Re: Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion
On Dec 7, 2006, at 2:13 PM, Seth Ackerman wrote:
Chomsky doesn’t claim that ingrained common sense can be fought
through repeated factchecking. His answer isn’t necessarily
sufficient, but least he has an answer: He says common sense can
only be changed through mass participation in social movements.
Yeah, but isn’t that hard? Sure, but you have to try. Usually
you’ll fail, but sometimes you’ll succeed. I think that’s the
Chomsky prescription in a nutshell.
So how do you get people to participate in these social movements if
they so violate their common sense?
I’ll admit to a partly instrumental interest in this discourse stuff:
I want to know why and how people come to believe the things they
believe, and what, if anything, can be done about it. But of course
that’s not the only reason; as Yoshie put it years ago, theory also
serves as a kind of erotica for intellectuals.
And at least he’s got history on his side. The rare moments in
history when mass common sense changed, it was usually through the
work of mass social movements. I’m guessing your critique of
Chomsky’s factchecking is by way of a defense of Judith Butler- style work. It won’t work to just expose the true facts, you have
to figure out why people are so resistant to the facts. Sure, but
however true and interesting Butler’s insights are, they’re not
particularly novel. I suspect if you summarized them to an old CIO
organizer, he or she would probably nod their head in agreement,
and rattle off a bunch of anecdotes to prove the point.
People often say one of two things about Butlerish stuff: either it’s
old & obvious, or its obscurity serves to hide its emptiness. She got
her start as a Hegel scholar; she’d be the first to admit she comes
out of an intellectual tradition. I doubt, though, that CIO
organizers ever showed much interest in why people want to invoke
physical or biological “reality” when some critique or other starts
making them nervous.