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jj:
there comes a point in a discussion in a real pub where people have been drinking for a long time and the thread of what was being talked about starts to dissolve.
it's curious to see the same pattern happening in an imaginary one. presumably without the drinking part.
there's an experience of these debates that one can appeal to. one can know something of that general experience without claiming to know what's happening in the heads of everyone who posts, what particularities of individual histories condition them. that's because even a debate in a pub is a social phenomenon that's knowable at a variety of registers. these registers are not mutually exclusive.
the idea that to know a social phenomenon means that you have to know all the complexity of the individual experiences that pass through it, that are impacted by it, operates from a viewpoint that claims to have a definition of "expertise" that is not outlined (positions like this are strongest when they're not outlined) that is more capacious and therefore better than other forms of expertise. without that, there'd be no basis for saying anything about the "experts"...so the claim that there's something odd about the "experts" in this debate follows from the same logic it criticizes.
the content of that claim is that to know a social phenomenon is to know all the individual experiences. well, if that's the case then no-one can know anything about the social world without knowing everything about the social world. in which case all discussions are shuffling about arbitrary factoids and debates are shaped not by how these factoids are shuffled but by claims about the nature of the shuffling.
this sort of nonsense works best when it comes wrapped up in the accompanying claim that all positions but your own are patronizing.
this typically works best when the people you pull it on are drunk.
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to keep with the idea of drunken argument, now i'll do the same kind of thing i was just criticizing. discussions in a bar--real or imaginary--that exclude information from outside operate on the basis of assumptions which tip into prejudice structures (which is a technical term that doesn't mean what you think but i can't come up with a better one--dispositions and the images of the world that accompany them--ideas or pictures that order your view of aspects of the world that are distant from your immediate experience, that simplify the world and fit it into your overall aesthetic)....what can be interesting about drunken conversations concerning phenomena--o i dunno--the intertwining of past and present as it plays out across the american class structure (which you can talk about without knowing all experiences of all individuals who are impacted upon by that structure); the way good ole amurican racism--which has a history (which you can talk about) that was always from the start histories---the way racism has intertwined with class across the history of the american class structure; and what might be done to alter how that class structure effects those who are disadvantaged by it. reparations in this context gets for some folk anyway turned into a metaphor for addressing class.
for others, that shift cannot happen because they don't organize their images of the world in terms of collective processes like class.
this is not without interest because without claiming to stand entirely outside of things, you can pick out these images and do things with them. stick pins in em, put them in a row on a corkboard, look at them, notice patterns. then you can say: i see a pattern...if you're more conservative you tend to avoid social processes and their effects and instead prefer to pin the effects of these processes on some individual characteristic like virtue or lack thereof. whether the way that gets coded does or does not slide into racism is an aesthetic matter. or maybe a decorum thing. or maybe it's just a function of not being quite drunk enough to say what you really think.
to get there, you don't need to make arguments about the content of what other folk say--you just need to arrange how what they say is organized so that you can look at it. when you talk about what you see, all you're doing is describing a pattern. it's not a claim to higher expertise because you could do the same thing. anyone can. it just has to occur to them that there's more than one way to talk about talking about things.
anyway, in that context, folk also tend to normalize the overall system. at the limit, there is no social system, just a bunch of people who bounce around brownian motion style, their trajectories a function of specific gravity (virtue)...
this is kinda interesting to see---again---because it is the split between conservatives and others; this kind of choice leads to very different ways of grouping information because they reflect quite different aesthetics.
once upon a time this thread offered a variety of positions, but now it is approaching last call and the statements are getting simpler and simpler. but it's good i suppose that folk show up on their way home from other things who are not also drunk and who can look at what's happening. happens all the time.
well it's getting late and i have to be up early in the morning. don't want to be hung over.
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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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