Eating your words

[imomus]

1. No knowing is total, no knowing is without its particular perspective, its vested interest, its framing.

2. There is no knowing that will not, at some point, be abandoned, replaced by a better knowing, which will be replaced in its turn. All sciences rise and fall on history's stock exchange.

3. Methods of knowing are like fictions, or like constructions that we assemble playfully, experimentally, and disassemble when they cease to be useful.

4. In order to know, we must be capable of forgetting, abandoning, abjuring.



5. The tragedy of autism is that the sufferer is incapable of excluding things that are not relevant. He cannot, therefore, "know" in the way most of us do. (See "The Curious Incident of the Dog In The Night-Time".) But autism is only a disability because not everybody is autistic.

6. One way to look at a "renaissance man" is to say "He's interested in so many things!" Another way is to say: "He's already passed over and lost interest in so much!"

7. One way to look at a socialite is to say "He knows so many people!" Another is to say "He snubs and is snubbed by an incredibly large crowd!"

8. What are the ethics of forgetting mistakes? Revising, for instance, the archives of the New York Times so that it looks as if the paper never made any mistakes? Ought we now to become the Winston Smiths of our digital archives just because we can be? Would you rather read a "corrected" version of what 1966 thought, or what 1966 actually thought? Is correction of fact falsification of history? If so, which do we choose, fact or history?

9. Might certain decisions look, one decade, correct, the next, incorrect, and the one after correct again? Might there therefore be a case for leaving in everything "wrong" until it becomes right again?



10. Barthes says, in his wonderful Inaugural Lecture at the College de France, 1977, that when science writing is made "wrong" by subsequent science (and it all is, eventually), what remains is writing; pure literature.

11. In that lecture Barthes also says that every language is a system of ranking things, and all ranking is oppressive. Ranking, too, is a way of sifting things in order to forget the less important.

12. Equality of the importance of information sounds "just" in some way -- it's egalitarian -- but it's the enemy of semantics. That's why it's more like autism than communication. Communication relies on ranking and disambiguation (disambiguation: the banishing of the equality of two meanings). Communication depends on binary oppositions in which one element is dominant, the other repressed.



13. The effort to restore the repressed element of a binary ("women are better than men!") does not remove power's asymmetry, it merely shifts it somewhere else. As Barthes said, "we boast of reviving what has been crushed, without seeing that this, in itself, crushes something elsewhere".

14. Roland Barthes quotes Pasolini: “I believe that before action we must never in any case fear annexation by power and its culture. We must behave as if this dangerous eventuality did not exist… But I also believe that afterward we must be able to realize how much we may have been used by power. And then, if our sincerity has been controlled or manipulated, I believe we must have the courage to abjure.”

15. Pasolini thought that his Ragazzi di Vita trilogy had been misappropriated by his political enemies. He abjured the films, but did not regret having made them. Compare Auden's abjuration of his communist didactic poetry in later years.

16. Speak your words without fear. But later, be prepared to eat your words. Their meaning will change. History will see to that.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

If no knowing is total, then neither can any statement about knowing be total. Therefore you cannot be sure that no knowing is total.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

The Blingee (http://blingee.com) action is a bit more maximalist over at Momus_LOLZ (http://community.livejournal.com/momus_lolz/). But here at Click Opera we have Roland Barthes Blingee! We prefer to shake the intellicock at happy hour, n'est ce pas?

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's true. For now.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"13. The effort to restore the repressed element of a binary ("women are better than men!") does not remove power's asymmetry, it merely shifts it somewhere else. As Barthes said, "we boast of reviving what has been crushed, without seeing that this, in itself, crushes something elsewhere"."

If only you´d chosen a different example, I wouldn´t feel like putting an icepick into your brain now.

[masnomas.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you could explain in more detail?.

[fritztegularius.livejournal.com]

Great post! FUNES EL MEMORIOSO, a story by Borges provides a great illustration of how the inability to forget a thing results in the lack of abstract thinking.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

It´s a stupid example, as even if this was a popular opinion, the imbalance of power is such that it would take hundreds of years for it to shift so far as to make men the ones without power, in danger of being "crushed".

And using that instead of a closer, easier example makes it seem like it´s a distinct possibility in the world as it is now, which makes him sound like one of those OMG WHITE MEN ARE SO OPPRESSED whiners, who think that losing some of their extreme privilege is the same as being oppressed.

I should have responded with a cat macro, ffs. I hate srs bsnss.

[(Anonymous)]

Sybil Fawlty, Basil's wife, knew.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

But you assume Barthes "something crushed elsewhere" is men again. Actually, that isn't the case. Imagine a company that decided to prioritize appointments for women. Resources (and positions) being finite, this policy might well impact on, say, minorities (Latino men), or working class candidates who weren't women, or male homosexuals, or disabled people.

In the specific context of this company, women would at this point, thanks to "affirmative action", become the new dominant power, and every other category would slip down the ranking.

And that's not even addressing the question of whether the women so advanced would simply become "the new men" or would be able to bring something specifically feminine to the job (like not being very interested in threatening people with ice picks, for instance).

[masnomas.livejournal.com]

Mmmm...I won't speak for momus, but it seems to me that while he speaks of power in binary, it would not be true that equalizing the power between the genders creates a "loss" in the power of males necessarily.
"elsewhere" is elsewhere.

[masnomas.livejournal.com]

I dislike him, but is there something Freudian in the penetrative nature of ice picks in the male/female power difference.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

"like not being very interested in threatening people with ice picks, for instance"

No, I don´t think that´s likely to happen.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, it was the binary that annoyed me, because that doesn´t even leave room for the power to shift elsewhere, as he explained was the idea of the example.

[trickseybird.livejournal.com]

I still affirm you stole that blingee 'tache off ziggy's arse.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Every binary is a power hierarchy between two elements, but it's not the only place power resides. There's always a place "elsewhere" for power to shift. It's just hidden by the framings of language.

The enabling-yet-limiting binary definitions of language (and the oppositions do change with context: fast might be the opposite of slow in one context, the opposite of cheap or moral in another) encourage us to think about women in relation to men, but not women in relation to blacks, to people who can't speak English, to paraplegics, to the autistic and so on. Yet any change in the relationship between men and women also changes these hidden relationships. Failing to notice that can make us unjust in the way Barthes describes.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

There's always a place "elsewhere" for power to shift.

Or powerlessness.

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, I get it already. Don´t worry, I´ll never be serious again.

[(Anonymous)]

You've always said how you think women are less aggressive, so the world would be better off if run by them. I'm not buying it.

As Chris Rock said, "every woman got some other woman at her work that's out to get her."

Women are so overly sensitive that they end up thinking more people hate them than really do, and end up in more conflicts than men as a result. My female co-workers are always coming up to me and saying things like.. "now, that woman is crazy," or "i'm gettin sick of her mess," etc.

[jermynsavile.livejournal.com]

I recognise the phenomenum that Barthes describes. My problem with it is reflected in the discussion above. As long as we identify "binaries" and "power" in such broad terms (gender, race etc) we will get exactly the result Barthes describes. Some of your differentiations above break things down a little but the categories are still so wide as to be almost meaningless. I keep thinking "all", "most", "some"?

Difficult though it is I think we should concentrate on building a groundwork that supports equitable relationships between people as individuals and not spend our time trying to put right perceived wrongs (particularly as wrongs against the dead can never be put right by the living). We should also be clear about what we mean by equality and what degree of equality we aspire to - currently power is hardly evenly distributed even within the broader categories of gender and race.

[kumakouji.livejournal.com]

A monk asked Joshu: "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?"

Joshu answered: 無

"Has a dog Buddha-nature?
This is the most serious question of all.
If you say yes or no,
You lose your own Buddha-nature."

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I don't really care what Chris Rock says. The stats are here (http://www.unece.org/stats/gender/genpols/keyinds/crime/perps.htm).

"Women comprise a small minority of all convicted criminals, constituting around 15 per cent of convicted criminals in most of the ECE countries according to 1996/1998 figures. While women are more likely to commit non-violent crimes, such as theft and economic crimes (such as cheque forgery and illegal credit card use), or resort to violence in self-defence, men commit the majority of violent crimes, according to the Fourth UN Survey of Crime Trends and Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (1986-1990) referred to in Women and Men in Europe and North America (2000).

"In most ECE countries, fewer than 1 in 10 assaults are committed by women, as said by the same report. For both women and men in most countries, convictions for assault, i.e. physical attack, comprise less than 20 per cent of all convictions, with few exceptions. The most violent crime, homicide, is one of the rarest crimes committed by both men and women. In general, close to 90 per cent of all homicides are committed by men, with the exception of Canada, Hungary, Latvia and the United States, where women account for between 14 and 23 per cent, according to official figures from 1980, 1990, and 1998."

I've always thought it one of the most absurd uses of the equality of opportunity idea (which has all sorts of problems in itself -- I'm much more interested in actual outcomes than theoretical opportunities) that even negative phenomena like violent crime are supposed to be equally open to men and women. Why tar women with this brush, when they're far, far ahead of men in their refusal of violence as a solution?

[eclectiktronik.livejournal.com]

Here are a few pointers relating to the above, if anyone wants to look some of the matters in more detail they could do worse than read a bit of Nietzsche, who had a lot to say about 'valuing', and notions of 'truth'.

re: Point 1: Nietzsche, in 1886, told us that we pursue knowledge insofar as to support a metaphysical position, an idea of how we want things to be.

Generally an automatic process to us, but problems come when people dress this up as the result of some 'objective ' pure' methodology of 'discovery' of a reality we assume to be existing separately from us. Firstly because he rejects the existence of a 'fact-value distinction'. There can't be any value-free scrutinizing of the world, since valuers derive their values from the culture of which they are members. sometimes these values are so deeply instilled in us, we aren't aware of having them as values! we create them, and place them on things as 'labels' as individuals or more commonly, as societies.

re: Point 2: it seems like there is a 'will to truth' as a human drive, but even truth is subjective. It is enough to mention the idea that if you believe something to be true, then it is, even if it is so for you alone.

re: point 15 (=16!) See 'On the old and new law tables ', Nietzsche, F, 'Also sprach zarathustra'. Here Nietzsche warns us of the dangers of assuming the permanence of value systems and meanings. He gives a nice analogy : in summer the bridge (representing values) is firmly fixed above the river below, seems like it will always be so. seems like a 'permanent natural order'.

When winter comes, the river becomes a torrent and all things thus reach a state of flux; the bridge (metaphor for value/meaning systems) is washed away, it becomes nothing. Hence, who would now cling to the old certainties it represented? only a fool.

....
Ben.

I can´t believe I have to say this, but:

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

It´s a statistic fact that men take violence to the outside world, but women take it out on themselves; crime stats may be lower for women, but suicide rates, self harm and anorexia are far higher.

And damaging yourself might be nicer for everyone else, it is still damaging someone, and that is wrong.

It doesn´t make women any less violent, either, just because they are expected to repress it because being visibly violent is not feminine. Denying that women are also violent is encouraging repression and self harm, which is also wrong.

We are all humans, we are all good and bad, and the only good solution is healthy expression as opposed to acting it, so that I might tell you how angry you make me without repressing it, and without actually taking an icepick to your head or my own. As a bonus, I´ll get to keep my vagina. See what I mean?

[electricwitch.livejournal.com]

PS: Statistics are also severely skewed, as a lot of crimes involving women are not reported because men feel it is emasculating to admit to being abused by a woman.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Barthes' lecture very much draws on this part of Nietzsche. In fact, it's amazing how many of his generation were still drawing on N's incredibly rich legacy -- Foucault, Derrida, Lacan. It's also amazing how little Nietzsche has been taken on board in the mainstream of internet debate. Especially this matter of the cultural framing (often unconscious) of valuation.

One thing puzzles me, though. How can subjectivity be meaningfully meaningful when objectivity is generally declared not to exist, even as a possibility? How could we retain a use for the idea of subjectivity when we don't believe its defining binary opposite, objectivity, can exist? Or is it enough that some things could be described (oxymoronically) as "relatively objective"?

This is, in a sense, the same as the question of how the universe might be meaningless if God doesn't exist. Surely if you remove God, you remove the idea that God should be the source of meaning, and therefore you remove that sort of theological meaninglessness too?

But of course Nietzsche didn't say God didn't exist. He said God was dead, which is quite a different thing, and allows all sorts of existentialist nonsense to rush into the god-shaped hole.