Sez Carrol (very much in Carrol mode):
["Joanna wrote:
Oh, piffle. Every gesture we make is political. Besides (and therefore), having fun can be a form of resistance.
This is utter nonsense. Note that the statements "God is everything" or "*Everything is God" are in fact the same thing as saying nothing is God. Just as pantheism is a route to atheism, so Joanna's statement is a way to dissolve politics. If everything is politics, then nothing is politics."]
If Joanna's comment that every gesture is political is utter nonsense then that must mean that Carrol reckons our gestures are not necessarily political. As a gesture is a subset of communication, and communication is definitively as social as it gets, Carrol would have to explain to us either how the complex of power relations that constitute the social are not political or how an intervention therein could be circumscribed so as to be guaranteed sans political origin or content. If he can't, Joanna's claim seems the more compelling to me, for if her premise holds, her inference seems entirely tenable to me. 'Course, we may distinguish between the apparent intentions and desired/likely functions of gestures, and differentiate between behaviours that are politically 'better' or 'worse' - but Carrol ain't into making fine distinctions here.
And he goes on:
["But I think her post illustrates the point I was making in my original post -- as she herself acknowledges by its wording: "having fun CAN BE a form of resistance." This was one of the few verbal forms that I used to really burn English 101 students for using in their themes. It is an utterly meaningless statement.
Almost anything CAN BE almost everything. "Can Be" statements are a way for the writer to avoid responsibility for whatever he/she is saying. They are a form of intellectual cowardice."]
The problem with Carrol's statement here (well, one of its problems) is that 'can be' statements are absolutely necessary.
They are in deduction:
Premise: 'Carrol Cox is a leftie'. Premise: 'Joanna Sheldon is a leftie'. Conclusion: 'Therefore not all lefties are arrogant pedants', which can have forms like 'Lefties CAN BE arrogant pedants', (or, thankfully, 'Lefties need not be arrogant pedants').
They are in induction:
Observation: All the lefties I have met criticise the current order, but seem to have no particular personality trait in common. Conclusion: Lefties CAN BE arrogant pedants.
And in a more dialectical mode:
Members of a mailing list can react to the contradictory mode of alienation that permeates e-space in modern capitalist society in contradictory ways. Thus, these new modes of communication CAN produce a mode of discourse which helps people conduct their relations in a way which stresses their social being - which undermines the estranging walls bourgeois ideology reproduces between them, and allows them socially to share in the production of a new knowledge about how they might recognise, assert and affirm themselves anew. For such people, there can be no certainty about what must happen, because they recognise it is their practice together that produces new knowledges. In other words, there are all sorts of things that CAN happen, but very few that MUST happen as as the rugged individualist's programme would have it happen.
And it CAN drive people ever further apart, into lonely little repositories of apparently self-produced knowledge ... which CAN manifest as an arrogantly pedantic certainty that there CAN actually exist a set of behaviours in the human world that are not at all social in their constitution and implication, therefore existing entirely beyond the category of power relations, and therefore completely without political content. For these people, other people MAY continually be corrected, even castigated, for trying to point out the social, and thus political, character of everything we do.
I CAN BE arrogant and pedantic, too, eh? Rob.