>No but they bear close watching to make sure they don't get too chummy.
>Hey, I hope we haven't just tossed Rob into our laundry basket. I have
>this image of him in there with his feet in the air and his hands going,
>"what?" and the MOST puzzled look on his face. He'd better show up soon to
>defend himself or he'll end up in your gram's wringer...
I used to love playing in my mum's washing (washing definitely belonged to mums in those days). I still envy the cats when I see 'em all curled up in that sweet-smelling multi-textured fortress. But then, cats are cleaner than boys, I s'pose. So it's the wringer I have to avoid, eh?
I don't always manage to identify the important propositions in a post, and this is sometimes because the associations that come to the mind of the author - which she is using as substantiations or clarifications - themselves require more elaboration than the author, to whom the associations seem self-evident, thinks they need. Many here are formidably erudite, and their capacity to contribute is consequently particularly pressed by three-post limits on a list where what you don't say now won't be relevant any more tomorrow. So they cram in what they can and stress only those elaborations which seem most required.
To develop the point: Kel is a sociologist, Ken and Ange are philosophers and Yoshie is a lit-critter - of course all this stuff overlaps substantially (and bloody-well should), but the fact remains that I'm none of those things - never did a formal unit in any of 'em (journalism, political science and classics were my majors).
So I don't always get it. That's all. And saying you don't get it has two pretty prosaic virtues: it's true and it invites an attempt on the other party's part to clarify.
That sounds pretty common-sensical, and therefore engenders suspicious squints throughout leftie-land - where the obvious/apparent is often taken as manifestation of the actually decisive but non-apparent (a healthy default assumption, for mine) and where some have taken this a step further - into positing the notion of incommensurability (a critical possibility that should ever be allowed for, but which logically must have its limits, I reckon). I reckon it's true that (especially American positivist) cross-cultural methodologies come up against this quite a bit (say, Geertz's anthropological methodology-critiques seem quite sensible to me), but I don't reckon we should assume such a thing within speech communities (like, for instance, left-leaning, degreed, white-collar Anglo-Saxons in voluntary discourse about matters of mutual concern - I realise there are heaps of exceptions to that little list on this channel, but they're more aware than anyone that it characterises the list pretty well, eh?).
So I persist in disagreeing with (*what I think is*) Ange's suggestion to me that there's stuff I should just admit I'll never understand because I've an incommensurable world-view - or the view implicit in that beautifully written Irigaray piece on pubis-determined-world-views, that I might never understand a woman's apprehension of the world coz I don't have those 'self-embracing lips'.
To quote the Syracuse siren herself: "to speak theoretically necessarily means that we must clarify the muck, even if we know that it's much more confused and mixed up than that. we have no fucking choice here and you do it all the time yourself by insisting that certain terms mean what they mean and nothing else."
That's what I meant by necessarily assuming the possibility of mutual understanding (hence all the Habermasology), and that's why I reckon the occasional 'I don't get it' is okay - even if it looks rhetorical, it's still a speech act with substance and regulative function.
So there.
Was that dry enough to avoid the wringer?
Cheers, Rob.