Einherjar86
Active Member
A sadly accurate account:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/o...-of-the-english-major.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/o...-of-the-english-major.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0
Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week
- Thread starter Ender Rises
- Start date
Jimmy... Dead.
contemplative curmudgeon
Einherjar86
Active Member
Coincidentally, Dak was explaining some of this to me a few days ago. 
I just want to say something about my position on intentionality and what in literary studies is called the "intentional fallacy," and how it applies to race and gender issues currently occupying the news. The intentional fallacy is basically the contention that an author's purported original message can't dictate the worth or value of a literary text. As Wimsatt and Beardsley put it: "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."
Now, how does this apply to race and gender? On Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow explained that the general thrust to define marriage as between a man and woman demeans the efforts of gays and lesbians who try to marry. One of the conservatives on the show said that he couldn't "let that comment go," and took offense that Maddow was calling him a bigot. Maddow then countered that she wasn't calling anyone a bigot.
I feel that this is a common misunderstanding among conservatives and, more simply, non-academic persons: that general opinions, positions, or even statements can be demeaning even if the individual doesn't intend them that way. Conservatives are often so driven to extend racism or intolerance to individual actors, thus taking it personally when someone says that the effort to define marriage as between a man and a woman demeans gay marriage.
That isn't at all what Maddow was saying or what any intellectual is saying. They're identifying systematic racism, or systematic intolerance, not bigotry that can be traced back to individual actors. I know Dak has often made the argument that these systems are comprised of individuals, but I don't think that matters here. People often say things without intending them to be intolerant, but that doesn't mean the statements themselves aren't intolerant or racist. We need to understand that language operates at a level beyond the visceral utterance of the individual, and that a comment can be systematically racist or demeaning without being intended as such. In this way, if we follow the intentional fallacy, the value of a statement cannot be reduced to what its speaker intended.
We also, I have to concede, cannot call specific people bigots for iterating a statement of systematic intolerance; but we should acknowledge that a bigoted attitude still prevails throughout our cultural unconscious.
I just want to say something about my position on intentionality and what in literary studies is called the "intentional fallacy," and how it applies to race and gender issues currently occupying the news. The intentional fallacy is basically the contention that an author's purported original message can't dictate the worth or value of a literary text. As Wimsatt and Beardsley put it: "the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art."
Now, how does this apply to race and gender? On Meet the Press, Rachel Maddow explained that the general thrust to define marriage as between a man and woman demeans the efforts of gays and lesbians who try to marry. One of the conservatives on the show said that he couldn't "let that comment go," and took offense that Maddow was calling him a bigot. Maddow then countered that she wasn't calling anyone a bigot.
I feel that this is a common misunderstanding among conservatives and, more simply, non-academic persons: that general opinions, positions, or even statements can be demeaning even if the individual doesn't intend them that way. Conservatives are often so driven to extend racism or intolerance to individual actors, thus taking it personally when someone says that the effort to define marriage as between a man and a woman demeans gay marriage.
That isn't at all what Maddow was saying or what any intellectual is saying. They're identifying systematic racism, or systematic intolerance, not bigotry that can be traced back to individual actors. I know Dak has often made the argument that these systems are comprised of individuals, but I don't think that matters here. People often say things without intending them to be intolerant, but that doesn't mean the statements themselves aren't intolerant or racist. We need to understand that language operates at a level beyond the visceral utterance of the individual, and that a comment can be systematically racist or demeaning without being intended as such. In this way, if we follow the intentional fallacy, the value of a statement cannot be reduced to what its speaker intended.
We also, I have to concede, cannot call specific people bigots for iterating a statement of systematic intolerance; but we should acknowledge that a bigoted attitude still prevails throughout our cultural unconscious.
Dak
mentat
The video was pretty funny and sadly more accurate than like 95% of what passes for economic punditry on US news networks.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I realize this may only be interesting to literary students, but anyway...
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fb67c556-d36e-11e2-b3ff-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2XjQAXs9P
http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/fb67c556-d36e-11e2-b3ff-00144feab7de.html#ixzz2XjQAXs9P
Dak
mentat
Well it's interesting to me as an extension of a larger process: The digitization of life.
Some conspiracy sites suggest that there were civilizations in the far past that reached the same level of technological development (or higher), and that we have little record of them (and what record we have is hidden, hence the conspiracy angle) because everything was digitized, and harddrives just aren't going to last as long as stone structures or cuneiform or whatever other archaic methods you can think of.
So when some civilization crushing incident happens, all record of the last 300 years is erased. Some castles might be left standing or something.
Some conspiracy sites suggest that there were civilizations in the far past that reached the same level of technological development (or higher), and that we have little record of them (and what record we have is hidden, hence the conspiracy angle) because everything was digitized, and harddrives just aren't going to last as long as stone structures or cuneiform or whatever other archaic methods you can think of.
So when some civilization crushing incident happens, all record of the last 300 years is erased. Some castles might be left standing or something.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I met with some other grad fellows in the program today and discussed the topic. It's really interesting, and one of the fellows (he's a fourth-year) has actually experimented with some of the software. There are copyright issues for contemporary literatures, but hopefully in the future we'll find ways around that.
It raises plenty of pertinent issues, for instance: how does the quantitative approach alter what we consider "reading"? how does it affect authorial intention? how does it assess information, and what exactly is information? how does it disrupt generic conventions and categories? and how does it impact the field of literary analysis in general? Lots of things worth considering.
It raises plenty of pertinent issues, for instance: how does the quantitative approach alter what we consider "reading"? how does it affect authorial intention? how does it assess information, and what exactly is information? how does it disrupt generic conventions and categories? and how does it impact the field of literary analysis in general? Lots of things worth considering.
Jimmy... Dead.
contemplative curmudgeon
Einherjar86
Active Member
My friend has actually run Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations through the program, and it turned back some interesting results. You would think the word "word" would be prominent throughout the PI, but it actually fluctuates indirectly with the word "sense."
Matthew Jockers, a literary scholar, has (if I recall correctly) run Moby-Dick through the program multiple times, using something specific called "topic modelling." As it turns out (according to the software), Moby-Dick is only something like 10% about whaling, 50% about seafaring, 35% about homo-eroticism, and 5% about monomania. Of course, all by itself this information doesn't tell us anything useful about the novel, but it can provide us with very helpful information if we then go and actually read the novel.
The program doesn't read the book; it takes the book as a "bag of words" (a phrase we were using yesterday) and sifts through its contents, taking word counts, word proximity, etc. From there, it generates topics based on clusters of words. So, for instance, if in a Hemingway novel you get the words "battle," "fight," and "gun" turning up within close proximity to one another, the program simulates a topic for "war" and categorizes the words accordingly.
Such a process can't stand in for reading though (yet). Moby-Dick might only be 5% monomania by word count; but as readers of the novel know, Ahab's monomania is what drives the narrative. There would be no seafaring at all if it weren't for Ahab's obsession. So the software isn't designed to take the place of reading, but rather to help us sift through the vast collection of texts and better direct our reading.
Matthew Jockers, a literary scholar, has (if I recall correctly) run Moby-Dick through the program multiple times, using something specific called "topic modelling." As it turns out (according to the software), Moby-Dick is only something like 10% about whaling, 50% about seafaring, 35% about homo-eroticism, and 5% about monomania. Of course, all by itself this information doesn't tell us anything useful about the novel, but it can provide us with very helpful information if we then go and actually read the novel.
The program doesn't read the book; it takes the book as a "bag of words" (a phrase we were using yesterday) and sifts through its contents, taking word counts, word proximity, etc. From there, it generates topics based on clusters of words. So, for instance, if in a Hemingway novel you get the words "battle," "fight," and "gun" turning up within close proximity to one another, the program simulates a topic for "war" and categorizes the words accordingly.
Such a process can't stand in for reading though (yet). Moby-Dick might only be 5% monomania by word count; but as readers of the novel know, Ahab's monomania is what drives the narrative. There would be no seafaring at all if it weren't for Ahab's obsession. So the software isn't designed to take the place of reading, but rather to help us sift through the vast collection of texts and better direct our reading.
Einherjar86
Active Member
Just stumbled across this:
http://symposium-magazine.com/why-write-the-history-of-capitalism-louis-hyman/
http://symposium-magazine.com/why-write-the-history-of-capitalism-louis-hyman/
Dak
mentat
SentinelSlain
Suck my joined date.
- Nov 21, 2007
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some blonde car garage receptionist I dated in Bradford told me that even though she accepted her freedoms as a western white girl and believed in them to be right, if she had a relationship with one of the guys she met in the African country she'd volunteered in, she would go along with their customs due to cultural relativism (and her romanticising it and being quite a simple person). She even said she would allow her (theoretical) daughter to undergo FGM / clitoris removal.
I'm sorry but this is the point where your wish for a life free of political and ideological conflict and yes *NO RACISM* just leaves you an utter simpleton. Women like her are basically like driftwood with a sprinkling of pretence on the top. She's a racist bitch for saying that her child should get its genitals mutilated, partially, ultimately, because it's black.
Women wont like this post, but whatever. People who try and embarrass you out of talking about this stuff through reference to male insecurity or whatever (because FGM and Koro are clearly totally unrelated to male insecurity) but you should just stand up to all of that rubbish and say the truth.
White women are nearly always a little bit like this. Like this was the extreme version of these dumb views. The only reason for her extreme cultural relativism is the socialization of "being white" in the decades she has lived (all two of them) and the location she was at. Basically, white women are oversexed, hypocrites, incapable of defending the freedoms that allow them to live their lives in the manner which they choose and are overly romantic about other cultures.
I'm sorry but this is the point where your wish for a life free of political and ideological conflict and yes *NO RACISM* just leaves you an utter simpleton. Women like her are basically like driftwood with a sprinkling of pretence on the top. She's a racist bitch for saying that her child should get its genitals mutilated, partially, ultimately, because it's black.
Women wont like this post, but whatever. People who try and embarrass you out of talking about this stuff through reference to male insecurity or whatever (because FGM and Koro are clearly totally unrelated to male insecurity) but you should just stand up to all of that rubbish and say the truth.
White women are nearly always a little bit like this. Like this was the extreme version of these dumb views. The only reason for her extreme cultural relativism is the socialization of "being white" in the decades she has lived (all two of them) and the location she was at. Basically, white women are oversexed, hypocrites, incapable of defending the freedoms that allow them to live their lives in the manner which they choose and are overly romantic about other cultures.
Einherjar86
Active Member
What a horrible context in which to discuss his purportedly humanitarian ideal of providing goods/services for the one going without. I wonder if he even knows what the Colosseum was for...
Female circumcision should be abandoned not because it's a "savage, culturally backwards idea," but because research has shown that it poses a measurable health threat to those who must suffer it. Your ex seems to be making an effort to acknowledge cultural value. While her belief in female circumcision may be misplaced, her intention seems to be that other cultures are not qualitatively better or worse. You, on the other hand, seem to genuinely think that we can evaluate different cultures, eventually ranking them in terms of "best" to "worst." This is untrue.
Cultural relativism shouldn't be an excuse for blindly participating in cultural practices; but these practices aren't to be condemned or abandoned specifically due to their cultural worth, nor should we extend the scientific research on certain practices to evaluative judgments on whether or not a culture is "good" or "bad." Cultural relativism means refraining from qualifying another culture as definitively worse than our own. Good, bad, better, worse, etc. are terms that can only be weighed from within a cultural framework. Female circumcision might be a scientifically unhealthy practice, but this doesn't mean that a culture that practices it is definitively worse for someone born into that culture than, say, Western liberal democracy would be.
Einherjar86
Active Member
What a horrible context in which to discuss his purportedly humanitarian ideal of providing goods/services for the one going without. I wonder if he even knows what the Colosseum was for...
Female circumcision should be abandoned not because it's a "savage, culturally backwards idea," but because research has shown that it poses a measurable health threat to those who must suffer it. Your ex seems to be making an effort to acknowledge cultural value. While her belief in female circumcision may be misplaced, her intention seems to be that other cultures are not qualitatively better or worse. You, on the other hand, seem to genuinely think that we can evaluate different cultures, eventually ranking them in terms of "best" to "worst." This is untrue.
Cultural relativism shouldn't be an excuse for blindly participating in cultural practices; but these practices aren't to be condemned or abandoned specifically due to their cultural worth, nor should we extend the scientific research on certain practices to evaluative judgments on whether or not a culture is "good" or "bad." Cultural relativism means refraining from qualifying another culture as definitively worse than our own. Good, bad, better, worse, etc. are terms that can only be weighed from within a cultural framework. Female circumcision might be a scientifically unhealthy practice, but this doesn't mean that a culture that practices it is definitively worse for someone born into that culture than, say, Western liberal democracy would be.
Dak
mentat
Cythraul
Active Member
- Dec 10, 2003
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So does the claim "Female circumcision should be abandoned because it poses a measurable health threat to those who undergo it" hold true across all cultures or only some cultures and not others?
Why's that?
So is it bad to engage in unhealthy practices or not? If it is, then why can't somebody say that one culture is worse than another insofar as the one engages in unhealthy practices that the other doesn't engage in?
Dak
mentat
Einherjar86
Active Member
I would say certainly; but I'm speaking from my perspective. I think it should be abandoned. I do not claim to possess the cross-cultural tools to be able to convince a member of a different culture that I'm right. Claiming that a specific practice is harmful does not translate into the corresponding claim that a culture practicing it is thereby less valuable, or not as good.
Words like "good" and "bad" don't trace back to objective qualities. When I say "This beer is good," it means something entirely different than "He's a good man." "Good" can only be appreciated within the bounds of cultural (and syntactic) relativity. That's just the nature of the word. Show me what is always, without exception, good, and I'll show you an ideologue.
What does "bad" mean? It might be "bad" in a bodily sense; but who are we to presume that a culture practicing female circumcision places any worth or value whatsoever on the body? Perhaps we believe we do a "good" deed by extracting a young woman from such a barbaric culture, only to find that she kills herself days later out of shame or hopelessness, because her system of knowing the world has been irreparably shattered. When we presume that we can measure cultural worth based on purportedly Western, scientific views of good and bad, we establish a dangerous precedent whereby we view ourselves as qualitatively superior. I can't stand that.
Put more succinctly: we cannot definitively say that a specific culture is better or worse in any general sense. We can only say that specific cultures are better or worse for me/him/her/etc.
Cythraul
Active Member
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But it seems like you want to subscribe to some kind of relativism where good is relativized to different cultures. But this is, in a significant sense, a kind of moral objectivism. I take it that the real contrast to relativism would be universalism, I guess (I am not sure what the best term is here.) If you want to deny that terms like "good," "bad," etc. latch onto any objective properties in the world, you might as well go the whole hog and deny the reality of moral facts entirely rather than stopping at relativism.
That's right, but I'm having trouble seeing how this example supports your view.
You're conflating two different things here, namely, (1) the question of whether there is something that is objectively good, and (2) the question of whether there is something that is always, without exception, good. You can answer in the affirmative to (1) while answering in the negative to (2). The question of objectivity concerns something like whether good is something mind-independent. This does not necessarily have anything to do with the concern over whether anything is always good. If I think there are some things that are objectively good, I need only believe, minimally, that some things are sometimes good and that their being good is independent of whether I take them to be good.
Maybe there is a culture that doesn't. But what does that prove? It doesn't show that they're right not to; it just shows that they're different from us.
Somebody who denies moral relativism need not maintain that wresting somebody from the only culture they've ever known is the right thing to do all things considered.
Even if our acting like moral universalists had bad consequences like what you describe above, that would not support relativism. It's entirely consistent with the claim that female genital mutilation is just flat out wrong. And anyway, at the purely conceptual level, relativism definitely does not buy you the tolerance you seem to prize so much.
SentinelSlain
Suck my joined date.
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I'm sure I've criticised cultural relativism some time before on here. The last time I kind of got the same response, a definition of the concept with the implication that I didn't have an understanding of it.
I really don't see why cultural relativism is so widely accepted among people. It satiates people with insecure identities that relate to say, post-colonial nationalism or their religious identity. I don't think it does much in the way of good though, or at least other than that, if you regard that as being particularly important.
I want to respond with quotes and my comments because it would take me time to summarise the same point I'm about to make.
Bernays:
""There is no word in the English language," it says, "whose meaning has been so sadly distorted as
the word 'propaganda.' The change took place mainly during the late war when the term took on a
decidedly sinister complexion.
"If you turn to the Standard Dictionary, you will find that the word was applied to a congregation or society of cardinals for the care and oversight of foreign missions which was instituted at Rome in
the year 1627. It was applied also to the College of the Propaganda at Rome that was founded by Pope Urban VIII, for the education of the missionary priests. Hence, in later years the word came to be applied to any institution or scheme for propagating a doctrine or system."
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an
important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society."
Bernays, E, 1928
Now, as for Western universalism, is this really a 'problem' as such, or is it really a sign of the times and arguably a great accomplishment?
To quote:
"Our time is the first in which it has been possible to take a literally universal view of human history, because this is the first time in which the whole human race, all round the globe, has come within sight of coalescing into a single society." He goes on to mention this situation's precedents, through historical unification through Empire. "The issue between universalism and nationalism is one of life and death for the human race."
Arnold Toynbee, 1963
Now, I think I have brought some backing for at two proposals. First, that culture, popular opinion and political trends in a country are ultimately decided by an elite few. Whilst showing respect for those opinions and cultural trends (say the rise of Islamism after a few decades of flirting with secularism or something) might, on the surface, appear to be a benevolent decision, I would argue that it is most directly beneficial to the ruling elite in the country, both the official political elite and perhaps religious elite but also the more veiled sources of influence.
As the countries we call the West moved away from dogma, authoritarianism and made economic progress, the culture definitely changed. Witches are no longer killed by fire and women aren't dunked in lakes for gossiping. The Catholic Church has lost large amounts of its power and influence in various parts of the West and ultimately this is deemed to be good by progressives.
Now, view these changes from the point of view of an Islamist, they weren't truly positive changes. More to the point, they probably aren't from the point of view of someone living in Byzantium, if they could see the West today. There isn't a small reservation were nazis are allowed to kill a quota of Jews and Roma to satiate their fury and preserve their cultural integrity and Germanic pride.
