Carrol:
>>I can't speak for Ian, but I am not implying but affirming that the
>>phrase "distorted values" is incoherent, meaningless.
Joanna:
>The "your terms are meaningless" hobbyhorse is looking a little lame,
>Carrol, perhaps you should give it a rest.
I think 'meaningless' misses the point, too. It seems to me that democratic liberalism is precisely a set of values. And that the high capitalism unfolding around and within us is about contradicting those values. This is, to my mind, a fundamentally important contradiction for our time. Capitalism is dissolving its own legitimating principles, and it's politically necessary and potent to stress this to anyone who'll listen, I reckon. 'Distorted' is a useful word in this important sense.
On a more pedantic plane, it occurs that meaning is something contingent on other meanings (indeed, the complex of all relations between all meanings). If there's no 'platonic' 'value', there's no platonic 'meaning' either. As 'value' is meaningless, so is 'meaning' meaningless, and hence must 'meaningless' be meaningless. A tenable meta-proposition that gets us precisely nowehere.
Carrol:
>>But values simply do not exist, and never have. What exist are social
>>relations within which acceptable modes of behavior endlessly created
>>and recreated.
I think that values are necessarily ever in a mutually constitutive relationship with social relations, so I think values exist to exactly the same degree that social relations do (ie are no less 'material').
Joanna:
>I've been using "values" to mean the customs, attitudes and relationships
>that a collective agrees to value -- as inescapable, I imagine, as they are
>mutable.
Yep. Just like social relations - which reproduce values, but are are necessarily practised through ('always already') values.
>Then again, we've done that to nude bathing, too. If
>we start throwing out all English words with moralising notes we'll be left
>speechless.
And if we keep 'em, we leave Regina McKnight speechless ...
>> What in the world, in the abstract, could "Loyalty to other people" mean?
>
>Why this need for definitions of words "in the abstract"?
Yeah, 'distort' means something in every concrete setting. And so does 'loyalty'. After all, concrete settings are the only place stuff means anything at all.
>Then we have so-called "brand loyalty", a peculiarly capitalist phenomenon.
>There's a new spin on an old concept, eh? There's a new twist. Twisted,
>some might call it.
or 'distorted' ...
>>To begin with loyalty was strictly a feudal relationship.
>
>If you say so, Carrol. There must be some basis for this statement, but I
>can't think what it'd be.
There existed an effectively contractual relationship between lord and serf. But that was then.
>The fact that feudal relations required loyalty
>doesn't mean that loyalty began with feudalism, nor (which you seem to say
>below) that all feelings of loyalty imply a feudal relationship.
Social beings (as the humanist in me persists in believing we are as a matter of essence - as the rationalist in me says we must be and the empiricist in me watches us being all the time) must have loyalty in their essence. That doesn't mean we're always loyal, not even that a set of social relations can't pertain in which we're often disloyal to each other - just that (a) we always have it in us, (b) it'd be best to live social relations in which acts of loyalty are not systematically discouraged, and (c) it's something we could call upon in our efforts to build social relations more amenable to our capacity for it. Money is definitively created in an act of disloyalty (exploitation) and its generalised exchange for goods and services is a clumsy way to replace much of what interpersonal loyalty could do for us. comradeship.
>"Loyal comrades" is not a contradiction in terms, I think.
Nope. It's a tautology. Like 'democratic socialism'.
>According to the rule that I derive from your little rant against
>"loyalty", you could make much the same argument (while changing origin and
>application) against "fair play". How does that advance us?
Yep. Getting rid of 'fair play' doesn't do us any good at all. Arguing about what's fair is necessary. I know Marxists can get very excited about the role of 'fair' in leftist politics (because Marx could get confusing on it - capitalism having us all fairly exploited, as it were), but I reckon it's a crucial word for the practice of leftie politics. For a start, talking 'a fair day's wage for a fair day's work' (the Australian unionist's cry through the ages) is a great way into talking exploitation theory ...
>Let's not indulge an obsession with purity, look where that took the fascists.
Fascism, or something isomorphic, is indeed where it takes you to ...
Cheers, Rob.