Friday 12 August 2011

Objectivity, where art though? (Probably in Asia).





  • Karen Winnett
    Oh oh..and the other thing on the topic I have to observe too..Cedric and mike,when they analyse with a perspective unpalatable because its "marxist"..people see that,assume they know what is meant,assume its too hard,assume the ideas are going to be dogma (making that trasnmutation we were discussing) and then they just stop listening and start an ad hominem attack or just don't reply...and with you,with any comment about patriarchy it seems to make the same response in some people!Very few people can see where an idea might in fact not BE perosnal,it might address a macro social issue or an entrenched power structure..and so they "fog" it...its actually quite interesting.


    5 minutes ago · · 1 person

  • Jennifer Frances Armstrong Western culture tends to lead to these kinds of misunderstandings more than any other I have encountered. I think it is because Western culture emphasizes the individual to an oftentimes pathological degree. That said, the division you imply between what is objectively "out there" and what could be said to be, as it were "merely" "inside my mind" or, based on "subjective experience" -- that, too is a Western dichotomy. Where it goes wrong is in making it seem as if the macro scale of things was somehow self-justifying -- i.e '"Objective". Oftentimes, the majority of people doing something -- or, indeed, an analysis of how they do things -- does not lead to anything like an understanding of actual objectivity, but rather to a conceptualisation of MASS SUBJECTIVITY. The conceptualisation itself, needless to say, could also be right or wrong.
    3 minutes ago ·

  • Jennifer Frances Armstrong So, just because one imagines oneself to have achieved a divorce from emotion is by no means a guarantee that one has alighted upon objective truth of any sort. In fact, there is no correlation there at all, I think.
    2 minutes ago ·

  • Jennifer Frances Armstrong The fogging of the issue of patriarchy is very common, not least because it is in fact taught BY PATRIARCHY that "women" per se are only able to communicate personal issues. So, what we are encountering here is, in a very material sense, patriarchy's immune defence against a hostile critique.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity