> i know honeybunchems. but it's purely theoretical. it
doesn't work in practice and it surely isn't the case that we
can just impose meaning on the past as if its a blank slate.
!!!???!!!
Not, the past is never a blank slate. But the contents are dramatically altered as we experience things. Memory isn't rock solid, it is radically subject to ongoing interpretation.
I was bored throughout the movie the Matrix... but when I figured out how to read the movie through a Lacanian lens, I was delighted to have sat through it! Let's say you said something that was really funny at the time. Then you found out that the person you said it to was really really hurt by it. The memory changes... all of a sudden you recall things you hadn't noticed before, the exact look on the persons face, the way they moved afterward. What you had originally taken for laughter now comes to mean tears. This isn't a blank slate... it is just that you have reinterpreted the scene.
> see i guess i can't figure out why you wanna stop time?
I don't see myself as stopping time at all. Isn't Bernstein's reconciliation / rupture an attempt to capture dialectics at a standstill? (which is why he can neither point to a reconciliation or a rupture - rather their own simultaneity).
> but his 'hope' rests in sociality. that we're social beings.
and we have to recognize this even in the midst of the most
heated battle/war and this will rescue us from self/destructive
impulses. that's the only universal and i cannot see how "you
are social and so you are," is destructive b/c it does not
mean happy happy joy joy
So we are left with the regulative principle of hope. Isn't this a bit Blochian?
And could it not be said that "raising the idea of hope to the level of a principle is akin to running amok to God?"
> >Bernstein understand subjectivization to take place in
> >community... and the 'fullest subject' (my term) is the
> >decentered subject ("what has come to be called the
> >decentering of the subject is integral to the pragmatic
> >project") (328).
> and your objection is.....?
The hierarchy. This is the terror. You have good citizens (democrats) and bad citizens (everyone else). The motivation to participate is one of fear, the fear of being identified as a bad citizen. The obligation to participate, hailed as the always already presuppositions of language, leads people into acting instrumentally toward each other.
> >Can we at least agree that Bernstein thinks a decentered
> >subject is qualitatively "more democratic" than an egoist?
> not sure why democratic is opposed to egoistic
The egoist, according to cognitive development, cannot see things from the perspective of an other (no reciprocity). So the mature democratic is interpreted to be at odds with the egoist.
These perspectives, in line with Kohlberg, are incommensurate and mutually exclusive.
> yah but he doesn't use that as the universal regulative
ideal. it's sociality. we are social beings and working
together to get something accomplised. that's his categorical
imperative i'd say.
?? A categorical imperative is a moral obligation. So you are saying that Bernstein is saying that we are morally obligated to be social beings and work together to get something accomplished. But this is precisely the abstract negation, the moment of terrorism!!! We are morally obligated to be social beings. But what kind of beings? We are morally obligated to get something accomplished? But what? We are morally obligated to work together. With whom? There is no content here! The moral imperative is indeterminate. We are commanded to do something but we have no idea what it is! This is Hegel's critique of Kant - the terror of pure conviction: I exist, and I must do something! I knew it. Bernstein's praxis philosophy is sadistic. We must keep doing things because we must. I'm actually fine with this, and you might recognize this in the Lacanian critique of Sade and Kant right... but my argument against Bernstein is stronger. I'm arguing that he is substituting in something concrete - that he identifies the subject as substance. In other words - he concretely identifies the good - ie. democracy. So the democrat lives democratically in the security that they are right and good, without conscience. This is the teror of identifying substance with subjectivity. The democrats exist as pathological beings, free from responsibility. But perhaps I've misunderstood Bernstein here. Maybe he's a closet Lacanian - and agrees that the subject is not substance. Which is then strange, because his position is almost identical with that of Laclau and Mouffe - yet he doesn't acknowledge them once.
Dennis wrote:
No, no, capital has *us*. Distinguishing the subject (a.k.a. identity) from the object (a.k.a. the commodity-form) means, as Adorno put it, deciphering the preponderance of the object.
Yes. The subject is distinguished from the object, as the preponderance of the object. What Adorno focuses on is not the substance of the subject (which he is well aware is ideological) but what has failed. What could have been but is not. Adorno tarrys with the negative here... the failed potential of the past...
ken