[lbo-talk] Bruno Latour on post-post-modernism

Bill Bartlett billbartlett at dodo.com.au
Mon May 24 20:25:14 PDT 2004


At 8:22 PM -0400 24/5/04, Ted Winslow wrote:


>The idea is that, in the case of an ideal human occasion of
>experience, the goodness of the experience - its emotional content -
>is the feeling arising from appropriating and creating beauty and
>truth within relations of mutual recognition.

The goodness of an experience is an emotional thing. This doesn't seem very profound.


> These relations are internal relations, i.e. others through their
>creations are immanent in me via my internal relations to them and I
>through my creations will become immanent in them through their
>internal relations to me. This is what is meant by describing the
>occasion as an "activity of concern."

Obviously emotions are direct experiences of those who feel them. This translation doesn't make it any clearer to me though. It all seems very banal.


>Marx repeats the same "meaningless gibberish" in his description of
>how we would produce if we "carried out production as human beings."

You think? The thing is that, whether or not I agree, at least I sometimes understand some of the meaning he's trying to convey. Its bloody hard to deceipher it sometimes, but there is SOMETHING behind the convoluted language trying to get out.

[...]
>Wordsworth pointed out about the fragmentation of the universe into
>"vacuous bits of matter with no internal values, and merely hurrying
>through space" that "we murder to dissect."

Your point is what? I don't get it with this concern about depriving matter of its supposed "internal values". What meaning is that intended to convey? Because it doesn't convey anything to me. Does it refer to the atomic weights of various elements, but how can you strip matter of its atomic mass? Its nonsensical.

Perhaps I'm a bit literal minded, perhaps even autistic? Assume that to be so then, strip the poetic language and translate it for me. But if you can't, if the emotional content is all there is, with no solid core, then it is, for me, not even transcendent. Let alone immanent.

As you would expect, emotion is like that. Even poets can't create emotion, they can only stimulate us to recall what is already there.

Bill bartlett Bracknell Tas



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