[lbo-talk] "For all we know, there may not be a safe way down"

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Sat Oct 24 08:17:26 PDT 2009


At 11:49 PM 10/21/2009, Eric Beck wrote:
>On 10/21/09, shag carpet bomb <shag at cleandraws.com> wrote:
>
> > so, since this is so abstract (!), I'm curious if you could illustrate with
> > something more concrete.
>
>I'll try. But I'm cooking and drinking, plus the example I'm bringing
>up is "personal," not "political," so we'll see how it turns out.

*grin*


>Sometimes when a person -- politicians especially are good at this --
>is caught in an uncomfortable position, say an extramarital affair,
>that person might claim something like, I had a lapse of judgment,
>*I'm not the kind of person who has extramarital affairs*. Well,
>that's obviously bullshit: they *are* the kind of person who has an
>extramarital affair because, um, they had one. What that person is
>trying to do is separate their actions from some being they inhabit.
>They think that their being and their actions are separate things,
>that they have some say in which actions really apply to their being.
>They think that predicates can be applied to, or revoked from, their
>being without altering that being. Or, to put it in the way Mike
>discussed it, the effects that a "structure" has are like some clue to
>but not actual expression of the essence of the structure. But to my
>mind, those effects, the expressions and differences that they make,
>are essential to the structure. When you glimpse those effects, you
>*are* glimpsing the structure. In other words, observing each effect
>is "directly observing the structure," even if it is maybe a partial
>observation. (It seems to me now, after Mike offered a clarification
>to my post, that he was very much keeping alive the difference between
>effects and expressions, which most people, I think, tend to
>collapse.)

yes. I think this relates to the debates that erupt over social structure as Miles sometimes defines it. I may have this wrong, but sometimes I think Doug (and others) see Miles' account as a superstructuralist account that leaves individuals behind. So Miles talks about racist or sexist social structures and Doug will object, "but racism and sexism are about individual behavior and thinking."

Is that what you are getting at?

I guess I'm not really clear, still. For example, take an analogy: are symptoms THE disease? is the footprint in the sand the person that was there, or is it an effect of a person walking in the sand?

In another post, I tongue-in-cheekily mentioned that, Ehrenreich analyzes depression as an effect of capitalism and sees it as an effect of social structure, not social structure itself. What you seem to be saying is that depression (assuming agreement with E's account) IS social structure. Yes? No?

shag



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