On Wed, 14 May 1997, Big Brother wrote (in part):
>
>
> John Ransom wrote:
>
> > I think society has a compelling interest, one that overrides the
> > right of free speech, in stopping the dissemination of such views.
>
> > what's to keep others from trying to silence socialists and
> > Islamic fundamentalists? But I think this is a logical dead end.
> > In fact, *nothing* keeps others from trying to silence socialists
> > and Islamic fundamentalists. Let them try. They will lose.
>
> who will lose? who will try? who are the ones we decide to exile
> with our forced censorship? what political commitments do we
> re-entrench when we justify so called 'limited' discursive violence
> against the nebulous 'others', this time, with 'white' faces?
>
> > But groups who unapologetically celebrate and hope to recreate
> > regimes that systematically murder millions upon millions of
> > individuals are not worthy of *citizens'* right to free speech.
>
> worthy? how does one 'earn' rights? what hoops of power must one
> jump through to be endowed with such liberal virtues?
>
[snip snip]
> do we merely silence or do we try to understand, to critically
> evaluate? and it isn't just about 'who the next "other" will be'
> i.e. the black faces staring up from the ghetto, the turban clad
> terrorists from the islamic world, or the redneck nationalists; its
> more about 'why will we accept the next "other" so
> unconditionally' and what solutions we forclose in the process...
>
> cheers,
> paul
>
>
>
An issue here that is somewhat related to Foucault is the perception we
have of the word "Other." Do we see it as an ontological category or an
ontic moral judgment? How is the term "the Other" used in Continental
thought? how does that compare to how it's used in North America? did F
use the term and how?
By "ontological category" I just mean "condition of being." Hegel and
after him the existentialists Sartre and Beauvoir think that in a very
real sense "being" only comes into being when the being of an individual
is reflected back to it by the eyes of the Other. Strictly speaking, this
is not a moral relation. At least when they're working in an ontological
mode, the relation to the Other described by Hegel and Co. is not at all
necessarily a relation of respect and mutual enablement. True, these
writers sometimes try to read a moral implication into their ontologies,
but at that point it seems to me that the usefully analytic features of
their primary investigations are lost.
Currently in the United States the term "the Other" is almost synonymous
with "unjust and coercive imposition of one kind of being at the expense
of," you guessed it, "the Other." At this point, however, I find myself in
agreement with Ming the Merciless, who writes:
i guess my problem here is the assumption that "counterviolence" is
implicitly bad. is all violence implicitly bad? i can see how it would
be if one cuts a conversation short by shooting one's interlocutor, but
can't violence sometimes enable conversation, or force it to happen? and
can't historical violence enrich, complicate, challenge, create revolution
within, a historical discourse? [end Ming the Merciless citation]
There are all sorts of Others that we should not aspire to become nor
encourage and there are even some on the margins that one can at least
have reasonable arguments about including or excluding. I don't see why we
can't use our political judgment more often in place of these "in all
cases whatsoever" kinds of Kantian imperatives. Politically, these "in all
cases" lines of reasoning are too gross.
For instance, to mention an old and familiar example, I remember when the
Nazis, in full regalia -- prominently displaying the symbols of a regime
that turned the physical elimination of the Other into an economically
viable state enterprise -- marched through Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of
Chicago, which at the time was the home of many Holocaust survivors and
relatives of Holocaust victims. Unless we insist on universalizing the
most extreme cases, we will not have to use the suppression of a
provocative march as the "litmus test" for our commitment to free speech.
If we just refuse to test everything against the most extreme case, if we
insist instead that we be allowed to use our political judgment, a lot of
merely theoretical problems go away. In practice, I think, we make these
kinds of judgments all the time. For instance, I just read an article
about a black and white couple who were discriminated against at a co-op
in Manhattan. Once the Board of the co-op realized that a black man was
going to be moving in, it became obstructionist and refused to approve the
sub-lease. The Board and the co-op were successfully sued on this issue.
So: two suppressions of the Other. First, don't let the Nazis march
through Skokie. Second, deny mixed-race couple an apartment in Manhattan.
Instead of retreating to the universal and insisting that all suppression
of the other be regarded as *a priori* immoral, why can't we use our
judgment to assess specific instances?
Anyway now I'll really stop. Though I haven't answered the last question:
How does F use the term if at all?
--John
>
>
> John Ransom wrote:
>
> > I think society has a compelling interest, one that overrides the
> > right of free speech, in stopping the dissemination of such views.
>
> > what's to keep others from trying to silence socialists and
> > Islamic fundamentalists? But I think this is a logical dead end.
> > In fact, *nothing* keeps others from trying to silence socialists
> > and Islamic fundamentalists. Let them try. They will lose.
>
> who will lose? who will try? who are the ones we decide to exile
> with our forced censorship? what political commitments do we
> re-entrench when we justify so called 'limited' discursive violence
> against the nebulous 'others', this time, with 'white' faces?
>
> > But groups who unapologetically celebrate and hope to recreate
> > regimes that systematically murder millions upon millions of
> > individuals are not worthy of *citizens'* right to free speech.
>
> worthy? how does one 'earn' rights? what hoops of power must one
> jump through to be endowed with such liberal virtues?
>
[snip snip]
> do we merely silence or do we try to understand, to critically
> evaluate? and it isn't just about 'who the next "other" will be'
> i.e. the black faces staring up from the ghetto, the turban clad
> terrorists from the islamic world, or the redneck nationalists; its
> more about 'why will we accept the next "other" so
> unconditionally' and what solutions we forclose in the process...
>
> cheers,
> paul
>
>
>
An issue here that is somewhat related to Foucault is the perception we
have of the word "Other." Do we see it as an ontological category or an
ontic moral judgment? How is the term "the Other" used in Continental
thought? how does that compare to how it's used in North America? did F
use the term and how?
By "ontological category" I just mean "condition of being." Hegel and
after him the existentialists Sartre and Beauvoir think that in a very
real sense "being" only comes into being when the being of an individual
is reflected back to it by the eyes of the Other. Strictly speaking, this
is not a moral relation. At least when they're working in an ontological
mode, the relation to the Other described by Hegel and Co. is not at all
necessarily a relation of respect and mutual enablement. True, these
writers sometimes try to read a moral implication into their ontologies,
but at that point it seems to me that the usefully analytic features of
their primary investigations are lost.
Currently in the United States the term "the Other" is almost synonymous
with "unjust and coercive imposition of one kind of being at the expense
of," you guessed it, "the Other." At this point, however, I find myself in
agreement with Ming the Merciless, who writes:
i guess my problem here is the assumption that "counterviolence" is
implicitly bad. is all violence implicitly bad? i can see how it would
be if one cuts a conversation short by shooting one's interlocutor, but
can't violence sometimes enable conversation, or force it to happen? and
can't historical violence enrich, complicate, challenge, create revolution
within, a historical discourse? [end Ming the Merciless citation]
There are all sorts of Others that we should not aspire to become nor
encourage and there are even some on the margins that one can at least
have reasonable arguments about including or excluding. I don't see why we
can't use our political judgment more often in place of these "in all
cases whatsoever" kinds of Kantian imperatives. Politically, these "in all
cases" lines of reasoning are too gross.
For instance, to mention an old and familiar example, I remember when the
Nazis, in full regalia -- prominently displaying the symbols of a regime
that turned the physical elimination of the Other into an economically
viable state enterprise -- marched through Skokie, Illinois, a suburb of
Chicago, which at the time was the home of many Holocaust survivors and
relatives of Holocaust victims. Unless we insist on universalizing the
most extreme cases, we will not have to use the suppression of a
provocative march as the "litmus test" for our commitment to free speech.
If we just refuse to test everything against the most extreme case, if we
insist instead that we be allowed to use our political judgment, a lot of
merely theoretical problems go away. In practice, I think, we make these
kinds of judgments all the time. For instance, I just read an article
about a black and white couple who were discriminated against at a co-op
in Manhattan. Once the Board of the co-op realized that a black man was
going to be moving in, it became obstructionist and refused to approve the
sub-lease. The Board and the co-op were successfully sued on this issue.
So: two suppressions of the Other. First, don't let the Nazis march
through Skokie. Second, deny mixed-race couple an apartment in Manhattan.
Instead of retreating to the universal and insisting that all suppression
of the other be regarded as *a priori* immoral, why can't we use our
judgment to assess specific instances?
Anyway now I'll really stop. Though I haven't answered the last question:
How does F use the term if at all?
--John