Please Edouard,
I cannot swallow that, even if it's labelled as a gross oversimplification.
What I hear dominating the current con-textualization is rather the
crossing and twisting of strands that struggle with the problem of
maintaining a theorized awareness of the complexity of a relational account
while still acting sensibly in a world where the Powers That Be take the
testability of transferable knowledge for granted. So yes, there's a
majority out there holding entities constant (pushing the pain and
desperation of the work of 'holding' downwards in the power hierarchies)
but I don't hear a lot of those non-relational voices on the list. It may
not all be Heidegger, but somewhere in the subtext of all the theoretical
positions that meet here around the CHAT waterhole I sense this Will to
relational thinking (relational ontologies) that is ONE of the grand themes
of this century.
However, being in the world, maintaining an awareness of the complexity of
relationality is not easy. For reasons of power and politics. But also for
the reason that our ACTING in the world seems dependent on our trust in
fixed entities (me and the object I'm acting upon as clearly separate).
Mike quotes Gregory Bateson in a footnote to Ch5 of CP (which is about as
far as I have gotten in my reading -- wasn't easy to get hold of the
book...). Bateson commented on the difficulty of thinking relationally
about context that... he didn't know how to!:
"Intellectually I can stand here and give you a reasoned exposition of this
matter; but if I am cutting down a tree, I still think, 'Gregory Bateson is
cutting down the tree. _I_ am cutting down the tree.' ... ... ... The step
to realizing -- to making habitual -- the other way of thinking, so that
one naturally thinks [relationally] when one reaches for a glass of water
or cuts down a tree -- that step is not an easy one."
Hmm... I'll try not to get into an argument with Gregory B here... because
what I wanted to conclude this with was a musing on the theme of words: how
words just as much as anything else-in-the-world are relational stuff. So
how do you compare theorists, when each writer of some originality spins a
different relational web, while recycling manytimes a lot of the same
signs/ /words? Well, I'll leave this understated.
Eva
Eva.Ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se