From: Matt Kundert (pirsigaffliction@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Mar 16 2005 - 18:25:27 GMT
Hello Max,
I meant to say something to you when you first arrived, but the time spilt
by. I’m glad you've stuck around. I haven't read much of any Deleuze
and/or Guattari, but from what I understand of them they're alright cats.
Its nice to have someone familiar with such people around.
Max said:
Generally, I ascribe to the idea that all experience is mediated immediately
through past experience, already defined by culture and language, and
categorized appropriately. But what about an event experience that, instead
of being subverted by past experience, instantly subverts and mediates past
experience prior to its own mediation? Or, in other words, what about a rare
experience event that immediately mediates past experience, maybe the same
that will in turn mediate it?
Matt:
Well, first I would suggest not using “mediation” so much for so many
different things. Funny, but terribly confusing ;-)
Following in the idea that pragmatists also ascribe to, that is, that we are
all “suspended in language” as Bohr said, I don’t think you should have a
problem with belief change. It seems to me that once one accepts the social
constructionism common to Foucault and Deleuze (which is the same, on the
analytic side of the border, as Wilfrid Sellars’ thesis that “all awareness
is a linguistic affair”), all the sting and suspicion should be taken out of
the idea of our experience being “mediated immediately through past
experience.” Not only could it not be any other way, being historically
contingent beings as we are, but an experience or sentence wouldn’t make any
sense unless it were placed against the background of a bunch of other
experiences or sentences. This is Wittgenstein’s addition to the scene. To
understand a sentence, you’re already going to need to understand a lot of
other sentences.
I think the type of suspicion you hint at (“instead of being subverted by
past experience;” subverted? But it couldn’t be any other way?) is the same
type of equivocating suspicion that was symptomatic of Foucault, as when he
said, “I think to imagine another system is to extend participation in the
present system.” But this kind of suspicion hinged in Foucault on his
equivocation between two senses of “power”: one was the neutral, descriptive
sense in which we were all wrapped in webs of power (the social
constructionist sense) and the other was the pejorative sense of the
powerful pushing around the weak.
In the same way, I think you have to rest with the descriptive sense. In
this sense, we make sense of an experience based on our past experiences,
but sometimes an experience is so crazy that it doesn’t immediately make
sense against our background experiences. In this case, we have to generate
a web of beliefs to house this new experience, i.e. to make sense of it.
Or, sometimes an experience will strike two different chords in two
different quadrants of our web of beliefs (the background which we are using
to make sense of things) and we will have to revise our web of beliefs one
way or the other, or in an entirely new way, if there is a tension generated
by the two differently ringing chords.
In other words, this is the normal, everyday kind of thing that happens all
the time as we take in new experience. Most of the time, our experiences
are easily assimilable into our web of beliefs. But sometimes you get
something new that forces you to reweave your web. This something new, I
think, is what Pirsig called Dynamic Quality. And for people who think
about philosophy a lot, and are here engaging in these dialogues, the
activity of reweaving your web of beliefs is generally an ongoing,
never-ending, and regular occurrence.
Matt
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