I appreciated the Hicks paper very much. I will illustrate my own take on the paper with a hypothetical case.
Consider a case where X , Y are colleagues at a workplace. X successfully applies for a new job in another company. Y congratulates X heartily. What has really pleased Y is that X is leaving and there is a chance of a promotion for him. He doesn’t really care about X and his new job.
In this hypothetical case, I do not believe you can grasp the meaning of Y’s ACT by studying words such as "congratulations!" that he uses. I do not see how concepts like accent and intonation fit in this case? The meaning of the Y’s ACT is tied to the history of the two individuals in a specific context. What is needed is empathy, which is a word that I had hoped to see in the paper. I think when we look at specific contexts we find that human discourse is only partially a consensual domain of meanings. It is also a conflictual domain of power struggles, deception, and struggle.
I agree with Hicks that "The narrative histories of persons and their concrete forms of answerability are central to a theory of knowledge" This statement comes in the concluding paragraphs. I do not see that it has been given sufficient weight in the main body of the discussion. When Hicks says: "Moral ends and narratives histories are constituted by social, discursive practices that entail the specificity of relations of feeling, embodiment and moral judgment", I take her to mean that narrative histories are subordinate to the social/discursive practices. What seems to emerge from the essay is a constrained agency, with the social/discursive forever dominant. Maybe the relation fluctuates over time, and in times of rapid change and uncertainty personal agency dominates and structures a new and emergent consensual domain.
kedmon hungwe
Center for Educational Techology
University of Zimbabwe.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Mar 01 2001 - 01:01:19 PST