From: henry sholar <hwsholar-AT-uncg.edu>
Subject: re: Re: commentary is a minstral show
Date: Tue, 12 Jan 1999 08:39:56 -0500



One word:  "paragraphs"



On Mon, 11 Jan 1999 17:10:28 -0800 (PST) Tony Roberts 
<fdrtikol-AT-yahoo.com> wrote:

> Rationality or objectivity has claimed to be just such an overarching
> meta-perspective. Habermas still thinks this is possible, that in an
> "ideal speech situation" all persons of good will could agree on a
> single assumptive context sufficent to resolve all disputes. This is
> the claim that abstract and impartial justice administered from a
> perspective of "objectivity" not distorted by power relations is
> possible. This is what Foucault and Lyotard have demonstrated, at
> least to my satisfaction, to be false. One must, I think, give up that
> particular dream, what I would call the dream of a common language
> into which all our concerns, commitments and greivances can be
> translated without loss or distortion. The dream is utopian and, when
> we try to put it into practice, authoritarian and violent. I buy the
> Whorf hypothesis. I believe there are words in any other language that
> will not translate without loss or distortion into english. This does
> not mean that I can never know the meaning of these words. It only
> means that if I come to know their meaning I will know something that
> I can not quickly and easilly explain to most english speakers. Every
> shared experience, to the extent that it is important, creates a
> community of common understanding similar to a shared language. These
> shared understandings are just as hard to translate as foreign
> tongues. I know things I can not explain to some of the people I love
> most. Finally, I can not be everything I am in any one place. My
> identity is dispersed across several communities and the total of what
> I am is only tallyed by suming across groups. If you ask me "who are
> you really, the person you are for group A or the person you are for
> group B", you might as well ask me "what are you really, your liver or
> your lights?". Yet the people in group A may understand little of what
> I share with group B not because I have not explained but because I
> can not. I can not find a common language to express all that I am to
> everyone that I love and cherish. I've never meet anyone whose life
> was not impoverished who could. I'm serious. I would pity the person
> so narrow and so shallow that he could explain everything he loved to
> everyone he loved. Yet we have this dream of rationality, of
> objectivity, of a common language into which everything will translate
> without loss and distortion, that would allow any fair minded person to 
> explain absolutely anything of any importance at all to any other fair
> minded person. The dream is insidious in its beauty. It is the last
> and worst seduction. It is the disease that philosophy both is and
> presumes to cure. It is the root of all evil done not out of fear or
> selfesness but out of general principle. There is no one language so
> broad and so rich as to incompass everything that anyone could
> imagine. Trying to pretend that any one language can deminishes one to
> exactly the extent of the contrast between what that language can say
> and what any human being anywhere anytime could possibly imagine.
> Beleiveing that one common language can say it all and that everything
> worth knowing can be known from some single meta-perspective tempts
> one sorely to believe that whatever does not speak its self in that
> language is not human and that whatever does not scan from that
> perspective is deformed. Blake said "one law for the ox and the dove
> is most bitter tyranny to both". I say that one language for the ox
> and the dove will keep either from speaking truely. I think this is
> what Foucault is saying also. I'm a great admirer of Willaim
> Burroughs. His slogan "exterminate all rational thought" was, I think,
> aimed at a common language which really was not common at all. Which,
> for example, kept the gentleman junkie from expresiing his need with
> through and for language. In the fifties, the junkie was an invisible
> man disappeared behind a (in exactly Foucaults' sense) commentary
> about vice and virtue. Imagine living in a world where every mirror is
> distorted. Imagine not being able to see yourself reflected anywhere
> except as a failure of someone elses morality or as a social problem
> from Ken Star's perspective. I read Foucault the way I do because of
> Burroughs and Burroughs the way I do because of Foucault. Each is a
> glas on the other and I don't think it is really possible to
> understand just how much of the evil in this world flows from your 
> innoucent dream of a common language without reading both. Please do
> not misunderstand me. I am not saying that you are evil or that your
> intentions are not honorable. I'm saying that "objectivity" is the
> deepest, darkest utopian dream of all. Communism pales by comparison.
> Any common language will be a commentary denying the reality of any
> passion which has no name in that language, or, as is more likely, a
> name the passion would not gladly answer too. 
>                       Sincerely,
>                         Tony Michael Roberts          
> 
> 
> 
> ---Michael Smith <mich98ael-AT-hotmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > 
> > >In the animal kingdom, the rule is eat or be
> > >eaten. In the human world, the rule is define or be defined. Power is
> > >the power to define, to make knowledge a dispersion of what goes
> > >without saying from ones' own perspective and, at the same time, a
> > >commentary defining the alterity of the other as delusion and
> deviance.
> > >                       Any Comments,
> > >                          Tony Michael Roberts 
> > 
> > "Define or be defined" is true enough, but isn't it more a question
> of 
> > "define and be defined"?  Of course, in defining the "other" we
> define 
> > "ourselves", but can we really define "ourselves" without defining an 
> > "other"?  Can we live by "our" own "self-definition" with out it 
> > implying statements about others which may or may not be true? Can
> any 
> > "we" statement escape this implication?  Are "I think" statements 
> > entirely free of "other-defining" implications?  
> >  
> > I'd have to say that the last is possible, that we can all talk about 
> > our own immediate perceptions without imposing, impinging, or
> defining 
> > others, but I'm interested in the implications of what you are saying.
> > 
> > It's precisely that "eat or be eaten, define or be defined" that 
> > interests me.  There is a religion in India (is it the Jains?) that 
> > takes extreme caution lest microbes inadvertently be destroyed by
> being 
> > eaten, inhaled or trodden upon.  As with "eat or be eaten", I have to 
> > wonder how radically we are to take "define or be defined".  So I
> have 
> > to ask if we can truly define ourselves with out defining others.
> > 
> > One thing that interests me about your post (I know nothing about 
> > Foucault, but I'm trying to stay intellectually active), is the 
> > possibility (and impossibility) of a "metalanguage" of overarching 
> > statements.  To say, "I dislike X, because I view it against the 
> > background of W, Y and Z," leaving open the possibility that you may 
> > love X, because in your experience it is juxtaposed with or seen
> against 
> > the horizon of A, B, and C, may be a way of making sense of the world 
> > and minimizing disagreements (assuming that we think it important to
> do 
> > so).  But if life is a struggle of "eat or be eaten, define or be 
> > defined" does one want to achieve such an "overarching
> > metaperspective" 
> > 
> >                                       Michael Smith
> > 
> > ______________________________________________________
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> > 
> 
> => "I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order." Michel Foucault
> 
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---------------------- 

henry sholar
hwsholar-AT-uncg.edu