Well, I think that tying shoe laces is a universal human capacity, one that became evident in a very narrow window in evolutionary time, one within which broad regularites can be determined, as well as there being local variation, but I don't think that this universal capacity to tie shoe laces suggests that human behaviour is channeling some sort of primary, normative, analytical system (Not that I don't love Chomsky for all sorts of other reasons).
You get the same kind of thing in Pinker's remarks on that RSA clip -- human reasoning and memory are deficient tools for thinking with if the job of thinking is to accord with normative models of rationality.
" I don't think that this universal capacity to tie shoe laces suggests that human behaviour is channeling some sort of primary, normative, analytical system"
no but it is "channelling" something normative, fingers right? it's really explicable in relation to human hands and probably not if you ignore the typical, common features of human hands.
pinker is really a reactionary and an ideologue; i don't think eh is honest.
i was once more of a social constructionist, kind of just immediately reacting badly to any suggestions about "human nature". But now I think chomsky is right and you can't assume that chomsky, whose claims are very minimal, implies pinker whose claims are insanely ideologically essentialist and idealist in the "materialist" guise.
I just thought pinker was funny in parts and wanted to give a context for his answer to the question of what he thought he knew that everyone else ought know also.
thanks though for replying - this is very interesting to me just now, this old question of how much is socially constructed. i am pretty orthodox historical materialist, but sometimes I think nobody reads or understands marx anymore, that is, the ability to read marx was destroyed by some post structuralist hermeneutics dogma.
Fair point -- Chomsky doesn't deserve to be smeared with the likes of Pinker. While Chomsky’s claims might be minimal, they still, it seems to me, embody the idea that language is essentially that sort of compositional, analytical system that was meant to derive from a universal grammar. I think that’s a problem, not because I don’t think that it’s a universal human capacity to produce such language, but that there’s lots of evidence of language that isn’t analytical and compositional in that way. The methodological issue arises when the languages used to construct theories are necessarily restricted, and the most readily available ones may be those within which the sort of characteristics that Chomsky deems essential (like compositionality) are most likely to be found – e.g. those used in literate societies (if not even merely written language). Literacy is kind of useless if it doesn’t have the analytical and compositional qualities that would enable transparent communication with a socially distant receiver who doesn’t have access to all the implicit historical and contextual knowledge that the speaker has. That general point – about transparent communication with ‘strangers’- might be important when it comes to seeing Chomsky’s even minimal position as not reflecting the essence of language, but rather a particular social and historical form of it (e.g., developing specialisations within communities would lead to a reduction in the degree of shared knowledge amongst all members, whether or not that community was interacting with others). With regard to his comments in the video clip, it’s probable that those kinds of social forces(specialisation, interacting with strangers) were present minimally if at all when languages first emerged. If that’s the case, then it may be that there’s no need to assume that the emergence of the universal capacity for composition analytical language is the same thing as the emergence of the universal capacity for language.
I don’t think any of this requires adjudication _between_ biological and social forces. There are some very meaty things that may well have played a critical role in the evolution of language. The limited capacity of our lungs puts constraints on the duration of an uninterrupted utterance and the tendency for our speech planning mechanisms to produce occasional slips within such utterances may well have drawn attention to the possibilities for segmenting such utterances and recombining the segments in different forms. However, none of these meaty things are essentially linguistic.
"then it may be that there’s no need to assume that the emergence of the universal capacity for composition analytical language is the same thing as the emergence of the universal capacity for language. "
Okay. if i get you you are not disputing that existing concrete referent of "language" is compositional or that we have innate capacity to produce it but pointing out that this may not be a quality narrowly necessitated by our innate capacity - that our language capacity is realised as we see but could be otherwise.
i don't think chomsky would dispute that. But you imply that there is an idea of "language" that is not descriptive of concrete human production. Sort of sounds Platonic. Unless I misunderstand, which is very very possible, i don't know much about this.
otherwise I think i agree with you about the suppositions about our consciousness; i would accept a maximally flexible view of capacities that accepts basic obvious finitude and biological nature. i think chomsky's rhetoric in popularising speech can veer into unwarranted individualism in the sense that he downplays the biological entity our species and that the environment is part of the individual body too - he downplays the process, the incessant historical production. On the other hand, when questioned, he seems less skewed toward this perspective of the individual.
"_between_ biological and social forces."
yes well our biology is social. We reproduce sexually. so it's kind of just sometimes a useful distinction but i would agree not here especially.
"The methodological issue arises when the languages used to construct theories are necessarily restricted, and the most readily available ones may be those within which the sort of characteristics that Chomsky deems essential (like compositionality) are most likely to be found – e.g. those used in literate societies (if not even merely written language). "
I think I really misunderstood this at first (thinking "languages used to construct theories" meant the language of the theorist, the language that is the form of the theorists theory and thought, and not the languages as the data from which the theory is derived).
Okay, so you are possibly disputing that the concrete referent of "language" has those features.
?
is there an essay you could recommend for a history of this question?
“But you imply that there is an idea of "language" that is not descriptive of concrete human production.” I think the contention is that the idea that linguistic behaviour manifests the sort of compositional/analytical system that we might call Chomskyan is not necessarily borne out by all the data. In other words, there is concrete human language that arguably isn’t amenable to the Chomskyan scheme (even via reference to the old competence/performance chestnut). Aspects of this include the finding that we tend to display much less compositionality than such a theory would predict and instead tend to rely more on non-novel, formulaic linguistic formations, and that in general, we simply don’t use all the options that we would have at our disposal, which we would be optimally inclined to use (even though as literates we can do it if necessary), if all our linguistic behaviour was indeed underpinned by that sort of linguistic capacity. It also appears that some languages are neither taught nor used nor interpreted via such a compositional scheme (not necessarily the same thing as saying they’re not underpinned by it though..), and there’s lots of evidence that people just don’t interpret language as they would be predicted to if they were in possession of some sort of compositional linguistic capacity. In other words, the analytical/compositional is just one, and not even necessarily the most prevalent form of language. (I think most of these ideas I got from reading papers by Alison Wray and various of her citees and colleagues. If you can’t find stuff on google scholar let me know and I should be able to track down some pdfs)
“ that our language capacity is realised as we see but could be otherwise.”
One thing is that some aspects of our universal linguistic capacity, such as the ability to deal with embedded clauses, while clearly reflecting the sort of compositional scheme we find in Chomsky, seem to only be evident in written language (evidently such embeddedness doesn’t appear in non-/pre-literate language, and people hardly ever use it while speaking, preferring instead to line clauses up one after the other) and so couldn’t have been selected for as linguistic capacities per se. I think this is the kind of thing (if I thought harder about it) that enables us to go beyond trying to account for biological versus social forces in the emergence and development of language (I think it was what I was trying to get at with the shoelace comment – you can’t necessarily maintain an a priori distinction between the organic and the artefactual components). If something is written down, then it’s not subject to the vicissitudes of ‘memory’ (which as Pinker points out in the RSA clip is no bloody good at all). That in turn means that it’s open to all sorts of manipulations that it wouldn’t otherwise be. So, writing, as making marks, isn’t inherently or necessarily linguistic, but can create linguistic capacities that couldn’t be assigned clearly to either social or biological forces.
"i would accept a maximally flexible view of capacities that accepts basic obvious finitude and biological nature."
I always thought I was an orthodox Marxist (Paris manuscripts? German Ideology? I dunno), but I wouldn’t go along with basic obvious finitude and biological nature(maybe I am an Hegelian or some other kind of idealist – I used to be accused of it). I just don’t know what that finitude would look like or how it could be established. I know that human beings have the capacity to fly (i've seen it and done it), and I’m similarly sure we have the capacity to live forever (pending).
" I just don’t know what that finitude would look like or how it could be established. I know that human beings have the capacity to fly (i've seen it and done it), and I’m similarly sure we have the capacity to live forever (pending)."
Well, if there is no finitude what can you possibly mean by "we"? Are you speaking for the helium molecules in the sun as well?
"maybe I am an Hegelian or some other kind of idealist"
maybe, but maybe more Pico-nian. Infinite capacities but remaining identifiably "us" and heros of the story sounds Renaissance-y Italian-y to me.
Thanks for the Wray ref, there are some things available; i am having a pdf problem today and have to fix it, will read, and reply to the other matters.
thanks for the comments, very interesting.
patrick snarkity snarkity! you sound like me today, grumpelstilskin!!!
So I'd like to hear then precisely how biology (or 'nature' in general) imposes constraints on human behaviour that exist outside of history, in a way that, say, constraints stemming from the need to extract surplus value from labour doesn't.
"So I'd like to hear then precisely how biology (or 'nature' in general) imposes constraints on human behaviour"
so what do you mean "human" behaviour? If there are no vbiological constraints on "human" behaviour, the big bang could be included. so "we", the "human" that is not constrained in behaviour by what is normally considered human biolog, already live forever travel at the speed of light, etc..
If you mean "human" as something less than the whole of spacetime, then what is it? How do you specificy "human" without definition? If human capacities are unlimited, we can grown cockroach bodies and lead cockroach lives, then human includes cockroaches, and stars and everything. Presumably. You can't limit without identifying limits; if the humlan species' capacities are infinite the species has more capacities than the universe itself probably. So such views aren't that new, like christian cabalism.
if you mean you want to know what the limits of human capacities are, well, join the club!
Except that starting from the position that such limits will be found by identifying particular ‘natural’ phenomena means you’re going to have to end up in a predetermined place at some point. This reminds me of an argument I had with John Molyneaux a long time ago, when he cited the fact that it was possible to identify a human tibia and distinguish it from that of some other primate. Which is fine, but bad news for individuals without legs or individuals who don’t possess whatever other characteristics might define the internal, dumb generality.
"Which is fine, but bad news for individuals without legs"
not if they can just grow more and wings. but they can't. they have no capacity to do that.
might we have a latent latent capacity to do that (to develop a technology to assist)? yeah. but if we do have this capacity now, unrealised, it is an aspect of our nature; that is, it's possible that we don't have that capacity. right?
"or individuals who don’t possess whatever other characteristics might define the internal, dumb generality."
we don't all fly, we don't all walk, we don't all use language.
i get you. i'm not just trying to bark. that's why i said "maximally flexible" but i do think that the vision that depends on imagining the non-existent humanity a lot is problematic, and that the idea of the infinite capacity for infinite transformation is ideological.
"bad news for individuals without legs or individuals who don’t possess whatever other characteristics might define the internal, dumb generality."
I enjoy thinking of legs as 'characteristics'. Admit I do like this phrase 'internal, dumb generality', though. Yes, I agree with Arpege not to change the subject so rudely from 'capacity to live forever'(pending or no) to 'bad news for amputees'. I frankly don't see that as a problem that won't be solved before you are stuck living in your laptop's hard drive forever.
Thanks for email.
This exquisite discussion has made me long to perish as some point more than I realized I had wanted. Now that Bill has proved that we have the capacity to live forever by scientific method, and Arpege has pointed out that we have always lived forever, but most of the time were lucky enough not to have to know anything about it, I think I'm beginning to like the idea of the 'long view' a little more now. It is kind of true about the ciggies, even when you are just giving up one (I slipped last night, because I worked on the book really hard editing for several hours, and that was great, so I rewarded myself, but it gave me NEGATIVE THOUGHTS!) The indisputable fact of 'internal, dumb generality' makes us wish to tidy up our affairs as quickly as possible, except that corpses also have an internal, dumb generality, yes even the ones that get cremated possess this for a brief time, although there are other experiences that they don't get, so dead people are all just as unique as living ones.
But you can FLYYYYY You can FLYYYY Up, Up and A-way-hay-ay In my beautiful, my beautiful balLOOOONNNN
Suspended under a twilight canopy We'll search the clouds for a star to guide us..
Arpege, my friend Sheila told me to go see gurumayi sometime in the early 90s, she was always doing these retreat things. She said 'you just wanna bliss out?' well, I don't tend to want to all that much, because it's been my experience that all the spiritual people tell you that 'bliss and joy and pleasure are one, but that the bliss and joy are the good part...' cf. Mrs. Dworking, so I opted out. No wonder I've had such a long adolescence, maybe I didn't even reach True Puberty until I was 55. I always remember the similar fate of that woman in the Djuna Barnes story that reached her peaked at an advanced age, and she felt it incumbent on her to perish in a more precipitous fashion than the nursing-home set tends to favour.
-I enjoy thinking of legs as 'characteristics'. Admit I do like this phrase 'internal, dumb generality', though.
They’re not always good characteristics. As for the phrase, I don’t know what language Marx originally wrote the Theses in Feuerbach in, so it might even be down to Engels.
- gentle whispering about how we've conquered death
Or even polio, maybe
- But he's right. There is no such thing as biological constraints.
Jeez patrick, just because you’re deploying your cheese-sensitive whiskers so deftly doesn’t mean you have to go and completely give up on your eyes at the same time
-and that the idea of the infinite capacity for infinite transformation is ideological.
Could it be anything else? And the idea of finitude isn’t? So this is really what my first comment was meant to be: How come, in a place where the universalising (reactionary, Hegelian) tendencies of certain strands of left wing thought on matters of the human condition (work, domesticity, imperialism, struggle...) are remorselessly hunted down and exposed, the idea that biology might pose, however minimally, an end point in human history isn’t similarly exposed for what it is? I’m not just trying to bark either.
"So I'd like to hear then precisely how biology (or 'nature' in general) imposes constraints on human behaviour"
That's what you wrote, I just did a riff, what you write I do not consider Holy Scripture. I'll play with it any way I choose, since you're writing such shit as 'living forever' (although you may have wanted to get off that one as too trivial, after all even the ones with the 'real science' and know Bill Gates think 5000 years is enough).
"the idea that biology might pose, however minimally, an end point in human history isn’t similarly exposed for what it is? I’m not just trying to bark either."
You mean it's a hoax, all that biology? Well, that's a little hard to swallow, given that you want the human being to live forever, and therefore there can be no biological constraints, but the 'biology' is also a hoax, so humanity can go ahead without biology. Arpege, if you would be so kind, would you tell me what VALUE this kind of shit talk has? Obviously, the perp here is going to croak himself (the sooner the better, one imagines) and is a thanatophobe, so is probably going to spend her savings on cryonautism or something, so she can be revived and 'de-biologized' to live forever.
Okay, Arpege, I would like to know why this is not barren shit talk. In the mean time, 'Bill', address me with respect. I don't like you, and I don't know why Arpege is even talking to you. You're bullshitting and we both know it. And don't ever say 'Jeez' to me. It reminds me of many loathsome people besides yourself.
Honestly though, I only mean to be remorseless when something is turned to propaganda purposes having what all reasonable people can see are real effect.
The universalism which identifies "reverse racism" theme, for example, that Alberto Toscano plays in his assertions about Malcolm X, is resurgent and odious and affecting people:
does " the idea that biology might pose, however minimally, an end point in human history isn’t similarly exposed for what it is?"
do the same? I think it's a mixed bag. I think today right now we rather have a neoliberal ideology which likes the infinite protean nature of "the human" - which likes this abraction and this utopian technological progressivism implied and how easily it allows one to dismiss contemptuously the concrete needs of existing humanity, to dismiss that that are not being met, that they could be met. And then one goes off into the improving humanity before we can have (before we can deserve) communusm. With the infinitely flexible humanity comes an indifference to concrete humanity's concrete needs, like shelter, water, companionship, justice.
the universalism i object to is bogus and a disguise for white supremacy (how but through white supremacy could Malcolm X' post-hajj politics be fantasisied as "a break with black nationalism"? how but through patriarchal misogyny could the "consumerism" of the core in globalisation and the superexploitation of women be perceieved as a question to be framed as "the failure and sins of feminism"? The ongoing catatrophe in Haiti is the story of ongoing imperialism not "the sins and complicity of anti-imperialism" and the story of ongoing super exploitation of working women is the story of patriarchal capitalism not "the failure and complicity of feminism".)...
This "universalism", whihc identifies "consumerism" and "seperatisparticularism" the sin of women, is precisely not about the recongition and real human capacities and needs and championing those who revolt against exploitation, but of "critiques" of normativity and proposals for the more improvement of the most privileged people.
"This "universalism", which identifies "consumerism" and "seperatism-particularism" as the sins of women, is precisely not about the recongition of real human capacities and needs, and championing those subjects in their struggle against exploitation, but of "critiques" of normativity and proposals for the moral improvement of the most privileged people."
I think Bill that in fact this "soooduniversalism" that is the guise of the latest bourgeois reaction against Marxism in elite circles of the culture industry (led by US academia) is really dangerous, if you take a view just over the next decade. This is what is here now to destroy the accomplishments of the radical cultural politics which have been on the defensive but still fighting away throughout postmodernism. And postmodernism is a reaction that anyone can see contained some concessions - these cooptations such as the abolition the "human" one way or another. Now that postmodernism has performed these concessions, followed by cooptations with deploy an extremism to absurd degrees, now that the multiversality that is already present in Marxism and reasserted in new postmodern vocabularies is coopted and transformed into absurdity, this white supremacism can return and assume a dominant position. It is much like the neoliberal style of aggression all other things - one cannot micromanage the world, one can't stabilise an unstable financial system or rule the world despotically controlling every person. but one can destroy and create chaos for which one is ready, and reduce everyone else to helplessness and insecurity.
Here we have this white supremacy that excuses itself for rehashing endlessly the old canards by saying it is only recognising "the racist Imaginary" and Ideology that already exists. It is only being honest about what's there. This argument is similar to that advanced from the same quarters about why the US occupation of Afghanistan must be sustained.
I mean, alongside "the human is infinitely flexible" thing, we do get corporate personhood etc, the usurpation of the human (as subject of rights) by capital. An abstraction is offered in place of the concrete - humanity whose individual members live forever replaces the concrete humanity whose individual members live less than 100 years - and of course abstyractions are easily shuffled, there's no real obstacle to "the human" in "human rights" being identified as blocks of immortal capital. (through also a slippage or kind of trap door thing created between the individual and the species).
The neoPlatonist, Pauline christian "universalism" that its vendors are specifically promoting against "postcolonial" thought, "pluriversality", Spivakian adaptations of deconstruction, feminism, and non- or less- Hegelian Marxism deploys a strategy even more like Israel's "facts on the ground". A patriarchal capitalist ruling class can organise the oppression of women and coopt the discourses of our resistance and then "critique" us for those very artifacts it produces with what of ours it has expropriated, vitiated, commodified and now sells back to us.
this "universalism" one notices is - not arbitrarily - very popular with the young and ignorant. Because it is anti-wisdom. Over the past fifty years, the left has been able to share its knowledges globally, communism and the women's movement, the civil rights movement, and anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism and aided by telecom technologies. "Feminism" and "black nationalism" and "liberation theology" and "Marxism" also name traditions that are the repository of a lot of collected wisdom. This sood- universalism peddled by badiou and zizek is all about revelation - instant enlightenment for the innocent and open of heart, with these simply formulae. The pantomime is of these Paul Bremers, crowning themselves amidst the explosions and rubble, writing memos to redesign political traditions that they know nothing of, giving instructions to movements they never even joined let alone were chosen to lead, simply to exploit the targets for their own gain. That right to work piece in the guardian was like the billboard judy holiday buys in that movie where she just wants to promote her name. here's another by the same author -
Girls, I just finished watching you go wild again and here are some of my thoughts....
just vacuous, purposeless groundless scolding, also incoherent; there's no reason for this except for self-promotion, to somehow present herself as advisor. This is the technique of perky strivers everywhere - tv networks have low level development people writing memos like this to veteran writers whose scripts they have not even understood. Young perky ambitious PR pros write memos to directors listing the ten things their colleagues whose jobs they covet could do better, and for less money! Once upon a time the production of left political journalism had too many genuine militants and too few rewards to produce this sort of character, but with the internet it's become a valuable culture industry niche, and there she is, the one who leans over peter gallagher's shoulder in The Player and says "i really want to be one of your soldiers on this."
"Arpege, my friend Sheila told me to go see gurumayi sometime in the early 90s, she was always doing these retreat things."
It's actually very nice there. Relaxing, you get this great veggie mlunch for five bucks, nobody bothers you for money, you can walk around, then go and chant. then there are the expensive weekends and stuff, more than the equivalent at a nice resort, because you get shaktipat included - but it's very nice. there's a division where the devotees do all the promising of magical good results and the guru herself just says be good, be kind boyzengoils.
Just to be really clear here, Bill - I think there are legitimate debates obviously about defining our species as subjects, creative producers of ourselves, what we have in common, how to think about our capacities and needs, but this is seperate from the "universalism" of Zizek, Power, Toscano, whose main product is white male supremacist historical revisionism - the attempts to reinstate as mainstream the patriarchal white supremacist history taken for granted by generations of white men since Kant and Hegel, the efforts to reinstate these bogus fallacious works and thinkers as Authorities and enforce their Authority through every tactic including purging of the historical record, spurious revisionism, race baiting and contemptuous mockery in age-old racist and misogynist traditions. This is a degraded kind of discourse that is not really part of the legimate issues you raise regarding chomsky's naturalism as possibly (probably) sustaining certain ideological frames about what the arrangements of property and power in human affairs ought to be and risks linking up with idiotic evopsych and all that shit.
I mean I concede that finally Chomsky's way of concieveing "human nature" partakes of the classic liberal ideological conception of the individual, although i think there is much misreading of his relation to this via a mind/body or mind/matter or spirit/matter dualism that his reactionary and pomo critics read in which he has simply dismissed utterly but which they cannot rid themselves of. But say even if you don't misread, there are issues here. This is not the same kind of propagandistic assault on history and rationality constituted by, for example, Lenin's claim that "socialist feminist critique" is represented at its surgical best by that imbecile incoherent bit of self-promotion plus neolib propaganda in the Guardian. The LT audience is not so well informed about socialist feminist critique that this misrepresentation can pass as something no one will believe anyway, that everyone will take as just "comradely" generosity. It is likely that some readers will be seriously disinformed and emerge from the encounter even more misogynist, even more convinced that women are feebleminded unprincipled egoists, than they were before these affirmations.
Then freaked out and came right back and went to Lutece and got "drunk, I bet, smoked a whole pack of ciggies in one night, because Ms. Mayi wouldn't let you smoke nor drink, I bet."
had to walk all the way off the grounds to smoke and did so only twice. and after I went actually to a very good resto in Athens, NY called Stewart House.
"and the guru herself just says be good, be kind boyzengoils."
Did you tell her what Spivak thought about such things? Somehow it's still hard envisioning you up a totally mindlessness-oriented place, where they might not have let you talk about The Ear of the Other all that much...an', an' the 'resort' aspects of the place sound almost like, I mean, y'know, the Pierre or sump'n (love that place, all champagne. I've just decided we'll do that this Xmas, go have a kir there in the Cafe. Have you ever been there? One of my favourite places in town.)
That Judy Holliday movie is 'It Should Happen to You', and the poster is Gladys Glover. One of her best, she's SO precious. Started off w/Comden and Green in the Revuers at the Village Vanguard.
-I think today right now we rather have a neoliberal ideology which likes the infinite protean nature of "the human"
Point taken, but my take is that what that neolib ideology actually says is that we’ve arrived at the essence of a human society – this is what we ARE. It doesn’t help to try to say that what we ARE is something else than the neos say. Rather, as you say, this thing doesn’t work, it doesn’t meet concrete needs. But those needs don’t come to an end if they might give us a minimum wage or our own house or yacht. However rich ‘we’ get...
-how but through patriarchal misogyny could the "consumerism" of the core in globalisation and the superexploitation of women be perceieved as a question to be framed as "the failure and sins of feminism"?
Again, no way not to agree with that. The point of disagreement might arise if and when lefties are actually saying that.
-The LT audience is not so well informed about socialist feminist critique that this misrepresentation can pass as something no one will believe anyway, that everyone will take as just "comradely" generosity. It is likely that some readers will be seriously disinformed and emerge from the encounter even more misogynist, even more convinced that women are feebleminded unprincipled egoists, than they were before these affirmations.
I see the danger, but then I always thought that the point being made was a different one – an argument within feminism about precisely what sort of progress has and hasn’t been made.
-In the mean time, 'Bill', address me with respect. I don't like you...And don't ever say 'Jeez' to me.
You’ve broken my heart! We used to say ‘jeepers’ when i was young cos we knew we were going to hell if we said ‘jesus’ too many times (more than 7, I think). Maybe i should have tried Jeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzusssss!!!!! Respectfully, etc...
"I see the danger, but then I always thought that the point being made was a different one – an argument within feminism about precisely what sort of progress has and hasn’t been made."
Where and how in the post or the article do you see this point made?
"The point of disagreement might arise if and when lefties are actually saying that."
Saying what? That Nina Power frames the global division of labour and the superexploitation of women as "the sins and failures of feminism" and that this is an old misogynist manoeuvre of propagandistic scapegoating women that goes back to the early 18th century in England?
I have already said it.
If you disagree then how can you explain the presence of the word "Feminism" in this sentence?:
"Feminism is not wrong to see the economic autonomy of women as central to their political and social freedom, but we do a disservice to its aims if we believe that it is enough to have a job, regardless of what it is."
What does "feminism" have to do with you/those who believe it is enough that you/they have a job regardless of what it is? How are you "doing a disservice" to the "aims" of "feminism" by believing this (or anything)?
Perhaps you are insinuating that it is some position "within feminism" that "it is enough" for ? "to have a job, regardless of what it is", but then you should substantiate that claim by at the very least naming the feminists whose praxis supports your interpretation.
The Mysteries of Language or the Spooks of AngloSaxon Methodology?
ReplyDeleteOkay - what do you think?
ReplyDeleteWell, I think that tying shoe laces is a universal human capacity, one that became evident in a very narrow window in evolutionary time, one within which broad regularites can be determined, as well as there being local variation, but I don't think that this universal capacity to tie shoe laces suggests that human behaviour is channeling some sort of primary, normative, analytical system (Not that I don't love Chomsky for all sorts of other reasons).
ReplyDeleteYou get the same kind of thing in Pinker's remarks on that RSA clip -- human reasoning and memory are deficient tools for thinking with if the job of thinking is to accord with normative models of rationality.
ReplyDelete" I don't think that this universal capacity to tie shoe laces suggests that human behaviour is channeling some sort of primary, normative, analytical system"
ReplyDeleteno but it is "channelling" something normative, fingers right? it's really explicable in relation to human hands and probably not if you ignore the typical, common features of human hands.
pinker is really a reactionary and an ideologue; i don't think eh is honest.
i was once more of a social constructionist, kind of just immediately reacting badly to any suggestions about "human nature". But now I think chomsky is right and you can't assume that chomsky, whose claims are very minimal, implies pinker whose claims are insanely ideologically essentialist and idealist in the "materialist" guise.
I just thought pinker was funny in parts and wanted to give a context for his answer to the question of what he thought he knew that everyone else ought know also.
thanks though for replying - this is very interesting to me just now, this old question of how much is socially constructed. i am pretty orthodox historical materialist, but sometimes I think nobody reads or understands marx anymore, that is, the ability to read marx was destroyed by some post structuralist hermeneutics dogma.
ReplyDeleteFair point -- Chomsky doesn't deserve to be smeared with the likes of Pinker. While Chomsky’s claims might be minimal, they still, it seems to me, embody the idea that language is essentially that sort of compositional, analytical system that was meant to derive from a universal grammar. I think that’s a problem, not because I don’t think that it’s a universal human capacity to produce such language, but that there’s lots of evidence of language that isn’t analytical and compositional in that way. The methodological issue arises when the languages used to construct theories are necessarily restricted, and the most readily available ones may be those within which the sort of characteristics that Chomsky deems essential (like compositionality) are most likely to be found – e.g. those used in literate societies (if not even merely written language). Literacy is kind of useless if it doesn’t have the analytical and compositional qualities that would enable transparent communication with a socially distant receiver who doesn’t have access to all the implicit historical and contextual knowledge that the speaker has. That general point – about transparent communication with ‘strangers’- might be important when it comes to seeing Chomsky’s even minimal position as not reflecting the essence of language, but rather a particular social and historical form of it (e.g., developing specialisations within communities would lead to a reduction in the degree of shared knowledge amongst all members, whether or not that community was interacting with others). With regard to his comments in the video clip, it’s probable that those kinds of social forces(specialisation, interacting with strangers) were present minimally if at all when languages first emerged. If that’s the case, then it may be that there’s no need to assume that the emergence of the universal capacity for composition analytical language is the same thing as the emergence of the universal capacity for language.
ReplyDeleteI don’t think any of this requires adjudication _between_ biological and social forces. There are some very meaty things that may well have played a critical role in the evolution of language. The limited capacity of our lungs puts constraints on the duration of an uninterrupted utterance and the tendency for our speech planning mechanisms to produce occasional slips within such utterances may well have drawn attention to the possibilities for segmenting such utterances and recombining the segments in different forms. However, none of these meaty things are essentially linguistic.
thanks bill-
ReplyDelete"then it may be that there’s no need to assume that the emergence of the universal capacity for composition analytical language is the same thing as the emergence of the universal capacity for language. "
Okay.
if i get you you are not disputing that existing concrete referent of "language" is compositional or that we have innate capacity to produce it but pointing out that this may not be a quality narrowly necessitated by our innate capacity - that our language capacity is realised as we see but could be otherwise.
i don't think chomsky would dispute that. But you imply that there is an idea of "language" that is not descriptive of concrete human production. Sort of sounds Platonic. Unless I misunderstand, which is very very possible, i don't know much about this.
otherwise I think i agree with you about the suppositions about our consciousness; i would accept a maximally flexible view of capacities that accepts basic obvious finitude and biological nature. i think chomsky's rhetoric in popularising speech can veer into unwarranted individualism in the sense that he downplays the biological entity our species and that the environment is part of the individual body too - he downplays the process, the incessant historical production. On the other hand, when questioned, he seems less skewed toward this perspective of the individual.
"_between_ biological and social forces."
yes well our biology is social. We reproduce sexually. so it's kind of just sometimes a useful distinction but i would agree not here especially.
"The methodological issue arises when the languages used to construct theories are necessarily restricted, and the most readily available ones may be those within which the sort of characteristics that Chomsky deems essential (like compositionality) are most likely to be found – e.g. those used in literate societies (if not even merely written language). "
ReplyDeleteI think I really misunderstood this at first (thinking "languages used to construct theories" meant the language of the theorist, the language that is the form of the theorists theory and thought, and not the languages as the data from which the theory is derived).
Okay, so you are possibly disputing that the concrete referent of "language" has those features.
?
is there an essay you could recommend for a history of this question?
“But you imply that there is an idea of "language" that is not descriptive of concrete human production.”
ReplyDeleteI think the contention is that the idea that linguistic behaviour manifests the sort of compositional/analytical system that we might call Chomskyan is not necessarily borne out by all the data. In other words, there is concrete human language that arguably isn’t amenable to the Chomskyan scheme (even via reference to the old competence/performance chestnut). Aspects of this include the finding that we tend to display much less compositionality than such a theory would predict and instead tend to rely more on non-novel, formulaic linguistic formations, and that in general, we simply don’t use all the options that we would have at our disposal, which we would be optimally inclined to use (even though as literates we can do it if necessary), if all our linguistic behaviour was indeed underpinned by that sort of linguistic capacity. It also appears that some languages are neither taught nor used nor interpreted via such a compositional scheme (not necessarily the same thing as saying they’re not underpinned by it though..), and there’s lots of evidence that people just don’t interpret language as they would be predicted to if they were in possession of some sort of compositional linguistic capacity. In other words, the analytical/compositional is just one, and not even necessarily the most prevalent form of language. (I think most of these ideas I got from reading papers by Alison Wray and various of her citees and colleagues. If you can’t find stuff on google scholar let me know and I should be able to track down some pdfs)
“ that our language capacity is realised as we see but could be otherwise.”
One thing is that some aspects of our universal linguistic capacity, such as the ability to deal with embedded clauses, while clearly reflecting the sort of compositional scheme we find in Chomsky, seem to only be evident in written language (evidently such embeddedness doesn’t appear in non-/pre-literate language, and people hardly ever use it while speaking, preferring instead to line clauses up one after the other) and so couldn’t have been selected for as linguistic capacities per se. I think this is the kind of thing (if I thought harder about it) that enables us to go beyond trying to account for biological versus social forces in the emergence and development of language (I think it was what I was trying to get at with the shoelace comment – you can’t necessarily maintain an a priori distinction between the organic and the artefactual components). If something is written down, then it’s not subject to the vicissitudes of ‘memory’ (which as Pinker points out in the RSA clip is no bloody good at all). That in turn means that it’s open to all sorts of manipulations that it wouldn’t otherwise be. So, writing, as making marks, isn’t inherently or necessarily linguistic, but can create linguistic capacities that couldn’t be assigned clearly to either social or biological forces.
"i would accept a maximally flexible view of capacities that accepts basic obvious finitude and biological nature."
I always thought I was an orthodox Marxist (Paris manuscripts? German Ideology? I dunno), but I wouldn’t go along with basic obvious finitude and biological nature(maybe I am an Hegelian or some other kind of idealist – I used to be accused of it). I just don’t know what that finitude would look like or how it could be established. I know that human beings have the capacity to fly (i've seen it and done it), and I’m similarly sure we have the capacity to live forever (pending).
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ReplyDelete" I just don’t know what that finitude would look like or how it could be established. I know that human beings have the capacity to fly (i've seen it and done it), and I’m similarly sure we have the capacity to live forever (pending)."
ReplyDeleteWell, if there is no finitude what can you possibly mean by "we"? Are you speaking for the helium molecules in the sun as well?
"We" - all that exists, the universe and the funky regions, God - have the capacity to "live" forever?
ReplyDeleteDo we have the capacity even to "live" right now? Seems most of us don't "live" ever and it's not clear ever will.
"maybe I am an Hegelian or some other kind of idealist"
ReplyDeletemaybe, but maybe more Pico-nian. Infinite capacities but remaining identifiably "us" and heros of the story sounds Renaissance-y Italian-y to me.
Thanks for the Wray ref, there are some things available; i am having a pdf problem today and have to fix it, will read, and reply to the other matters.
thanks for the comments, very interesting.
patrick snarkity snarkity! you sound like me today, grumpelstilskin!!!
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ReplyDeletewe have already lived forever. and with ciggies prohibited, it feels like we live forever again every day.
ReplyDeleteSo I'd like to hear then precisely how biology (or 'nature' in general) imposes constraints on human behaviour that exist outside of history, in a way that, say, constraints stemming from the need to extract surplus value from labour doesn't.
ReplyDelete"So I'd like to hear then precisely how biology (or 'nature' in general) imposes constraints on human behaviour"
ReplyDeleteso what do you mean "human" behaviour? If there are no vbiological constraints on "human" behaviour, the big bang could be included. so "we", the "human" that is not constrained in behaviour by what is normally considered human biolog, already live forever travel at the speed of light, etc..
If you mean "human" as something less than the whole of spacetime, then what is it? How do you specificy "human" without definition? If human capacities are unlimited, we can grown cockroach bodies and lead cockroach lives, then human includes cockroaches, and stars and everything. Presumably. You can't limit without identifying limits; if the humlan species' capacities are infinite the species has more capacities than the universe itself probably. So such views aren't that new, like christian cabalism.
"'d like to hear then precisely how biology (or 'nature' in general) imposes "
ReplyDeleteif you mean you want to know what the limits of human capacities are, well, join the club!
if you mean you want to know what the limits of human capacities are, well, join the club!
ReplyDeleteExcept that starting from the position that such limits will be found by identifying particular ‘natural’ phenomena means you’re going to have to end up in a predetermined place at some point. This reminds me of an argument I had with John Molyneaux a long time ago, when he cited the fact that it was possible to identify a human tibia and distinguish it from that of some other primate. Which is fine, but bad news for individuals without legs or individuals who don’t possess whatever other characteristics might define the internal, dumb generality.
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ReplyDelete"Which is fine, but bad news for individuals without legs"
ReplyDeletenot if they can just grow more and wings. but they can't. they have no capacity to do that.
might we have a latent latent capacity to do that (to develop a technology to assist)? yeah. but if we do have this capacity now, unrealised, it is an aspect of our nature; that is, it's possible that we don't have that capacity. right?
"or individuals who don’t possess whatever other characteristics might define the internal, dumb generality."
we don't all fly, we don't all walk, we don't all use language.
i get you. i'm not just trying to bark. that's why i said "maximally flexible" but i do think that the vision that depends on imagining the non-existent humanity a lot is problematic, and that the idea of the infinite capacity for infinite transformation is ideological.
i had a realy spiritual experience at the south fallsburg ashram of siddha yoga foundation, gurumayi chivilasinanda.
ReplyDelete"bad news for individuals without legs or individuals who don’t possess whatever other characteristics might define the internal, dumb generality."
ReplyDeleteI enjoy thinking of legs as 'characteristics'. Admit I do like this phrase 'internal, dumb generality', though. Yes, I agree with Arpege not to change the subject so rudely from 'capacity to live forever'(pending or no) to 'bad news for amputees'. I frankly don't see that as a problem that won't be solved before you are stuck living in your laptop's hard drive forever.
Thanks for email.
This exquisite discussion has made me long to perish as some point more than I realized I had wanted. Now that Bill has proved that we have the capacity to live forever by scientific method, and Arpege has pointed out that we have always lived forever, but most of the time were lucky enough not to have to know anything about it, I think I'm beginning to like the idea of the 'long view' a little more now. It is kind of true about the ciggies, even when you are just giving up one (I slipped last night, because I worked on the book really hard editing for several hours, and that was great, so I rewarded myself, but it gave me NEGATIVE THOUGHTS!) The indisputable fact of 'internal, dumb generality' makes us wish to tidy up our affairs as quickly as possible, except that corpses also have an internal, dumb generality, yes even the ones that get cremated possess this for a brief time, although there are other experiences that they don't get, so dead people are all just as unique as living ones.
But you can FLYYYYY
You can FLYYYY
Up, Up and A-way-hay-ay
In my beautiful, my beautiful balLOOOONNNN
Suspended under a twilight canopy
We'll search the clouds for a star to guide us..
Arpege, my friend Sheila told me to go see gurumayi sometime in the early 90s, she was always doing these retreat things. She said 'you just wanna bliss out?' well, I don't tend to want to all that much, because it's been my experience that all the spiritual people tell you that 'bliss and joy and pleasure are one, but that the bliss and joy are the good part...' cf. Mrs. Dworking, so I opted out. No wonder I've had such a long adolescence, maybe I didn't even reach True Puberty until I was 55. I always remember the similar fate of that woman in the Djuna Barnes story that reached her peaked at an advanced age, and she felt it incumbent on her to perish in a more precipitous fashion than the nursing-home set tends to favour.
-I enjoy thinking of legs as 'characteristics'. Admit I do like this phrase 'internal, dumb generality', though.
ReplyDeleteThey’re not always good characteristics. As for the phrase, I don’t know what language Marx originally wrote the Theses in Feuerbach in, so it might even be down to Engels.
- gentle whispering about how we've conquered death
Or even polio, maybe
- But he's right. There is no such thing as biological constraints.
Jeez patrick, just because you’re deploying your cheese-sensitive whiskers so deftly doesn’t mean you have to go and completely give up on your eyes at the same time
-and that the idea of the infinite capacity for infinite transformation is ideological.
Could it be anything else? And the idea of finitude isn’t?
So this is really what my first comment was meant to be: How come, in a place where the universalising (reactionary, Hegelian) tendencies of certain strands of left wing thought on matters of the human condition (work, domesticity, imperialism, struggle...) are remorselessly hunted down and exposed, the idea that biology might pose, however minimally, an end point in human history isn’t similarly exposed for what it is? I’m not just trying to bark either.
"So I'd like to hear then precisely how biology (or 'nature' in general) imposes constraints on human behaviour"
ReplyDeleteThat's what you wrote, I just did a riff, what you write I do not consider Holy Scripture. I'll play with it any way I choose, since you're writing such shit as 'living forever' (although you may have wanted to get off that one as too trivial, after all even the ones with the 'real science' and know Bill Gates think 5000 years is enough).
"the idea that biology might pose, however minimally, an end point in human history isn’t similarly exposed for what it is? I’m not just trying to bark either."
You mean it's a hoax, all that biology? Well, that's a little hard to swallow, given that you want the human being to live forever, and therefore there can be no biological constraints, but the 'biology' is also a hoax, so humanity can go ahead without biology. Arpege, if you would be so kind, would you tell me what VALUE this kind of shit talk has? Obviously, the perp here is going to croak himself (the sooner the better, one imagines) and is a thanatophobe, so is probably going to spend her savings on cryonautism or something, so she can be revived and 'de-biologized' to live forever.
Okay, Arpege, I would like to know why this is not barren shit talk. In the mean time, 'Bill', address me with respect. I don't like you, and I don't know why Arpege is even talking to you. You're bullshitting and we both know it. And don't ever say 'Jeez' to me. It reminds me of many loathsome people besides yourself.
Hey bill - fair points.
ReplyDeleteHonestly though, I only mean to be remorseless when something is turned to propaganda purposes having what all reasonable people can see are real effect.
The universalism which identifies "reverse racism" theme, for example, that Alberto Toscano plays in his assertions about Malcolm X, is resurgent and odious and affecting people:
http://www.facebook.com/timjwise#!/notes/tim-wise/of-loaded-footnotes-and-lying-pundits-deceptive-data-and-the-attack-on-racial-eq/413103989503
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resignation_of_Shirley_Sherrod
does " the idea that biology might pose, however minimally, an end point in human history isn’t similarly exposed for what it is?"
do the same? I think it's a mixed bag. I think today right now we rather have a neoliberal ideology which likes the infinite protean nature of "the human" - which likes this abraction and this utopian technological progressivism implied and how easily it allows one to dismiss contemptuously the concrete needs of existing humanity, to dismiss that that are not being met, that they could be met. And then one goes off into the improving humanity before we can have (before we can deserve) communusm. With the infinitely flexible humanity comes an indifference to concrete humanity's concrete needs, like shelter, water, companionship, justice.
the universalism i object to is bogus and a disguise for white supremacy (how but through white supremacy could Malcolm X' post-hajj politics be fantasisied as "a break with black nationalism"? how but through patriarchal misogyny could the "consumerism" of the core in globalisation and the superexploitation of women be perceieved as a question to be framed as "the failure and sins of feminism"? The ongoing catatrophe in Haiti is the story of ongoing imperialism not "the sins and complicity of anti-imperialism" and the story of ongoing super exploitation of working women is the story of patriarchal capitalism not "the failure and complicity of feminism".)...
This "universalism", whihc identifies "consumerism" and "seperatisparticularism" the sin of women, is precisely not about the recongition and real human capacities and needs and championing those who revolt against exploitation, but of "critiques" of normativity and proposals for the more improvement of the most privileged people.
should say
ReplyDelete"This "universalism", which identifies "consumerism" and "seperatism-particularism" as the sins of women, is precisely not about the recongition of real human capacities and needs, and championing those subjects in their struggle against exploitation, but of "critiques" of normativity and proposals for the moral improvement of the most privileged people."
I think Bill that in fact this "soooduniversalism" that is the guise of the latest bourgeois reaction against Marxism in elite circles of the culture industry (led by US academia) is really dangerous, if you take a view just over the next decade. This is what is here now to destroy the accomplishments of the radical cultural politics which have been on the defensive but still fighting away throughout postmodernism. And postmodernism is a reaction that anyone can see contained some concessions - these cooptations such as the abolition the "human" one way or another. Now that postmodernism has performed these concessions, followed by cooptations with deploy an extremism to absurd degrees, now that the multiversality that is already present in Marxism and reasserted in new postmodern vocabularies is coopted and transformed into absurdity, this white supremacism can return and assume a dominant position. It is much like the neoliberal style of aggression all other things - one cannot micromanage the world, one can't stabilise an unstable financial system or rule the world despotically controlling every person. but one can destroy and create chaos for which one is ready, and reduce everyone else to helplessness and insecurity.
ReplyDeleteHere we have this white supremacy that excuses itself for rehashing endlessly the old canards by saying it is only recognising "the racist Imaginary" and Ideology that already exists. It is only being honest about what's there. This argument is similar to that advanced from the same quarters about why the US occupation of Afghanistan must be sustained.
I mean, alongside "the human is infinitely flexible" thing, we do get corporate personhood etc, the usurpation of the human (as subject of rights) by capital. An abstraction is offered in place of the concrete - humanity whose individual members live forever replaces the concrete humanity whose individual members live less than 100 years - and of course abstyractions are easily shuffled, there's no real obstacle to "the human" in "human rights" being identified as blocks of immortal capital. (through also a slippage or kind of trap door thing created between the individual and the species).
ReplyDeleteThe neoPlatonist, Pauline christian "universalism" that its vendors are specifically promoting against "postcolonial" thought, "pluriversality", Spivakian adaptations of deconstruction, feminism, and non- or less- Hegelian Marxism deploys a strategy even more like Israel's "facts on the ground". A patriarchal capitalist ruling class can organise the oppression of women and coopt the discourses of our resistance and then "critique" us for those very artifacts it produces with what of ours it has expropriated, vitiated, commodified and now sells back to us.
this "universalism" one notices is - not arbitrarily - very popular with the young and ignorant. Because it is anti-wisdom. Over the past fifty years, the left has been able to share its knowledges globally, communism and the women's movement, the civil rights movement, and anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism and aided by telecom technologies. "Feminism" and "black nationalism" and "liberation theology" and "Marxism" also name traditions that are the repository of a lot of collected wisdom. This sood- universalism peddled by badiou and zizek is all about revelation - instant enlightenment for the innocent and open of heart, with these simply formulae. The pantomime is of these Paul Bremers, crowning themselves amidst the explosions and rubble, writing memos to redesign political traditions that they know nothing of, giving instructions to movements they never even joined let alone were chosen to lead, simply to exploit the targets for their own gain. That right to work piece in the guardian was like the billboard judy holiday buys in that movie where she just wants to promote her name. here's another by the same author -
http://www.alternet.org/vision/147491/10_things_that_feminism_could_do_better/
wtf? is this a message in a bottle ?
MEMO
From: Nina, at the beach
To: Feminism, Earth
Girls, I just finished watching you go wild again and here are some of my thoughts....
just vacuous, purposeless groundless scolding, also incoherent; there's no reason for this except for self-promotion, to somehow present herself as advisor. This is the technique of perky strivers everywhere - tv networks have low level development people writing memos like this to veteran writers whose scripts they have not even understood. Young perky ambitious PR pros write memos to directors listing the ten things their colleagues whose jobs they covet could do better, and for less money! Once upon a time the production of left political journalism had too many genuine militants and too few rewards to produce this sort of character, but with the internet it's become a valuable culture industry niche, and there she is, the one who leans over peter gallagher's shoulder in The Player and says "i really want to be one of your soldiers on this."
"Arpege, my friend Sheila told me to go see gurumayi sometime in the early 90s, she was always doing these retreat things."
ReplyDeleteIt's actually very nice there. Relaxing, you get this great veggie mlunch for five bucks, nobody bothers you for money, you can walk around, then go and chant. then there are the expensive weekends and stuff, more than the equivalent at a nice resort, because you get shaktipat included - but it's very nice. there's a division where the devotees do all the promising of magical good results and the guru herself just says be good, be kind boyzengoils.
Just to be really clear here, Bill - I think there are legitimate debates obviously about defining our species as subjects, creative producers of ourselves, what we have in common, how to think about our capacities and needs, but this is seperate from the "universalism" of Zizek, Power, Toscano, whose main product is white male supremacist historical revisionism - the attempts to reinstate as mainstream the patriarchal white supremacist history taken for granted by generations of white men since Kant and Hegel, the efforts to reinstate these bogus fallacious works and thinkers as Authorities and enforce their Authority through every tactic including purging of the historical record, spurious revisionism, race baiting and contemptuous mockery in age-old racist and misogynist traditions. This is a degraded kind of discourse that is not really part of the legimate issues you raise regarding chomsky's naturalism as possibly (probably) sustaining certain ideological frames about what the arrangements of property and power in human affairs ought to be and risks linking up with idiotic evopsych and all that shit.
ReplyDeleteI mean I concede that finally Chomsky's way of concieveing "human nature" partakes of the classic liberal ideological conception of the individual, although i think there is much misreading of his relation to this via a mind/body or mind/matter or spirit/matter dualism that his reactionary and pomo critics read in which he has simply dismissed utterly but which they cannot rid themselves of. But say even if you don't misread, there are issues here. This is not the same kind of propagandistic assault on history and rationality constituted by, for example, Lenin's claim that "socialist feminist critique" is represented at its surgical best by that imbecile incoherent bit of self-promotion plus neolib propaganda in the Guardian. The LT audience is not so well informed about socialist feminist critique that this misrepresentation can pass as something no one will believe anyway, that everyone will take as just "comradely" generosity. It is likely that some readers will be seriously disinformed and emerge from the encounter even more misogynist, even more convinced that women are feebleminded unprincipled egoists, than they were before these affirmations.
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ReplyDeletepatrick i can't tell if you're even serious.
ReplyDelete"I'm going back to Badiou and white male supremacy, because you and Anodyne both just want to castrate all men, not just Rush Limbaugh."
oh oh oh, now i can tell.
Then freaked out and came right back and went to Lutece and got "drunk, I bet, smoked a whole pack of ciggies in one night, because Ms. Mayi wouldn't let you smoke nor drink, I bet."
ReplyDeletehad to walk all the way off the grounds to smoke and did so only twice. and after I went actually to a very good resto in Athens, NY called Stewart House.
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ReplyDeletepatrick i was just joking - like now i can tell you must be serious because the topic is castration.
ReplyDeleteyukity yuk; not funny okay. it's a long hard headachey day for me.
it seems to me bill is sincere and bringing up topics of interest, why be angry?
most people are women, patrick! so it's a bit annoying to be treated as eccentric on account of femality.
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ReplyDeleteAre most people really women? I didn't know it was a vast majority, anyway I knew they live longer.
ReplyDelete"and the guru herself just says be good, be kind boyzengoils."
ReplyDeleteDid you tell her what Spivak thought about such things? Somehow it's still hard envisioning you up a totally mindlessness-oriented place, where they might not have let you talk about The Ear of the Other all that much...an', an' the 'resort' aspects of the place sound almost like, I mean, y'know, the Pierre or sump'n (love that place, all champagne. I've just decided we'll do that this Xmas, go have a kir there in the Cafe. Have you ever been there? One of my favourite places in town.)
That Judy Holliday movie is 'It Should Happen to You', and the poster is Gladys Glover. One of her best, she's SO precious. Started off w/Comden and Green in the Revuers at the Village Vanguard.
ReplyDelete-I think today right now we rather have a neoliberal ideology which likes the infinite protean nature of "the human"
ReplyDeletePoint taken, but my take is that what that neolib ideology actually says is that we’ve arrived at the essence of a human society – this is what we ARE. It doesn’t help to try to say that what we ARE is something else than the neos say. Rather, as you say, this thing doesn’t work, it doesn’t meet concrete needs. But those needs don’t come to an end if they might give us a minimum wage or our own house or yacht. However rich ‘we’ get...
-how but through patriarchal misogyny could the "consumerism" of the core in globalisation and the superexploitation of women be perceieved as a question to be framed as "the failure and sins of feminism"?
Again, no way not to agree with that. The point of disagreement might arise if and when lefties are actually saying that.
-The LT audience is not so well informed about socialist feminist critique that this misrepresentation can pass as something no one will believe anyway, that everyone will take as just "comradely" generosity. It is likely that some readers will be seriously disinformed and emerge from the encounter even more misogynist, even more convinced that women are feebleminded unprincipled egoists, than they were before these affirmations.
I see the danger, but then I always thought that the point being made was a different one – an argument within feminism about precisely what sort of progress has and hasn’t been made.
-In the mean time, 'Bill', address me with respect. I don't like you...And don't ever say 'Jeez' to me.
You’ve broken my heart! We used to say ‘jeepers’ when i was young cos we knew we were going to hell if we said ‘jesus’ too many times (more than 7, I think). Maybe i should have tried Jeeeeeeeeezzzzzzzusssss!!!!! Respectfully, etc...
"I see the danger, but then I always thought that the point being made was a different one – an argument within feminism about precisely what sort of progress has and hasn’t been made."
ReplyDeleteWhere and how in the post or the article do you see this point made?
And is the point you are going to identify here valid?
ReplyDelete"The point of disagreement might arise if and when lefties are actually saying that."
ReplyDeleteSaying what? That Nina Power frames the global division of labour and the superexploitation of women as "the sins and failures of feminism" and that this is an old misogynist manoeuvre of propagandistic scapegoating women that goes back to the early 18th century in England?
I have already said it.
If you disagree then how can you explain the presence of the word "Feminism" in this sentence?:
"Feminism is not wrong to see the economic autonomy of women as central to their political and social freedom, but we do a disservice to its aims if we believe that it is enough to have a job, regardless of what it is."
What does "feminism" have to do with you/those who believe it is enough that you/they have a job regardless of what it is? How are you "doing a disservice" to the "aims" of "feminism" by believing this (or anything)?
Perhaps you are insinuating that it is some position "within feminism" that "it is enough" for ? "to have a job, regardless of what it is", but then you should substantiate that claim by at the very least naming the feminists whose praxis supports your interpretation.
ReplyDeletecan you identify and substantiate the claims in the article about feminisms and feminists?
ReplyDeletewhat does "equality as a race to the bottom" mean and what can it have to do with feminism?