- 08 Jul 2016 08:29
#14699619
Wanting some pushback on something I been thinking about.
I read someone's thoughts about what seemed like their idea that expanding categories and making them more inclusive was the best route to improving things. It got my thinking about how the social relations of our world relate to certain concepts such as race and gender.
And what I thought instead was it'd eb better in many contexts to make these categories irrelevant by making them socially significant and the route to doing this was to improve the fluidity between the categories.
And what I'm thinking isn't that a person with darker skin pigmentation makes it lighter, but instead that if in the long term one was able to improve racial equality in a country, the social significance of being black in the US would be diminished on the basis that a person of darker skin tone could ideally be perceived in the same light as a white person. I have an assumption that much that is attributed to these categories are often spacially defined.
Blacks in the US end up being defined by poverty and black becomes synonymous with poverty for people and black then becomes synonymous with implications of enduring poverty.
If you had somehow achieved a society in which there was less informal segregation through economic disparity, then the category of being black wouldn't be significance because blacks would then be in the same areas as whites. Blacks get then defined by where they're confined to, where they are seen as a majority, it becomes a space that is defined as being for blacks, this happens in the US where all the blacks have been segregated to the other side of a river of a city or a poorer side of town sort of thing.
A similar thing happens especially for women, man becomes defined by where men are expected to prevail.
For an example http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jackson/future.of.gender/Readings/DownSoLong--WhyIsItSoHard.pdf p. 9
So i'm thinking the idea of a gender difference i diminished once it in the real world is diminished. Of course people can counter to the real world prevail in their beliefs and make subcategorizations of someone being an exception to a rule and so forth. But if prevalent enough, if it became say normative for both men and women to work and do housework, the idea of housework being a woman's gender role would be made socially insignificant. Similarly I'm assuming this would apply to other contexts when the exclusively of space and behaviours is intermingled between demographics and exclusivity between groups in important aspects is diminished.
And when it comes to the expansion of categories I get the feeling there's a trend of reactionaries setting up assumptions and categories that have problematic and debatable assumptions implicit in them and moderate progressive fail to launch a counter attack because they merely try to adapt the concept but leave the inherent assumptions unscathed.
I've seen in when it comes to multiculturalism: http://www.drustvo-antropologov.si/AN/PDF/2012_3/Anthropological_Notebooks_XVIII_3_Fontefrancesco.pdf
Here basically the modern conception of culture isn't in the debate,t eh very assumptions that inform the idea of multiculturalism come from a conception of culture where culture was seen as static, hell for some through Spencerian sense even inheritable.
I've seen it with the use of the right's campaign of being against political correctness as a means to distort the public sense of the word victim and present themselves as victims and delegitimize the validity of people being victims.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.454.3637&rep=rep1&type=pdf
The left's response? To stop using the word victim and instead use the word survivor, leaving the tactics of the right intact and unchallenged.
These aren't examples of conceptual expansion but are of the rights success in dominating the discourse and setting the terms. The examples in which some progressives seem to want to expand is dichotomies of sexuality and gender which I don't get the feeling from many that they challenge the concepts which have dubious origins and assumptions to their foundations that I'm skeptical to how much they can be conceptually transformed and wonder whether to diminish these concepts and approach better ones similarly would require a radical change in the social relations of society.
Do you think the assumptions I make here are hitting somewhere in how the real world informs the concepts or do you have a better interpretation of how the social relations in the material world inform our abstract concepts?
And do you think it's the reasonable route is to diminish social signifcance of categories as informed by the real world rather than playing an abstract game of making a concept braoder or more inclusive in definition?
Beyond all this verbosity, I suppose what I wonder about is the base and superstructure sentiments and the validity people believe they have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure
I have a sort of leaning that we are free to act on the world and change it but only if one changes the material world and how relate to it, only then do abstract ideas radically change and gain traction.
Challenging the abstract should be a minor step to getting into positions of changing social relations and conditions that maintain ones one doesn't desire as I get the sense that the 'base' does more to inform the 'superstructure' than the 'superstructure' does the base.
Ramblings over.
I read someone's thoughts about what seemed like their idea that expanding categories and making them more inclusive was the best route to improving things. It got my thinking about how the social relations of our world relate to certain concepts such as race and gender.
And what I thought instead was it'd eb better in many contexts to make these categories irrelevant by making them socially significant and the route to doing this was to improve the fluidity between the categories.
And what I'm thinking isn't that a person with darker skin pigmentation makes it lighter, but instead that if in the long term one was able to improve racial equality in a country, the social significance of being black in the US would be diminished on the basis that a person of darker skin tone could ideally be perceived in the same light as a white person. I have an assumption that much that is attributed to these categories are often spacially defined.
Blacks in the US end up being defined by poverty and black becomes synonymous with poverty for people and black then becomes synonymous with implications of enduring poverty.
If you had somehow achieved a society in which there was less informal segregation through economic disparity, then the category of being black wouldn't be significance because blacks would then be in the same areas as whites. Blacks get then defined by where they're confined to, where they are seen as a majority, it becomes a space that is defined as being for blacks, this happens in the US where all the blacks have been segregated to the other side of a river of a city or a poorer side of town sort of thing.
A similar thing happens especially for women, man becomes defined by where men are expected to prevail.
For an example http://www.nyu.edu/classes/jackson/future.of.gender/Readings/DownSoLong--WhyIsItSoHard.pdf p. 9
Consider another example showing how beliefs about sex differences cloud people's analytical vision. How often have we heard question like: will women who enter high-status jobs or political positions end up looking like men or will the result of their entry be a change in the way business and politics is conducted? Implicit in this question are a set of strong assumptions: men have essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations that have shaped the terrain of high status jobs and women have different essential personality characteristics and cultural orientations. The conclusion is that and women's entry into these positions unleashes a conflict between their feminine essence and the dominant masculine essence that has shaped the positions. Either the positions must change to adapt to women's distinctive characteristics or the women must become masculine. (It is perhaps telling that those who raise this issue usually seem concerned only with women entering high-status positions; it is unclear if women becoming factory workers are believed immune or unimportant.) The analytical flaw here i assuming that masculinity has shaped the character of jobs rather than that jobs have shaped masculinity. In her well-known book Men and Women of the Corporation, Rosabeth Kanter argued persuasively that the personality characteristics associated with male and female corporate employees really reflected the contours of their positions. The implication is simple and straightforward. Women who enter high-status positions will look about the same as men in those positions not because they are becoming masculine, but because they're adapting to the demands and opportunities of the position, just like men.
So i'm thinking the idea of a gender difference i diminished once it in the real world is diminished. Of course people can counter to the real world prevail in their beliefs and make subcategorizations of someone being an exception to a rule and so forth. But if prevalent enough, if it became say normative for both men and women to work and do housework, the idea of housework being a woman's gender role would be made socially insignificant. Similarly I'm assuming this would apply to other contexts when the exclusively of space and behaviours is intermingled between demographics and exclusivity between groups in important aspects is diminished.
And when it comes to the expansion of categories I get the feeling there's a trend of reactionaries setting up assumptions and categories that have problematic and debatable assumptions implicit in them and moderate progressive fail to launch a counter attack because they merely try to adapt the concept but leave the inherent assumptions unscathed.
I've seen in when it comes to multiculturalism: http://www.drustvo-antropologov.si/AN/PDF/2012_3/Anthropological_Notebooks_XVIII_3_Fontefrancesco.pdf
This vision of culture clearly opposes the concept of culture that underpinned the idea of multiculturalism that had been created and spread since the 1980s. In fact, multiculturalism became a fundamental concept in the public and political debate in that decade, as it was a response to the introduction of the concept of “culture” imposed by the “new right” of Thatcher and Regan. Since the end of the 1970s, in the same years when it was proclaimed that ‘such a thing as society [did] not exist,’ culture became the fundamental ideological hinge of the immigration policy both in the UK and the US, and more broadly of their entire political discourse. In that context, it was affirmed that to become an “American” or a “British” person, one had to be an American or a British. In other words, an individual had to embody a particular set of intangible social and behavioural characters defined as culture. If we consider what we said about anthropology, this idea of culture appears to be the direct descendant of Taylor’s: it was not acknowledging the fluidity of knowledge; instead, even worse, it was affirming a principle of superiority of a particular culture over all the other forms of knowledge and lifestyles (Wright 1998).
Here basically the modern conception of culture isn't in the debate,t eh very assumptions that inform the idea of multiculturalism come from a conception of culture where culture was seen as static, hell for some through Spencerian sense even inheritable.
I've seen it with the use of the right's campaign of being against political correctness as a means to distort the public sense of the word victim and present themselves as victims and delegitimize the validity of people being victims.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.454.3637&rep=rep1&type=pdf
The left's response? To stop using the word victim and instead use the word survivor, leaving the tactics of the right intact and unchallenged.
These aren't examples of conceptual expansion but are of the rights success in dominating the discourse and setting the terms. The examples in which some progressives seem to want to expand is dichotomies of sexuality and gender which I don't get the feeling from many that they challenge the concepts which have dubious origins and assumptions to their foundations that I'm skeptical to how much they can be conceptually transformed and wonder whether to diminish these concepts and approach better ones similarly would require a radical change in the social relations of society.
Do you think the assumptions I make here are hitting somewhere in how the real world informs the concepts or do you have a better interpretation of how the social relations in the material world inform our abstract concepts?
And do you think it's the reasonable route is to diminish social signifcance of categories as informed by the real world rather than playing an abstract game of making a concept braoder or more inclusive in definition?
Beyond all this verbosity, I suppose what I wonder about is the base and superstructure sentiments and the validity people believe they have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_and_superstructure
I have a sort of leaning that we are free to act on the world and change it but only if one changes the material world and how relate to it, only then do abstract ideas radically change and gain traction.
Challenging the abstract should be a minor step to getting into positions of changing social relations and conditions that maintain ones one doesn't desire as I get the sense that the 'base' does more to inform the 'superstructure' than the 'superstructure' does the base.
Ramblings over.
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/For%20Ethical%20Politics.pdf#page90
-For Ethical Politics
-For Ethical Politics