This being my last day of last year, and this year staring at me from the
clock, I sat down to try to reply to some messages that I have been pondering
on, but not been able to gain closure on.
Going to xmca to check on December mail, I find that December is not yet
posted (it being last year I suppose, and next year being still a few hours
away) so I cannot be systematic, which I suppose lets me off the hook. None
the less, I have saved one message on my unix system and others in my head,
and a couple are even from January, so, my last note of 2001.
First, Paul posted an interesting note about subjectivity and intersubjectivity
which someone disagreed with some part of, but which opened up lots o
interesting avenues of thought for me. The passage reads:
I think history is the track of the activity of "the intersubjective form
of subjectivity" although I have trouble with that phrase since I believe
that all subjectivity is given in intersubjectivity, that you don't get the
one without the other, which isn't true about love and marriage.
---------------------
Having been a cause for merriment concerning the last phrase in the
last year, I'll pass that observation by. But the "history as the
track of......" statement I have a lot of sympathy for. I think it
maps onto my notions of culture as "history in the present" and
follows from what I understand as a chat perspective on human nature.
Since the key to "subjectivity" is "freedom", or as Sartre clarified
phenomenologically, "to exist for-itself but not in-itself", we are not
simply talking about the structure of social constraints as the
"intersubjective form of subjectivity" but of some form in which this
interesubjectivity assumes its own level of ontological existence and acts,
as such, as subject, as historical subject. This morning I read an
illuminating passage in Lukacs' essay on Hegel. He describes Hegel's
understanding of the relation between man and society as one in which
social patterns are reproduced through "individual acts and passions, etc.".
He then continues:
"If this structure is already present in the case of the individual
consciousness, which can only exist in a social conterxt, it is present in a
qualitatively more intense manner where various indvidual acts are
inseparably entwined together to produce a social movement, no matter
whether they are individuallly intended to support each other or whether
they are directed against one another. Hence it is completely justifiable,
from the standpoint of an ontology of social being, to ascribe this
totality, this dynamic and contradictory relationship of individual acts, a
being sui generis."
-----
This is the part of Paul's note I have been pondering over. Freedom is a term
I think about often, in its various imaginings by various people.
I think this is similar to what Holland and colleagues are pointing
to when they talk about the space between social structures and cultural
logics. Individuals are highly constrained, but not determined (except
perhaps, under extreme conditions of coercion, and even then I am not
sure) and each of us must constantly work to resolve the contradictions
of our everyday experience. I think of this work/process as consciousness
and its product may be the ontological level being indexed by Lukac/
Sartre/Paul.
Is that the idea?
Re colors of things. Here I have been seeking some refs and I need to
leave simply a promisory note. But it links to the discussion of race.
Resarch by Hirschfeld on little kids notions of social categories
points toward a very early, perhaps domain specific notion that
corresponds to "race" such that little kids will identify someone as
"black" and when asked why give answers such as "his teeth are longer."
This most emphatically does NOT make race a scientific category, but
it complicates the discussion. And (although I have not tracked it
down) I believe there are data showing little kids are responsive to
categorization of plants by color before they use color to classfy
artifacts.
Since this is all from memory, it may be dead wrong, in which case,
the truth will out, but it has preoccupied me at odd moments and I
feel as if it may be worth following up on.
For ref to Hirschfield see his "Do children have a theory of race"
in *Cognition*, 1995, vol 54, pp.209-252.
Now to continuing backing into next year, sure that the past will
be there waiting to be constructed.
mike
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