[lbo-talk] Caudwell on on language's inability to reflect the...

Arthur Maisel arthurmaisel at gmail.com
Tue Jan 7 07:11:21 PST 2014


I knew there was something specious about the molecular argument (all new molecules = all new person), but I only just thought of a good analogy. Every four years we get a new President; every two and eighteen, respectively, we can have an entirely new House and Senate. Anyone here want to say that we would have an entirely new government once those sweeps were completed?

Of course the government analogy is actually much fuzzier than the molecular person argument, because when you get a new molecule of some amino acid in your liver, it is presumably identical to the old one, whereas a new senator is only substantially the same---given the tolerances of the system---but naturally not identical.

On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 5:47 PM, Charles Brown <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:


> On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 3:29 AM, James Heartfield <james at heartfield.org>
> wrote:
>
> >
> > In the 1970s Caudwell's work was in print with Lawrence and Wishart, and
> was by default the first port of call for anyone interested in Marxism and
> art. I spied a copy of his Art and Illusion on the shelves of the fantastic
> poet Tony Harrison when he was being interviewed on the TV.
>
> ^^^^^^^^
> CB: I have a copy of the Lawrence and Wishart edition right here.
>
> ^^^^^^
> >
> > Lastly, Charles makes the argument that we are not the same people we
> were. This same argument was made by the reactionary Joseph Barker,
> defending slavery and himself against charges of inconsistency, as recorded
> by a contemporary, the Chartist Adams:
> >
> > At one meeting, Barker was challenged from the audience, a letter in his
> name of some years earlier, against slavery was produced. Was he the Joseph
> Barker who had written it? ‘No,’ was the astonishing reply. ‘It is, as
> everybody knows, a physiological fact that the particles of the human frame
> are all changed in the course of every seven years. More than seven years
> have elapsed since that letter was written; therefore I am not the Joseph
> Barker who wrote it!’ W.E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom, 1968, p 400
>
> ^^^^^^
>
> CB: Good point, James , although in this case, don't have to go to the
> molecular level. Evidently, Joseph Barker had changed in that he had
> changed his opinion on slavery. He had turned into his opposite.
>
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