(no subject)
Jan. 20th, 2012 04:09 amIn a Derrida-based class again, hence a tired kind of sad. Taught by one of the Derrideans who misunderstand Derrida - assuming there's another kind - which makes me ambivalent, as his direction of misunderstanding is toward sense. But a mistake is a bad direction to approach sense from. Sense being in this case that:
Inadequate correspondence between concepts and things exists.
These inadequacies can lead to other troubles, since we act based on concepts and among things.
Assuming correspondence is exact can lead to snowballing errors.
Lots of cultural and linguistic factors influence our liability to assume this.
Active knowledge of the four facts above can save you from grief.
That's about as far as I go with "theory" (and I can give plenty of examples of people perfectly familiar with all this dating back to, ironically, Plato). The agonizing thing about theory courses, for me, is that frequently this is all the professor wants to say. They just don't feel it counts, as phrased. It needs the sponsorship of intellectual authority. Most aspects of which count among the influences in proposition 4, above.
There's no science to not being a dick, is the unfortunate truth. You can sensitize people by exposing them to facts and you can show them the various methods by which facts are obscured, making it more difficult to use some of these on themselves (thus incidentally killing religion and stuff). And in my experience that produces leftists pretty reliably. Whereas puritan hypochondria about puritan hypochondria just tends to imaginatively castrate existing ones.
Writing all this again, that's the sad tiredness.
"Step one is to see there are no steps." How sick I am of watching people fall into and out of this loop. Or loops, rather, each of the several interpretations of the line constituting a distinct one. As well as a step in a hierarchy.
Those hulaing the political loop make me the saddest. You'd only stay doing that if you'd been traumatized to the point where, trapped in conversation with what hurt you, you're willing to talk down the (you-ventriloquized) ghost of your enemy with what talks down talk itself.
Inadequate correspondence between concepts and things exists.
These inadequacies can lead to other troubles, since we act based on concepts and among things.
Assuming correspondence is exact can lead to snowballing errors.
Lots of cultural and linguistic factors influence our liability to assume this.
Active knowledge of the four facts above can save you from grief.
That's about as far as I go with "theory" (and I can give plenty of examples of people perfectly familiar with all this dating back to, ironically, Plato). The agonizing thing about theory courses, for me, is that frequently this is all the professor wants to say. They just don't feel it counts, as phrased. It needs the sponsorship of intellectual authority. Most aspects of which count among the influences in proposition 4, above.
There's no science to not being a dick, is the unfortunate truth. You can sensitize people by exposing them to facts and you can show them the various methods by which facts are obscured, making it more difficult to use some of these on themselves (thus incidentally killing religion and stuff). And in my experience that produces leftists pretty reliably. Whereas puritan hypochondria about puritan hypochondria just tends to imaginatively castrate existing ones.
Writing all this again, that's the sad tiredness.
"Step one is to see there are no steps." How sick I am of watching people fall into and out of this loop. Or loops, rather, each of the several interpretations of the line constituting a distinct one. As well as a step in a hierarchy.
Those hulaing the political loop make me the saddest. You'd only stay doing that if you'd been traumatized to the point where, trapped in conversation with what hurt you, you're willing to talk down the (you-ventriloquized) ghost of your enemy with what talks down talk itself.