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 | Grad Idea 2004/2005 Forum |
Comments are posted in the order in which they are received, with earlier postings appearing first below on this page. To see the latest postings, click on "Go to last comment" below.
| a new year Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2004-09-04 12:16:58 Link to this Comment: 10766 |
Rich conversation yesterday (as always). Thanks to all and particularly to Corey for the introduction to Fraser. Who I DO like, for lots of reasons (her relation to Foucalt among them). But who I also think is a reminder about the hazards of "waffling around in cultural space". A hazard I was a little surprised to find myself calling attention to (since its a space I like, tend to waffle around in myself). So I liked where we get to at the end, the idea that there are a series of different but interconnected spaces with appropriately different languages in each AND a need to develop languages/story tellers that communicate among the spaces. More particularly, in this case, there IS value in the "academic" but it is equally important that the academic be translateable. With the objective not simply of making the stories accessible but, even more importantly, of assuring that those who speak other languages are able to affect the story. To put it differently, for people interested in social change the explicit aim ought to be to enhance peoples' abilities to tell stories in ways that can impact on other communities.
Very interested too in the possible parallels between catastrophic (and other kinds of) change in evolution and in culture, the necessity to disrupt stabilizing webs of connectedness to get new things. Presume that will show up in one way or another in Roland's summary of our conversation, and that we can look at it more in future conversations.
| waffling....teleologically? Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2004-09-04 20:00:28 Link to this Comment: 10777 |
I was pretty puzzled during the first half of yesterday's (as-always-rich-if-sometimes- provoking) discussion--really was not understanding the claim that any "population which doesn't work in words" has a particular problem in trying to make sense of what's happening, by using conventional cultural stories and words that "don't fit their experience"...
I think because it's so clear to me that words are for all of us, loquacious or not, academic or not, reductions of what is; like maps, they always give partial accounts of the whole. They are always inadequate--and thereby generative: productive of further words, further conversation, further change.
After an hour or so I finally realized that the real complaint being lodged against Nancy Fraser's "Genealogy of 'Dependency': Tracing a Keyword of the U.S. Welfare State," was that it spent so much time re-constructing the etymology of "dependency" (and asked us to spend so much time following that trace) without ever arriving @ what we might do to not be bound by such a history in the future. It was claimed that "the point was not simply to understand the story, but to change it"; the problem was that Fraser didn't do what she "should" have done....
And here (I think?) is the rub: what happens when any of us asserts what others should do....Corey made a (to me) very useful distinction between work that is "descriptive" (simply giving an account of "what has been and what is") and that which is "normative" (describing what should be). In these terms, we were ourselves being "normative" in faulting Frazer for being merely "descriptive," for failing to construct, on top of her historical etymological study of "dependence," a proposal for how to move closer to a more equitable state than the one we now inhabit, which so stigmatizes (certain kinds of) dependencies, and rewards others. But that "should...."
Dunno. We can certainly say (as some of us loudly did) that we do not find others' work useful to our our own purposes. I suppose we can even say (as Paul does above) that "for people interested in social change the explicit aim ought to be to enhance peoples' abilities to tell stories in ways that can impact on other communities." I suppose we can even say (as some of us also did) that others' work is not useful to their own proclaimed purposes (as Fraser's work may not be to her own stated end). But that it is required to be, that it "should...."?
Dunno. I just read Roland's contribution to the Descartes forum (where he introduces a fine new phrase, "ordering problems," to describe aspects of thinking that attempt to establish a meaningful ordering of problems). Also finding himself "not liking" the slightly teleological sound of
I am, and I think, therefore I can change who I am,
Roland goes on to gnaw away at the difference between "my truth and the truth," between what I know for certain--and cannot act against--and what I claim as true for all ("natural rights...just another way of saying 'God'"??)
Seems to me "should" is the (normative? even teleological?) bridge we build (often inappropriately) between "my" and "all"....
| education, change, assessment Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2004-09-11 12:50:50 Link to this Comment: 10821 |
I liked very much the willingness to consider thinking of the business of education as promoting change, and think potentially very useful some of the thoughts that were made possible by that platform as a take off point. In particular, I like the notion of measuring the success of education in terms of the degree of change in participants and then the making of that more concrete by relating it to the "view from everywhere".
Not to skip too quickly over the hard parts, it IS significant to clear the decks a bit and agree that what goes on in a classroom should be thought of in terms of the distance between where people start and where they end up (as opposed to thinking of it in terms of mastery of some material or some other desired end state independent of individual starting points). And it is further significant to think of a classroom in terms of enhancing the capacity of people to change rather than in terms of "content" (cf This Isn't Just My Problem, Friend).
What's new, for me, is starting to come to grips with the next questions. I'd been inclined to say that one encourages/looks for change of any kind in any direction, and am still so inclined in general but there are two problems there, One is conceptual (there probably are at least some directions of change I'd be less happy with than others), and the other is practical (it is simply not possible to conceive of all of an infinite array of possible directions of change and so one may well miss something). Its for these reasons that I like a lot the "view from everywhere" idea applied in the educational context. It feels right to me that it is not just change but the capacity for further change that one wants to achieve in classrooms and that a not bad measure of this capacity is the number of different perspectives one can usefully bring to bear on the status quo. Will enjoy thinking more along these lines, seeing what new directions in opens up for me.
Thanks again to all involved. Looking forward to future conversations.
| unconscious/conscious / practice/theory Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2004-10-05 17:03:13 Link to this Comment: 11025 |
Think the issue of whether "thinking" is necessary for "theory" was well put, is significant. And liked very much where things seemed to come out. The "theory/practive loop" can/does occur quite effectively unconsciously. T(capital t)heory, ie conscious, verbal, reflective processes may advance the theory/practice cycle but they may also retard it.
T(capital) is most often produced not by practitioners (those who engage in the theory/practice cycle unconsciously, unreflectively) but by "Theorists" (story tellers) who make use of (translate/reflect on) the theory/practice cycle products of practitioners. It is possible for practitioners to do the reflecting themselves (teacher/classroom research) but many are not inclined to do this/need encouragement? modelling to do it?
Looking forward to more conversation. As always.
| gratefully group-thinking Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2004-11-02 18:37:07 Link to this Comment: 11327 |
This just went into the Writing Descartes forum. I copy it here because here's where it came from, and where my gratitude lies.
The Study Group of the Graduate Idea Forum had, this morning, a rollicking time with a selection of dialogues from Writing Descartes. We spent most of our time trying to figure out how to get from individual stories to collective ones, and we didn't (to my satisfaction, anyhow) actually make it across that great divide. But in the attempt to do so a number of (to me) useful fireworks/illuminations went off, and I want to record them here, for further building-on by others (either individually here or collectively when we gather again in a month).
What I remember, first, are these moments of clarity-in-language:
And the going 'round about is great fun. For which many thanks--
A.
| causing havoc Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2004-12-01 08:41:35 Link to this Comment: 11824 |
A wonderful discussion yesterday of Arthur Miller's Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc. The highlights, for me, were these questions:
| calling the social scientists...? Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-01-12 22:39:44 Link to this Comment: 12032 |
here's what was happening to me while you all explored notions of creativity...
and here's the syllabus i'd like a hand with: the query being how/if it can be made attractive/accessible/interesting to social scientists, whose interest in changing the world is located at a different "level" (is that what's going on?) than the course is??
| change/newness etc Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2005-01-13 14:12:35 Link to this Comment: 12035 |
The notion that emerged that there is a distinction to be made between interested in "change" and being interested in "newness" is, I think, an important one. There are people who are most comfortable with things as they are ("conservatives" in the old sense of the term), and people who would prefer things to be different than they are for particular reasons and try to change them to be "better" (activists, revolutionaries). And then there are ... people like Picasso and Einstein. Their primary motivation, I suggested, is not to make things "better" but to make them "new", ie different from what has ever been.
A "newness" drive is consistent with observations on young children and, if I'm remembering correctly, with data on newness as a reinforcer in at least some other animals. It may also be related to Freud's "eros", or "pleasure principal", in contrast to "thanatos", which is readable as a drive for stability. The tension between the two is that "new" is by definition somewhat unpredictable in its effect and so to one degree or another "risky". One might, in fact, suggest that there are two orthogonal scales involved here, stability/newness being one and pleasure/displeasure being the other.
Arguably, P and E had very high interest in newness (so high that the world around them couldn't satisfy them and they had to create "new" things themselves) and, perhaps, less displeasure aversion than many people? Maybe we need as well a "sociability" parameter, also orthogonal? With some combination of them helping to define which people "fit", ie can more stablely share ivy?
Thanks, all for interest, present and future, in the bipartite brain notion and its potential relevance for psychotherapy. I do think the "third thing" issue ("preconsciouis"?) is an important one but will continue for the moment (with your help hopefully) to explore the intuition that the third thing is not a separate entity but rather a pattern of interactions between unconscious and conscious processing that has itself an influential structure affected (like both "boxes") by both the genome and experience. My hunch is that somewhere in that arrangement will be found a basis for "conflict", "repression", "projection" and some of the other phenomena so apparent in therapeutic practice (if less obvious in neuroscience). And, hopefully, for the important (I still say) role of the coin flip in decision-making.
| We're back to coin-flips!! Name: Judie McCo Date: 2005-01-29 12:46:48 Link to this Comment: 12306 |
Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2005-01-30 10:16:32 Link to this Comment: 12319 |
Am more than happy to acknowledge the significance of "stewing on the back burners". I do a lot of that myself, frequently trying the patience of others (and sometimes me as well). But I don't see that as a problem for the bipartite brain idea. The back burners are out of sight, not only of others but of oneself, and so are a part of the "unconscious". Its because they are out of sight that one is sometimes surprised to find a useful product apparently having come from nowhere (and without any clear indication of the processes that produced it). Its the arrival of the product in consciousness that is that set of feelings (see more at The Bipartite Brain).
One could have a bipartite brain without coin flips, so that's a different set of issues in my mind/brain. What the coin flip is good for is to give one the capacity to transcend one's current state, to do things that don't follow necessarily from one's genes/experiences. The issue here is more related to the question of whether everything has meaning already (due to an external purposive agent, or god) or whether one creates meaning as one goes along. Its something used in both parts of the bipartite brain, and usefuly as well when one gets "stuck".
I'd guess that "spiritual understandings" may, in different people, have a different balance of contributions from the two parts of a bipartite brain, so no, not yet convinced there needs to be a third thing. Other than the interaction of the two parts. But am very much in a minority (historically and otherwise) on this one, so remain (as serious profound skeptic) willing to be persuaded otherwise.
| Back to Binaries? Name: Judie McCo Date: 2005-01-30 18:21:39 Link to this Comment: 12341 |
| agitation (of neurons? of morals?) Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-02-01 22:57:08 Link to this Comment: 12425 |
So, Judie, I've been listening to your thinking aloud, trying to understand what you are saying--and what drives your saying it. I'm wondering if this analogy (drawn from some experiences I'm having right now) will contribute to any sort of understanding....
Sharon Burgmayer (of the Chemistry Dept. here) and I (from English) are piloting a brand-new interdisciplinary course on Beauty. We are in the midst, just now, of reading work by (the! great! pragmatist! educator!) John Dewey and his colleague Albert Barnes, visiting the Barnes Foundation, and trying to figure out what the intersection is between what we feel (that sense of "vibration" we get when we recognize beauty) and what we know (instruction in shape and form and color, in relationships among these with a single painting, and among collections of them). We were talking today about "primal experiences"--the excitation of sensory neurons in the unconscious--and then consciously engaging in "second order work"--trying to "make sense" of that "movement." As Barnes says, "direct impact...on the senses is very important....behind preferences we cannot go....Reason...can never prove anything good which does not lead...to some experience valued for its own sake....in it an instinctive prompting finds fulfillment...."
The question I posed @ the end of class, and will continue to ask in future sessions, is whether we can take some object that we do NOT respond to instinctively (=do not find beautiful), and learn enough about it that we can find it beautiful, can have a "mystical" experience of engagement with it? Can we learn not just to see it another way, to appreciate what it does mechanically, but also to experience it differently, or--even before the awareness that is "experience"--to have a different unconscious reaction, have a new set of neurons get agitated? At this point, some of our students, who say they can't be trusted to enjoy art on their own, are anxious for more instruction; others insist that experience cannot be engineered and formulated to reach a desired end result.
Still with me? What I'm thinking is that what we are learning about the experience of beauty--an initial "excitation" (what you call "visceral") that we then "feel" and "reflect on" ("consciously")--might work analogously for what you're calling spiritual experience: we have it, we recognize it, we can even learn to alter it...?
But there is still no way to say that such experience is either "right" or "wrong," "real" or not: it just is. And I've got a hunch that that is actually the mine you're working--wanting to be able to judge what is correct, to know that a certain choice (a certain experience? a certain "agitation"?) is the right one?
| another "varied reply" Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2005-02-02 20:16:52 Link to this Comment: 12445 |
| associative thinking Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-02-02 22:09:27 Link to this Comment: 12451 |
With the beginning of a new semester, I've been thinking alot lately about the ways in which the web facilitates the expanding thinking of my students...and the ways in which they resist that challenge (they want to be "right"; they don't want to risk being "wrong"--especially not in public!). In many ways I see the web functioning like a (collective!?) unconscious, w/ multiple associations (=links), with multiple directions in which to move, in part precisely because it lacks the linear organizational strategies of conventional academic work (of consciousness?). A piece by Steve Johnson called "Tool for Thought," in a recent NYTBook Review (January 30, 2005), explored some of the possibilities that this sort of "fuzzy" "associative" linking may open up:
Changing the way we think...was the cardinal objective of many early computer visionaries....2005 may be the year when tools for thought become a reality...thanks to the release of nearly a dozen new programs that...share two remarkable properties: the ability to interpret the meaning of text documents, and the ability to filter through thousands of documents....riffing, or brainstorming, or exploring...there are many happy accidents and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the fuzziness of the results is part of what makes the software so powerful....Modern indexing software learns association between individual words, by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other. This can create almost lyrical connections between ideas....these tools...are not as helpful to narratives or linear arguments; they are associative tools ultimately. They don't do cause-and-effect as well as they do "x reminds me of y"....they're ideally suited for books organized around ideas rather than single narrative threads...freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated...seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking.
| Right? Name: Judie McCo Date: 2005-02-03 09:43:37 Link to this Comment: 12467 |
| Pulling Anne into the conversation by way of previ Name: Judie McCo Date: 2005-02-05 09:16:04 Link to this Comment: 12526 |
| No promises Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-02-06 11:18:14 Link to this Comment: 12548 |
Not that I don't like being quoted...
but in the interests of efficiency/avoiding redundancy, here's a quick crib (cribbed from another quick crib). To make a link to another message in this forum, you need to grab-and-use its message-id number. For example:
...will come out later looking like this:
As Paul observes in the original instructions, "will come out later" is an interesting --I'd say maybe even paradigmatic--event. Rather than displaying directly what it gets from another computer, your web browser is "interpreting" what it receives and "translating" it into language we all can read....
...which brings us directly back to your much larger and harder questions, all about the "interpretations" we make of the multiplicity of inputs we are getting from the world, and the degrees to which they are both "accurate" in describing the world-as-it-is (?) and "useful" in helping us decide what to do (for what it's worth, even the very specific language of one computer's instructions isn't always reliably followed by other computers...and of course there's plenty of slippage when we talk to/try to interpret one another. But)
I'm trying to talk here about what I call the (very productive) slippage/what you call leakage that happens within an individual, when she is trying to shape/order/make sense of what's happening in her world. What really struck me, in the passage you re-quoted from Thomas More, was the juxtaposition of "polytheism" with "single-mindedness," and how inexact THAT binary was in making sense of your own absolute refusal of "twoness," of binaries. If I hear you correctly (always doubtful), you're wanting a spectrum of possibilities (which the off/on, right/wrong, up/down button doesn't allow for). The trouble w/ binaries is that they only allow for two clearly demarcated choices, when there is always a range, always some space--and multiple choices--between them. (How useful to you is the notion that laying out a binary, as a thought experiment, actually enables us to see the range of possibilities between the poles?)
This notion of getting stuck in one "single-minded" place calls up for me two earlier conversations on this topic. First, an intense discussion we had in last year's version of The Story of Evolution/The Evolution of Stories, when I evoked a question from Ahab's Wife which troubled many of the students: "What are promises but holding the future hostage to the past?" Second, one of the early conversations in the Writing Descartes forum, when I challenged an "explicit promise of safety" as a "false consolation": there's lots of fun, huge possibilities, in the freedom to "actually to MAKE something new...but the safety is a long way off (maybe, just maybe, one will make something that will be of--unanticipated--future use)."
What I'm getting at here is the impossibility of predicting, of knowing, ahead of time, what will happen--what will be possible--in the future. It is in the "leaking" between those two modules of the bipartite brain that the range of possibility--the imagining of what has not yet been--the production of counterfactuals--occurs; those possibilities are never single, never binary, always multiple. And/BUT there are no promises of how they will work out...
| Mulling, stewing, simmering Name: Judie McCo Date: 2005-02-09 17:22:23 Link to this Comment: 12716 |
| Today's Irony Name: Judie McCo Date: 2005-02-18 12:33:25 Link to this Comment: 12996 |
| "a promise is holding the future hostage to the pa Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-02-18 12:54:39 Link to this Comment: 12997 |
Thanks to Corey and Roland for writing and sharing the essay that generated this morning's conversation, so lively we could hardly hear one another speak. The very-related reading I was trying to get in edgewise was an on-line conversation Sandy Schram and I (joined later by Paul) had last summer on "Science IS Story." Dismissing Sandy's use of what I called "scientism," as a straw man against which he was positioning "phronetic" (unfortunate word) social science, I traced there an alternative understanding of science that was entirely compatible w/ the sort of engaged social work you guys are pursuing.
But this morning I revised that idea: one of the ideas which interested me most, amid the many thoughts zinging around, was the notion that social scientists may actually constitute a particular subset of scientists: those who are willing to be upfront about their political investments, their willingness--and the social need--to say, "Here I will stop questioning, and act. Here we need to stop theorizing, and intervene in what is."
Which brings me to my second new understanding of the day (so far!): the impossibility of insisting on the "purity" of "profound skepticism." It seemed very clear to me by the end of our conversation that "unending skepticism" can not be given some "ideal" location outside of the system being interrogated, but is simply (and I really do mean simply) located inside it, as are all other subjective/political positions. To insist on endless questioning as the profound motivation generating all scientific inquiry is to insist on a radical/revolutionary point of view that valorizes change and newness. It is not in any way value-free. It privileges (to harken back to some of Judie's earlier questions) what might be new in the future over what might have been valuable in the past, and refuses to confine the former to the latter.
Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2005-02-18 17:29:20 Link to this Comment: 13008 |
"who continues to be skeptical- even of her/his own behavior- this is the third option person" ... not SURE about the option number or even numbers of options but that option is the one I outlined in response to a related challenge from my own flesh and blood: "The key here is that depriving EVERYTHING of the status of FINAL "authority" gives one permission/room to (not actually paradoxically) make use of everything one has at any given time".
Rich conversation, lots more to work through, particularly on the issue of the distinctive role that science/social science can/should play, on the lack? of significant difference between the two, and on the need for both to be willing to get dirty and to be skeptical of self as well as other.
| University of Toronto fraud Name: Michael Py Date: 2005-03-28 10:23:37 Link to this Comment: 14077 |
| floogling... Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-04-02 12:55:29 Link to this Comment: 14209 |
I found it quite useful, during our discussion yesterday morning, to be given an alternative way to think about the origins of internal conflict: not between "individual needs" and "social needs" (as in Freud's "id" vs. "superego"), but rather between the "unconscious" and its "storyteller," with the movement between them being from the multiplicitous to the singular, from the "cacaphonous" to the "coherent," from (do I have this right?) the context-independent to the context-dependent.
Thanks. But/and...
I had suggested, @ the end of our discussion, that the celebration in Bellah's Habits of the Heart of our essentially "social nature"--and and its concomitant valorization of the need for us all to engage in a "social contract" for the "common good"--existed in direct opposition to the counter-claim which had arisen that, as individuals, we are "fundamentally isolated from one another," with "no direct access to one another's stories."
It occured to me afterwards that we could think of isolated individualism and communal commitment not as opposites (always: this dialectic!) but in reciprocal interplay: it is BECAUSE we are isolated w/in our selves that we MUST use the material world (our eyes, our tongues, our hands...) to mediate between us. (And maybe it is BECAUSE we are social creatures that we MUST be able to withdraw periodically into our selves, to shape and order what it is we have to communicate about our experiences?)
Next series of questions arising (from a conversation w/ my analyst immediately following, a later brown bag discussion on the "constraints" on storytelling, and an even-later but much-related discussion with a student who feels "not heard":)
| dialectical-ness? Name: Corey Date: 2005-04-03 18:48:12 Link to this Comment: 14250 |
| Nostalgia, different stories and meaning Name: Judie McCo Date: 2005-04-05 15:32:52 Link to this Comment: 14328 |
| The Medusa stare Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-04-10 12:38:52 Link to this Comment: 14407 |
At what point do one's personal relationships...turn into societal influences?
There's one pretty rich answer to Judie's query in next week's New York Review of Books (4/28/05). The review there of Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book on The Ethics of Identity insistently refuses the binary we were (as always re-) constructing together a week ago. It begins by calling "overdone" the conventional contrast (surely this is one Bellah et. al. presented) between "rootless cosmopolitan" and the rootedness of traditional societies:
Appiah offers a defense of 'rooted cosmopolianism'...a decent respect for what we have inherited is consistent with a wish to do something novel with it....we acquire an individual identity by acquiring a social identity...that is not a straitjacket....we acquire both our individuality and our sense of who we are by learning how to fill the social roles available to us...What we are faced with is a tension between a respect for the variousness of different ways of life and a wish to help individuals to emancipate themselves from any one of them if they so choose...
Appiah repudiates any suggestion that we should attach all our loyalties to some particular culture...Appiah fears what he calls the Medusa stare of an exaggerated respect for culture...benign campaigns to secure respect...can end by trying to impose one canonical identity on individuals...Rooted cosmopoltians are citizens of the world who employ the resources of the particular cultures to which they are attached in order to construct their own individual lives.
How different, that "Medusa stare," from Judie's description, above, of how new information comes in... and changes the story--. That's what the fixedness of nostalgia inhibits, what the freedom of time-and space-traveling enables.
| thanks for fellow-traveling Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-04-12 09:05:00 Link to this Comment: 14503 |
new information comes in...to inform/challenge/mollify my storyteller.
So, while we fiddle 'round w/ various possible meeting times...
I've made very good use, already, of
The Geography of Thought.
Thanks, friends, as always, for feeding and fellow-traveling.
| the end of storytelling? Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-05-01 11:25:21 Link to this Comment: 15005 |
I was sorry to have to slip out, Friday morning, just as our discussion of The Geography of Thought was getting hot(ter). Am recording here, now, the chart I'd put on the board, in hopes of inviting further chewing, both inside and out (you'll see that I reversed what were originally the left and right-hand lists, because the former seems to come "first," both structurally and epistemologically). I'd like to hear more of the notion that this chart "leaves the realm of 'what is'" altogether, more of what it means to say that "the story is in the 'therefore,'" and more of what is entailed when one says that a "model is 'bought' by a storyteller.
My own big question, however, is
This is indeed my largest, hardest question of the week: if stories are incommensurable, why bother telling them to one another?
Kate Shiner, a student in the course on The Story of Evolution and The Evolution of Stories, also discovered recently that everything relevant she'd been thinking about lately fit into a dichotomous chart, and then--having drawn up the chart, asked whether there are cultures and people who find some other way to make sense of their experience than by using these types of rigid dichotomies.
| "relativism" | "fundamentalism" |
| verbs ("reactive," "relational") | nouns ("inert," "categorical"/categorizing) |
| "natural" | "normative" |
| "modelbuilder" | "storyteller" |
| "modelbuilding" | "storytelling" |
| "unconscious" | " conscious" |
| "metonymic" | "metaphoric" |
| "female" | "male " |
| "eastern" | "western" |
| "emotional" | "analytic" |
| "relational" | "individual" |
| "multiple" | "unitary" |
| "acceptance of contradictions" | "curiosity about contradictions" |
| "holistic" | "fragmented" |
| "contexual" | "decontextual" |
| "cooperation" | "competition" |
| "relevance" | "rigor" |
| "qualitative" | "quantitative" |
| "middle way" | "two ways" |
| accept the two | resist, then insist on resolving the two |
binary!
| on refusing to be bored Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-05-24 19:29:15 Link to this Comment: 15235 |
There's a record elsewhere of some the contributions that our most recent shared text, Benjamin Barber's Jihad Vs. McWorld, might make to on-going discussions of Fundamentalism and Relativism. What I wanted to be sure also got recorded here, though, out of the good conversation which arose this morning among our "gender-shaped star-of-David," was not only the observation that
changing things. It turns a consumerist term into a scientific? humanistic? heterogenizing? one (as Barber says in conclusion, "humankind depends for its liberty on variety and difference. We are governed best when we live in several spheres...none wholly dominated by another").
| Statements or Questions Name: Judie McCo Date: 2005-05-26 11:58:41 Link to this Comment: 15245 |
| bugged by nouns Name: Anne Dalke Date: 2005-05-26 17:50:03 Link to this Comment: 15246 |
Anne often takes us to entymological roots (is that the right word, or is that the bug word??)
Grinning: it's close to the bug word (entomology).
And you really shouldn't encourage me (since I'm fully aware that etymologies are searches for first principles/origins/fundaments/rational links where there are none).
Nonetheless (still having fun):
Relativism and pragmatism,
like fundamentalism and boredom, are clearly
'ismdoms--
words
whose forms indicate stasis.
But curiosity, as a word form, is no better. The suffix
-ty denotes quality or condition;
-ity turns comparatives into abstractions
(majority, minority, superiority, inferiority, interiority...)
I propose we try paying attention to/using only verbs for a while.
Only process words, continuing words.
Let's go verbing.
| Freud and pathological culture Name: Alice Lesnick Date: 2005-06-14 12:25:11 Link to this Comment: 15341 |
| places ... Name: Paul Grobstein Date: 2005-06-14 17:45:38 Link to this Comment: 15342 |
The point here is that what makes humans different isn't that they impact negatively (or positively) on each other (as individuals or groups); that's true of all biological interactions. What's different is the "experiencing/judging/imagining that it might be other than it is". In these terms, one isn't "oppressive" or "oppressed" unless/until one has a story of oneself and others (including perhaps "society" or "civilization" or "culture" in which the state one is in is contrast to other possible states.
I need to think a bit more about this (and want to, thanks) but what this opens up (I think) is the complexity that an individual is oppressed (or oppressive) only to the extent that there is a conflict between unconscious and story-teller in that person or some other person. And that would in turn mean that to understand (and alleviate) "oppressive forms of social organization (and education)" one needs to think about not only the relation between the individual and their surroundings but also the ways in which surroundings do (or do not) set up conflicts within individuals. Maybe? Might be a particular instance of general thought that am (thanks all) that serious politcal/social/economic theory needs solid underpinnings in theory of individual.
| oppression Name: Alice Lesnick Date: 2005-06-14 23:15:06 Link to this Comment: 15345 |
| a new year, a new forum Name: Ann Dixon, Date: 2005-08-26 10:19:34 Link to this Comment: 15927 |
