> Imagining that you're serious, do you know so little of Marx that you really
> think that the roots of the architect's imagination lies in ideas rather
> than the material history of her culture and training?
The passage quoted said "imagination", admittedly not exactly the same thing as "ideas", but it still elides the grappling with the concrete that architects really do. They make models, they draw diagrams, they find out late in the game that they've routed two pipes through the same space (and they let the contractor sort it out). They improvise a corner solution to a problem they haven't "imagined", sometimes happily, and sometimes not -- even the greats; Palladio has some pretty clumsy corner solutions. And as for the masterpieces of the Gothic, don't make me laugh. Those guys definitely made it up as they went along.
[and is my]
> neurobiological knowledge and imagination so limited as to really be
> asserting that a spider has subjectivity as understood in terms of
> historically-situated social self-reflexivity?
My neurobiological knowledge is nil, as is everybody else's. My imagination, on the other hand, is almost limitless. But even so, I wouldn't venture to assert that I know anything, one way or the other, about the consciousness or feelings of other species -- or, for that matter, that I understand what the sonorous phrase "socially situated self-reflexivity" might possibly mean.
That said, I'm off to heat up some delicious lamb stew, left over from Easter.
Having not followed this thread from its inception, perhaps it's unwise to start piling on now. But unless I'm misreading, I get the impression that something is thought, by some of us, to turn on the postulate of human exceptionalism. Now this is a notion for which there seems to be zero evidence. I don't mean "difference" -- of course we're different from every other creature, and so is every other creature. So what else is new?
Isn't it enough to be merely human, rather than uniquely human? And for most if not all mere humans, that seems to have meant eating other critters when you can get 'em. Not that we should quarrel with those who choose otherwise -- it shows an admirable kindheartedness, which is a virtue that most mere humans also, paradoxically, admire.
Call us what you will, but don't call us consistent.
> > > At the end of every labour-process, we get a
> > > result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its
> > > commencement.
Except in the not infrequent cases when we get something quite unexpected and unimagined. And the greater the role imagination plays -- rather than rote repetition -- the greater the likelihood of an unexpected outcome, or a disaster suitable only for the scrap heap.
Dr Marx certainly deserves our admiration, but c'mon, he wasn't omniscient. He spent most of his life reading books, when he wasn't writing 'em. As far as I know, he never wrote a novel, or designed a building, or even played an instrument.
Any non-analytic proposition that seems self-evident is almost certainly wrong.
--
Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org