Greetings Economists, On May 25, 2006, at 3:25 PM, bitchlab wrote: If you want to insult me by refusing to call me by the from name I use
Doyle, I've commented before to Bitchlab my opinion of the name. So I'm not going to go over old ground. The tools we use here and predominantly in society are ill suited to resolve the structure of emotion that people use to think by. We see emotion friction on occasion in well regulated forums based upon 'rationalist' habits. To me that's a sign of difficulty in practice that needs further research and thought. I suppose this century will approach this problem from another angle. For Marx the social contradictions were the direct evidence of class. We see the conflicts and know that society is struggling on the granular level with the problems contradictions throw up at every juncture. On the other hand, where people begin to escalate their feelings they are doing a kind of work, producing a kind of information. Mostly in Rationalist sense, there are ways to avoid a certain amount of temperature rising in feelings by studied methods of thought work. I think of the peer reviewed academic work as an example. LP has complained in the past of how redolent of abuse that is. I agree, with the caveat that what's the better road to follow? In my view, the better road to follow is not a moral path, but understanding the needs of producing information. The large scale over production of information we see all around us begs to be organized in a new way. One can picture that automation can take the concept of peer review and broaden and deepen who does what. But the automation suggests strongly that with increased information we can also address the emotion content in different sorts of ways. Fighters like LP to some extent thrive with battle. So that shows how motivation or mental energy can express itself in one person. Another shrinks from the fight and seeks shelter to be protected and sensitive. To the extent someone like that has to endure emotion content that feels threatening their energy declines and goes underground. So a framework appears there in some abstract way. Were we to rely upon just human labor, then it's hit or miss whether someone gets an emotion they need to be productive. For LP, of course I think he can do well enough standing up for himself, but what about his or anyone's needs to be not always duking it out? The over production of information indicates to me that in the past, this issue was one of how much information was available. There was in this what Marx called alienation. And struggle. I would add that society deals with this content of information according to the development of the tools of production. For example, movies are vastly more information than painting and drawings could do. And writing as well. The tradition of movies was shaped early on by the one-to-many model of print or copy production of information. The language like production of information that can be 'interacted' with was well beyond the reach of movie information in 1900. It's this huge increase in information and the qualitative change that implies in the information use that I see emerging this century. I think the name Bitchlab is some sort of effort to address pejorative emotions, but fails because of it's anchorage in text based methods of producing information. It seems to me here that Nussbaum is right, we need to consider what is social emotion, what is not and think of producing this sort of information as a by product of the vast increase in information production coming with thousand terra-byte memories and terra-byte transmission of file exchanges. It seems to me that rationalism must be abandoned as a failure to deal with how people feel in a realistic manner. It certainly would benefit the 'mentally ill' like myself to consider what our rights are in the context of what society can deliver as a need for each person in the emotion information that suits them. thanks, Doyle Saylor
