At 07:33 PM 6/2/97 -0700, Colin wrote:
>A. Main point: Ehrenreich & MacIntosh wrote that "postmodernists"
>resist arguments about the role of biology in social phenomena, and
>that these postmodernists are resistant for reasons "eerily similar"
>to those motivating fundamentalist Christians, who are represented as
>having a dogmatic attachment to a certain notion of human nature and
>the position of humans with respect to the natural world.
>
>Wojtek reproduced this line of thought in a post on Friday, writing:
>
>> The only difference in the subject matter area that still can be maintained
>> is that between "naturwissenschaften" (or what is called science in English)
>> and "geisteswissenschaften" ("cultural sciences" or humanities), and this
>> indeed is the major (if not the only) battle zone over reductionsim. Since
>> the realm of spririt is where "human uniqueness" seems to reside, this is
>> really an ideological battle over the unique position of "man" in the
>> universe. For the very same reason, most of the contemporaries vehemently
>> rejected the Copernican theory, sticking to the empirically indwadequte
>> Ptolemaic system -- for the Copernican system removed the Earth, the "man's"
>> habitat, from its central position in the universe.
>
>In which, again, anyone who argues for a nature-culture divide is
>tarred as tantamount to a religious dogmatist ("for the very same
>reason"). I protested this specious reasoning, pointing out that one
>can sustain nature-culture divides for a number of very different
>fundamental reasons.
I reply: First, I did not use the term "religious dogmatis" let alone
stipulated that comparison to a religion amount to "tarring." IMV, religion
is just a mode of knowing, akin to science, except that it sometimes attmpts
to address ontological questions without having adequate tools. Since
religion's method of verification is limited to logical consistency and
illustration (invoking supporting evidence while ignoring contradictory one
-- juts like neo-classical economic theory, BTW), it naturally views
everything from an exclusive human perspective, and that is only step away
from claiming human uniqueness. If one takes a radical social
constructivist position, one essentially places him/herself on the same
epistemological ground: everything one claim is considered as a subjective
perception of thinking subject, and that is only one step away from claiming
that the only objective reality is the thinking subject (which is exactly
what Rene Descartes did in his cogito).
Since when finding commonalities is considerd "tarring?" Of course, I do
not consider what Pat Robertson, Christian Coalition and kindred zealots say
as a "mode of knowing" religious or otherwise. They use ideas, including
religious ideas, the way drunks use street lamps -- for support rather than
enlightenment.
>
>In his latest point Wojtek now says "it was the distinctenss in general
>not its particular form (such as centrality) I was arguing about."
>Either he is backing away from the above-quoted position (and hence
>from Ehrenreich & MacIntosh) or there is an argument missing.
Au contraire. Centrality is but one possible form of calimed uniqueness of
human condition, and I tried to deconstruct more than just that one form.
As far as "Ehnrenreich & McInosh's ideas" are concerned, I consider myself a
scientist not a literary critic and I do not recognise intellectual property
rights. If I find and element in someone's thinking that I like, I use
without necessarily buying the whole package and wondering whetehr my usage
of that idea is consistent with the "intent of the author, or whatever else
that author happened to say." I think that Ehrenreich's idea of common
epistemology between two intellectual trends that otherwise stand in two
opposing political camps is an intersting one, her agenda of making that
claim (imputed or real) notwithstanding.
>It's difficult to tell because Wojtek seems to veer away from this
>question and instead devotes a good chunk of his post to arguing
>against the nature/culture divide per se. He's of course welcome to
>his own position, but not to conflationist arguments about those who
>hold other positions.
>
>B. Point on the construction of knowledge in natural science: the
>wiggle-word here is "compartmentalization." Terry made what I took
>to be an ontological argument for the need for different kinds of
>knowledge, but one which was precisely and carefully non-
>compartmental. Biology requires chemistry and is in important
>ways inextricable from it, but natural history cannot be worked out
>from chemical (or physical) first principles.
I reply: Somehow, I fail to see how you can maintain the argument of
irreducability without maintaining that reality itself is naturally (i.e
assuming the basence of the thinking subject making distinctions) divided
into different realms, each addressed by differnet science. Without making
that ontological claim there is no way you can defend irredeucability
(without, of course, evoking divine authorities, traditions, intellectual
property rights and so on that justify the 'scientific turf'). Consider,
for example the argument made by Spinoza who argued that universe (=deity,
since he was a pantheist) has different or mutually irreducible "aspects"
and each one had a corresponding mode of knowing. (BTW, I thing that the
term "compartment" was more self-explanatory than other rather obscure
philosophical terminology such as "aspects" "hypostases" and the like.
>From that standpoint, what really matters is not whether, say, physics can
be reduced to chemistry or perhaps the two subsumed under one theoretical
framework (cf. constant efforts to build metatheories that would unify the
existing disciplines), but whetehr the knowledge of human culture can be
subsumed into the same framework as the knowledge of nature. The former
matters so much not because of the quibbling over logical implications of
certain theorems, but because of the ideological implications of that
distinction -- namely that we are different, we are special.
As I pointed in my original comment on Ehrenreich's article, much of the
pomo and identity politics writing is similar to the production of
fashionable items that cater to the sensibilities of the "me" generation:
"me want to be different, me want to be special, me want to stand out in the
crowd, so me buys clothings and cars that express me to the world, and me
buys books that cater to the me's sense of being special and unique." If
you pardon my French, pomo and identity politics is a bullshit intellectual
commodity marketed for college educated yuppies who have no other problems
in life other than finding their own unique cultural identity.
If you tell those spoiled brats that all those expensive distinctions they
made to distinguish themselves from the crowd and that, in fact, they and
'those people' living in the ghetto share the same nature -- what a
disappointment! That is not why they spent thousands of $$ on Ivy League
tuition, fashionable clothing, condos, cafes, weird books, health food,
Volvos and kindred hierophanies of yuppism.
The distinction between nature and cluture is not only an ideology, it has a
class dimesnion as well. However, as most class-based ideologies, it
pretends to be a natural distinction. That pretension is created, albeit in
different ways, by creationism that mainly appeals lower class social
climbers and yuppie wannabies, and by identity politics marketed for upper
middle class "new age" crowd.
BUt the bottom line is that the culture/nature distinction is itself
socially constructed (for obvious ideological reasons, of course), and is
meaningless outside the realm of human perception. I doubt that the cat
that lives in my apartment makes any distinction between "natural" objects
and "cultural" objects , but even if he does, he does it in his special own
way. On the one hand, he is very careful not to touch any onkect placed on
a shelf when he jumps on that shelf, but on the other hand, he brazenly lies
down on my papers and my keyboard as if it were grass. Has it ever occur to
any social construcyionsist what the animals make out the human organisation
of urban and suburban space. Do they make a distintion between "man made"
and "naturally occurring?"
Knowing what my cat thinks on that subject would be more intellectually
stimulating than all that pomo-identity-creationist crap ever printed
combined.
>An epistemological position also begins to emerge in Wojtek's posts.
>As with ontology, I think it's wonderful that Wojtek has a specific
>and well worked-out position on these questions. But progress is not
>made by stigmatizing adversaries, in part because you lose the benefit
>of any insights they may have.
Me stigmatising adversaries??? Well what is the next thing I'm going to
hear about myself: a racist? an anti-semite? a sexist pig? a homophobe? a
fascist? For the record: I've spoken against hegemonic tendencies of
positivist thinking to reduce science to one "politically correct" version
while jettisoninng all alternatives modes of knowing. My disagreement with
identity politics is not diversity -- which otherwise is a valuable asset,
but its rabid subjectivism that undercuts all rational discourse. People in
different identity niches either do not talk to each other at all, or if
they do, they usually do it in two ways: either "don't touch my identity"
or "my identity is bigger than your identity." One does not fight
super-patriots and inquisitors with nihilism, for nihilims only adds more
oil to the fires set up by these fanatics. You fight them by demonstrating
the absurdity of their position, not by assuming the identity they created
for their adversaries.
One of the weirder aspects of this
>debate is that pomos have been especially critical of the notions of
>human essence and human centrality, and are most often anathematized
>as nihilists for this. Now they are assailed as essentialists.
The trick is that if you are overzealous, you often end up in the same camp
as your opponents. Overzealous cops are often criminals in blue uniforms.
Same for other cultural warriors.
regards,
wojtek sokolowski
institute for policy studies
johns hopkins university
baltimore, md 21218
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
voice: (410) 516-4056
fax: (410) 516-8233
