Greetings Economists,
I am sorry Carol, I speak sometimes in the short hand of my vision of
what socialism means.
Socialists want to see the work that makes workers connected. To some
degree for the last centuries we take as a foundation that language is
what unites human beings. There are some sorts of comments from Marx
and Engels along this line. Language though is more a reflection of
how we learn to use the body, that is the work necessary when using our
bodies to do grasping with the hands, walking with the feet, etc. This
work is the fundamental commonality that lies beneath language.
A key to this is that the brain really does much more than language,
and that language has never yielded up a module in the sense say the
parietal lobe is mapped to the hand or face. In other words using math
as an example, language is not fundamental, because we can distinguish
the thought work of math from language work.
This really is the error in seeing language as innate. Our ancestors
in the primates steadily grew a collection of work they could do given
a steady development of the hand, what the eye could see, mobility, and
range of labor processes.
Culturally in part because of writing and printing we tend to mystify
language as a thing in itself. Rather than reflecting work. We began
to bank the work as resource to be used later with language maybe
50,000 years ago. Accumulating how to work in more and more ways.
Further, by seeing language this way it frees us to regard what we are
doing by communicating work processes, to see that language is more or
less like the work at hand. That is a fundamental way to say what
realism is. So for example if our storage devices like hard drives can
hold a reservoir of let's say 'data', the language like use of that is
to best describe the work, not as say Chomsky would try to do explore
the math/logic like structure of language. Since language is work, we
are just exploring the larger universe of material reality. Language
then is a kind of metaphor of how to do work.
To summarize this connects to the rest of the note I wrote by saying
the French Nation state of Europe was fixated on language as the trope
of what makes human nation states rather than the work. Fetishing
language as apart from human labor. They thought this because the
Enlightenment taught them the subjective human was apart from the
language.
thanks,
Doyle
On Jun 11, 2006, at 10:41 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
Doyle Saylor wrote:
This then is the challenge to Socialists to develop as computing
technology advances. It is well known the voice technology is not up
to the task of speech acts in most contexts (barring restricted office
dictation). Yet this is the central task of Socialism to recognize
the
common work process of brainwork.
thanks,
Doyle, I do not see any connection whatever between this paragraph and
the rest of your post! The logic of the "This then" completely escapes
me!
Carrol
