Date: Sun, 24 Jan 1999 17:50:18 -0800 (PST)
From: Michael Rooney <rooney-AT-tiger.cc.oxy.edu>
Subject: Re:  God help us, back to tropes




On Sun, 24 Jan 1999 Unleesh-AT-aol.com wrote:

> Mass murder is straw men???!!! Hardly! It's relevant! It's an example of
> "ultimately repressive" conditions!!!! I have not invoked fundamentalism, I
> have not invoked authoritarianism, I have not invoked consumerism!!!

Your repudiation of truth opens the door
to all ideas, and thus to the aforementioned
trio of terror.

And your reference to mass murder was a
straw man in relation to my comments.  That's
all.


> Now, let's address some of your questions :
> 
> "If we should "depass tropes", which ones
>  are "ultimately repressive" and how do we
>  tell the difference?
> 
>  Does homeopathy work?
> 
>  What needs to be destratified and what
>   doesn't and how do we tell the difference?
> 
>  Why should we believe someone isn't using
>  "filters" when they give clear evidence to
>  the contrary?
> 
>  Why describe non-traditional unions as
>  marriages?"
> 
> My first question is : who is the "we" you refer to when you ask how 
> "we" are to know the difference or "we" are to believe? The "we" 
> on this list? Who? 

The impersonal "we", less stilted than "one".


> I would direct the questions by indicating that 
> the answers to these may be different depending on the groups 
> answering them. 

Well, in what ways?


> I've already identified one trope that fits into a repressive regime :
> "ecologists versus loggers".

But this doesn't help to differentiate non-
repressive categories from repressive ones.
For example, your original point was to 
criticize certain psychological categories.
How do we tell the difference between a
benign medical category, trying to help ill
persons, and a sinister clinical gaze?


> Does homeopathy work? For whom? Under what conditions? I will say 
> that under certain conditions, yes, it definitely works ; I've 
> experienced it myself and seen it work for others. This doesn't
> necessarily mean it's applicable in all cases. Are you asking for
> people's experiences with homeopathy? 

No.  Experience is not always a reliable guide,
and in the case of causality, it is frequently
misleading.  Unless it can be distinguished from 
mere placebo effects and can explain how it works,
there's no good reason to say that homeopathy
works.


> By asking "what needs to be destratified" it would seem as if 
> we are placing ourselves in some objective, god-like place of 
> deciding outside of history, outside of our placement ... 

I have suggested no such thing.


> Regarding destratification, I have already given
> you some good guidelines ... Write out an intention for your 
> experiment, find support networks, give delimited time for the
> experiment, evaluate the experiment ... 

Without the least personal animus, these
guidelines (and those you presented earlier)
are supremely vague.  How do we evaluate
the experiment? 


> Re : "filters", perhaps a less-than-literal entering-into the sense of
> the other's position would be more helpful than simply deciding that 
> A) "Filters" means this, 

Well, what else does "filter" mean, if not
separating things?  If you mean something
else, be more precise.


> I'm not sure what you're afraid of. The "machine"
> certainly worked! The encounter was a success! We both occupied a 
> certain space for a period of time that was altered, in which 
> we mutually experienced differently.

Well, that's swell.  Could you talk about 
what sort of difference this alteration of
experience made?


> As far as describing nontraditional unions as marriages, it's a 
> strategy: it decenters certain notions of what marriage is, decenters
> the privilege ... 

How does *expanding* the concept of marriage
decenter its privilege?  And what does "de-
centering" amount to?  Why should anyone de-
center anything?


Cordially,

M.