catherine.driscoll at adelaide.edu.au wrote:
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> Superstition?
I'm not sure of the precise word -- but it resembles superstition.
> Carrol, I just don't think these "two contexts" are this separable (let
> alone this easily separable). Show me an operation of social power which is
> not instantiated in personal relations, or the other way around. I just
> don't buy it.
Layoffs. There are no personal relations whatever between the (non)consumers who haven't been buying the corporations products, the executives who decide to cut production and reduce the labor force, the workers who are laid off, their children who drop out of school, and the fact that you have different students in your class this term than you would have had had those consumers bought more. (Then there is the questionof why they didn't buy more.)
There was no personal relations between the politicians and generals who decided on the firebombing of Tokyo and the thousands killed in that bombing (nor was there any personal relationship between the plane crews who dropped the bombs, the workers who produced the B-29s, the stockholders of the corporation that produced the bombs, and those killed in the raids.
It seems to me that your position here makes sense only on the basis of Margaret Thatcher's argument that society doesn't exist, only individuals.
Do you believe that social relations are _real_? Or are you assuming somekind of radical nominalism? Perhaps your argument is as much with Aristotle as with me.
Carrol
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> Catherine