File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postco_1995/postco_Dec8.95, message 1


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.



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