[lbo-talk] My Aristotle rant, was: Re: Glenn Beck breaks down in tears, blubbers on-air AGAIN

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Fri Apr 3 08:43:13 PDT 2009



>
> Well, and I respect you for putting it forward in such a blunt form, I
> really do. Anyway:
>
> There's no "essence" here. That's bullshit. And you know it!
>
> Check the fucking stats my friend... Here's a list:
>
> (a) Women
> (b) Mexicans
> (c) Blacks
>
> Go on: check it... honestly.... I dare you.
>

I appreciate your respect but I don't see your answer answering the question. I'll try to be even more blunt, without cussing or double-daring you to do something else. My position - like Sayer's Marxist one and Geertz' non-Marxist one - is that what it is to be human is to be social and what it is to be social - in its human variety - is to be enabled, constrained and defined by the qualitatively and quantitatively different modes and forms of sociality that have existed across time and space.

As Homo faber we have made, and continue to re/make ourselves - and we are not always the kinds of builders, much less landlords or regulatory/disciplinary authorities many of us would like us to be. We appear to have done so well coevolving/coproducing/coconstructing our bodies/sociality, powers/knowledges/emotions and natural/built environments that all of them remain remarkably plastic but so poorly that we keep materially and ideologically fouling our own ecological, personal and communal nests.

We may be able to - or maybe even in the process of - producing/constructing a shared humanity but we've never had it before and, should we succeed, it certainly won't be and I don't want it to be immutable. It seems to me that your position on love argues that the form, content and experience of love is and always has been the same which is - as Geertz and a million feminist scholars have shown - hooey. If I am wrong, however, and you are arguing that the form, content and experience of love changes over time but that love itself is immutably something transcendent then we're in the realm of Platonic Ideals and, while I now understand your position, I categorically disagree with it. Arguing about transcendent Ideals is, as Plato shows by his metaphor, a kind of suppostional shadowplay and I don't want to play. If you are arguing something else, I have yet to be able to state it clearly enough in my own words to show you, me and the rest of us that I get it and I, therefore, need more help.

Along those lines, what stats are you asking me to look up and what am I supposed to learn, from what statistics? Is it supposed to be something about the relationship between women, mexicans and blacks and immutability? I feel like I must be misreading your intent because the interpretation I keep coming up with is that you are asserting that there is something immutable about those categories... and I can't believe you're saying that, at least not in the face of the state of critical sex/gender/sexulity, race/ethnicity/nationalism and environmental/science/cultural studies.

Here's hoping we're talking past each other and can either figure out what the difference is or establish how we're using different language to say similar things.



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