Date: Fri, 08 Dec 1995 00:03:55 -0600 (CST) From: Quetzil-AT-UH.EDU (Quetzil Castaneda) Subject: non-discursive hello, can i add a comment to the following: >I am not suggesting that expereince can be outside of >the cultural realities a person holds. Well, maybe I am. It seems that >the expereince (s) are mediated within various constructs, but that the >experience itslef is often, in the academic writings, then denigrated to >be no more than cultural construct (as in Csordas). i have been reading lightly on this thread, but it seems to me that most of the comments are indeed in search of a prediscursive, prelinguistic, precultural meaning that is corporeal and sentient. On the one hand can I suggest a source that some might find relevant if they are pursuing this notion: Michael Taussig, especially MIMESIS AND ALTERITY. Its a nice reworking of Bejamin into anthropological thinking, analysis, & theory. On the other hand, I really think that it is a poor reading of constructionist analysis if one thinks that to argue for the socio-historical, cultural construction of the body (its feelings, emotions, pains, bodilyness, etc) that the constructionist argument necessarily implies or explicitly means A DENIGRATION of the corporeal, sentient, experiential, etc. such a reading is premised on a binary notion of truth/falsity versus a more relativist understanding of the truths, realities and meanings of other peoples worlds. there is widespread conflation of a traditional marxist critique of ideology as false and a poststructuralist/constructionist analysis of the sociocultural fabrication of bodily and social realities. The first indeed wants to argue about some realities being false, but the other does not. realities are all the more real for being historically constructed -- where "real" in this sentence means at least "not denigrated"! personally, I cannot imagine that any definition of a prelinguistic domain is anything but a trope of language; of desire manifested in the linguistic/discursive shape of a rhetoric of the truly truthful truth of the really real bodily experience. that being the case my question would always be whats the political motivations and power dynamics that embed wanting to define such and such a domain, action, feeling as the truthful one of the body. sorry if these comments are out of place. quetzil. --- from list postcolonial-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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