[lbo-talk] Chuck's Cassirer posts

shag shag at cleandraws.com
Wed Jun 18 05:55:29 PDT 2008


I was gonna say that this is an interesting assertion, in a thread that was about taking the ideas of the post-structuralists' seriously. The orderliness of nature is an assumption embraced by the Enlightenment, upheld by Deists as an indication of dog's presence when dog design 'nature', and these days lurved by intelligent design proponents who, breaking from Protestant tradition, claim that the orderllness of nature is proof of dog's plan for the universe, blah blah.

A social constructionist, and you don't have to be pomo/poststruct/whatever to take this view, would ask to what extent we're projecting when we perceive orderliness in nature. indeed, I seem to recall that positivists no longer insist on invariable natural laws, but look for statistical probabilities. Someone with more of a natural sciences background should jump in here....

Poststructuralists/Pomos/whatever take this further though and don't worry about how our biases, beliefs, assumptions, etc. shape how we see nature, instead, they get at _how_ this narrative of how nature works is part of the way power operates -- how such conceptions of nature are productive or generative of various struggles for power.

In other words, implicit in chuck's response here is the assumption of our ability to finally grasp nature as it is, without our biases shaping our perception. If we just get out of our disciplinary straightjackets and embrace nature, unmediated, we can finally get at the truth of nature. It will, in all its orderliness, reveal itself to us, unmediated by power relations. Its a dream of deliverance from uncertainty, in a pomo world view, a dream of deliverance from having to be responsible for the way our biases, beliefs, etc. etc. are, uh, always already there, that there is no Archimedean Point from which to stand to take some dog's eye view and, finally at long last, see the natural world as it is, as if we aren't there to observe it. blahbeddy blah blah.

sorry. outta time.

shag


> Do you mean specific ordering systems (modern science, medieval theology,
> the beliefs of the Moogs-Mooga People, or whatever), or ordering systems
> in general? You can't interact with the world without an ordering system,
> except on the totally reflexive biological level, and in a sense that's
> not really interaction at all.
>
> --- On Tue, 6/17/08, Charles A. Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:
>
>
>>
>> My general answer is that almost nobody in antro, soc,
>> pysch,
>> philos, linguistics... bio look outside themselves for
>> answers. For
>> example where do ordering systems originate? You ask each
>> of these
>> fields and they give you a different answer. Nobody seems
>> to remember
>> that the natural and physical worlds are highly ordered
>> places long
>> before we came along. It might be a good idea to look at
>> the world,
>> rather than inside the foundations of these fields...
>>
>> Or something like...
>>
>> CG
>> ___________________________________
>> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
>
>
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