dear quality meta-narrativists :
once upon a time
a squad had a discussion about power
a snot-nosed punk (me) decided to scrawl (on e-mail?) an interesting maxim
~ quality = power ~
since then this same punk has filled his brain with some postmodernism
as a new thread in a quality/power theory (which carmen and myself created),
i would like to add some postmodern thoughts to this discussion
michel foucault was quite fond of the concept called 'power/knowledge'
he claimed that power and knowledge were inseparable
or in pirsigian terms - the social level and the intellectual level can't
be separated
that is, one interacts very deeply with the other
indeed, to speak of them as separate concepts almost becomes useless
instead they share a common quality called 'subjectivity'
so in response to bo's rendition of pirsig's letter
in response to the idea that socrates separated the social and intellectual
levels
i must cry, poppycock
social and intellectual exist identically
socrates made a social/intellectual revolt
yet his thoughts grew out of his society as much as any other's
lest we forget that society creates both in and out groups, just as
intellect does
both systems of subjectivity operate by division - the creation of self and
other, us and them
the intellectual level as pirsig terms it appears to me just another
discourse of division
socrates defined the 'reasonable' (self/us) and the 'unreasonable'
(other/them)
and since part of his 'unreasonable' applied to society's gods, they
murdered him
let us not forget that every narrative originating in either the social or
the intellectual level
divides up everything - 's/he's an us or s/he's a them'
even pirsig implies that all who don't believe in his way are headed down
the wrong way
he's not as dogmatic as all that, but the meta-narrative which he created
excludes, curtails, truncates, and discards many differing discourses to
smash them all into one metadiscourse
when he defines the (high) 'quality' he defines the (low) 'no-quality'
(i think he know this as i've read lila (i assume this by his creation of
dynamic quality and his lamentation that a perfect metaphysics can never be
created))
so i challenge this squad (in a non-competitive sense) to define a
difference
between the social and the intellectual qualities of quality
for example - 'democracy' isn't some disembodied (literally) concept
it has history and can only be seen as part of this history
'nothing exist outside of the text' - derrida
nothing about the concept of 'democracy' exists outside of the society
which gave
this concept birth
and breifly i can say that when examined within it's history, 'democracy'
is only a
mask for a new form of domination in which the people are tricked into
thinking
they are governing themselves so another social power can oppress them
to ignore the social would ignore this criticism of the seemingly-solely
intellectual
in summation:
seen in the light of the moq, what is described in the last part of ZMM is
another constructed meta-narrative of the social/intellectual quality
we hatingly called it subject-object metaphysics - and it didn't 'emerge'
and it wasn't 'discovered' - it was like all other social/intellectual
qualities, constructed
(sidenote: and to ask who participated in it's creation is like asking
what flea created the dog - the moq should quickly recognize the mythology
of individuality if it wishes to break free of separatedness)
: luv,kev
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Jan 17 2002 - 13:08:50 GMT