On Dec 7, 2006, at 2:13 PM, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> Chomsky doesn't claim that ingrained common sense can be fought
> through repeated factchecking. His answer isn't necessarily
> sufficient, but least he has an answer: He says common sense can
> only be changed through mass participation in social movements.
> Yeah, but isn't that hard? Sure, but you have to try. Usually
> you'll fail, but sometimes you'll succeed. I think that's the
> Chomsky prescription in a nutshell.
So how do you get people to participate in these social movements if they so violate their common sense?
I'll admit to a partly instrumental interest in this discourse stuff: I want to know why and how people come to believe the things they believe, and what, if anything, can be done about it. But of course that's not the only reason; as Yoshie put it years ago, theory also serves as a kind of erotica for intellectuals.
> And at least he's got history on his side. The rare moments in
> history when mass common sense changed, it was usually through the
> work of mass social movements. I'm guessing your critique of
> Chomsky's factchecking is by way of a defense of Judith Butler-
> style work. It won't work to just expose the true facts, you have
> to figure out why people are so resistant to the facts. Sure, but
> however true and interesting Butler's insights are, they're not
> particularly novel. I suspect if you summarized them to an old CIO
> organizer, he or she would probably nod their head in agreement,
> and rattle off a bunch of anecdotes to prove the point.
People often say one of two things about Butlerish stuff: either it's old & obvious, or its obscurity serves to hide its emptiness. She got her start as a Hegel scholar; she'd be the first to admit she comes out of an intellectual tradition. I doubt, though, that CIO organizers ever showed much interest in why people want to invoke physical or biological "reality" when some critique or other starts making them nervous.