Philip Pilkington wrote:
On Sun, Mar 1, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Carrol Cox wrote:
shag carpet bomb wrote: [clip]
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
Shag] who knew? homophobia as transhistorical phenom. penetrating, forceful stuff!
Cbc] That the kernel of Q existed in (say) 1500 is no evidence whatever that Q or anything like Q existed.
Philip Pilkington] 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.
Cbc] No, that is ahistorical. First you have to treat the PRESENT as history, and explain it in its own terms. Only then is exploring its origins history rather than mere anitquarianism.
Philip Pilkington] 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?
Cbc] You confuste thinking historically with indulgence in anitquarianism. I enjoy antiquarianis but I don't let it lead me into geneteic or historicist fallacies. How do you understand Marx's sentence, "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape." (And he means that The anatomy of the ape IS NOT (repeat NOT) a key to the anatomy of man.) That is, innumerable diffferent evolutionary 'lines' might have emerged from the ape, all of them but one NOT leading to the emergence of homo sapiens. We don't know all those other descendants of the apes because they don't exist. It would have been just as easy for us not to exist. Hence one cannot start with the ape and intuit homo sapiens, but one can start with homo sapiens and "doing history backwards" (Bertell Ollman's phrase) understand a potential in the ape that that would not have been knowwable had homo s. not evolved.
Roughly speaking, this is the mistake such historians as Max Weber and Jim Blaut make in looking at capitalism: they see that some capitalist institutions (such as the market) existed in China or Greece and therefore assume that China or Greece were in some way embryonically capitalist. See Ellen Meiksins Wood, _ Origin of Capitalism: a longer view_ (Verso, 20020. One must first study capitalism as it NOW exists, and only then look for origins in the past. If you start with the past you will end up utterly unable to understand capitalism. If you start with the ape you will end up utterly unable to undestand homo s. Homosexuality and homophobia as they hae existed for a bit over a century can shed light on effeminacy as it existed prior to the 19th century, but the concept of effeminacy as it exists in the past cannot shed light on homophobia untless you first understand homophobia as an expression of 19th/20th-c cultures and social relations.
Cbc] 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.
Philip Pilkington] 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.
Cbc] Precisely, the historicist fallacy. You think that the existence of contempt for effeminacy pre-19th-c leads to homophobia, but it could have led to many other things. Conditions in the 19th-century generated homosexuality, and those who responded negatively to this cultural development grasped on to the imagery etc. of the ancient contempt for effeminacy to express their reaction. But there was no "necessary" or "logical" reason for that to have happened.
Philip Pilkington] But ts 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.
Cbc] Yes and no. Attitudes towards efrfeminacy (pre-19th-c) had no causal relationship to homophobia, which has to be explained in its own terms and only then can its use of previous attitudes towards effeminacy be of any explanatory use. Under different historical conditions homophilia would have made use of the contempt for effeminacy by proudly parading its superiority to the past. You simply cannot get anywheres by reading histgory forwards. You have to read it backwards to understand it.
Philip Pilkington] 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.
Cbc] Pish. It's based on a profound belief in the importance of history and thus in a profound opposition to historicist perversions of history.
Philip Pilkington] My understanding is that Marx, especially in historical mode, would have been the first to advocate the historical investigation of political and cultural formations:
Cbc] You mean he had any other sort of mode than the historical mode?
You can't understand Marx's historical method until you understand that he explicitly condemns the genetetic fallacy. You cannot explain capitalism by its origins, though you can explain its origins by capitalism. The causes of present beliefs must be found in the present, and then and only then can you trace how the present makes use of (or fails to make use of) the materials handed to it from the past.
Philip Pilkington] "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. . . .
Cbc] Precisely. Homophobia was something entirtely new in substance, and those developing their negative reaction to the new practice of homosexuality "dressed" their attitudes in the language of ancient reactions to effeminacy, believing that they were only continuing a tradtion but were in fact only using that tradition to express their new content.
Philip Pilkington] . . .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).
Cbc] Yes, you select a beautiful passage to quote, but its meaning is exasctly opposite to the meaning you want to give it.
Men make their own history out of materials given them (or imposed on them) from the past, but to see what 'man' MAKES OF THOSE MATERIALS you have to examine the 'present.' Naopoleon I does NOT explain Louis Bonaparte, though Louis Bonaparte for his own purposes seized on the history of Napoleon I. Cicero did NOT cause the French Revolution but the French Revolution seized upon Roman models for its own purposes. You cannot start with Cicero and Caesar et al and get to the French Revolution; but you can understand the French Revolution better by first understanding it in its own terms (ignoring Rome) and THEN seeing how it made use of Roman materials.
Philip Pilkington] 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.
Philip Pilkington] Marx used Hegel for his own purposes. That use changed over time, but it was a use of Hegel, not a repetition or a "logical" development from Hegel from the very beginning.
Cbc] Also, "theory" is misleading here. Marx had many interesting opinions and analyses of language, culture, ancient history, anthropology, etc. but he didn't have anything approaching a theory. Only his Critique of Political Economy constituted anything like a developed theory.
Carrol