colin,
>You seem to want to claim some middle position, 'practice' as the locus of
>mediation between idea and material. I have no problem with this position,
??? you don't? it sure seemed like you did:)
>but would add the caveat that it is only one such position.
certainly, indeed we were talking about one position speicifically, that of
butler, who leans heavily on foucault.... and we (malcolm and i) used butler
to add to the thread on actual past. we could also talk about the way
bourdieu tries to sit in this space of practice as a resolution to the
tiresome idealism/materialism debate; or, do you want to talk about Giddens
doiuble structuration that lifts all over the map of intellectual history?
or is there some one else you thought that we were not talking about that
you think we should be talking about here?
>Moreover, you
>also seem to be suggesting that this 'practice' is something that upsets the
>simple binary opposition that has weighed so heavily on the minds of western
>thought/thinkers.
you read my intentions correctly.
>Still, I feel obliged to point out that implicit in your
>quote is the assumption that this practice IS a site _between_ ideas and
>materials. I have no problem at all with this.
well, actually, I do! I have not said that practice is "site" between ideas
and material, but practice is a key concept where specifically foucault and
butler and many many others have thought to think of how ideas and material
ARE "inseparable" (except through analytical machinery imposed), intimately
intertwined and mutually reinforcing, the condition of possibility of the
other.... practice is a site of conceptual/theoretical thought, not a
site-space where ideas and materials "meet" in their difference, but
articulate in their supplementarity to each other.
>But why then when you come to
>analyse this practice do you give primacy to only the idea and elide the
>material, which by the way on my reading would include the ideational (I am
>not wedded to the opposition between material and ideas, both are real).
perhaps tryhing to make a point TOO quickly is the issue. but, the concept
that there is no past or sex that actually exists except through its
practice/performance does not give emphasis to ideas; it gives emphasis to
P{RACTICE, to PERFORMATIVITY, to EVENT, to the contestations that constitute
practice, performance, event. I would here throw into the mix, Haraway
whose excellent notion of natural-technical object of knowledge, of sex as a
natural-technical object of knowledge is felicitous, precisely because it
points out a link --- but look closely here, it is NOT a link between that
separates idea-material, but -- between natural and technical, where both
are already comprehended as constituted in a relation of knowledge/material....
>Practice must be on and with something other than itself to be practice at
>all. So, I think I would return the charge and claim that it is indeed an
>idealist position if the material, 'the actual past', in terms of the
>present discussion, is accorded no role in practice.
no one has said that nor suggested that, neither I nor malcolm in his
discussion of actual past.
Consider, for example a
>common text book example. A 'fish is only a fish because we say it is' (I
>think this comes from Keith Tester, or Hindess, I'm not sure, I can look it
>up of course, presuming of course that it is actually there (ooops, sorry I
>getting flippant again).
don't worry about it, we have come to expect it from you :)
In one sense, but only one, of course this is
>right. I mean I am not a linguist but I'm fairly sure that there are many
>words throughout the world for fish. Still, if a fish is _only_ a fish
>because we say it is then presumably untreated sewage is only untreated
>sewage because we say it is. This raises the rather intriguing prospect,
>that if we call untreated sewage 'fish' we can solve two problems
>simultaneously: global hunger and pollution of the seas. It does raise the
>rather interesting question of what happened to the previously named fish,
>but we'll let that ride for now.
>
>So, I think what I am saying is that the postulation of practice as a
>mediating point that does away with logocentric binary thinking, which is
>what I think you were implying, doesn't really work. In this respect I want
>to return to philosophical geography later in this post. for now I will
move on.
>
>
>>Indeed it is as not existent as the quarks that you suggest killed humans at
>>hiroshima. and, certainly the existence of quarks is a totally irrelevant
>>to the lives and deaths of those of that died/survived as practice is for
>>uyou.
>
>This is an outrageous statement, the splitting of atoms is of central
>concern to those that died and survived at Hiroshima,
take a poll colin. see what you get. see if the survivors are more concerned
about the technical construction and equations of the split atom, or that it
was a war --- the practice of antagonims --- that construed an event that
had horrorific concommittants.
What about radiation
>sickness, death perhaps, and the knowledge of it avoidance, ie. 'don't live
>here, there are things you can't see that will kill you'. Are you suggesting
>that if I just say this to the people that invade my space at supermarkets,
>etc. it will keep them away? I think people will question, and rightly so,
>what it is and why. Knowledge, even scientific knowledge circulates wider
>than Kuhn's scientific communities. Moreover, philosophically, it seems to
>me that your position cannot deal with 'real' absence, or the non-existent.
>Precisely because what is, only gets its existence in practice, and human
>practice at that, back to idealism I suppose. So ontologically your position
>is monovalent, all presence in the guise as practice. Real absence can not
>exist, nor incidentally, ironically enough, it seems can real presence. With
>regard to the latter many seem to have seen Derrida as providing a
>justification for denying real presence through his critique of the
>metaphysics of presence. However, what I tried to show in using the quote
>from Derrida and in raising the issue of linguistic idealism, is that
>Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence is best seen as a critique
>of the boxing of being into some category in which some atribute of the
>human must play a role: ideas, perception, practice, experience etc. ad
>naseaum.
>
> those of hiroshima have no interest in whetehr it was
>>a quark a split neutron, two "heavier cousins" of the quark or some other
>>subatomic matter that killed/maimed them. actually the reality of the bomb
>>that destroyed that city was its bomb-iness, if you will. and, i imagine
>>that if you were to speak with survivors of the bomb, i wonder how much
>>interest they would show for quarks or your concern about the real reality
>>of quarks; or for your argument to them that instead of worrying about the
>>loss of loved ones, they should instead be concerned with whether or not
>>there is actually some kind of sub sub quark matter that is what really
>>caused the corporeal scars on a survivor versus radiation....
>
>There is no inference from my position that concern with the (un)reality of
>quarks etc., implies a neglect of concern for the loss of loved ones. This
>arguement is specious. However, insofar as the survivors are not, I admit,
>primarily concerned with whether or not quarks exist, they clearly would
>have preferred them not to have. Would the bombi-ness of feathers have had
>the same effect, I wonder?
you insist on speaking in the name of the "real" and the "actual" in which
you appeal to something outside language and the practices that have made
that those linguistic/signifying forms have meaning. whereas it is absurd
to talk about feathers made of bombs, because indeed that is an absurdity in
the reality that has come into effective force as "real". but, its
precisely the issue that what is "real", what is the "actual" reality/past
or sex, does not escape discursive practice. and its the endeless, ceaseless
repetition of practices that makes the words we use have any weight at all,
that they can come to have a referent that is experienced as outside those
words.
The existence of bomb-ness is dependent upon the
>knowledge of the possibilities inherent in certain substances to be bombs as
>well as in the notion of bombs. Only this explain why bombs as such appeared
>at the particular historical juncture they did. That is therewere dependent
>upon certain forms of knowledge _and_ certain materials with certain
>properties. . More importantly, for the people of Hiroshima, their lack of
>knowledge and/or practice of quarks etc., did nothing to stop them being
>killed. Existence is not dependent upon human descriptions of it.
you are correct, but the experience of this existence has no other
alternative but to be bound by "human descriptions" of it.
and, thus, we return to "meaning" and the power strategies that are
connected to this or the other "description"
>
>Back now to philosophical geography. I think it was Foucault who argued
>somewhere something about drawing a line between those who continue to think
>in outmoded ways (I can't remeber the exact quote, but agin if it actully
>exists I'll hunt it out). Thing is, if we misidentify where we are coming
>from we are in serious danger of ending up at that point we think we want to
>move from. In this respect Positivism/modernity is generally presented as as
>the foe, the point we wish to reject. But when one begins to read the works
>of the positivists themselves, one finds that they held certain things in
>common with many of todays so-called radicals, something I have suggested in
>previous postings
. So what I am actually suggesting is that the denial of
>the 'real' or actual is and focussing on the given and/or practices is
>essentially a positivist move. There is a direct transmutation route from
>sceptism to empiricism to pragmatism and thus onto conventionalism. Have a
>look a the works of Schlick, Carnap, Mach, Avenarius et. al., if you get the
>time, it comes as quite a shock. But if you haven't got the time try
>Kolakowski's 'Alienation of Reason' or David Oldroyd's 'Arch of Knowledge'.
one can insist on reading what one reads as monotonous repetition of the
past, as you want to read foucault; thus, there is nothing new in the world
or in foucault particularly. or, one could in fact read for difference and
thus recognize some surprises that would lead one quite far away from your
thesis presented above ("foucault is an arch-positivist!")
>Also, what about the ethics, Malcolm's, claim that the best strategy would
>be to simply kill nazis, seems to fly in the face of Foucault's call to
>respect differences. When does difference get so problematic that we
>dispense with it al la malcolm. Also as should be clear, a denial of
>anything indepent of our discourses is an outright denial of difference not
>its affirmation.
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------
>
>Colin Wight
>Department of International Politics
>University of Wales, Aberystwyth
>Aberystwyth
>SY23 3DA
>
>--------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>You seem to want to claim some middle position, 'practice' as the locus of
>mediation between idea and material. I have no problem with this position,
??? you don't? it sure seemed like you did:)
>but would add the caveat that it is only one such position.
certainly, indeed we were talking about one position speicifically, that of
butler, who leans heavily on foucault.... and we (malcolm and i) used butler
to add to the thread on actual past. we could also talk about the way
bourdieu tries to sit in this space of practice as a resolution to the
tiresome idealism/materialism debate; or, do you want to talk about Giddens
doiuble structuration that lifts all over the map of intellectual history?
or is there some one else you thought that we were not talking about that
you think we should be talking about here?
>Moreover, you
>also seem to be suggesting that this 'practice' is something that upsets the
>simple binary opposition that has weighed so heavily on the minds of western
>thought/thinkers.
you read my intentions correctly.
>Still, I feel obliged to point out that implicit in your
>quote is the assumption that this practice IS a site _between_ ideas and
>materials. I have no problem at all with this.
well, actually, I do! I have not said that practice is "site" between ideas
and material, but practice is a key concept where specifically foucault and
butler and many many others have thought to think of how ideas and material
ARE "inseparable" (except through analytical machinery imposed), intimately
intertwined and mutually reinforcing, the condition of possibility of the
other.... practice is a site of conceptual/theoretical thought, not a
site-space where ideas and materials "meet" in their difference, but
articulate in their supplementarity to each other.
>But why then when you come to
>analyse this practice do you give primacy to only the idea and elide the
>material, which by the way on my reading would include the ideational (I am
>not wedded to the opposition between material and ideas, both are real).
perhaps tryhing to make a point TOO quickly is the issue. but, the concept
that there is no past or sex that actually exists except through its
practice/performance does not give emphasis to ideas; it gives emphasis to
P{RACTICE, to PERFORMATIVITY, to EVENT, to the contestations that constitute
practice, performance, event. I would here throw into the mix, Haraway
whose excellent notion of natural-technical object of knowledge, of sex as a
natural-technical object of knowledge is felicitous, precisely because it
points out a link --- but look closely here, it is NOT a link between that
separates idea-material, but -- between natural and technical, where both
are already comprehended as constituted in a relation of knowledge/material....
>Practice must be on and with something other than itself to be practice at
>all. So, I think I would return the charge and claim that it is indeed an
>idealist position if the material, 'the actual past', in terms of the
>present discussion, is accorded no role in practice.
no one has said that nor suggested that, neither I nor malcolm in his
discussion of actual past.
Consider, for example a
>common text book example. A 'fish is only a fish because we say it is' (I
>think this comes from Keith Tester, or Hindess, I'm not sure, I can look it
>up of course, presuming of course that it is actually there (ooops, sorry I
>getting flippant again).
don't worry about it, we have come to expect it from you :)
In one sense, but only one, of course this is
>right. I mean I am not a linguist but I'm fairly sure that there are many
>words throughout the world for fish. Still, if a fish is _only_ a fish
>because we say it is then presumably untreated sewage is only untreated
>sewage because we say it is. This raises the rather intriguing prospect,
>that if we call untreated sewage 'fish' we can solve two problems
>simultaneously: global hunger and pollution of the seas. It does raise the
>rather interesting question of what happened to the previously named fish,
>but we'll let that ride for now.
>
>So, I think what I am saying is that the postulation of practice as a
>mediating point that does away with logocentric binary thinking, which is
>what I think you were implying, doesn't really work. In this respect I want
>to return to philosophical geography later in this post. for now I will
move on.
>
>
>>Indeed it is as not existent as the quarks that you suggest killed humans at
>>hiroshima. and, certainly the existence of quarks is a totally irrelevant
>>to the lives and deaths of those of that died/survived as practice is for
>>uyou.
>
>This is an outrageous statement, the splitting of atoms is of central
>concern to those that died and survived at Hiroshima,
take a poll colin. see what you get. see if the survivors are more concerned
about the technical construction and equations of the split atom, or that it
was a war --- the practice of antagonims --- that construed an event that
had horrorific concommittants.
What about radiation
>sickness, death perhaps, and the knowledge of it avoidance, ie. 'don't live
>here, there are things you can't see that will kill you'. Are you suggesting
>that if I just say this to the people that invade my space at supermarkets,
>etc. it will keep them away? I think people will question, and rightly so,
>what it is and why. Knowledge, even scientific knowledge circulates wider
>than Kuhn's scientific communities. Moreover, philosophically, it seems to
>me that your position cannot deal with 'real' absence, or the non-existent.
>Precisely because what is, only gets its existence in practice, and human
>practice at that, back to idealism I suppose. So ontologically your position
>is monovalent, all presence in the guise as practice. Real absence can not
>exist, nor incidentally, ironically enough, it seems can real presence. With
>regard to the latter many seem to have seen Derrida as providing a
>justification for denying real presence through his critique of the
>metaphysics of presence. However, what I tried to show in using the quote
>from Derrida and in raising the issue of linguistic idealism, is that
>Derrida's critique of the metaphysics of presence is best seen as a critique
>of the boxing of being into some category in which some atribute of the
>human must play a role: ideas, perception, practice, experience etc. ad
>naseaum.
>
> those of hiroshima have no interest in whetehr it was
>>a quark a split neutron, two "heavier cousins" of the quark or some other
>>subatomic matter that killed/maimed them. actually the reality of the bomb
>>that destroyed that city was its bomb-iness, if you will. and, i imagine
>>that if you were to speak with survivors of the bomb, i wonder how much
>>interest they would show for quarks or your concern about the real reality
>>of quarks; or for your argument to them that instead of worrying about the
>>loss of loved ones, they should instead be concerned with whether or not
>>there is actually some kind of sub sub quark matter that is what really
>>caused the corporeal scars on a survivor versus radiation....
>
>There is no inference from my position that concern with the (un)reality of
>quarks etc., implies a neglect of concern for the loss of loved ones. This
>arguement is specious. However, insofar as the survivors are not, I admit,
>primarily concerned with whether or not quarks exist, they clearly would
>have preferred them not to have. Would the bombi-ness of feathers have had
>the same effect, I wonder?
you insist on speaking in the name of the "real" and the "actual" in which
you appeal to something outside language and the practices that have made
that those linguistic/signifying forms have meaning. whereas it is absurd
to talk about feathers made of bombs, because indeed that is an absurdity in
the reality that has come into effective force as "real". but, its
precisely the issue that what is "real", what is the "actual" reality/past
or sex, does not escape discursive practice. and its the endeless, ceaseless
repetition of practices that makes the words we use have any weight at all,
that they can come to have a referent that is experienced as outside those
words.
The existence of bomb-ness is dependent upon the
>knowledge of the possibilities inherent in certain substances to be bombs as
>well as in the notion of bombs. Only this explain why bombs as such appeared
>at the particular historical juncture they did. That is therewere dependent
>upon certain forms of knowledge _and_ certain materials with certain
>properties. . More importantly, for the people of Hiroshima, their lack of
>knowledge and/or practice of quarks etc., did nothing to stop them being
>killed. Existence is not dependent upon human descriptions of it.
you are correct, but the experience of this existence has no other
alternative but to be bound by "human descriptions" of it.
and, thus, we return to "meaning" and the power strategies that are
connected to this or the other "description"
>
>Back now to philosophical geography. I think it was Foucault who argued
>somewhere something about drawing a line between those who continue to think
>in outmoded ways (I can't remeber the exact quote, but agin if it actully
>exists I'll hunt it out). Thing is, if we misidentify where we are coming
>from we are in serious danger of ending up at that point we think we want to
>move from. In this respect Positivism/modernity is generally presented as as
>the foe, the point we wish to reject. But when one begins to read the works
>of the positivists themselves, one finds that they held certain things in
>common with many of todays so-called radicals, something I have suggested in
>previous postings
. So what I am actually suggesting is that the denial of
>the 'real' or actual is and focussing on the given and/or practices is
>essentially a positivist move. There is a direct transmutation route from
>sceptism to empiricism to pragmatism and thus onto conventionalism. Have a
>look a the works of Schlick, Carnap, Mach, Avenarius et. al., if you get the
>time, it comes as quite a shock. But if you haven't got the time try
>Kolakowski's 'Alienation of Reason' or David Oldroyd's 'Arch of Knowledge'.
one can insist on reading what one reads as monotonous repetition of the
past, as you want to read foucault; thus, there is nothing new in the world
or in foucault particularly. or, one could in fact read for difference and
thus recognize some surprises that would lead one quite far away from your
thesis presented above ("foucault is an arch-positivist!")
>Also, what about the ethics, Malcolm's, claim that the best strategy would
>be to simply kill nazis, seems to fly in the face of Foucault's call to
>respect differences. When does difference get so problematic that we
>dispense with it al la malcolm. Also as should be clear, a denial of
>anything indepent of our discourses is an outright denial of difference not
>its affirmation.
>
>
>--------------------------------------------------------
>
>Colin Wight
>Department of International Politics
>University of Wales, Aberystwyth
>Aberystwyth
>SY23 3DA
>
>--------------------------------------------------------
>
>