> -- But this garbage by Ken is in principle unfit for civil conversation.
> Statements of this sort about mental illness, and in particular about
> those illnesses miscalled "psychoses," cannot form the substance
> of any conversation among decent people. Your question refers to
> style, my post referred to substance. There is no possible style which
> could make Ken's propositions civil.
I don't quite understand, off hand, why clinical terms are inappropriate for social theoretical discourse. I mean, everybody else is doing it so why can't we? I'm using the term psychosis to describe cultural logic - no different than Jameson, Irigaray, Anderson, Kristeva, Marucse, Arendt, Castoriadis, Adorno, Gilroy, Habermas or Marx. Sickness, health, well-being, the good life, neurosis, diagnostics... these are all medical terms which can be translated into social theoretical arguments. Naturally - there are problems in doing so which is why they tend to take on a very technical meaning. Why should we limit ourselves to mythological metaphors - distenchantment, gods and demons, fetish, divinity, narrative... or literary metahors - social text, politicla grammar, form and content or mathematical metaphors, sum, totality, infinity, zero... It seems to me that there are many ways of talking about society. What packs more political punch: individualist consumerism in society is bad or it is psychotic? You'll find my conversation quite civil in the context of psycho-social analysis. I think I've done a pretty good job explaining the terms I'm using to open the ideas up to a wider audience. So part of this, I suspect, comes from planting our tees on different terrain. But theory must grow - and I think it is prudent to acknowledge that, in fact, the grass might be greener on the other side. So, it is my contention that you are objecting to the sytlistic features of my writing, not the substance. We agree recently that power is at the centre of most political conflict. Well, that's a start. In the end, I think that we can both agree that human welfare is at the core of any theory that understands itself to be contemporary. In this, we can agree that our root concern is human suffering.
field of dreams, ken