Dear Paul,
My apologies, I actually thought that as I was framing it I was honoring
both your contributions and Dianne's and Martin's. It is far from true
that for me that there is nothing but text (and I'm not sure I read
Dianne or Martin that way either). I am an activist at heart and in
fact. And certainly even theories of Textuality with a capital "T"
don't presuppose that they are referring only to text with a small "t."
Freire entreats us that literacy is about "reading and writing the word,
in order to read and write the world;" I don't read him as sporting a
bourgeois notion of text with a small "t."
I actually thought that of the parties involved, Dianne or Martin might
take exception to what I wrote rather than you. Clearly I've
unknowingly and unintentionally tripped a sensitive chord. Again, my
apologies.
I appreciate Wallerstein's world system theory contributions, was weaned
on them in undergraduate studies of political economy, though certainly
lack your expertise. And when you write:
"Histories can either make these events intelligible from the
perspective of causal relations that generated the situations (e.g.,
Marx's theory of cycles of capitalist expansion), or they can make these
events intelligible from the perspective of how the actor's experienced
them. And, of course, there is a dialectic relationship between these
two dimensions (e.g. E.P. Thompson's study of the poet William Blake is
quite interesting in this respect)."
Perhaps you are suggesting that "interpretation," "causal analysis,"
"perspective" or "history" are also material and structural processes,
and that, perhaps, you can "read" situations themselves as
"interpretations" of historical-structural forces that have propelled
them. I don't deny that; it is the notion of "histories making
intelligible" that still sounds to me like a primarily a textual
undertaking (and here I suppose I'm leaning to the small "t' side).
But perhaps the dialogue about learning and expansion will offer some
new ways of thinking about all of this. I am offering an olive branch.
Further conversations can certainly occur offlist, Paul.
I'm absolutely sure that I am missing nuances of your comments Paul, but
not intentionally, I have only my own "psychological instruments" to
blame.
In Peace,
K.
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