> shag carpet bomb wrote:
> >
> > At 11:06 AM 3/1/2009, Philip Pilkington wrote:
> > >this, according to
> > >Foucault, is the kernel, traceable back to Ancient Greece, of homophobia
> > >today and I ask anyone who doubts it to actually sit down and talk to
> > >someone who is avowedly homophobic without being a militant,
> quasi-Fascist,
> > >its ALWAYS effeminacy that's the issue, either too much, in men, or too
> > >little, in women
> >
> > who knew? homophobia as transhistorical phenom. penetrating, forceful
> stuff!
>
> That the kernel of Q existed in (say) 1500 is no evidence whatever that
> Q or anything like Q existed.
Huh? If we're talking about simple binary oppositions (inclusion/exclusion, acceptable/unacceptable, good/bad etc.) then what comes into existence today should, of course, be related to the past. Unless, of course, you have no interest in history generally and thus want to focus on the immediate present all the time. But that would be rather boring and stupid, wouldn't it?
>
>
> The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape. That does not
> make the ape a man. That the kernel of homophobia is to be found in
> attacks on effeminacy is irrelevant to the question on when homophobia
> itself came into existence. All sorts of kernels of all sorts of social
> practices existed in the past, but only a small selection of those
> potentials were ever realized. This is the historicist fallacy, the
> assumption that the explanation of anything is to be found in its
> genesis.
>
> Carrol
>
>
Actually, this argument isn't really "historicist" (at least, it isn't
"historicist" in the negative sense that you're giving the term), its quite
strictly "logical" or "law-like" and stems from the idea that first the
world is carved up between the "self" and the "other" and that gradually
these oppositions develop into different formations. Its not so much that
things can be explained by their genesis (although in many instances they
quite literally can...), moreso that one can gain a richer understanding of
things by focusing on their genesis and then following its historical
development.
I'm not 100% sure what alternative you'd suggest, but I suspect it might be some sort of anti-intellectualist notion such as "knowledge is to be subordinated to practice", or something of the sort. My understanding is that Marx, especially in historical mode, would have been the first to advocate the historical investigation of political and cultural formations:
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue." (Marx, "18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte", Chapter 1).
In fact Marx's theory of language/culture was remarkably similar to the one I was putting forward above - derived directly from Hegel, it could be said to be almost a century ahead of its time.