From: Greg Jordan (jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 01 2003 - 10:12:56 MST
On Tue, 1 Apr 2003, Damien Broderick wrote:
> One problem here is in discerning the limits of `political' as a framing
> adjective. Feminist critique, for all its excesses, has shown convincingly
> the ideological forces skewing, constraining, even largely *creating* the
> ways most men and women in the Western 1950s, say, understood what it is to
> be a male or a female human. This construction was largely invisible to
> those involved; it was *just how the world is*. If you were a black man or
> woman, you had further layers of ideological shaping simultaneously imposed
> *on* you and internalized *inside* you. That's ideology: not what political
> opinions you happen to find fashionable, but the immense social
> constraining and enabling powers of discourse.
A lot of this is pretty old. A lot has been done since then. Postmodernism
got off track assuming arbitrary relation between signed & signifier
(foundation of poststructuralism). Relation is not arbitrary, but
historical (determined, probablistic, random, or chaotic).
New language theory can place itself in an evolutionary context. Combined
with behavioral memetics, we can now see how everything is getting
assembled, disassembled, and reassembled by various natural
processes. It's bigger than social construction, and without the paranoid
mysticism of the trancendent agent (e.g., "discourse").
gej
resourcesoftheworld.org
jordan@chuma.cas.usf.edu
>
> Of what?
>
> Oh well, here's a bit from THE ARCHITECTURE OF BABEL. I probably posted
> this last time around, but it might provide some chewy nuggets:
>
> ============
>
> A discourse, in general terms, is a kind of local communication field which
> arises in the unexplored linguistic gap between the realms of langue and
> parole. Discourse, that is, has some of the characteristics of a language
> system, as a competence at a high level of abstraction, which yet arises
> out of the performative speech acts which mediate the day-to-day exercise
> of power and knowledge. Perhaps each discourse, in as much as it can be
> specified, is a slice through the polysemous jangle-jungle of conflicting
> meanings which become attached (through conflicts, and the pressure of
> novelties of every kind) to each human utterance or inscription.
>
> Let us look briefly at some of the typical moves in that variety of
> discourse theory which is an offshoot of Althusserian Marxism, as discussed
> in a survey by Diane Macdonell (1986).
>
> Typically enough, Macdonell's attempted redemption of Althusser ascribes
> the relativist, constructivist commonplaces of discourse theory to what she
> calls his `radical breakthrough' (p. 13). Suddenly, after the 1969 essay
> `Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', intellectuals in the French
> Communist Party were urged to see that superstructural social phenomena
> like families, religions and education (now `ISAs') might be as causally
> significant as brute `relations of economic production'. Is it unfair of me
> to belittle Althusser's discovery as a commonplace? Has not theory, under
> his influence, opened our understanding of the self to unprecedented voids
> of uncertainty? Not altogether unprecedented. Consider that much-debunked
> falsificationist Karl Popper, on the topic of subjectivity:
>
> "It seems to me of considerable importance that we are not born as
> selves, but that we have to learn that we are selves; in fact we have to
> learn to be selves....
>
> "I suggest that a consciousness of self begins to develop through the
> medium of other persons: just as we learn to see ourselves in a mirror, so
> the child becomes conscious of himself by sensing his reflection in the
> mirror of other people's consciousness of himself." (Popper and Eccles,
> 1977, pp. 109-10)
>
> Popper's figure of the mirror is not a sly appropriation of one of theory's
> favorite tropes. As he points out, it goes back at least to Adam Smith
> (1759: The Theory of Moral Sentiments) who `puts forward the idea that
> society is a "mirror" which enables the individual to see and to "think of
> his own character, of the propriety or demerit of his own sentiments and
> conduct, of the beauty or deformity of his own mind", which suggests that
> if it were "possible that a human creature could grow up to manhood in some
> solitary place, without any communication with his own species" then he
> could not develop a self' (cited in Popper and Eccles, p. 111).
>
> While not precisely gleaming with dark Lacanian opacity, this bourgeois
> classic is not very far from the celebrated entry via Alice's Looking Glass
> to the Symbolic Order, and Althusser's construction of subjecthood via the
> process of `hailing' or `interpellation' by another.
>
> The difference, of course, lies in the sustained Althusserian attack on any
> `human nature' which might be considered necessary to underpin the
> effectiveness of any process of interpellation. As Terry Eagleton says, it
> is ineffective to baptize a badger (Eagleton, 1983, p. 118; he is
> discussing Austin and illocutionary acts). In much the same way, it is also
> ineffective to interpellate a chair, or even a computer (although often
> enough I find myself doing so). Althusser, of course, was aware of this
> flaw in his case and attempted to correct it by what seems to me
> self-evidently a vacuous re-definition:
>
> "[I]deology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects. As
> ideology is eternal, I must now suppress the temporal form in which I have
> presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already
> interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear
> that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects,
> which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are
> always-already subjects." (Althusser, 1984, pp. 49-50)
>
> The sole sense which can be made of this - Althusser says it `might seem
> paradoxical' (p. 50), and he is right - is that individuals are genetically
> predisposed to take the imprint of culture. We are `primed' to be
> interpellated. Now as it happens (it could have been otherwise; we might
> have been social insects) the kind of pre-formation this is lends itself to
> the experience of inner consciousness, self-motivation, whether this be
> valorized as `individual initiative' or stigmatized as `original sin',
> `bourgeois illusion', or the clamor of Maya.
>
>
> ...the books mentioned, now all rather old:
>
> Althusser, Louis (1984) Essays on Ideology, London: Verso
>
> Eagleton, Terry (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Blackwell
>
> [and see also Eagleton, Terry (1991) Ideology: An Introduction, London: Verso]
>
> Macdonell, Diane (1986) Theories of Discourse: An Introduction, Oxford:
> Blackwell
>
> Popper, Karl and John Eccles (1977) The Self and its Brain: An Argument for
> Interactionism, Berlin: Springer International
>
> ================
>
> That's obviously not intended as a substantive reply to either Hal or Lee,
> but as a hint of where one might need to look for further elaborated
> discussions.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
>
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