tell it to a cushion carrol. flames belong on list
>digloria at mindspring.com wrote:
>
>> well wow! i wish i could live in such a rl world where i was certain
>> someone wasn't lying. and carrol i grew up in a small hick town where
>> supposedly everyone is "real" i dunno, i'm rilly rilly suspicious of any
>> claims that suggest that people are just somehow more *authentic* and
>> *sincere* in real life.
>
>I don't want to clutter the list with this, but a couple observations. I
>have never in my whole fucking life, before or after becoming a
>marxist, ever ever ever contrasted the "authentic" or the "unauthentic,"
>the "natural" or the "unnatural," "real life" with whatever in the hell
>"unreal life" would have been.
>
>In fact my response in this area have been beutifully knee jerk from
>as far back as I can remember, and led to my one real triumph of
>repartee as a teacher, and in my very first semester as a teaching
>fellow at the University of Michigan. It was the year Elvis Presley
>had hit the headlines and I had never heard of him. One of my
>freshman students (english 1) mentioned him and I said "Who's that?"
>He (she?) said, gee Mr. Cox, you live in a narrow world. I said,
>Miss X, we all live in narrow worlds, mine is just a different narrow
>world.
>
>You exhibit a few undesirable kneejerk associations in your response
>to my post. Let me detail a few of them.
>
>1. "rl world where I was CERTAIN someone wasn't lying"
>
> a. I never said that lying didn't occur elsewhere. What made you
>think I was denying the existence of lying in that corrupt little burg
>my wife came from (Arthur IL). All I said was that on maillists we
>had no a priori reason to believe the electrons on the screen were
>not *entirely* fictitious. I can't tell my neighbor that I am a one-legged
>woman living in Lima Peru, but I could tell you that on e-mail and
>you would have no way of knowing. How do you know my name
>is Carrol? How do you know I even exist except in the feverish
>imagination of some small-village Milton (to echo Gray's elegy)? How
>do you know my name is Cornelius Q. Wainsbury, serving a life
>sentence somewhere as a serial killer? I might even be that very
>lowest form of life, an Illinois State Legislator taking a break from
>that cesspool in Springfield?
>
> b. Where in my post did you find the remotest hint that I though
>there existed, anyplace, any certainty that someone wasn't lying? But
>now that you raise that interesting possibility, let's explore it a bit.
>
> Let's imagine a paleolithic hunting gathering group, whose (I guess
>male, adult) members regularly hunt together, and that among other
>things they are equipped with knives. Now can you imagine bloke
>A stealing bloke B's knife, and then lying about it, when the *only*
>time he ever uses said knife is when he is working together with
>bloke B. Even lying and theft are social (i.e., historical) developments,
>not something that drops out of the blue. (One of the fascinating
>things about the *Odyssey* is that it apparently celebrates humanity's
>declaration of mental independence, for that is what lying at its
>core is. "That's what I like about you, Odysseus," Athena gushes,
>"You're such a good liar." And Athena of course was not only the
>goddess of weaving and of war BUT OF WISDOM, intellect.)
>
> c. What do you mean rl world. Dancing electrons are every bit
>as real as the proletariat. There is no such thing as A being more
>"real" than B. Do you think I'm some kind of cretinish follower of
>William James? On the contrary, I love Henry (next to Austen)
>among non-marxist writers. It is pragmatism not marxism that
>privileges practice in the sense you have in mind. (Charles Brown
>is always getting this wrong by claiming that for materialists practice
>is the test of theory, which is nonsense. Practice is the SOURCE
>of theory, which is someting entirely different from pragmatism. The
>11th thesis is the Marxian epistemology in its entirety. No further
>epistmology needed, other seeming epistemological questions being
>actually questions for neurology.)
>
>2. "poland's solidarity movement": so it was social scientists who
>turned solidarity into a fascist supporter of the pope, huh. One of
>my biggest subjective errors of the last two decades was admiring
>Solidarity.
>
>3. "sociological thought": Back at Michigan in the '50s my favorite
>joke always fell flat except with one young woman, the jewish
>daughter of a Long Island psychiatrist, who greatly appreciated
>it: "Some of my best friends are sociologists, but I wouldn't want
>my daughter to marry one." (They didn't: one married a genius
>of a computer consultant 10 years younger, the other married an
>unemployed factory worker 20 years older than she.)
>
>Carrol
>
>