roachboy

i started thinking about this seriously (again) while i was putting up the thread about berlusconi's decision to deploy the italian military around the country as part of a campaign against "crime" and it's neo-fascist synonym in the "illegal immigrant"....

we are embedded creatures--we operate within frameworks and we move with them. these frameworks are, arguably, linguistic in their basic structure (in the way and to the extent that memory is, that it relies on syntax and operative theories concerning category to order itself, to become ordered)...ideology is maybe a set of social rules that shape how we interact with what we order in real time--and what we order is what we experience--so ideology is an ontological framework, in that it conditions subject-verb-object relations, which is a way of thinking about how we experience stuff in the world, a way of organizing it in statements about it.

so subject-verb-object relations are shaped by second-order rules that operate by shaping and disappear into what is shaped. in this way, ideology becomes like the perception/projection of space or extension.

but if that's true, then our experience would shift as these rules shift.
it would be a real *problem* saying much coherent about an adequately dominant ideology.
there are ways to limit this--even in a pseudo-democracy like the american, the fact that there are a number of political positions which jockey for influence means that to some extent it's possible to relativize most ideological frameworks.

but at the same time, if the above is true, then it would follow that what we understand to be "normal" would drift as the rules which define it drift.
and that as adaptive creatures, we would have difficulty sorting out what conditions are and are not normal, what conditions are and are not acceptable--because anything we experience that can be assimilated into the "normal" is just that.

this possibility is maybe why ethicists like the idea of some god so much--it enables them to argue that there are transcendent norms that come from somewhere that limit the drift.

but it seems to me that anything--at all--can be integrated into this floating notion of the normal if the theater which stages it is adequately dense or compelling.

history doesn't help with this because typically the factoids that it uses for collage-production are ordered around a notion of an outcome, and so everything one way or another leads to that, which effectively evacuates the space for choosing.

if that is the case, then our adaptability is in a sense a danger, even as it enables us to function. if that is the case, a single dominant ideology is a real problem, in that it reduces the possibility for relativization and entails adaptation to ANYTHING that is presented as part of the environment, as routine, as normal.

how do you figure out what is politically normal, what is acceptable?
what do you appeal to and why?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite