"Robert Link" <[email protected]> wrote: To: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, March 10, 2009 1:00 PM Subject: Re: Arguments against privileging the competition narrative
> > On Tue, Mar 10, 2009 at 12:28:42PM -0000, John Bunzl wrote: >> What we need to distinguish is the difference between a competition on >> the >> one hand, and its holding framework on the other. > > My example from the realm of political discourse was not meant to stand > for the entire domain; I was riffing, and the joy of it is that you were > on hand to shape the exhuberance into something more refined. That's a > blessing. > > As background, perhaps seemingly tangential but I promise to connect it > up, I have misgivings about Professor Lakoff's discussions of framing > and counter-framing and re-framing, all of which pretty much presuppose > a holding framework of what I will here call principled dialectic, > itself like that tennis match, an overt competition on one level of > analysis, and an equally overt cooperation in search of more refined > truths at another level. His work, "Don't Think of an Elephant" is > explicitly directed at political discourse, and, in a flax-seed sized > nutshell, argues that where liberals go wrong is in letting > conservatives frame issues. The argument more or less goes that > proffered frames need to be rejected. It's an almost purely defensive, > responsive orientation, but it could work in a debate-club setting. It > most assuredly is inadequate in the larger world of political > discourse...because the holding framework is quite different from > academic dialectic. > > Trying to better model these things, I found myself looking to game > theory, that very rudimentary sub-set of game theory related to the > scenario known as "The Prisoners' Dilemma". I had some years earlier > read "Nested Games" by Tseblis, but came to the conclusion that nested > games, while important, were just a subset of concurrent games, in which > one "move" might be a loss in game alpha but a more-than-compensating > win in game beta. This, to my eye, allows the best understanding of what > I have seen many times in political discourse: One person clearly has > the win on reason or rationality, but the other has the win in a larger > game of convincing his audience. (Cue video of Nick Naylor in "Thank > You For Smoking", saying, "It's that I'm not after you. I'm after > them.") > > So I have to agree that my riff had holes through which one could > navigate large shipping vehicles. But I can't agree that the tennis > players are clearly competing any more than they are clearly > cooperating, at least to the extent that they play by the rules. If they > participate then they both compete and cooperate, not neccessarily at > different levels, but certainly in concurrent transactions. > > What you refer to as "governance system" I would be tempted to call a > concurrent transaction. > > Thanks again for reigning me in. > > rl > Thanks for that, Robert - very interesting your point about concurrant transactions. It basically brings us back to the need for both transactions - the competition and the cooperation - to be present. In the field of political economy, this is precisely the problem the world faces now. We have a global economy (which is the competition transaction) but we have no global governance of that economy (so the corresponding cooperation transaction is missing). Interestingly, this could have a bearing on your comment about conservatives framing the issues while liberals fail to do so, and let me try to explain. My suggestion would be that all the while there is an ABSENCE of global governance (the cooperation transaction), economic and many social and environmental issues are necessarily framed against the backdrop of that reality. That means policies/issues/arguments which one way or another require people, corporations and nations to remain "internationally competitive" to survive in the global market (i.e. broadly conservative policies/issues/arguments) will generally prevail. Liberals will only gain the upper hand when they finally recognise that the problem is not free markets, capitalism, or whatever, but the over-riding need, now, for global governance; the over-riding need, that is, for us to complete the global competitive market with globally cooperative governance. We need to complete the competition transaction by campaigning for and ultimately implementing the cooperative transaction! My two cents. best John --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CooperationCommons" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CooperationCommons?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
