File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9903, message 7


Date: Mon, 8 Mar 1999 08:10:55 -0800
From: "Gerald M. Swatez" <swatez-AT-ni.net>
Subject: Re: contingent constructs and self-evident truths (was: the rest


Anita,

I apologize for the delay in reply. However this, I think, is one of the
great advantages of this form of communication --one can take up where one
left off in a conversation weeks or even months ago. Especially if one is
sparing with the delete key. It reminds me of transatlantic correspondence
in the days of sailing ships, or sending messages across the starways.

I also think that delays can temper the tendency for this form of
communication to tempt its users to fall into a hostile, blaming,
denigrating discursive form (flaming) or an excessively praising discursive
form (fawning). My major goal in participating on this Lyotard list is to
clarify for myself the extant to which and manner in which
"miscommunication" online (and elsewhere) is a simply (!) a matter of
heterogeneous discourses. I have an intuition that Lyotard's explication in
"The Differend" of some of the ins and outs of the pragmatics of
communication (contrasted with syntax and semantics) is an extremely
powerful step toward understanding various of the conflicts and
miscommunications that arise among us on this multi-culturally diverse
planet.

I like your following sentence:

>I really don't believe the appeal to objectivity
>has any value except as a strategy in the struggle of subjectivities.

Lyotard has something to say about objectivity, I think. I hope that we can
discuss these matters with each other here in the terms he uses: genres of
discourse, phrase regimens, genre-specific rules for refutation and
validation.

I hope that those of us who choose to participate here can agree to use
this forum as a means for gaining skill in using a "language of phrase
analysis" as Lyotard proposes.

(If some of us can break through the ol' lurker mode barrier . . .)

Jerry

At 6:30 PM -0800 2/23/99, Anita Berber wrote:
>I think maybe I see the source of the contradiction you are feeling
>and, if I'm right, you're right to call it constitutive. Extreme
>relativism, which I will admitt to, comes down to a rejection of the
>idea that any objective standard could provide the basis for settling
>a dispute between two people whose subjective experience of some
>situation both consider important differs. Such disputes are always
>settled by force in one form or another.
>     The rejection of this idea amounts to the assertion that all
>subjectivities are absolutely real. Truth is, from this perspective,
>subjectivity in the very literal sense that the perspective itself
>presupposes the lack of any standard against which one might measure
>one's own subjectivity in a way that would invalidate or bring into
>question that subjectivity. In the absence of any such standard or
>resource of self-critique, what I experience is real and what I
>believe is true. This is in no way a denial of my status as a victim
>in relation to demands of force running counter to my subjective truth.
>     A dogmatist is someone who believes that by some standard beyond
>question she is right. A relativist is someone who beleives that any
>standard by which she could be judged to be wrong is questionable. The
>two sound a lot alike and, for many practical purposes, the
>distinction between the two is moot. The distinction is really only
>important in a case where saying "I'm totally Right" has different
>consequences than saying "I'm totally not wrong".
>      This does not mean that I never change my mind based on what I
>learn from other people. It only means that when I do, I think of the
>change as haveing more to do which acquiring a new taste or changing
>my idea of fun than with aligning my subjectivity more closely with
>something objective. I really don't believe the appeal to objectivity
>has any value except as a strategy in the struggle of subjectivities.
>It is a strategy I sometimes find it neccessary to use but I always
>feel slightly sleazy when I have to resort to this. I would feel
>exactly the same way if I had to seriously threaten to beat someone
>senseless with a baseball bat if they did not stay out of my face.
>
>
>
>
>---"Gerald M. Swatez" <swatez-AT-ni.net> wrote:
>>
>> Anita,
>>
>> I hear/feel a dissonance in your discourse. (A constitutive
>contradiction?)
>>
>> Your content comes across to me as an extreme relativism, while your
>> sentences are constructed in a dogmatically assertive mode.
>>
>> It makes me wonder.
>>
>> Jerry




   

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