From: Arlo J. Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Sat Sep 10 2005 - 17:09:37 BST
Greetings C.L.,
[You wrote]
First, I really appreciate that you are so patient with Platt. It's
an admirable quality and as taxing as he is I'm glad he's here. I
don't exactly know why. Maybe it's an adrenaline thing. Would that
be "strictly biological"?
[Arlo]
Well, I don't think its an adrenaline thing. I value the dialogue with Platt
because it forces me to refine and construct things, and get at a level of
precision in my thoughts. Sometimes I do realize I don't engage with others,
whom I am in more or less agreement with, because I'd simply be a "yes man" and
nothimg more. Others, those who argue the finer, subtler points of the
epistomological end are great reading but a little out of my league in
epistomological depth, so I just read and hope to learn.
[Arlo previously]
To restate my entire premise, then, what you call the "individual" I say
refers to the "social individual", which is formed by the collectivization
of "biological individuals" (language, symbolic semiosis, all that jazz).
From the collective formations of social individuals emerge "intellectual
individuals" (math, MOQ, science, etc.).
[C.L.]
I'm with you. Goody and Watt call the individual a pampliset "composed
of layers of beliefs belonging to different stages in historical
time". I think of a pampliset as a text (we are ONLY read here,
except for those few of you who have met F2F) which has been written
over and erased (like a chalkboard) time and time again predominately
by "kultur".
[Arlo]
I like that definition. Jacques Lacan makes a similar arguement about the
textuality that emerges from, or through, social level formations. He echoes
Derrida in many ways (everything is a text, open to deconstruction), but ties
in a more refined historical dialectic. In some ways, he tends to be a little
too less "materialist" for me (preferring Vygotsky's "mediation via artificats
(symbolic and material)). Lacan, and of course Derrida, would say that we are
ONLY read even when we meet F2F. The fact that some signs begin as auditory
impulses doesn't negate the textuality of the symbolic interaction.
[C.L.]
I use the idea of a space between that contains the individuals into a
collective. It's all around us, we can't see it but it contains and
connects everything. David Bohm calls the world of both the
implicate-explicate order. It enfolds and unfolds continuously but
there is no real separation between the one and the many, the tree and
the soil, the individual and the collective.
[Arlo]
Which is what I had been saying to Platt all along. But you know, anything that
is not "Long Live the Isolated Individual" gets one branded as a Stalist
dictator seeking to put republicans into gulags. :-/
As Pirsig would likely agree, there is no real separation between the one and
the many, it is simply a use of the analytic knife. One that comes with value
(in our mastery of the world) but also a price (we forget what it is like to be
part of the world). I think this too captues the Tao underpinnings to the MOQ.
What I stress is that at each evolutionary level, exponentially greater value is
gained. The lower level can neither choose this, nor predict it, nor conceive
of it- or anything- being greater than itself. And yet "emergence" is just
this. And I think this is just what the MOQ suggests.
[C.L. on Platt's Use of Rhetorical Party Propaganda]
He won't, he won't, he won't. Platt brings insult and politics into
everything. He is really little more to me, at this point, than a
"name caller". I'll bet if we did a simple search of the posts in the
last year looking for "you liberals" or "you lefties" or "you
Marxists" or "liberals like you", or "people like you" we'd find out
two things. Platt would be the majority poster of those lines and the
subject would always be about current politics, not the MOQ. Pirsig
would call him a "political reactionary" and would set up a character
like Platt to be the straw man he took down at the knees. That's why
I still wonder . . . hmmmmm.
[Arlo]
Oh geez... don't get that going again. ;-) Poor Ian is likely rueing that
attempt at sardonic wit.
As for the rest, well, its just part and parcel of what happens when you
dichotomize the world into ridiculous little factions of Conservatives Ultimate
Good and Liberals Ultimate Evil. You have no room to move, because you've built
your entire thought-structure around this One Central Premise. Only "liberals"
lie. Only "liberals" are arrogant. You remember when Ant removed the phony
Loggins paper, Platt said this proved how liberals rely on censorship. That
conservatives lie, or are arrogant, or use censorship is just ridiculous
because it violates the Prime Directive (ooops, showing my Trekkian geekness
again). But, that tactic of repetition ad nauseum, to make something true by
repeating it over and over and over again, is a sly political propaganda
technique. Platt knows this, he is no dummy.
But its been heightened recently, and I didn't know why... until I listened to
Bill O'Reilly the other day, as he railed on Exxon excutives for their greed
and lack and concern as they screwed the little guy at the pump ("$33 billion
in profits last quater, $33 billion, he Exxon, wouldn't $22 billion have been
enough? You had to kick us when we're down, didn't ya? Get that extra little
profit by bleeding the working men and women of this country. I've invited them
on my show, but they all declined. And I know why, because what they're doing
is indefensible! Indefensible! Its just greed, plain and simple".... That is
nearly a verbatim quote (I tried to write it down out of shock), coming from a
right-wing pundit!), and read George Will's Newsweek piece this week (on how
Katrina has proven the indisibility of the public sector, a "liberal hour" he
calls it... although to fair to Will, he also tries to show how the
conservatives were partially right as well..., and went "AH HA!!"
You see, when right wing commentators start talking like this, Platt can react
in one of two ways, concede the points that O'Reilly and Will are making, or
step up the aggressive repetition of party propaganda. We are seeing the
second.
I'm writing another post about the O'Reilly segment later.
Good talking to you C.L.,
Arlo
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