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To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com cc: (bcc: DANIEL DAVIES) bcc: DANIEL DAVIES Subject: Re: The Psychoses
Carrol wrote:
>Doug can't see the difference between using the word
>cancer (actually, the correct term I believe would be malignant
>carcinoma) for many different kinds of cancer (*all*
>fundamentally characterized by "run-away proliferation of
>cells -- hence all having the same same etiology -- and fever,
>a symptom of wildly different conditions.
Tangentially, I'm reminded that I've stopped using phrases such as "a cancer in society", after making an absolutely *horrible* gaffe with someone who had reason to feel very strongly about the issue. It's just not worth it (although one might worry about the effect in the long term on our ability to communicate, but that seems to be screwed anyway).
Yoshie wrote:
>The reason why Ken & other followers of Lacan & Zizek don't want to
>renounce the recourse to the use of the word "psychotic" must be that
while
>they want a word that damns their objects of criticism, they can't bring
>themselves to using such words like "bad," "wrong," "untrue," "incorrect,"
>"ideological," etc.
Heheheh, I'm un-PC enough to think you might be onto something here.
Speaking not of which, here's an interesting footnote from Brad's (excellent, btw) paper on the digital economy:
10. That excludability is a very important foundation for the market is suggested by the fact that governments felt compelled to invent it. Excludability does not exist in a Hobbesian state of nature. The laws of physics do not prohibit people from sneaking in and taking your things; the police and the judges do. Indeed, most of what we call "the rule of law" consists of a legal system that enforces excludability. Enforcement of excludability ("protection of my property rights," even when the commodity is simply sitting there unused and idle) is one of the few tasks that the theory of laissez-faire allows the government. The importance of this "artificial" creation of excludability is rarely remarked on. Fish are supposed to rarely remark on the water in which they swim. See Brad J. Cox, 1996. Superdistribution: Objects as Property on the Electronic Frontier. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley.
Now I'm the dumbest, most bourgeois bastard ever to have read one of Jerry Cohen's books (ask him if you don't believe me), but even I can see that this is something very like commodity fetishism, and a citation of Marx might be apropos, rather than some random cyberfuturist. Would that be "more than my job's worth", or is Brad J Cox incredibly famous and yet again I missed the boat?
Oh yeh, and although fish rarely remark on the water in which they swim, Eskimos (or at least Central Alaskan Yupiks) have about fifteen words for snow. Check it out http://www.rt66.com/~srlee/OOOWOO/eskimo.html
All of which is pretty much irrelevant to the central point of Brad's article, but by now everyone should have realised that I'm wasting time.
dd
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