[lbo-talk] language query

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 2/7/07, Jerry Monaco <monacojerry at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2/6/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > >
> > > Jerry: Well yes, as Bateson was fond of saying, "The Map is not the
> > > Territory", borrowing from Alfred Korzybski, I believe.  Sometimes the
> > > map is not even a good guide to the territory.
> >
> > A "map" is not the right metaphor for "el Sur."  It's a banner, held
> > up by the leaders of Venezuela and like-minded leaders elsewhere.  At
> > present, they are a minority, but an insurgent, not declining, group.
> > They will never win over all countries that could theoretically belong
> > in "el Sur," but the more they can line up on their terms, the better.
> > --
> > Yoshie
>
> Alfred Korzybski's aphorism "the map is not the territory", may be
> right or wrong, as a semantic premise, but it was not meant to refer
> specifically to maps.  It was meant to remind us of certain kind of
> consistent mistakes by referring  to a quasi-Kantian premise that
> humans are often confusing "representations" with what is being
> represented, and the "thing-itself" is not the representation, etc.

When you use the metaphor of maps, you are approaching the world
analytically, as an object of knowledge (as in, does this map
represent the world better than that map?); when you use the metaphor
of banners, you are thinking of the world as a place where you pursue
a political project (as in, can we line up more people under this
banner than that banner?).  "El Sur" is a political project, not a
given.


> In the context of "El Sur", which I was not thinking about when I was
> replying to Carrol, it is important to remind ourselves that what ever
> we name "El Sur", or "third world" countries, or "developing
> countries" that the name itself usually comes out of a set of
> assumptions, implicit or explicit, that we should unpack, in order not
> to take the assumptions for granted (or even to accept the
> assumptions) and in order not to put all of the countries in "one
> basket" for every type of analysis or argument.

It's not for us to name.  It's for Hugo Chavez, et al. to name.  For
it is their political project.
-- 
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
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