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Panopticon's Subject Index Dd
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Jacques Lacan's theory of decentering:
1) Tries to argue that the self is based in language 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?Lacan's theory decenters the self; he says the self is constructed in language. Lacan decenters the source of knowledge and assumptions of Western thought by destabilizing the self.
~~~~~~~~~~ Deconstruction (Derrida's term) is the ideological opposite of structuralism -- language is seen as 'chains of signifiers' with only unsatisfactory glimpses of meaning. Deconstruction contends that meaning, and hence the foundations of any knowledge, is always unstable.
Deconstruction refers to ways of trying to 'undo, or deconstruct, many of the big structures of structuralism, and break them down to an individual level. Different intellectuals have applied the theory in different ways, e.g.,:
- Derrida deconstructs language.
- Foucault deconstructs history and culture, heading towards 'revisionism in history.
~~~~~~~~~~ The theory that our lives and all physical things are linked together in an unbreakable chain of cause and effect, and are determined by predictable causes. Theory is divided into 'hard' determinism and 'soft' determinism - the latter supported by Hobbes, John Stuart Mill, and David Hume, for example. Soft determinism decouples coercion from causality, and purports that agents can still have 'free will' in a deterministic universe since causes do not impose their wills on man.
Under determinism, we are no more than the result of the interaction of our environment and heredity. Thus, a 'SuperBeing' could, if he was aware of all these variables, be able to predict all our future actions.
~~~~~~~~~~ Marx's concept, aka base-superstructure theory, abstracted from Hegel. Marx stood Hegelianism on its head, by arguing that the economic base of society effectively determined the cultural superstructure.
~~~~~~~~~~ The term Discipline (as in academic discipline) is very important to Foucault. He argued that people who subscribed to a discipline (eg. Sociology, Psychology, Penology) were themselves imprisoned, or "disciplined," by that discipline i.e., they conform to the tenets of that discipline.
~~~~~~~~~~ Discourses can be defined in terms of talking about, or constructing, versions of reality that are ideological. Discourses are visible textual manifestations of ideology. For example, if a society encourages male domination over women as a general rule, its discourses will often reflect operating ideology/ies that tend to be heavily male-oriented and show women in a passive or negative light, e.g., as mothers, sexual temptresses, fools, or delicate creatures that must be protected by the dominating male. (NB: One of the tasks of Feminist Theory is to deconstruct common written and visual texts in society to show the underlying sexist assumptions upon which they are based (such as the ones mentioned above).
Discourses often represent the ideologies of the powerful against the powerless and the repressed. This is as true of discourses based on, say, racist and nationalist assumptions as it is on sexist ones. 8/19/97
See also:
CT. Subject Index Dd
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