Op 08-apr-97 schreef Erik Hoogcarspel:
> malgosia, you refer to a certain expectation towards others which you
> think is obvious. did you ever have a conversation with religius
> activists, did you ever come among people with believes and practices,
> you couldn't understand? i have and for me what counted was how they
> thought about harming or killing me and those who were with me. it's like
> a silent contract: we respect each other and willn't harm each other.
> what they thought they should do towards their opponents wasn't that
> important. so the dialogue starts with a person to person relationship,
> not with a universal moral. you don't have to expect others to be 'good'.
> why should they prefer to be what you would call'good'? i wonder if your
> moral expections are realistic, it seems to me they're falisified
> by CNN 24 hours a day! many people think they have very good reasons
> to kill others. what reason would they have to believe you, if you
> would tell them that they're immoral? i think that you can only convince
> others by giving an attractive alternative,this is one way to understand
> the transformation from ethics into esthetics. i think baudrillard had
> a point when he advocated the force of seduction, foucault has replaced
> power by seduction here.
Erik, thank you for taking my ridiculous piece of sloppiness and letting it
become bait for thought.
I have trouble figuring out whether you agree or disagree with me. You
write as if you disagreed; but what you say is, I think, not really at odds
with what I was trying to say.
The distinction I was trying to make was between actual lived relationships
one has with people, and the construction of "moralities", "humanisms",
and other such systems. It seems to me that the argument that without
some kind of an articulated system of morality or a "humanism" we would kill
each other uses the underlying model that such systems precede and
constantly mediate the lived person-to-person relationships. Further, it
seems to me that this model is one in which we are estranged from our own
lived experience -- which we of course frequently are (perhaps this is the
key to Foucault's claim that we have been transformed from being who work
into beings who speak). Since I seem to have been condemned to be stuck
with my mis-shapen contention about the belief that people are "good",
let me try to accept this stuckedness and wallow in the mud. So by "good"
I didn't mean "moral", and I am somewhat surprised that it keeps being
interpreted that way. I will gladly define my "good" to mean the same
thing as your "seducible".
Lived human relationships are erotic. To say that they are based on
some kind of "humanism" is to deny the primacy of this eroticism.
It is when the erotic leaves us, or we leave it, that we are thrown back
on systems of morality. It then becomes hard work to try to touch something
like a "lived experience", and one has to engage in "anti-humanisms" and
"trangressions", or Deleuze's tytanic labor to experience art "immanently"
rather than in terms of "transcendence". To say that we are a society of
the spectacle is to say that we don't _live_ experience, we spectate it.
Foucault's erotization, or aesthetization, of violence, is, I think, part
of the same package -- it happens when we are not capable of simply
_being_ violent, when we are removed from our own lived experience
of violence (as we indeed are). We say "I don't understand how this person
could have murdered someone in cold blood". Or we say: "On the contrary,
I _do_ understand it".
But lived experience is, instead, more like the figure of Wedekind's
Lulu, who simply must seduce, even if it's Jack the Ripper who, she knows,
will bring her death. This is what I mean by "unfalsifiable belief":
when one must seduce even the unseducible.
-m
> malgosia, you refer to a certain expectation towards others which you
> think is obvious. did you ever have a conversation with religius
> activists, did you ever come among people with believes and practices,
> you couldn't understand? i have and for me what counted was how they
> thought about harming or killing me and those who were with me. it's like
> a silent contract: we respect each other and willn't harm each other.
> what they thought they should do towards their opponents wasn't that
> important. so the dialogue starts with a person to person relationship,
> not with a universal moral. you don't have to expect others to be 'good'.
> why should they prefer to be what you would call'good'? i wonder if your
> moral expections are realistic, it seems to me they're falisified
> by CNN 24 hours a day! many people think they have very good reasons
> to kill others. what reason would they have to believe you, if you
> would tell them that they're immoral? i think that you can only convince
> others by giving an attractive alternative,this is one way to understand
> the transformation from ethics into esthetics. i think baudrillard had
> a point when he advocated the force of seduction, foucault has replaced
> power by seduction here.
Erik, thank you for taking my ridiculous piece of sloppiness and letting it
become bait for thought.
I have trouble figuring out whether you agree or disagree with me. You
write as if you disagreed; but what you say is, I think, not really at odds
with what I was trying to say.
The distinction I was trying to make was between actual lived relationships
one has with people, and the construction of "moralities", "humanisms",
and other such systems. It seems to me that the argument that without
some kind of an articulated system of morality or a "humanism" we would kill
each other uses the underlying model that such systems precede and
constantly mediate the lived person-to-person relationships. Further, it
seems to me that this model is one in which we are estranged from our own
lived experience -- which we of course frequently are (perhaps this is the
key to Foucault's claim that we have been transformed from being who work
into beings who speak). Since I seem to have been condemned to be stuck
with my mis-shapen contention about the belief that people are "good",
let me try to accept this stuckedness and wallow in the mud. So by "good"
I didn't mean "moral", and I am somewhat surprised that it keeps being
interpreted that way. I will gladly define my "good" to mean the same
thing as your "seducible".
Lived human relationships are erotic. To say that they are based on
some kind of "humanism" is to deny the primacy of this eroticism.
It is when the erotic leaves us, or we leave it, that we are thrown back
on systems of morality. It then becomes hard work to try to touch something
like a "lived experience", and one has to engage in "anti-humanisms" and
"trangressions", or Deleuze's tytanic labor to experience art "immanently"
rather than in terms of "transcendence". To say that we are a society of
the spectacle is to say that we don't _live_ experience, we spectate it.
Foucault's erotization, or aesthetization, of violence, is, I think, part
of the same package -- it happens when we are not capable of simply
_being_ violent, when we are removed from our own lived experience
of violence (as we indeed are). We say "I don't understand how this person
could have murdered someone in cold blood". Or we say: "On the contrary,
I _do_ understand it".
But lived experience is, instead, more like the figure of Wedekind's
Lulu, who simply must seduce, even if it's Jack the Ripper who, she knows,
will bring her death. This is what I mean by "unfalsifiable belief":
when one must seduce even the unseducible.
-m