>>
Hi Ian,
Where's the URL for this, please? Thanks for sending it!
And btw, I was glad to see you stomp on Yoshie for her unforgivably
dismissive attitude in the midst of the Foucault argument.
cheers
Joanna
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< http://news.independent.co.uk/world/ >
If I "stomped" on Yoshie, I apologize for it. I certainly harbor no
animus towards Yoshie and greatly appreciate her posts. I suspect she
is at an advantage because she probably types 60-70 words a minute and
frankly, on a lot of stuff, is far smarter than I am. I have read a
lot of MF's stuff [back in the '80's]and used "The Order of Things"
for it's history of biology sections for a paper I wrote in Grad
School, so I'm no stranger to his work.
I'm hyperattentive to violence metaphors in social theoretic discourse
because I'm a survivor of very real violence done to people I
cherished who no longer walk the earth; violence from proprietary
capitalist's and the state, from capitalist proxies in management,
from
the psychiatric establishment and from the state's war on drugs.
Violence metaphors and metonyms seem to be part and parcel of left
discourse; part of our legacy of sectarianism and the narcissism of
small differences in an era desperately in need of solidarity and,
gulp, compassion. Yes anger and outrage has it's place but isn't that
precisely the real dead end for us, blocking our ability to think
creatively about the kind of future we want and would hope others
would want as well? I've been caught in the cul-de-sac of anger. I
don't know how I got out. Yes there are days I'm stuck back in it,
insidious recursivities and the autocatalysis of adrenaline and
cortisol dadgummit.
But I think Doug's quote from MF should tickle our neurons for a
while:
Michel Foucault: "What is tiresome in ideological arguments is that
one is
necessarily swept away by the "model of war." That is to say that when
you
find yourself facing someone with ideas different from your own, you
are
always led to identify that person as an enemy (of your class, your
society, etc.). And we know that it is necessary to wage combat
against the
enemy until triumphing over him. This grand theme of ideological
struggle
has really disturbed me. First of all because the theoretical
coordinates
of each of us are often, no, always, confused and fluctuating,
especially
if they are observed in their genesis.
Furthermore: might not this "struggle" that one tries to wage against
the
"enemy" only be a way of making a petty dispute without much
importance
seem more serious than it really is? I mean, don't certain
intellectuals
hope to lend themselves greater political weight with their
"ideological
struggle" than they really have? A book is consumed very quickly, you
know.
An article, well.... What is more serious: acting out a struggle
against
the "enemy," or investigating, together or perhaps divergently, the
important problems that are posed? And then I'll tell you: I find this
"model of war" not only a bit ridiculous but also rather dangerous.
Because
by virtue of saying or thinking "I'm fighting against the enemy," if
one
day you found yourself in a position of strength, and in a situation
of
real war, in front of this blasted "enemy," wouldn't you actually
treat him
as one? Taking that route leads directly to oppression, no matter who
takes
it: that's the real danger. I understand how pleasing it can be for
some
intellectuals to try to be taken seriously by a party or a society by
acting out a "war" against an ideological adversary: but that is
disturbing
above all because of what it could provoke. Wouldn't it be much better
instead to think that those with whom you disagree are perhaps
mistaken; or
perhaps that you haven't understood what they intended to say?"
We all know Whisker's was big on contradictions. In logic, mathematics
and the "hard" sciences the opposite of contradictions is
consistency. In the ontology of social life together the opposite of
contradictions is a word we don't see much of these days;
compossibility. It's complementary concept seems to be
complementarity. Surely these are more interesting concepts with which
to imagine alternatives to the cumulative, sclerosis-like
non-compossibilities of capitalism that KM called contradictions.
So, yeah, debate to the max! But humility and hope, embarrassing
concepts for a lot of us, are more
interesting than anger and arrogance, however justified each of us
might feel about the legitimacy of those modes of cognizing the world
around us. Isn't there already enough suffering?
Gotta go,
Ian
