Eva calls me to task for what I thought was a fairly save bet at least in
terms of the Philosophical Foundations that this community "seems to hang
around."
>At 13.33 -0700 97-07-23, Edouard Lagache wrote:
>>At the risk of a gross
>>oversimplification, it seems to me the majority of the folks on this list
>>are asking the following question: "Why bother with this much more
>>complex account of being-in-the-world? Can't we get an adequate
>>description of human world by 'holding the beings constant' and
>>distributing the knowledge?"
>
>Please Edouard,
>
>I cannot swallow that, even if it's labelled as a gross oversimplification.
My response to that is . . . Cool! I'll make existentialists out of all
of you yet! :-)
>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.
I love hearing this too, but what I do strongly resist I suppose is folks
who want their cake and eat it too. Once we abandon the notion that
human beings are physically/Chemically/Biologically constituted beings .
. . there *AIN'T* no turning back!!
The price to be paid is in terms of a greatly complicated analysis. For
example Phil Agre held a seminar last fall where we contemplated the idea
of "cyber-beings;" the entities we create using computer-based mediation.
Such opportunities offer mind-bending issues such as the complete
blurring of gender. However, if we truly believe in the blurring of
gender, should we therefore require all buildings to have restrooms
labeled "other?"
>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!:
Perhaps my youthful optimism (Right Eva? :-), I'm not so concerned about
the task of thinking relationally, so much as the complexity. It
required 200+ pages of argumentation to "prove" the existence of one
community of practice in my dissertation. It is the only instance that
I'm aware of where the existence of the community wasn't simply taken for
granted. How many communities of practice can we say we *know* to have
existed in space-time. I think it is a very small number upon which we
have attempted incredible intellectual leverage.
>"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."
Actually here is where I start to argue with Bateson. My
"being-in-the-world" doesn't cut down any trees. On the contrary, the
slippery bit of existence labeled "me" flows freely in and out of
comporting various pieces of "equipment" (bicycle helmets, computer
keyboards, banana peels, breath mints, tea mugs, and so on.) My
being-a-human-being-in-the-world has hopes, dreams, and obstacles of
"average size." (To quote Andre Previn's score for "Paint your wagon.")
It is my being-an-analyst-in-the-world that gets me horribly tripped up.
Heidegger suggests at least some useful advice to prospective analysts:
don't get your "modes of being" conflated. We must recognize that
detached viewing of "things as they are" (unready to hand,) is different
from participating in the world (running in hand.) As researchers we
spend a lot of time pretending to be detached observers, when in fact we
are actively constructing our identity in a field of cultural production.
Sure, it feels like we are cutting the limb we are sitting on, but we
can't blame the Universe for that. Bourdieu is right on the mark when he
insists that we need to include self-analysis of our research practices
as an integrated part of our research program.
>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.
I suppose there is a essential conflict no amount of pragmatism can
resolve. There is an occasional gripe about Bourdieu's grand indictment
of western culture, from an endowed chair produced by that very same evil
culture. As academics in capitalist cultures, we do not have the
opportunity to purely engage in compilation as say religious workers from
the ancient Egypt to Buddhism today. However, I believe that Western
Intellectualism brought this contradiction down upon itself.
All human thought seeks to capture some aspect of truth/meaning. Western
Intellectualism has historically positioned itself as separate from its
subject matter and yet capable of describing and acting upon that matter.
This is the legacy that we inherit from the Greeks and Ionian Science.
It is also why Western Philosophy seems to have a "hole" stretching from
the birth of Christ until the Renaissance. It took that long for the
Western Intellectual tradition to first subvert and ultimately undermine
Christianity. From Native American worship, to early Christianity, to
Eastern Mysticism: existence is not distinct from understanding.
Religious truth is not written - it is lived. Only in the West do we
insist on dichotomies and in so doing, we not only subverted the
essential message of Christianity, but undermined our attempts to
understand the human condition to boot.
Oh well, at least we have all sorts of technical marvels with which to
document our predicament. Alas for humankind, technology has become the
"gold fever" that plagued the protagonists of "Paint your Wagon." Once a
means to an end; now many means to our own end? May the Lord forgive us
for the too many times we have tried to "play god."
Peace, Edouard
. - - - . . . - - - . . . - - - . . . - - - . . . - - - .
: Edouard Lagache, Lecturer :
: Department of Communication (0503) :
: University of California, San Diego :
: 9500 Gilman Drive :
: La Jolla, CA, 92093-0503 Voice: (619) 534-7192 :
: elagache who-is-at netcom.com FAX: (619) 534-7315 :
: http://members.aol.com/EdLagache/home_page.html :
:...................................................................:
: Pay attention to how you listen: for to those have, more will be :
: given; and from those who do not have, even what they seem to :
: have will be taken away. :
: Luke 8.18 :
. - - - . . . - - - . . . - - - . . . - - - . . . - - - .