JACQUES LACAN
~~k.i.s.s.~~
French poststructuralist; quite
difficult to understand. (In fact, he deliberately wrote in a
style that was, well, dense.)
Still, here goes . . .
Lacan predated Derrida
and Foucault
and influenced these intellectuals quite substantially. His
ideas decenter
the "self"; he says the self (i.e., who we are) is constructed
in language.
Lacan decenters the source of knowledge and assumptions of
Western thought by destabilizing that
self. |
I.
Lacan And The Self:
- 1) "Decentering the Self" (influenced Derrida's language
deconstruction and Foucault's
anti-history).
- 2) Lacan was a practising psychoanalyst and reinterpreter of Freud
(but sometimes anti-Freud as well).
- 3) Up till 1960s, despite Marxism
and Darwin's undermining of self, Descartes' idea of the self
("I think, therefore I am") was more-or-less maintained - until
Lacan appeared on the scene.
- 4) Lacan believed that the subject is nothing more than a moment
in discourse
or language;
he believed, much more so than Freud, that the self consists of
language and deals with the symbolic nature of the self as a result
of this belief. (Freud relied more heavily on the biological nature
of the self).
Hence . . .
There are three stages of childhood development of the self
(somewhat akin to Freud's
stages of id, ego, and superego):
- a) the mirror stage - the imaginary.
- b) the symbolic stage - uses the "Father" from Freud in
almost a metaphorical sense. "The Name of the Father" brings in the
concept of language: i) Lacan wanted to prove that the self consists
of language without abandoning the idea of sexual drives and
relationships; ii) If the self is based in language then, language
being common to everyone, you lose your uniqueness and become a
social being (a link to Marxist belief).
- c) the real stage - always unattainable: Involves the
idea of glissement - when we try to mean something or
discover who we are, we only slide off another signifier (e.g., like
Derrida's "chain of signifiers").
However, just as Foucault is vague about where power
comes from, Lacan is vague about the nature of the self; one minute he
argues as if he believes there is a self, but since his arguments say
there is no Cartesian self, then we are all subjects to the social
formations of language.
II.
Lacan And Decentering:
1)
Here, Lacan tries to argue that the self is based in language,
not biology, but keeps Freud alive at the same time.
2) Children
who cannot understand language can't tell the difference between
themselves and others; your sense of self comes about through
language.
3) Consciousness comes from outside, not inside, your
head.
4) Lacan also contributes to the nature/nurture arguement:
are our individual eccentricities learned or inherited?
III.
Difficulties With Lacan.
1) Lacan's is the most
radical theory attacking the autonomous self, yet even he still
accepts this fundamental principle to some extent.
2) He takes no
account of how cultural, historical, or economic shifts affect self
formation.
3) How does anything new ever develop if our self is
based only on language that existed before us?
4) His idealist view
of language denies genetics.
**We flatter ourselves when we think we're so different from
everyone else; from Marx on, the self is seen as primarilly social and
not personal.**
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~~~~~~~~~~
Harold Lasswell:
Early media researcher --
very interested in the use and effects of propaganda, drawing
his earliest work from a study of U.S. government propaganda in World
War I (in particular, the campaign that helped shift public opinion
from being anti-war to being pro-war and virulently anti-German). Like
his contemporary, PR pioneer Edward Bernays, Lasswell
regarded propaganda as an essential tool for "governmental management
of opinion" -- needed to generate the support of "the masses"
for the government (e.g., over U.S. entry to WWI).
So, to Lasswell, propaganda
was synonymous with democracy! BUT since he accepted that propaganda
was a mere instrument, it could also be used for negative purposes
(e.g., Nazis & anti-Semitism)!
Thus
Lasswell was a strong media determinist, beleiving that
media content could directly affect public opinion in a behaviorist
fashion. He called this the "hypodermic needle"
model of communication, i.e., a linear, one-way
cause-and-effect model for understanding media's influence on society;
the mass media could cause change, either for good or ill.
The
strong media effects approach is summed up by Lasswell's famous
formulation:
Mass communication is the study of
"Who ...
... says what ...
... to whom ...
... through what channel
...
... and with what effect"
This
approach to communication studies has influenced a vast swathe of
research down the years, from propaganda studies, numerous types of
public opinion research, social-psychological studies (e.g., Payne
Fund studies, effects of motion pictures on juveniles), and of course
P.R. and marketing research.
~~~~~~~~~~
CLAUDE
LEVI-STRAUSS
French anthropologist and structuralist. Initially, he posited that
the way we use language
could be used as a structural prototype for the way we study all
aspects of culture. (However, he argued, ultimately the structuralist
approach to language presents and accepts the impossibility of using
language to study language, of examining culture while one is a part
of that culture.) Those who follow a similar approach include Noam
Chomsky, as well as poststructuralists
such as Jacques
Derrida.
Levi-Strauss uses bricolage
as a method to describe how people use the objects around them to
develop and assimilate ideas, e.g., using the Mac graphic user
interface and the Web as a way of understanding postmodernist
ideas of simulation and surface
representation.
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EXTERNAL
LINKS
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None Entered Yet: Refer
to |
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Kiss's "Beyond"
section |
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for external
links |
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See also kiss links:
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~~~~~~~~~~
WALTER LIPPMANN
Influential American journalist and public intellectual: the
ideas contained in his landmark work, Public Opinion (published
in 1922) fundamentally altered the way people thought about the
relationship between a democratic government and the mass society it
prportedly serves.
Some famous
Lippmann quotes:
-
"We do not first see, and then define, we define first
and then see." In other words, we define the world around
us according to preexsisting "stereotypes"
(Lippmann first used the term in the context of media and
cultural studies)
-
these
stereotypes, prejudicial
though they may be, are "the guarantee of our
self-respect ... the projection upon the world of our own
value." They constitute not
reality but rather a "pseudo-environment."
They
might have value to us as individuals, but they didn't help the
proper governance of society.
- classic democracy, Lippmann argued,
"never seriously faced the problem which
arises because the pictures inside people's
heads do not automatically correspond with the world
outside."
- the
free press was a real problem: It only exacerbated
the irrational and propagandizing tendencies of modern society by
acting "like the beam of a searchlight that
moves restlessly about, bringing one episode and then another out of
the darkness and into vision."
(All quotes from Public Opinion, with due recognition
given to Ronald Steel, who extracted these quotes in his foreword to
the 1997 edition.)
In
the 1920s, an era of disillusionment, Lippmann was disillusioned with
mass democracy. He was in fact a bit of an elitist, in that he thought
the Enlightenment
idea of a government by, of, and for a citizenry of rational
individuals just didn't work anymore, in a modern society. It was
simply too easy for government and other powerful interested peoaple
to propagandize the public and thereby sway mass opinion. (Remember
also that Lippmann was writing just after WW I, when a massive U.S.
government propaganda campaign had turned public opinion in favor of
going to war.) The problem of the non-rational (mass) electorate could
only be circumvented, he thought, by a corps of experts, who would separate themselves from
manipulation either by the governing elites, or the mass as a whole,
and provide impartial information, wisdom, and advice. This conception
is not dissimilar to Plato's
philosopher-kings, except that in this case the Good and the Wise
would only provide advice, and not do the governing themselves.
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EXTERNAL
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None Entered Yet: Refer
to |
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Kiss's "Beyond"
section |
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for external
links |
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See also kiss links:
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~~~~~~~~~~
JOHN LOCKE
Locke is considered by many to be the father of empiricism,
the doctrine that all knowledge (with the possible exception of logic
and mathematics) is derived from personal experience rather than high
theory (one of the most elementary beliefs upon which the United
States is built.) (Altschull, 57).
Locke put forward his most influential political arguments and
theories in his Two Treatises of Government, first published in
1690. His prescription for good government consisted of two essential
elements: the social contract between the governors and the
governed, and the right of the people to rebel if that contract is
broken. The first leads naturally to the second, since the ruling
government (or monarch) is a party to the contract and can justifiably
be resisted and even overthrown should it fail to deliver its side of
the bargain. Locke's beliefs in natural laws and inalienable rights,
including the right of popular rebellion, were later seized on by the
writers of the Declaration of Independence, a document which, "with
its ringing phrases that have been written into the bloodstream of
American journalists, was the handiwork of John Locke as much as of
Thomas Jefferson" (Ibid.).
~~~~~~~~~~
GEORGE LUKACS
Lukacs, a central figure of the Frankfurt
School, was against what he called deterministic
Marxism. He said that revolution wasn't inevitable; you had to
activate the proletariat first before you can have action.
Lukacs was also a leading theorist of the 19th c. Realist novel.
His theory of the novel:
1) Makes a distinction between critical
realism and naturalism.
2) Critical realism captures essence of the
situation; naturalism is flat description.
3) Critical realism
examines the causes in society; naturalism looks at the surface.
4)
Character types are considered with totality and are accurately
detailed in critical realism, and are partial sketches in
naturalism.
5) Critical realism has Balzac and Tolstoy; naturalism
has Flaubert and Zola.
6) Critical realism lasted roughly from
1840s-1850s, naturalism after 1850s.
7) The bourgeoisie were still
a struggling class during classical realism and were the establishment
during naturalism.
"In reacting against the deterioration of Marxist
theory into a kind of 'economic determinism, Lukacs and still more the
Frankfurt School were to stress the Hegelian view of the social whole
as a seamless, constantly interacting totality' in which production,
politics, etc. were all a part" (Lunn, p. 24).
~~~~~~~~~~
JEAN-FRANCOIS
LYOTARD
French intellectual and author of The Postmodern Condition,
among other works, and a man who "saw science as a sort of convincing
story" (Woolley, 74). He argues that, with the collapse of the modern
metanarrative of reality, science has begun to sustain itself more and
more by the 'performability' of its theories, i.e., the ability of
these theories to generate more and more work. (Robert Pirsig, btw,
makes much the same argument in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle
Maintenance.) However, Lyotard also posits that scientists are not
out to find truth, but rather to augment power
-- their own as well as that of their masters.
According to Fredric
Jameson, Lyotard's work has "saved" the coherence of scientific
research and experiment by casting its justification in terms "not to
produce an adequate model or replication of some outside reality, but
rather simply to produce more work" and to generate new ideas.
(Introduction to The Postmodern Condition, p. ix.)
Lyotard has also looked at texts as diverse as Blade
Runner and Talking Heads tracks and used them to
examine how individuals in society have changed in order to
accommodate technology. Essentially, people now have to be
schizophrenic, fragmented, just to survive in today's world.
CT. Author Index
© Contents are copyright by
Douglas Bicket, unless stated otherwise. These may be reproduced for
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contents are not altered.
Last Updated: mar 28
2001
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