>
>It seems to me that Diane is making some headway, maybe more
>than she admits. Just her frustration at the parallelism of her
>different interpretive approaches suggests that we are heading
>towards a better view of the horizon where those lines do seem
>to meet. But now again I wonder if the language she yearns for
>is what she/we/i really want.
you and me both. Ideally, a language for combining perspectives could
emerge from dialogues between identity-theorists and social-theorists, such
as what occur here.
But again, pragmatically, in writing for "this" journal or "that" journal,
the weight of the perspective invariably needs to privilege a theoretical
stance - multidisciplinary analyses don't seem yet to have an academic
audience. I don't suppose a "new" language
is needed, so much as, perhaps, conceptual tools for combining the social &
the individual as both distinct features of politico-humanscapes,
and as mutually reflective - ?
>
>Would a fuller account of social structure that renders
>more readable the signs of
>>difference-as-isolation
>take us toward that more compassionate world?
>
>Someone once said to me that postmodernism is learning how
>to deal with (our own/others') pain. What do you think?
I think yes, pain & suffering is the one feature of humanity that we all
share; the one feature which dramatically shapes the ways we particiapte &
interact... and I have always, I admit, written from this perspective, that
"my past/pains" are "valid" data for understanding the way I participate in
social structures;
and that to theorize from the body is an authentic knowledge-project which
can inform theories of social structures, as well as theories of identity.
This stance, oddly enough, while theoretically definsible, remains
academically "strange" (and I use this in the sense of quantum physics)
I interpret Raymond William's quote to mean just that, untie
your(our)selves first and foremost from the structures you(we)(I) wish to
understand. (Althusser, too, tries to situate the body between, both inside
& outside the structures; but Williams is more prescriptive:)
[Creative practice] can be the long and difficult remaking of an inherited
(determined) practical consciousness: a process often described as
development but in practice a struggle at the roots of the mind - not
casting off an ideology, or learning phrases
about it, but confronting a hegemony in the fibres of the self and in the
hard practical substance of effective and continuing relationships.
(Raymond Williams, 1977, p. 212)
like with James' thunder, the body is always the "silence-just-gone;"
the body has been so removed from academic practice, the flesh and sting of
time, certainly, imprints on flesh; sounds & scents & touch trigger sudden
shifts, significantly so...
it is perhaps out of these kinds of analyses that a language of the
body-in-the-social and the social-in-the-body might emerge , for clearly
social theory without the "flesh and sting" of time is like identity theory
without the sociocultural situatedness of context -
diane
"Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right."
Ani Difranco
*********************************
diane celia hodges
faculty of education
university of british columbia
vancouver, bc canada
tel: (604)-253-4807
email: dchodges who-is-at interchange.ubc.ca