On Mar 21, 2010, at 6:52 PM, Ted Winslow wrote:
> I've done that before, e.g. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2008/2008-June/009861.html
> >
>
>> Here is a long extract from "Giving an Account of Oneself' setting
>> out the position, including the idea that the inescapable
>> "epistemological frame" is "an operation of power."
>>
>> “I find that the only way to know myself is precisely through a
>> mediation that takes place outside of me, exterior to me, in a
>> convention or a norm that I did not make, in which I cannot discern
>> myself as an author or an agent of its making. In this sense, then,
>> the subject of recognition is one for whom a vacillation between
>> loss and ecstasy is inevitable. The possibility of the ‘I,’ of
>> speaking and knowing the ‘I,’ resides in a perspective that
>> dislocates the first-person perspective whose very condition it
>> supplies.
>> “The perspective that both conditions and disorients me from the
>> very possibility of my own perspective is not reducible to the
>> perspective of the Other, since the perspective is also what
>> governs the possibility of my recognizing the Other, and the Other
>> recognizing me. We are not mere dyads on our own, since our
>> exchange is mediated by language, by conventions, by a
>> sedimentation of norms that are social in character. So how are we
>> to understand the impersonal perspective by which our personal
>> encounter is occasioned and disoriented? … When we ask, by virtue
>> of what exteriority is recognition conferred?, we find that it
>> cannot be the particular endowment of the Other who is able to know
>> and to recognize me, since that Other will also have to rely upon a
>> certain criterion to establish what will and will not be
>> recognizable, a frame for seeing and judging. In this sense, if
>> the Other confers recognition - and we have yet to know precisely
>> in what that consists – it does this not primarily by virtue of
>> special internal capacities. There is already not only an
>> epistemological frame within which the face appears, but an
>> operation of power as well, since only by virtue of certain kinds
>> of anthropocentric dispositions and cultural frames will a given
>> face seem to be a human face to any one of us. After all, under
>> what conditions do some individuals acquire a face, a legible and
>> visible face, and others do not? There is a language that frames
>> the encounter, and embedded in that language a set of norms
>> concerning what will and will not constitute recognizability.
>> “This is Foucault’s point and, in a way, his supplement to Hegel,
>> when he asks, as he does, ‘What can I become, given the
>> contemporary order of being?’ He understands that this ‘order’
>> conditions the possibility of his becoming, and that a regime of
>> truth, in his words, constrains what will and will not constitute
>> the truth of his self, the truth that he offers about himself, the
>> truth by which he might be known and become recognizably human, the
>> account he might give of himself.” pp. 23-4
>>
>> This necessarily implies "solipsism of the present moment."
I absolutely don't get how you draw this conclusion from the material you quoted, which is all about our embeddedness in history, society, politics, discourse. What is solipsistic or "present=ist" about it?
Doug