From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Wed Jan 08 2003 - 04:02:33 GMT
Platt,
Agh, I forgot to reply to on this. You said:
>Please explain what you mean by "privileged." Pirsig in the above quote
>says dynamic and static are equally important. Privileged suggests not
>equal, and has a pejorative ring to it.
Your sniffer is right to pick it up, but as it happens I was trying to be
descriptive. The perjorative of "privileged" comes from the postmoderns
who don't think there can/should be a privileged context (Lyotard, Derrida,
de Man, other deconstructionists [Culler, Gasche, Norris]). Deconstruction
as a literary movement (which Derrida shouldn't really be included in)
enjoys finding dualisms, figuring out which one is priveleged and going,
"Yeah, look at that. How ar_bi_trary. Yeah. Got ya' now, sucka'" (or
something like that). This isn't very interesting however. I mean, I
thought it was widely recognized that Dynamic Quality is priveleged. I
didn't think Pirsig said they were equal. He says both are _needed_, but
he also says that DQ is the moral trump card over all static patterns.
That's what I mean by privelege. If a half of the dichotomy trumps the
other one.
I think it is merely descriptive. A deconstructionist would come along and
try to "explode" the dichotomy somehow. Deconstructionists are notoriously
suspicious of binaries. Following Rorty, however, I wouldn't know how you
could do without binaries. Its the reifying of them that's the problem. I
don't see a problem with the priveleging of DQ because A) I don't want to
reify or hypostatize it metaphysically and B) I don't think we can tell
what DQ is until much later afterwards. If that's the case, then its a
compliment paid to good stuff that happens and we needn't never worry about
arbitrarily privileging a choice as "absolute" because we'll never know
which choice is the "absolutely good one, now and forever" at the time of
its choosing. That's why I don't take the absoluteness of DQ that seriously.
Matt
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