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i dont see things that way, art: worldviews are arguments--discrete elements can (and for me should) be pushed back into the larger schema/schemata that orient them if we are going to talk about those elements--that is how i operate--and i am pretty consistent in this, i think.
we live in a network of arguments, articulated by various institutions (in the big sense, not particular bureacratic entities), which have material correlates, are developed, have histories, etc. you could see them as fictions--for me, that was a heuristic that at one point i found useful and which i now do not find to be so useful.
if any worldview is (explicitly or implicitly) an argument (about how the world is or how it should be) it follows that you can find some to be more persuasive than others, and that dialogue often comes down to a presentation and counterpresentation of positions articulated within different schemata, partly to address the matter at hand, partly to engage the other person in a real dialogue, partly for self-clarification. for me--here at least---if i engage with an issue, i 'll either have or work out a position for myself and write it out--sometimes i am backed away from a position because i find other viewpoints more compelling than the one i started with, other times not.
i become a relativist when i do not engage in an question. or when i do not engage in a conversation.
if i engage, like anyone else, i have a position that i find to be compelling, i have (usually) reasons for finding it so, but i am (usually) willing to put the whole apparatus--the arguments and as much as i can articulate of what orients them--on the table.
what i think triggered your response above is the differing connotations that we spin out of the word pragmatism. i did not mean anything barbed by what i said--i simply mean to link a particular issue (it does not matter here which one) with the narrative(s) one holds about the world one the one hand, and with possibilities for acting on either (if you disagree)....what i meant was that i maintain a basically different view of wages/outsourcing (which are linked here) as a function first of my historian self, and second as a function of the position i occupy which gives me the possibility of acting in a political manner (at the level of argument generation)---if i did not have the latter, it would probably be more difficult to maintain an oppositional position for me. that is all i meant.....
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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