On 23 Oct 2000, at 9:55, Stephen Whitworth wrote:
> Certainly positivist approaches to linguistic artifacts can yield
> useful and sometimes insightful information. But I would just
> like to say that approaches that eschew biological reductionism in
> favor of what looks like more "mystical" methods can *also*
> provide insight, and pleasure, particularly when the objects of
> inquiry are products of the creative imagination.
1. I would agree with this except for the implication that there is
some other kind of linguistic science than the "positivist" one.
Nothing I've written the past couple of posts tries to debar Lacanians
from practising their form of criticism. But I do think that the
consequences of using such an intellectually bankrupt system
should be made clear. If you wish to rehabilitate Lacan, you will
have to start with Saussure. The refusal of Lacanians to face that
fact is not to me a sign of intellectual integrity.
2. At no point have I advocated biological reductionism, but a
logical discrimination between what we do and do not know, what we
can understand by scientific methods and what we cannot. We do
not know what consciousness is or how it's produced. As a
consequence, any assumptions about the existence or nature of the
unconsciousness are purely speculative.
3. Schemes that work on and affect the reader at some level
beyond thinking, even assuming such a level exists, can hardly be
rhetorical unless you imagine that unthinking is rhetorically
structured. If the schemes themselves are, as you say,
nonconceptual then we literally cannot think them. You are implicitly
arguing that some collective we as critics cannot think, but do talk
about at great length, has a complex structure that affects a kind of
unthinking receptor in the reader. The aporias are popping out
everywhere. I'll stick with Aristotle, Plato and Kant.
> In short, I respect your convictions, but feel that your
> wholesale, emotional rejection of anything other than those
> convictions is unfair and unnecessarily limiting.
4. There is nothing "emotional" about my personal rejection or that
of many another critic. The convictions of those of us who reject
Lacan are strictly based on logic and evidence. I am, however,
quite prepared to delimit myself if anyone can advance a persuasive
argument why his linguistics and psycholinguistics should be
respected. Until then, I don't have the slightest difficulty in
responding to all the nuance, music, power and resonance of
Spenser with help from the usual suspects.
==============================================
Steven J. Willett
University of Shizuoka, Hamamatsu Campus
2-3 Nunohashi 3-chome, Shizuoka Prefecture, Japan 432-8012
Voice and Fax: (053) 457-4514
Japan email: [log in to unmask]
US email: [log in to unmask]
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