After the Fall (was Re: religious crackpots in public life)

Rob Schaap rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au
Tue Jul 11 01:31:06 PDT 2000



>Sure there is. Most of our experiences aren't put into words. When you
>woke up
>this morning... how much of that "experience" did you articulate in language?

Whatever I perceived, and did not perceive, I perceived, or did not perceive, historically. 'Symbolic interactionism' is ever social, no matter how alone I might be at the time.


>Sure, you could explain it in language, but when you think about it you'll
>get
>a mixture of language and images. These images appear *as* images for a
>reason
>(understanding is, in part, scenic). You can translate these images, but
>something is always lost / in excess of the translation. Language builds on
>someting - that something is best understood as the imaginary. When you
>stubbed
>your toe in the afternoon, why did you think about grapefruit? (sting of
>associations... toe, round toe, swelled up toe, swelled up like something
>round, filled with blood, round like a orange, swelled up like a grapefruit.
>There is a link between the signifiers that is "filled in" by the imaginary,
>which sustains them. For a Marxist angle on this, you might check out
>Cornelius
>Castoriadis...

I've long intended so to do, Ken. But still can't see how you so confidently build this Lacanian fragmentation thesis on so modest a foundation. It still relies on the positing of a 'lost' something that was never there, for mine. If both the object and the subject are absent that is because they don't humanly have separate being. We're the relation of the two, is perhaps the simplest way of putting it. And that's not an absence - and it's not a fragmentation - although it could be a contradiction ...

Gotta go - mebbe more later.

Cheers, Rob.



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