Our Situation

I really enjoyed this class for giving the opportunity to explore the limits of what is constructed and what is real. We are to an extent distant from 'the real' but we also interact with the real world outside of ourselves. What is most fascinating about our situation is that we socially construct our world, not in the sense that we literally create it, but that we collectively decide in a complex litany of conscious and unconscious action in every moment our entire understanding of the world.

Our understanding is no doubt strongly influenced by the real world, but so much of the world we live in is constructed. Maybe, to give my metaphysical view of constructivism a moral value, if all the participants in a construct understood exactly what in the world is constructed we could all decide together what sort of world we want to construct.

A great project I hope someone undertakes is defining the limits of what is constructed and what is reality,

Marine Le Pen & Constructing an Enemy

We thought we had it bad in the US with conservatives vilifying 'Mexicans' and those who believe in illegal immigrants human rights. Marine Le Pen got almost 20 percent of the vote in France with her inflammatory anti-Muslim/anti-immigrant rhetoric. So how is it France has got itself in this mess?

I don't think it is at all unfair to use a dose of psychoanalysis here. What's changed in France? Economic conditions. The government is unable to force capital to play nicely in France and moreover new neoliberal policies instituted by previous governments has destroyed France's ability to weather the financial crisis. So then we have the Front National with it's old school right wing politics turning the issues around; it's not sacred France that has done wrong, it's the immigrants and the EU and everyone except the bankers and capitalists who actually caused this crisis.

In effect, Le Pen and her party are playing the old fascist game of point the finger at the Other, instead of Greedy Jews stealing from the Honest Christian [insert nationality here] it's Radical Fundamentalist Muslims (which are all of them) attacking the Sacred, Secular, and Free [insert nation here].

Q&A Nine Question Two

Q: Does feminism today need to critique the truth seeking mechanisms of a modern society ostensibly sympathetic with the aims of feminism?

A: Alright, that is a bit of a leading question, but really: in a society where no one would ever claim to hate or oppress women why do we need a special advocate for women's interests?

Like the mid-century Marxist/Feminists we've been discussing in class who described the 'Happy-Homemaker syndrome,' its clear that the face value of a word almost never reflects it's total function. It's absolutely silly to suggest that because everyone says they have the best interests of women taken to heart that they actually do, or that their understanding of the interests of women is at all acceptable.

It's sort of like a little child who is told to apologise after doing wrong. When you tell them they where not sincere they might say that they said the words. Like people who now have taken the interests of women to heart may have said the words, but there is still an undercurrent of reluctance and misunderstanding.

Q&A Nine Question One

Q: Can a critique of a social order be the creative foundation of the replacement of that order?

A: I doubt that it can be the foundation of a replacement or a paradigmatic shift in an order. A critique, or a certain understanding, of a situation is necessarily embedded within the event that a critique is evaluating, a critique seems like it would be fundamentally involved with the event thus limiting its purview to engaging with what is the nature of the event.

A critique may open up the space for a fundamental departure from that order, but this is a step to creativity not towards a unified theory of anything.

I realize I'm being quite vague here with almost all of the terms used; imagine them in a context such as feminism. Feminism has succeed in rallying troops to the cause but has failed to do away with the fundamental antagonisms that created feminist desire in the first place.

Divergent Epistemologies?

There may be come confusion about what constitutes a separate, feminist or other, epistemology. A feminist might try to understand the oppression of women through the way truth gathering and legitimizing mechanisms work in her society. A feminist as a person with unique understanding of the society she is studying and thus able to understand mechanisms as having latent capacities to oppress women.

This is the privileged epistemology state of understanding, the feminist is not in a privileged position because she (or he!) is a certain gender, but rather because they have the advantage of being able to attempt to find truth from a particular conceptual angle. Each different understanding could not be construed as separate epistemology, because many different ways of understanding may be complied in order to access the truth. They all also have to rely on the same fundamental rational operations that make all communication and thought intelligible.

The Ideological Neutrality of Critical Thinking

It seems tempting to view Critical Pedagogy (CP) as an ideologically biased form of Critical Thinking (CT), and even if we agree with the concept of an oppressive class structure existing in society, we still may prefer CT as the purer of the two. If we step back into a historicist's understanding of knowledge and ideology it CP might make some more sense.

CT would innately be committed to an understanding of the world at face value, at ideologies being accepted and rejected in each era based on the strength of their arguments alone and not on context. This is an incomplete view of the world. CT also inclines toward the prevalent atomisation of the consumer and laborer under capitalism, CT makes a more discerning consumer and a laborer more able to deal effectively with his exploitation, but that is the limit of the subjectification reached through CT.

Why Ethics?

We want ethics for a number of reasons, first and foremost, we want society to function. Therefore, we need ethics only in light of wanting society to function. To me this seems like a sufficient enough foundation for ethics, from which we can extrapolate moral principles when confronting a situation involving moral action.

This puts me in a tough spot because I don't think this necessarily leads to animal rights or vegetarianism.