Is it liberation? Emancipation? I don't know and I don't think the Butler knows either.
Kelley
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Hell, was it interesting? Not.
See, I would much rather go back over Jameson and Harvey and put together a critique of their work. I learned a lot from both. But they also have problems. Jameson, for example doesn't see the more concrete connection between his ideas of a conceptual space and the most obvious experience of driving around LA, or here, or anywhere in the urban US. For Harvey, the problem seemed to be very similar in his analysis of conceptual time and its relation to everyday work. In other words, they seem to miss the connection between our ideas and our lives.
"So what, are you saying that you really really do believe in the possibility of a transcendental aesthetic, something universal, everlasting, something that won't look like a period piece someday?"
Well, there is nothing transcendental about reading a book from another era that addresses common experience. That doesn't require you postulate some non-material realm in order to explain it. It also doesn't endow the book with some non-concrete quality. I didn't say 'timeless', or 'great' but that is what you imply by the word 'aesthetic'. In any case, most readers have these sorts of experiences and enjoy them, whatever you want to call them. If you want to delve into the processes of symbolic communication, then you have to use metaphors, many of which imply transcendence, or are borrowed from arguments of transcendence. Theory or philosophy might be better served by calling these linguistic devices a mode of abstraction. Transcendence and abstraction are not the same. You can form abstract constructions which are nevertheless concrete.
But, we can keep going. Does any sort of intellectual judgment imply a transcendent value scheme? Evidently. So, then value schemes are not to be understood as symbolic measures, those that can be written down and argued, but rather they become ephemeral and transcendent entities and therefore beyond the reach of explicit discourse? So, how does one arrive at this particular characterization? If you turn around and claim that the antithesis of a transcendent scheme is one that is always matched to the object or context of measure, and therefore, somehow relative, does such a claim escape transcendence? How? Or, rather what makes one intellectual method more concrete or desirable than another? Given a relative scheme, one that shifts and changes dependent on context, isn't that sort of method just as vulnerable, maybe even more vulnerable to a critique of its non-material quality? Isn't that shifting quality, the whole thrust of the idea behind Derrida's concept of differance? I suspect this is a recasting of idealism with all its nasty abilities to dominate spontaneous and engaged thought. Further I think this re-cast, is imitately related to a very abstract problem in logic that concerns the dual nature of parts v wholes.
In any case, can't you argue that all this business about creating a context driven value scheme is just another form of the same old problem of transcendence? The older form of a fixed, but non-material or ideal scheme just appears more explicitly a form of domination and oppression because it is historically and culturally more familiar. That is, it appears to capture the legislative and prescriptive qualities of oppression more accurately, and has been argued with or resisted longer. I think I would go further and say people who claim a relativity for their value scheme, and therefore lay claim to a somehow less prescriptive and more democratic approach, are lying. In short, they are just as power crazy as the rest of us.
I think what is much more important to understand is that the reason we are having these debates on value, on the nature of value, is because we are dominated by a socio-economic system that processes and consumes us like raw material, like ore--worthless in small quantities. Naturally, we start asking ourselves, gee, what's the value of life? Well, the answer is obviously nothing except in bulk quantities. But this also explains, at least in my mind, why we are attracted to the idea of the masses, or wish to identify with some large, nebulous and socially constructed entity, like the masses.
Chuck Grimes