Coz I didn't say anything to warrant you're saying this:
>it's just plainly a hypocrisy to assert that discourse theory is wrong
>because it's totalizing and turn around and say that your claims are just
>what you believe and you can't prove them which as you should know has
>little to do with absolute proof or any sort of claim to absolute knowledge
>and everything to do with subjecting them to the community of inquirers.
I didn't say discourse theory was wrong. There's tons of it about, and lots of different versions, after all. I expressly said on several occasions that only appeals to discourse as monad were my concern, because I thought that this had tyranny written all over it. Simply put, don't theories such that you would one day have to enforce young women's freedom by disallowing them to have sexual relations with older blokes seem problematic is all I was asking. I allowed for the possibility I'd read too much into Yoshie's post, but that was the one to set me off. And that's all.
Actually I thought you and I had sufficiently agreed on the *point* ages ago, and was merely correcting your misreadings of what I'd said. Peter did not misunderstand them in this way - indeed he expressed qualified agreement. You did misunderstand them, twice. Not because you're not a much more sophisticated social theorist than I. Not because the theory to which you subscribe is crap. Not because you're not a democratically inclined open-minded person. I don't think these things, never said 'em - none of 'em.
You didn't read my 'last bleat' post carefully enough. That's all. Else I'd've shut-up and got out of this morrass then and there.
And you're right about absolute proof, Kel - indeed demanding it has itself been a handy way of shutting people up. And that's all I meant. If you don't think we still have instincts or if you think any allusion to selfish gene stuff in any context is crap, go right ahead. I'm no scholar in the area, and I haven't the time to. I post stuff that seems sensible to me, that's all. This isn't an examination board.
>if you don't subject your claims and reasons to that community then what
>are they other than akin to burps at the table --to be ignored or hooted
>at in the conversation. why? because the assertion of the claim has no
>intention of engaging others in dialogue. it is fundamentally rude or
>laughable. it is clearly no discourse aimed at building consensus.
What was my claim, Kel? Tell me exactly what my claim was, so I know what I have to validate, ferchrissakes. How many times do I gotta tell ya that I THINK NATURAL TENDENCIES ARE AT PLAY IN THE ENSEMBLE OF HUMAN RELATIONS. Just because I don't know exactly how, isn't the point. I just want nothing to do with ideology that implicitly reckons it knows it all, or that correct discourse can fix it all. If I committed a crime it was reading too much into Yoshie's rhetorical question (which I may have done - so I bloody said I may have done) This matters if people here hold such an ideology. And it doesn't matter at all if they don't. I certainly never said you did. I haven't made ANY claims about you, Kel. Fascinating though you are, I was talking about something else.
>what you perceived because you were turning everyone into judy.
No, I didn't.
>and when
>we referred to social relations over and over you ignored that and heard
>discursive.
*I* also referred to social relations - in every boring bloody attempt to clarify myself!
>you've again called it discursivity.
Called WHAT 'discursivity'? I called a belief that discourse theory, without reference to a biological human essence, the details of which might be difficult and/or impossible to discern, but the denial of which would be an infringement of freedom, 'discursivity'. I never accused you of it! I just warned against it in general, and quite possibly irrelevantly (in the context of this list - I keep saying I might have misunderstood the guts of Yoshie's post), too. This seems entirely consistent with a humanist Marxist's stance - and that's what I've always thought I was. Where's the problem?
>why? catherine's the only one who unabashedly said that. when yoshie
>invokes >oppression she's talking about capitalism.
Dunno what you're talking about and I don't want to find out. I'm only posting this to the list in case others think I'm a Kelley-hating dickhead - if dickhead I be, I'd like to be considered so for the right reasons.
> and people who simply assert that they think what they think because they
>do and they can't say why are engaging in just as much obscuratism as the
>doctrinaire bullies by refusing to subject their thinking to the public
>realm.
Seems to me I've been trying to explain myself miserably for a week. So I'm a doctrinaire bully, am I? I'll learn to live with it. Have to tell everyone else I know first though, as I doubt it has occurred top them.
>and i'll be wholly totallizing and unabashedly so
As will I. You gotta try to work out your world the most holistic way ya know how. And never assume you're gonna know it all.
>and say that it
>is only through that sort of engagement that we will avoid either form of
>theology because at least the public realm involves people and dialogue and
>has some democratic checks built into it. yours and the bullies' are
>totalitarian.
Thanks for that, Kelley.