The New Constellation and the French Revolution

kelley oudies at flash.net
Tue Jul 27 12:08:41 PDT 1999


ken wrote:


>All of a sudden, the memory of boredom
>is replaced by enthusiasm. That which meant nothing all of a
>sudden takes on significant worth in a different domain.

hmmm. now this is not how i experience this at all. turn it around and say, "i saw a flik and thought it was great, then someone told me how much it sucked." while i could no longer see the movie in the same light, my experience of delight and enjoyment first time round doesn't go away, my memory of that isn't replaced by another memory. learning all the truth behind the myths of the US founding doesn't make those experiences or those myths go away, nor do we necessarily say "i always knew they were myths" instead, we say "i once thought washington chopped down a cherry tree and he was honest and told the truth, now i know that this didn't happen and the myth was created for inculcating the value of truth among school children"

and i don't think you meant to say "that which meant nothing at all" boredom isn't the experience of no meaning. indeed, boredom is generally because it's been experienced, felt, and interpreted the same was repetitively that there doesn't appear to be any reaction. but boredom is a reaction, one prompted by the sense of having seen this or done this before. ho hum, been there done that.


>Jealous history is an effect which precedes its cause (its
>hidden kernel, its meaning).

????


> The paradox consists of
>overtaking ourselves ('into the future') and then reversing the
>time direction ('into the past'). This is not just a subjective
>illusion of an objective process taking place. This
>supplementary snare is an internal condition of the symbolic
>process ("will have been"). Hegemonic discourse is an effect,
>the justification of hegemonic discourse is the cause, which
>occurs *after* hegemony has been achieved. Consider this,
>"What is Microsoft trying to accomplish by monopolizing the
>world market? What is their program?" "The program is,
>we're trying to monopolize the world market!" The manifesto
>doesn't exist until the question about the manifesto is asked.

actually, micro$oft doesn't say this. rather, microsoft says, "we're trying to provide the world with superior products and why hell we invite competition but look no one's as good as we are"

now, sometimes a corporation says this in it's self-promotion because they believe in the genX research that suggests that ppl are onto it all and they need a sophisticated ad gimmick to get attention in the cacophony of images/sound. and so we have the birth of the ironic, aren't we clever wink in the sprite commercial, 'obey your thirst'

[sickening side note: i couldn't exactly recall the whole slogan. so i did a search. i found it all over the place, on personal pages, on music sites [a cd promotion which has various groups singing the jingle], and even a christian web site. see how this ironic inversion works so well to install the message.]


>Bernstein's regulative ideas stem from Habermas's pragmatic
>analysis of language.

where do you see regulative ideal of discourse ethics operative as strictly that? why is DE divorced from the social here?

I suspect he is in agreement with Seyla
>Benhabib - that a democratic ethos entails two substantial
>principles: egalitarian reciprocity and universal moral respect
>(symmetry). Bernstein then leaps to the conclusion, implicitly
>I believe (since he doesn't talk about consciousness much)
>that the subject *is* the process of subjectivization.

what is the process of subjectivization. you can't take it for granted that anyone knows what this means. geezlouise ken, you had the nerve to bitch that bernstein does this?

what about bernstein's discussion of the self in the chapters on rorty? a discussion which, no, is not a discussion which takes as it's frame the theory of the subject, but another tradition altogether.

So he
>installs a *pre-political ethic* into the very idea of what it
>means to be a citizen in a democracy (although, again, he
>doesn't formulate this). A "good" citizien of a democratic
>ethos is both reciprocal and respectful.

but particularly so because what those mean are local and specific. a good citizen at the bad subjects list is quite different from the good citizen at lbo and different still from other lists.


> This is the obscene gesture in
>Bernstein as well. The 'authentic' subject is both reconciled
>and ruptured (the reconciliation has to do with an identification
>with the past, the rupture has to do with the self-critical
>process of reflection). However, by identifying the subject
>with this very process, Bernstein fails to recognize that the
>past itself comes from the future.

this isn't true at all. read his discussion of kafka's parable again, indeed his entire chapter on philosophy's identity as struggling between history--the struggle with the perennial problems [read foundationalist discourse] and getting down to the business of "doing philosophy" [same struggle goes on in sociology and its reveals itself in a disciplinary division between those who do theory, critical examination of social theorists and those who do empirical research]. bernstein's quote of dewey is instructive here:

"bacon, descartes, kant each thought with fervor that he was founding philosophy anew b/c he was placing it securely upon an exclusive intellectual basis, exclusive of everything but intellect. the movement of time has revealed the illusion: it exhibits as the work of philosophy the old and ever new undertaking of adjusting that tradition which constitutes the actual mind of man to scientific tendencies and political aspirations which are novel and incompatible with rec'd authorities. philosophers are part of history, caught in its movement; creators...of its future, but also assuredly of its past." [29]


> The
>subject is not the substance of the retroactive imposition of
>meaning and narrative.

huh? this makes no sense. so the subject makes meaning autonomously?


>Bernstein quotes Habermas approvingly, "communicative
>reason operates in history as an avenging force... a
>stubbornly transcending power, because it is renewed with
>each act of unconstrained understanding..." He we have a
>procedure of identifying with the symptom. In essence, the
>particular (the respectful and reciprocal citizen) is seen as the
>universal (the global citizen).

so here though you've misunderstood what he's said. it's not simply about the regulative ideal of the respectful and reciprocal citizen and it's not a universal. the citizen is local, specific, historical and always has content which is specific to that particular enactment of citizenship. see, you leave out society which is what bernstein is cautioning against in that statement.

kelley>



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