I realize that not everyone has yet read the Hicks article, but I'd like to
respond to comments already made by Ana, Jay, and Paul. Ana writes:
>If one
>cannot situate agency in an INDIVIDUAL, if one does not VALUE an
individual, then on one
>hand one cannot talk about individual moral answerability, and on the
other, destruction
>of individuals cannot be construed as a crime.
I agree with this, and I understand it to be the overarching argument of
Deborah's article. And I thank Jay, for his ever-so-fine clarification of
meaning through Pierce:
>A 'three-way relationship" can and here
>does, I think, mean an irreducible relational way of imagining
>communcation, in which no element has meaning outside of its relations --
In other words, the objective meaning is infused with subiectivity(ies).
Moreover, as Jay glosses Deborah's gloss on Bakhtin, the moral 'word'
(i.e., encounter with another) is ipso facto a realization of the _other's_
subjectivity within one's response to him or her.
Jay:
>But what, to return to the main theme, are the MORAL and BODILY dimensions
>of this triadic relationalism? Moral answerability has weight precisely to
>the extent that other people are constituted in part by the words we
>address to them, that their very Being and humanity is in part constructed
>by the dialogues in which we engage them.
A number of years ago, we entertained here a discussion of prolepsis, which
deserves a place in this discussion. Jay, Deborah, and Bakhtin in this
perspective emphasize the embodiment, the physicality of answerability/
morality.
Jay again:
For me moral answerability arises from our human vulnerability
>to pain; co-presence always implicates these issues: threat/promise,
>pain/pleasure. ....The subtler effects of language, its
>rhythms intonations accentuations extend the meaning possibilities that
>grow out of the most basic moral answerability of all interpersonal
>interaction."
But Paul reads into this view a "universal morality that somehow stands
outside and beyond the >clearly subjective (or alternately/equivalently
elevates the subjective to
>the universal).
While I disagree with Paul -- the argument made above is opposed precisely
to the view of fixed morality, fixed meanings; it's an argument for
unrepeatable, ungeneralizable moral acts -- still, there is an underlying
concern that I think coincides with Paul's challenge (though I strongly
suspect my framing will render it unrecognizable to Paul :) and that is the
issue of motivation.
On the one hand, in discursive, activity-based terms, the object motivates
participants to listen to / to HEAR one another (ideally), insofar as their
engagement makes possible productive work. Morality, in interpersonal
terms, is absent in this rendering, as such.
On the other hand, bringing dialogism back into view, motivation is a
problem of an individual's orientation, of desire.... and of course of
power, which desire circulates around. In Deborah's article, and perhaps in
B's early works, which I haven't yet read, stratification/ valuation is
neutral, benign. In Bakhtin's later works, there is no sense of neutrality.
Ventriloquation, reaccentuating discourse, is HARD WORK, a struggle;
everyday life is a struggle; genuine moral engagement is a battle with
centripetal forces, with powers of categorization, the naming of the real.
To imbue an activity with moral purpose, I believe, with Ana & others, that
we must theorize individuated selves and the processes of individuation
that stop ONLY when we accede to the authoritative word. The going word.
The buzz. What Bakhtin, Pierce, and many others concerned with meanings and
the social make clear is that there are no answers, there is only a
holding-in-view the uncertainties and conflicts that constitute our objects
and ourselves, that _put at risk_ whatever it is we do, IF WE DO IT WELL.
That make us vulnerable to one another.
Which sounds too much like an answer, because that's how we tend to end our
texts,
at 11 pm
Judy
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