Science and capitalism “a curious copulation” (Lacan)

With acknowledgements to Ian Parker’s “Psychology after Lacan” which is a great source of fundamental Lacanian thought. 

EBM and capitalism must be analysed together – and the analysis should address the issue of Too Much Medicine. 

The approach here starts with the question of human subjectivity, and the thesis is that the human’s consciousness in capitalism is shaped by social relations which includes the means of production and subsistence through exchange for profit. 

The argument relies on a philosophy of consciousness as lacking, and of language as the public/social symbolic structure in which the subject thinks and makes sense of communication but can never master. 

This in turn relies on the idea of this symbolic language as a social public domain of ungraspable meaning as our unconscious which sits alongside and affects consciousness but which is unable to communicate to us directly through language but only indirectly through slips and patterns of speech and behaviours. 

In this philosophy the human subject is never where he thinks and is always partly public and always partly historically constituted. 

Our unconscious holds that which had become non-sense because it conflicts with what we must believe to make sense of the communications we live by and through. Our relation to knowledge as a truth is always a relation in the line of the imaginary and a misrecognition. But this doesn’t means anything holds …. the social relational and productive structures of a given time limit what can be held to be true. 

For example innovation is good versus innovation is bad is  a false road to take -and to claim one or the other is to neglect the manufactured consent to the unequal distribution of vulnerabilities and discounts hospitality for the stranger, it would be an a priori kind of truth regime. There is no truth here about knowledge production being good or bad – it’s what is done with it and the nature of the ‘truth’ basis for the fantasy in the line of the imaginary and the social-political effects that has on oppression that matters first. 

Intellectual insight is not all of knowledge – belief is important here.