ravi wrote:
>
> LeoCasey at aol.com wrote:
> > Carrol:
> >
> >>accompaniments to ritual. In other words, anyone who seriously starts
> >>thinking about how thought begins has to find that beginning in motion
> >>which was not itself thought.
> >
> > I am with Doug on this one: this is the materialism of fools. Anyone who can
> > suggest that ritual is somehow prior to thought is only describing his own
> > lack of clear and rigorous thought about the matter. If ritual refers to
> > anything, it refers to the purposive repetition of action, clearly
> > requiring thought. Check out an introductory anthropology text.
> >
>
> when you say thought do you mean conscious reflection or just the
> chemical activities in the brain that correspond to some action?
> of course i do not suggest that conscious reflection consists of
> anything beyond chemical activities in the brain (i.e., this is
> not a metaphysical question), but that they are different kinds
> of actions, probably. in day to day use of the language, i will
> propose, the former (conscious reflection) is what is meant by
> thought. if you agree, then do you still hold that thought
> precedes motion? that a baby emerging from the womb thinks out
> its actions, in this conscious sense, before it kicks its limbs
> and utters its first scream?
Leo probably doesn't know any better, but Doug should. It isn't only (or even mostly) a matter of neuroscience or chronology -- those matters (as with the ritual) being cited as illustrations. It is a matter of social relations. What does it mean to find ourselves involved in social relations (always already so find ourselves)? It means that we are _always_ in the midst of an action, and our thought takes off from that action. So if anyone here is indulging in the materialism of fools it is Leo and Doug. They mechanically separate "motion" from the thing that moves. Then they have to get involved in one sort of mysticism or another to explain how an unmoving object can move. And they start out with the isolated individual, separated from all social relations, thinking about how to enter into those relations from the outside.
As to ritual it goes back at least to the mating behavior of some insects -- obviously "brainless" except in the most mechanical sense. If one accepts this sort of vulgar materialism, as Doug and Leo do, then one must either deny that thought actually exists (it's an illusion of some sort) or that it has a mystic or instinctive source. And social relations disappear, to be reduced to a mere exhaustive account of individual facts. (In this particular thread Doug apparently chose to deny the existence of thought, in his claim that the topic had no relevance to politics.)
Doug has sometimes claimed that the _Grundrisse_ is his favorite book -- but he either hasn't read it very carefully or the stress of composing the one-line zingers that he substitutes for conversation he forgets everything he ever learned from it.
please note that i am not being
> facetious here, but only trying to nail down some of these terms
> in a sense that i (and other lay people perhaps) might understand.
> though i am not going to attempt it here, i think similar
> questions can be raised regarding ritual, and to be a bit bolder,
> even about academic learning, where one repeats processes over
> and over before a conscious understanding and the capability to
> think about the matter emerges.
>
> i hope that you will not lable me too a fool for raising these
> questions, though i will admit they are tentative and might not
> hence meet your requirements of rigour or clarity!
>
Anyone who affirms the reality of relations will seem a fool to those (like Doug and Leo) caught up in what Marx called the "dot-like" isolation of workers in bourgeois society. It is also this dot-like isolation which is partly at least the source of the pathological obsession with communication so characteristic of capitalist thought.
Thought, of course, can (roughly: thought never catches up with actuality) reconstruct and understand the action (social relations) humans person always find themselves in, and on the basis of that reconstruction project further actions -- which always go beyond the plan or thought, thereby again placing the individual in the situation I describe as action prior to thought.
Carrol
> --ravi