mike,
being in LA and away from the email address that the
xmca mailserver would recognize, I'm sending this very
brief query/response to you for posting to xmca. this
isn't a gremlin issue.
Deborah,
although my post on your article might have given the
appearance of finality and that I had simply read and
done away with your article, the issues that you raise
there and the entire question of "morality" continue
to reverberate with me.
talking with my friend, who teaches ESL and remedial
English at a community college, about the readings
she's assigning her different classes and the types of
discussions that she seeks to engender, she agreed
that the most interesting discussions are about moral
issues. in a meeting of English/ESL teachers who work
in central Los Angeles where the typical classroom
looks like a United Nations subcommittee meeting we
discussed the problems of moral issues: starting with
a Bangladesh female student who admitted to the horror
of a lot of Armenians and central Americans that she
had had an arranged wedding, to another African woman
who had defended the practice of clitorectomy to which
she herself had been subject. The teacher who
described the African case said that she herself was
Jewish and if she gave birth to a son would feel
morally compelled to have him circumcised but that she
found the clitorectomy abominable. We asked her how
she could oppose the practice of clitorectomy while
defending that of circumcision to which she honestly
answered, "I don't know."
What I'm trying to say is that there is a very, very
serious problem of moral relativism here. From your
last post it sounds like you are advocating, and also
making the claim that Bakhtin's postion on morality,
can be understood as a "contextual" approach. This of
course is something that the existentialists,
especially Sartre in his own early period, advocated
as situational ethics. And the existentialists'
emphasis on the responsibility of individuals for
their own "projects" is well known. I find it
interesting that both Sartre and Bakhtin abandoned the
early emphasis on individual for a later recognition
of the derivativeness of both the situations in which
individuals find themselves thrown (we don't create
them) and consequently the very "subjectivities" that
we encounter ourselves to be. I really don't find any
support for your contention that Bakhtin advocated the
notion that an individual authors his or her own
subjectivity. At best this is a process of
co-construction but always within genres (frameworks
for the interpretation of self and other)that are
inherited, to which an individual adds little.
I found Jay's neo-utilitarian imperative: do no harm,
completely arbitrary, its interpretation totally
relative, one one hand, and incapable of accounting
for the existence of moral structures that transcend
the situational (ie, incest) in the same way that
language transcends specific vocabularies and
grammars. No understanding of morality can be based
on such. As Spinoza said concerning the common
judgment of men with no thought of cultural
relativity: ". . . as everyone judges according to his
emotions what is good, what is bad, what better, and
what worse, it follows that men's judgments may vary
no less than their emotions, hence when we compare
some with others, we distinguish them solely by the
diversity of their emotions . . . (Ethics, LI, Note)
What this implies is that any two men, even from the
same culture, will see different things in the same
situation, the same context.
Nevertheless, stable moral patterns, just like
relatively stable grammars in language, do exist over
time, are adopted and defended (to the deaths of both
self and other). Bakhtin indicated that the most
important question concerning genre was their
"stability" as I quoted in the last post I made. It
doesn't seem he thought, and neither do I, that the
stability of genres (or moral systems) can be reduced
to an individuals recognition, adoption of contextual
answerability.
But I can reduce this all to one simple question: do
you embrace the implicit moral relativism when
contextual answerability is made the basis of
morality?
Paul H. Dillon
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