of them. i know there's a second one, but every time i try to find it again i come up short sci-hub.tw/10.1521/prev.2006.93.1.1
liceo posted:i do think that a lot of psychoanalysis is hot air, and agree that it became a luxury good as soon as it reached the public during the 20th century. a funny take on this are the dialogues about analysis in gaddis' book recognitions. i do however also think that it's substantially better than other commonplace psychological treatments now. probably not a hot or new take on the rhizzone. the basics of psychology today are to coerce people into ignoring their perception so they can get back to work/work more efficiently/enhance productivity. that's it. i've spent the last 8 years in and out of academic and professional psychology and the only people i've come across in 5 different institutions that actually give a shit about theory, their clients' lives, or doing something halfway decent are typically the awkwardly passive laughing stock of everyone else in the department. if the people that give a shit about their clients work in community settings, they often make service-industry wages, constantly battle for treatment coverage on behalf of their clients, and work round the clock. the capitalist machine of medicine would happily stamp them out of existence, and the majority of people that work in any psychological science would be extraordinarily enthusiastic about ridding their evidence-based, empirical garbage of all decently-minded practitioners and thinkers. fuck them all!
i think the best quality of lacanian/freudian theory is that they refrain from becoming completely and perversely obsessed with classification. classification is only a practical, socially acceptable way to put the ideology of oppression onto the ground. a somewhat interesting person that writes about the pitfalls of classification is Ian Hacking. Hacking is a Hack in many ways, i.e. he is a terrible fucking writer, he does not acknowledge class struggle whatsoever, and is happy to pander to psychiatry/pop-neuroscience when it suits him.
that said, his primary concept is called the "looping effect". like nearly all popular academics, he uses idiotic turns-of-phrases to make himself entertaining. nonetheless, the looping effect is an interesting take. essentially his position is that classification works to create lifestyles, and that an increase of a diagnostic threshold (which is eternally widening) directly = reduced individual agency to "be" someone with subjective experience. for example, he traces the trend in the 80s of the widened diagnostic criteria for multiple personality disorder, and attempts to describe how it became something that non-clinically-significant people with inner-conflict could easily make sense of their experiences with, the result being that the diagnosis multiplied like crazy.
i am finishing an article about classification that i want to submit somewhere, but maybe i'll just post it here when i finish.
thomas bernhard FTW
Lol that guy just stole the idea of reification apparently and just stamped a fancy name on it. Laughing my ass off right now.
lo posted:your post reminded me of this one thomas bernhard interview where he is asked about freud
Yes, exactly. I'm not claiming credit for it by any means. Although from the get-go when reading Freud in a university setting that was my first impression ("this is bullshit, but very good bullshit"), Paul Ricœur deserves most of the credit.
nearlyoctober posted:no harm no foul. i think about that post a lot and i would say i'm ashamed of it but really i just think it's funny. it dawned on me recently that i don't know how to read at all much less know how to read freud/lacan LOL. i have no idea why i would take lacan's schema seriously over someone else's. i have a terrible habit of taking these proposed structures (of the psyche, in this case) at face value and understanding them on their own isolated terms without having any methodical ability to judge them in terms of reality. same goes with marx. i read some neoclassical textbooks a few months ago and suffered a complete ego breakdown when i realized how often i was nodding my head while reading along. lots of fun. now i'm trying to develop a practice of polyvalent interpretation and stuff that i never learned in school cuz i'm a stupid programmer. it's like you said: it's peak irony that we (i) would read freud literally. seriously funny
as for your last sentence, i haven't given up on reading/psychoanalysis and i'm wondering if you think we should?
I should clarify that my humanities degree says "literature" on it and that's what context I was taught Freud in. As mentioned above my first take happened to be the one that stuck with others as well (who do the argument far more justice), but the gist of the perspective from a literary POV is that sure, Freud might be bullshit. But if so many people use Freud as a basis for creating fictional characters, at least in some cultural/literary sense they've made the bullshit real, haven't they?
This is the basic split in opinion between the Marxists of the Soviet era (which is basically structuralist in nature) and the postmodern / post-structural rejections of those theories. That's not to say that disagreement with structuralism makes one a capitalist by default, but rather to say that there isn't a good set of theory for where we're at and where we're going (hence describing a milieu as "post-(thing)" rather than its own thing). Structuralism may also be bullshit, but that didn't stop both the US and USSR from spending a century at odds with each other despite both of them trying to create technocratic, engineered utopias. And no sooner than one fell apart and the other claimed ideological victory, the one with the ideological victory had two world-shattering economic calamities within a decade and is now returning to fascists vs socialists in its political discourse. So Marx isn't really any more dead than Freud, not because he was right about everything but because being a frame of reference makes him relevant even when he isn't, or something like that.
If I got anything from my time in a university literature department that I would not trade, it's the ability to read with a level of skepticism that I don't think is taught in many (any?) other disciplines. Derrida is still the standard-bearer of that, even though he's recently deceased. Similarly to Freud, it's also easy to say that Derrida is just an asshole and was in the business of trolling as many people as possible, but it's awfully hard to read Spectres of Marx or his lecture at Cornell about their nets under students were jumping from to kill themselves ("The University in the Eyes of its Pupils") and not admit that he was right in his predictions about a great many things that came to pass in terms of economics and international conflict in the 90s and early 2000s.
One of the recent things that stands out in my mind is the discovery of the actual treaties between France, Glyndwr, and Henry Percy mentioned in Shakespeare's Henry IV. Like so many lost manuscripts that were later re-discovered, it was just lying around in a stack of paper in a random French library collection, and in 2013 someone stumbled across it. For many decades everyone knew that this treaty didn't exist, it was just made up by Shakespeare as a plot device. Someone of the lesser nobility wrote a history and said that one chronicle that Shakespeare would have been able to get access to was, exact quote "not very good," while the other chronicle that didn't confirm the existence of the treaty was, exact quote, "from a better chronicler." No one would've known all of this if no one bothered to look, because everyone took the opinion of the bad historian to be true, probably just because he had a title after his name. But how would anyone who doesn't read all of this stuff along with the academic literature that goes with it ever know all of this?
And if everyone knows that what they read is true because they can find other people who also know and agree with them, imagine what all we'll be wrong about as time keeps chugging along. Logically, by Hegel's own fucking methods, it could be argued that we won't eventually reach the end of ideology (as conservatives claimed when the USSR collapsed) and the end of history where everyone is right and knows exactly what to do, but rather a culture of total anarchy where everyone is wrong about everything all the time.
tl;dr: the only thing I'm pretty sure of is that anyone who disregards a major figure of 19th century philosophy/literature/psychology because that figure doesn't fit with their chosen political/economic ideology, is in fact... wrong. I don't think you should be able to read Lacan without a professor's help if you have no background in the field. I don't think you should be able to read Marx and call yourself an economist, either. I don't think there's ever going to be Hegel's or Marx's or Reagan's utopia where we've figured everything out and we don't have to keep wrestling with the same problems over and over again. I think very few people will ever have the capacity to examine and change their own psychological nature, the rest will inevitably be byproducts of their own being and environment until they die.
And maybe, just maybe, when enough people agree with me (as everyone knows they should, respectively), we might free ourselves from the weight of our own stupid (and probably wrong) chronicles bearing down on us and demanding that we shoehorn our existence into that of our predecessors.
Edited by Over9000ft ()
Over9000ft posted:tl;dr: the only thing I'm pretty sure of is that anyone who disregards a major figure of 19th century philosophy/literature/psychology because that figure doesn't fit with their chosen political/economic ideology, is in fact... wrong. I don't think you should be able to read Lacan without a professor's help if you have no background in the field. I don't think you should be able to read Marx and call yourself an economist, either. I don't think there's ever going to be Hegel's or Marx's or Reagan's utopia where we've figured everything out and we don't have to keep wrestling with the same problems over and over again. I think very few people will ever have the capacity to examine and change their own psychological nature, the rest will inevitably be byproducts of their own being and environment until they die.
ah this is new. well let me tell you, this fucking sucks lol. you got epically owned for using cia indoctrination arguments when youve never read anything and yet your degree still gives your opinion more weight? fuck off forever lol
The rejection of Freud is twofold. The first is the decay of social imperialism in general and its replacement with the mental self-regulation of neoliberalism. Talk therapy is outdated compared to consumerism-as-therapy and a source of identity but generally the idea of connecting mental issues to real events, even if that connection is meant to make workers functional for capitalism, has no place in neoliberalism's absolute separation between production and realization, whether we are talking about outsourcing or simply the simultaneous commodification of everything and falling rate of profit/productivity. It's not a question of science since Freudianism is rather a paradigm for the practice of science oriented towards certain problems. Its replacement by a paradigm of medicalization and responsibility for self-care is ideological since the question of a cure is determined by the needs of capital. Unfortunately the new left in attacking Freud played a role on this though it was not determinant, railway spine was doomed by deindustrialization to irrelevance.
This would be enough but the continued interest in Freud comes from his unique innovations beyond the psychoanalytic institutions and followers he created. To put it simply, at the end of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud is like "what if everything I said before this is wrong? Lol. What if instead of real causes to mental effects, the cause is precisely the lack of a real cause and the trauma of never finding the satisfaction of connecting what you want to some real object that can satisfy it?" Obviously this can be read in an anti-capitalist manner: not only can commodity fetishism never satisfy our desires (more formally restore to its owner the embodied, concrete labor that went into the object that emerges as abstract labor through consumption) but even value itself can never be directly apprehended, it only manifests in crisis (metaphorically this serves the same function as the mental crisis that results from getting too close to the separation between trauma and the Real as lack of its cause). Of course Beyond the Pleasure Principle was seen as incomprehensible at the time (and it is given Freud's previous framework) but if you want to understand Lacan his interpretation of the work is the core of his entire project. Also keep in mind Lacan's claim that Marx "invented the symptom" and you can see how Freud is a continuation of Marx's diagnosis of ideology as the mental expression of reification.
It's up to you how useful this is given that it is still ultimately a project for the trauma of the imperialist core. The great usage Fanon and Spivak get from this is that the periphery comes into the world as it is represented by this trauma and there is no more a "real" authentic periphery outside of capitalism than there is a real effect behind mental trauma. This is the meaning behind the question of "can the subaltern speak?" given that talk therapy is the Freudian solution to trauma. For both the answer is no. For Spivak it is through deconstructing the ideological representations that have constituted the periphery into the image needed by the core that subaltern language is possible while for Fanon it is through speaking the real language behind the ideological facade of anxiety, the non-language of violence, that the subaltern can speak. Spivak admits her Derridean reading of Freud is still ultimately a project of self-critique for the first world intellectual. But it is implied in her work and explicit for Fanon that moving through this to actual language rather than negativity/deconstruction is only possible through communism, unfortunately the defeat of that hope in the third world led Spivak herself to become a useless reactionary and the followers of Fanon to become the same, but that essay is still good if you skip the sati stuff. Obviously we are not so fragile and still know communism is the only possible language of the subjects of history, the third world proletariat, so these ideas may have become exhausted given the further development of third world production makes the bad conscience of first world anti-Freudians rather boring (Spivak's main target is in fact the Deleuze/Foucault anti-Freuduanism and the illusion that the subaltern can speak if only we let them and stop trying to diagnose them with our western meanings or whatever, ironically the exact opposite message as the post-colonial theory that claimed to follow it. But who really cares what Deleuzians think, the left today is back to social fascism without the facade of liberaring the self).
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
Despite my social diagnosis, every path from the primal repression to the particular traumas that become our personality is unique (though within a general path dependence on class) and there is still value in clinically following them back to their origin. Otherwise Lacan wouldn't have practiced at all, although the question of the third world makes this more complicated (communist politics is still the ultimate solution, if that becomes impossible then we have a problem). At minimum, there's a difference between a healthy critique of capitalism and having anxiety attacks after work every day, though I have the luxury of petty-bourgeois academia and found myself basically unable to work as in a proletarian without stealing from the company and doing the minimum amount possible to feel some kind of control over my life. At least this place exists so my mostly negative experience with the PSL didn't become traumatic.
graphicalUSSRinterface posted:the above is interesting and i have some tentative objections but i dunno enough about that angle to reply so im gonna have to request some links/pdf that informed that if you remember what helped you come to that conclusion
Difficult to say, in the last week I happen to be reading the chapter on machines in Capital vol. 1, Spivak's Can the Subaltern Speak, Deleuze's Cinema 1 as well as the discussion about Zizek's book on Deleuze in Criticism Vol. 46, No. 4, Fall 2004 (not sure if you can access it, it's honestly not that interesting), Jameson's review of Capitalism and Schizophrenia in "Marxism and dualism in Deleuze." I've already decided that "May ’68 was the cradle of a new bourgeois society" as Regis Debray said
https://newleftreview.org/issues/I115/articles/regis-debray-a-modest-contribution-to-the-rites-and-ceremonies-of-the-tenth-anniversary
And formalized in The New Spirit of Capitalism though that's more abstract background information for thinking about why Deleuze and Foucault were so consequential and why that led to our current hellscape. I'm trying to decide if they are comrades who were naive and used by more nefarious followers (Zizek's claim is basically that Guattari was the problem, Jameson thinks Deleuze was at war with himself and couldn't overcome the impasse of neoliberalism's problematic though both ultimately believe he is a comrade. I'm not so sure and definitely not sure about Foucault who went from Maoist to full reactionary).
I only bring this up because the "anti-oedipus" seems to be the unstated foundation of many of the discussions of Lacan itt.
graphicalUSSRinterface posted:ah this is new. well let me tell you, this fucking sucks lol. you got epically owned for using cia indoctrination arguments when youve never read anything and yet your degree still gives your opinion more weight? fuck off forever lol
I never said my degree gives my opinion more weight. I'm not a teacher/professor of any sort so do not aim to teach anyone anything at all. I said that the weight of the knowledge of previous generations is too much for the average person to sift through on their own, that's why there are university degrees offered in reading this stuff. Since we're expanding on this, to accommodate university schedules as time goes on they will be subcategorized and diluted to even more uselessness the more time goes on. More material to read = more specialization so we don't have to read it, that's the university way. By and large they don't care about anything they're teaching, but rather only care about getting and keeping a university job.
But hey, you keep looking under every rock for that 19th century European struggle, I'm sure you'll find it one of these days. Protip: You're gonna need a boat with an awful lot of gas to get to a factory worth usurping. Might be better off trying to think of a better plan.
Edited by Over9000ft ()
Over9000ft posted:But hey, you keep looking under every rock for that 19th century European struggle, I'm sure you'll find it one of these days. Protip: You're gonna need a boat with an awful lot of gas to get to a factory worth usurping. Might be better off trying to think of a better plan.
chinas gonna save the world in myu opinion.
Over9000ft posted:I never said my degree gives my opinion more weight. I'm not a teacher/professor of any sort so do not aim to teach anyone anything at all. I said that the weight of the knowledge of previous generations is too much for the average person to sift through on their own, that's why there are university degrees offered in reading this stuff.
is that why my facilitator at shimer cut me off telling me my points werent on topic once for talking about leninism and then proceeded to talk about "the marxist theory of imperialism" apparently unaware marx didnt write about that
Edited by graphicalUSSRinterface ()
graphicalUSSRinterface posted:@bhpn lol i lied. while its true i skimmed all of your reponses on the bus, the only one ive looked at again since getting home was the one where you outline your background, and i didnt read that one well either. so i have to admit i know almost nothing about deleuze and ive been saying im gonna fix that for uhh like a decade. its really weird that i havent considering my interests and i probably need to considering what i think about. i will investigate that as well.. just dont know when. so,
You don't really have to know anything about Deleuze, all the critiques of Freud are the same from that era and all the poststructuralists kinda blend together, even Lacan.
So I totally agree with you about Seminar VII . Beneath this mask of flirting with radicality it is basically this conservative vision, you know, we have these moments of self-obliterating encounters with truth, but then we return to normal life, servicing the good, and so on, and this vision, which is also today's predominant reactionary vision of May ’68 …
Stephen Frosh: But that's also the seminar with das Ding, which you use so much.
Slavoj Žižek: I think the danger with this seminar is two things. First, it is still at the level of this transgressive passion of the Real. I think that this is the seminar that is closest to Bataille. No wonder there are so many parallels between this seminar and Bataille. I don’t think this is Lacan's last word. There is a hint in this direction. We all quote, even me, as Lacan's motto ‘Do not compromise with regard to your desire’. Jean-Claude Milner made a nice observation here: everyone refers to this formula, but people forget that whenever Lacan uses certain formulas they are usually part of his doxa; he returns to them, reinterpreting them. But it is only one or two times in the last chapter that he mentions this ‘Do not compromise your desire’; he never returns to it. And the reason is because it is not the true formula; he dropped it, basically.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fpcs.2010.22
Whatever you think about Zizek's excuse later or his own shitty politics, it's clear Lacan often flirted with the spirit of the age which was desire as a liberating force. I just happen to be reading Deleuze for class, but Spivak is right to homogenize Foucault and Deleuze and all the other anarchist/situationist theories together. She is very generous to Derrida but that's fine, he's basically harmless and at least made an attempt to apologize for his liberal followers with Specters of Marx. That's not to say these critiques are useless, they had to happen given the objective structural changes occurring within capitalism which echoed at every level of the superstructure. There's a reason everyone still refers to these theorists from France in the 60s-70s, it's still the spirit of our age which makes it second nature even to those who've never read them. The kind of desires that exist today are so complex and multiple that the simple model of the bourgeois family as the foundation of bourgeois discipline is unsustainable, you can abstract Freud but the popular image of his model as about sex, the family, and direct metaphors is not wrong (this is how it was actually practiced by psychoanalysts regardless of Freud's own hostility to the popular version of his work; this is more obvious looking at the hostility Lacan faced by institutional psychoanalysis) as much as absurd in the face of the completed separation between signifier and signified under late capitalism. That model has at last exhausted itself, the last great struggle for the liberation of desire was gender/sexuality and it took less than a decade to go from insurgent to commodified and now provides no satisfaction except in deconstructing its own terms. There may be some use in mining these theories for their contradictions like Lacan did to Freud but it's not essential and I would never actually tell anyone to read Deleuze (or Lacan for that matter) since it's either incomprehensible or a kind of poetry for the petty-bourgeois reader to take pleasure in with the facade of philosophical seriousness.
Over9000ft posted:
cringe
there is nothing wrong with reading on the train. that said, the 'reading fandom' as you call it is pathetic. they encourage reading as an identifier. the point is not primarily to learn but to become a 'book girl/guy'.
Belphegor posted:there is nothing wrong with reading on the train. that said, the 'reading fandom' as you call it is pathetic. they encourage reading as an identifier. the point is not primarily to learn but to become a 'book girl/guy'.
yeah its probably fine lol i just have dumb hangups. but its ok.
colddays posted:Just read PDFs on your phone. I read most of False Nationalism False Internationalism while on the bus over like 2 months from the readmarxeveryday.org webpage.
ive mirrored everything i have to google drive so its pretty easy but i still cant focus on the bus/train well enough to read anything more than twitter on there haha
Sunday posted:i am mentally ill and i freakin' love reading
you are not allowed to post until tomorrow so fucking log off
graphicalUSSRinterface posted:lassification can serve that purpose but to point out the most braindead obvious point its also just important in order to orient yourself intellectually.
i thought a lot more about this issue at shimer actually, im just gonna dump one of my papers i wrote, its probably the most academic thing ive ever written lol and i think i did an ok job at least.
Taxonomic classification is of critical importance in the study of animals: it provides a way of thinking about groupings of animals in a way that is amenable to humans. As Lamarck and Dobzhansky argue, the classification system is necessarily a product of artifice, though some systems are more 'natural' than others. In this paper I will begin with Aristotle's ideas on teleology and classification and move to discuss Lamarck and Dobzhansky.
Aristotle argues against bifurcate classification systems on the grounds that they will never be able to offer explanatory power-- dividing a genus into two opposing groups always results in a situation where categories must be repeated, thereby obscuring what is essential to the elements that fall under a division1. This criticism serves his argument for a teleological understanding of classification. That is to say that our definitions rely on a teleological understanding of cause and effect, not a mechanistic one: the parts exist for the sake of the whole, what is prior chronologically is not prior in the order of teleology2. That which falls under a division in a classification exist for the sake of the taxonomic rank: we develop abstractions (categories) in a particular manner, starting from specificities and working our way 'backwards' to the general. In terms of classificatory practice, this means thinking about the distinguishing features of an animal and working back towards fundamental categories shared by greater numbers of animals, going in the order from species to genus and so forth. This understanding can also be thought of as playing a crucial part in evolutionary explanations of phenomena, and our classificatory systems reflect this. The species in its specificity is what is known to us immediately: we must explain how this came to be, and our explanations serve this purpose-- the cause exists for the sake of the end.
Lamarck discusses the use of 'artificial devices' in natural science and the importance of distinguishing between the divisions made in our classificatory efforts and what is actually found in nature3. Lamarck notes that our efforts to classify serve economic and utilitarian needs and to some extent classes, orders, genera, etc will always include fundamentally arbitrary divisions within them, because the separation between kinds of animals does not inherently exist in nature4. Rather, life exists on a continuum of variation, and all that actually exists are offspring that resemble those before them. He stresses the importance of not conflating our classification system with what actually exists in nature-- we should strive to classify according to what is 'natural' and not what is convenient-- doing so could lead to eradicating the benefit of the system5.
Lamarck believes that studying the affinities amongst animals should be the priority of the science, and that we should understand these before classifying animals. Classifying according to affinities gets us closer to 'the order of nature' and eliminates the subjective element in our work as much as is possible6. Aristotle, in his criticism of bifurcate classification, somewhat anticipates Lamarck; Aristotle's point is that classification systems that do not capture the essence of what is studied are not the proper way to classify.
Dobzhansky reiterates this position: some classification systems are more 'natural' than others but the object of the systematist and the population geneticist are two different things, the former being artificial-- “categories of classification are constructs devised by the student for his convenience; in this sense, they are sometimes called 'arbitrary' or 'subjective.'7” Systematists make their classifications based on morphological distinctions, which does not take into account the actually existing genetic isolation that the population geneticist studies8. However, if the representative sample is large enough “a study of the morphology and the geographic origin of these specimens is usually capable of producing indirect evidence on the genetic limits of this population”-- thus, the classificatory species can more or less coincide with the actually existing species9. As he says earlier, “there is obviously no conflict between these aims and endeavors of systematists and of geneticists. In fact, they are complimentary10.” To summarize: Dobzhansky differentiates between the mendelian population and the species of our taxonomic classification, the latter belonging to the abstract and the artificial, the classification scheme, and the former being what actually exists, a mendelian population: a group of individuals who reproduce together.
This discussion relates intimately to species assignment, as the practical difficulties so often found in distinguishing between species and varieties illustrates. Darwin argues that “varieties are species in the process of formation, or are, as I have called them, incipient species11.” Species are formed through the accumulation of variation, and the process of speciation is completed once reproductive isolation has occurred.12 The fine gradations between species underscores the artificiality of the boundaries we draw between them, but that is not to say that species are not an actually existing phenomenon: as Dobzhansky says, “the species is … a stage in the process of evolutionary divergence.”13 The gradation between species and varieties rather points to a fundamental insight about evolution, the aforementioned fact that evolutionary divergence is accumulated variation.
Dobzhansky illustrates the borderline case with the phenomena of “rings of races,” and uses the Asiatic titmouse as an example. He writes, “sympatric populations which share the same territory without intergradation behave like distinct species, and yet they may be united by a chain of allopatric races which imperceptibly grade into each other and into the extreme members of the series.”14 That is, there may be interbreeding populations that inhabit the same territory and appear quite distinct, but their common descent can be 'traced' through other interbreeding populations that diverge slightly from another race in the chain, showing this gradual transition from one kind to another. Dobzhansky notes that if any of these races were to die out, the varieties would no doubt be considered separate species: but as it stands it is impossible to separate them from one another.15 Again, the species of the systematist is fundamentally arbitrary, as it depends on erecting a separation between one thing and another, where the biological species, though actually existing, may not be easily described by such a method of categorization. Our classification system is suited to the human need to organize and make sense of our world in terms that are beneficial to our understanding; our schemes do not inherently reflect things in the state of nature, and the art and science of classification is one of making apt and 'correct' distinctions within the context of the limitations of our system, which are indeed self-imposed, where the 'correct' distinctions are those that best reflect how nature is actually organized. The latter means that it reflects the true affinities between creatures, as determined by their acquired differences and retained similarities under the guidance of natural selection.
graphicalUSSRinterface posted:from a psychoanalytic standpoint schizophrenia and autism are closely related and fall in the same broader category with some differences in manifestation and personality dynamics. that is to say people assume im autistic which upsets me cause of all the fucking baggage that comes with what people assume or think it is these days, even autistic people because i have a very different idea of it. but imo, im schizophrenic and its pretty close. thats my unproblematic take
Could you talk more about this? I don't know anything about Lacan or psychoanalysis but it seems intuitively true. Also I remembered this interview with a person who experienced the onset of psychosis in his late 20s and a lot of aspects of how he presents in this video look similar to things people with autism do, but like I said, I'm very ignorant on this topic.