>Kelley, I love you sweet 'ums, and I love this: an institution
>that is strong enough to suggest... Institutions don't "suggest"
>one come to the table, the table *is* the institution, along with
>the lock on the door.
you know ken doll, sorta like jealous history. that little flourish of rhetorical style bound to persuade the disbelievers! works so well donut?
but institutions *do* suggest and they do so in and thru people, their re/actions, their statements, etc. right here, right now--we're enacting and occassionally transforming [violating norms of] an institution of what might be called civil society, a listserv. hard to pin down the norms that govern such spaces, but my previous wacked out post--purposefully wacked out as you know--was meant to break the rules of what counts as appropriate discussions here at lbo: i cut text out to make you like you said something you didn't, i purposefully misinterpreted, typed stranger than normal [for me] things. we all bring to this space different ideas--but not radically different--about how to behave here, what appropriate argument is, what to expect from others. we may or may not be right about these assumptions. and what we bring here will be transformed in our interactions and we may even bring new ways of behaving that influence others. surely you've witnessed this on these lists before? is anyone being forced? people are being shamed. people are being called to account for their claims. people are being flamed. but is anyone forcing anyone else to do anything?
what should we do in response to the, what was it, 6-7 flames that suggested that this discussion was of no value to others? well, if it was a substantive flame that suggested that we spoke in a language others didn't understand, we might think that, since they're reading, we ought to try to translate b/c they seem interested. or, if substanceless--didn't make much of a claim at all--then we could ignore or flame back. we could take the convo off list. we could stop the convo altogether. those responses to flammage of that sort aren't determined by the flame, but they suggest certain normative claims. we may or may not agree. what are we agreeing to? we might have our own partial belief that such convo isn't worthwhile in this particular space, and the least bit of criticism easily persuades. we might not want to piss people off who we respect. flames that make an argument can be argued with. or ignored. Etc.
>Yes, and when you put it like this, isn't Zizek's summary of
>Habermas's theoretical argument completely appropritate:
>pathetic. We ought to love one another. They nailed some
>guy to a cross for saying this a long time ago.
"jesus was a freak; just gimme a freak"
ken, i love you when you get like this on me. okay so let's rip each other new holes in one another's heads, 'kay?
now, dreamdate, when have i ever ever said that it's to be thought of as happy happy joy joy love?? do i even act like the kind of person who thinks that those qualities don't also come along with passionate hate, aggression, and so forth? i've continually cautioned against this reading of habermas. and, as you know, habermas is hardly a model of the good discourse ethicist. he's pretty awful in Philosophical Discourses of Modernity, no? these are ideals against which to gauge one's own and others actions; they don't make us act but they suggest to us that we ought to and others ought to.
I suppose it's
>revolutionary. Oddly enough, Rorty says the same thing -
>"don't hurt one another." Institutions simply turn this moral
>ought into a practical imperative.
dah!! getouttaheeya! the capitalist market is an institution and its normative practices are not at all about not hurting one another. its moral imperative is "do whatever you want but suffer the consequences if its not rational" "it is not the good will of butcher, the baker, the brewer that gives me my meat, bread, and beer but their self-interest "[a. smith, paraphrase]. 'Let me keep my own and i will become, without ever thinking about it, my brother's keeper"
now THATS procedural
The result being absolute
>bitterness (ie. Woodstock '99, the LA riots...). The problem
>with it is that people don't identify with it institutionally. It
>doesn't cater to their fantasies (see Renata Salecl on Rawls,
>The Spoils of Freedom). If you are told to love someone that
>pisses you off, don't this just piss you off more?
who said anyone has to love others in order to engage them in political dialogue? i don't love anyone here and yet i try my best to listen to them. when i think they're up the creek without a paddle i try to tell them and explain why i think this. they do same if they care to. sometimes we don't especially care what others ahve to say, ddddd, click trash, delete, abort. sometimes they think what i'm saying is crap and they flame me and i do same. i can also thoroughly detest them and what they do while we're in this space. if someone here wants to call people oreo cookies or use racial slurs or sexist slams then i'll call them on it. and if they want to advocate fascism then i might even support a call to boot them right the heck outta here.
Aren't don't
>you just get damn right hostile when you are *forced* to sit
>beside them and make small talk? At least that's usually how
>I feel.
yah. but who said anyone was forcing anyone?
>Do you think Bernstein would make a distinction between a
>"mature" subject and an "immature" subject? I suspect he
>would, and this is my gievance. He borrows a hierarchy to
>escape the paradox of subjectivity. Just like B. Russell does
>to escape the paradox in set theory.
??? you mean the difference between children and adults? or make an evaluative judgment about who's mature enough to engage in a dialogic forum? well tough luck but some people don't belong. everyone can start out belonging, but they have to prove themselves capable of engaging in reasonable discourse. if they want to hit people, then they're out. if they want to continually engage in long-winded oratory then the force of group pressure--the yawns, the ridicule, the subtle slams, etc--will let them know fairly quickly that such behavior is unwelcome. if, like vernon, they want to throw cans of paint around the room in the effort to make some sort of surrealist political statement, kewl. but uhh like they have to translate what their statement is if not everyone 'gets' it or at least everyone else has to talk about it and figure out what the meaning might have been. and if they wanna do it continually and no one is quite getting it and they don't want to explain what they mean, then bye bye OR they have to engage without throwing cans of paint around.
but, again, those are my views and, as the quote from habermas suggests, they have to stand up to the views of others. if, at Bad, we'd had serious discussion of a 10 post a day limit and if i deployed all the arguments i had against this as a procedural rule that i didn't think appropriate, but everyone else disagreed, then i'd have to accept that. stay or leave, i suppose. and, not only that, i could also take it upon myself and other disgruntled participants to set about to change that rule eventually.
madlove, kelley