What brings people together, what unites them, is non-aggregation (aggregate meaning- by the conjunction or collection of particulars into a whole mass or sum, ie the 'educated').
rather it is the emphasis on the difference of each mind and the complexity of processes entailed in communicating with another person.
Our intelligences have to be working hard to figure out what another person is meaning as "Thoughts fly from one mind to another on the wings of words."
The arbitrariness of language is the fact that there is no universal fixed meaning given to words and sentences, no immutable reference point of meaning. Why a particular sound gained a particular meaning cluster is most often lost in the past, but it must self-evidently be the result of a social process of oral communication.
Dr Johson's 1755 dictionary and those that followed made a claim to fix language in spelling and to stabilise the meaning of words by finding the first point at which the word and its meaning at that time, first appeared in print. This an attempted control of words by the literary class and marks a historical point of the arrogance of this class. The dictionary gave language an illusory permanence
War is first of all made with words. Its goal is the other's silence. It is how to cancel the others intelligence and will. By the use of rhetoric to funnel "the plummeting of minds into the material aggregation of consent." p.82 Think Blair and Bush.
"This supposes the culture of a reason that pits a precision of terms against the metaphors, analogies, and allegories that have invaded the political field, creating the field with words, forging it from absurd reasonings with the help of these words, and thereby casting a veil of prejudice over the truth." p.84 "Jacotot (the philosopher) took exception to such optimism.
He claims provocatively that there is no language of reason." p.84
Every speaking subject is the poet of himself and of things. Perversion is produced when the poem is given as something other than a poem, when it wants to be imposed as truth, when it wants to force action." p.84.
'Truth' withdraws the moment that conflict erupts between two consciences." p.90
The idea is to get the people to leave 'the swamp of self-contempt' p.101/2
Motto for teachers - As long as you 'teach what we don't know'! then all will be well..
Teach pupils what you 'know' and they don't and you have stultification in learning.
Progress became the new word for inequality! p.118/9. "The Old Master knows what he wants - stultification - and he works to that end. The progressives, on the other hand, want to liberate minds and promote the abilities of the masses. But what they propose is to perfect stultification by perfecting explications." p.121. "The perfecting of instruction is thus first the perfecting of tethers, or rather the perfecting of the representation of the usefulness of tethers." p.122
One (the educated class) protect itself against the self-education of the poor with a system of explicative education with examinations and recognised national qualifications.
"Public instruction is the secular arm of progress, the way to equalise inequality progressively, that is to say to unequalise equality indefinitely. Everything is still played out according to a sole principle, the inequality of intelligence." p.131. Those with an officially ratified intelligence will be selected to manage those who are still like brutes, the stupid multitude at home and abroad.
The rationality of society emanates from individuals. The fictive unity of individuals that is called society hasn't got 'reason' to distribute. It can only reproduce inequality through its social institutions. Equality has no value to society, it only has value to real people. We can still "learn how to be equal men in an unequal society. That is what being emancipated means". p.133
The republican concept of 'equality' is a pretence, a sleight of hand, an equality that is eternally deferred. This lie is carried out through a "pedagogisation of society - a general infantalisation of the individuals that make it up." p.133. At the same time it dresses society up as a 'rational order'. Progress is explication by another name. Whereas reason is equality by another name. Schools and universities can only teach inequality. The 'reason' they espouse is thus undermined and made absurd. True reason is not a stock set of knowledges but rather liberty of thought. Students would do well to look at the equality of themselves with their lecturers and authors rather than pay attention to the parade of hierarchial discourses and fall prey to their obfuscations.
Our reason is above being coloured by the sump (A low-lying place, such as a pit, that receives drainage. b. A cesspool. 2. A hole at the lowest point of a mine shaft)
into of our self-history.
Using that Catholic metaphor, the mind's original sin is not haste but distraction, absence" p. 53
Freud legacies are that a
Full intelligence became gradually occluded by instances of trauma that, if unresolved at the time, left a kind of mental ossification in relation to that experience. Memory recordings of the experience interfere with reasoning and can produce irrational behaviours. Our intelligence becomes gradually less flexible, more rigidly patterned. As these micro-traumas accumulate our minds gradually shut down. As we approach similar situations as adults the early memories and associated feelings are re-awakened. However the opinion was that our intelligence can be reclaimed at any time through the attention of a peer intelligence that agrees to listen non-judgementally. Not to verify our reasoning but rather to allow emotionally charged expression.
Early experiences of micro-trauma undermine our will to power, our ability to think straight.
Peer counselling has the tools to find out why our will was perverted and sometimes enables us to find a resolution. Think Alcoholics Anonymous et al, the dynamic here is peer counselling.
It is now commonplace it seems for people to designate each other on a scale of 1 - 10. Really stupid stuff right? But it rules most of our lives and relationships, and feels like something we have to accept and adjust to. We have to accept our ranking and feel its part of the natural order - We were just born that way - Rather than think of it arbitrary like all the other zones of signification.
Intelligence is a strange idea once you get to break out of the cage of humanistic neo-classical ontologies. Wouldn't it make more sense to think in terms of human ability. We humans do have bodies with much in common. We sense data from the world around us which then passes through a series of mental operations before proceeding to result in some muscular action whether writing with a pen or taking flight. Is it useful to think about intelligence divorced from the biological realities of this whole operation? Global forms of human education, culture, skills and even artefacts can be derived from functional features our common organism. Mind separated from the sensual body and the muscular body is a peculiarly bourgeois concept.
rather it is the emphasis on the difference of each mind and the complexity of processes entailed in communicating with another person.
Our intelligences have to be working hard to figure out what another person is meaning as "Thoughts fly from one mind to another on the wings of words."
The arbitrariness of language is the fact that there is no universal fixed meaning given to words and sentences, no immutable reference point of meaning. Why a particular sound gained a particular meaning cluster is most often lost in the past, but it must self-evidently be the result of a social process of oral communication.
Dr Johson's 1755 dictionary and those that followed made a claim to fix language in spelling and to stabilise the meaning of words by finding the first point at which the word and its meaning at that time, first appeared in print. This an attempted control of words by the literary class and marks a historical point of the arrogance of this class. The dictionary gave language an illusory permanence
War is first of all made with words. Its goal is the other's silence. It is how to cancel the others intelligence and will. By the use of rhetoric to funnel "the plummeting of minds into the material aggregation of consent." p.82 Think Blair and Bush.
"This supposes the culture of a reason that pits a precision of terms against the metaphors, analogies, and allegories that have invaded the political field, creating the field with words, forging it from absurd reasonings with the help of these words, and thereby casting a veil of prejudice over the truth." p.84 "Jacotot (the philosopher) took exception to such optimism.
He claims provocatively that there is no language of reason." p.84
Every speaking subject is the poet of himself and of things. Perversion is produced when the poem is given as something other than a poem, when it wants to be imposed as truth, when it wants to force action." p.84.
'Truth' withdraws the moment that conflict erupts between two consciences." p.90
The idea is to get the people to leave 'the swamp of self-contempt' p.101/2
Motto for teachers - As long as you 'teach what we don't know'! then all will be well..
Teach pupils what you 'know' and they don't and you have stultification in learning.
Progress became the new word for inequality! p.118/9. "The Old Master knows what he wants - stultification - and he works to that end. The progressives, on the other hand, want to liberate minds and promote the abilities of the masses. But what they propose is to perfect stultification by perfecting explications." p.121. "The perfecting of instruction is thus first the perfecting of tethers, or rather the perfecting of the representation of the usefulness of tethers." p.122
One (the educated class) protect itself against the self-education of the poor with a system of explicative education with examinations and recognised national qualifications.
"Public instruction is the secular arm of progress, the way to equalise inequality progressively, that is to say to unequalise equality indefinitely. Everything is still played out according to a sole principle, the inequality of intelligence." p.131. Those with an officially ratified intelligence will be selected to manage those who are still like brutes, the stupid multitude at home and abroad.
The rationality of society emanates from individuals. The fictive unity of individuals that is called society hasn't got 'reason' to distribute. It can only reproduce inequality through its social institutions. Equality has no value to society, it only has value to real people. We can still "learn how to be equal men in an unequal society. That is what being emancipated means". p.133
The republican concept of 'equality' is a pretence, a sleight of hand, an equality that is eternally deferred. This lie is carried out through a "pedagogisation of society - a general infantalisation of the individuals that make it up." p.133. At the same time it dresses society up as a 'rational order'. Progress is explication by another name. Whereas reason is equality by another name. Schools and universities can only teach inequality. The 'reason' they espouse is thus undermined and made absurd. True reason is not a stock set of knowledges but rather liberty of thought. Students would do well to look at the equality of themselves with their lecturers and authors rather than pay attention to the parade of hierarchial discourses and fall prey to their obfuscations.
Our reason is above being coloured by the sump (A low-lying place, such as a pit, that receives drainage. b. A cesspool. 2. A hole at the lowest point of a mine shaft)
into of our self-history.
Using that Catholic metaphor, the mind's original sin is not haste but distraction, absence" p. 53
Freud legacies are that a
Full intelligence became gradually occluded by instances of trauma that, if unresolved at the time, left a kind of mental ossification in relation to that experience. Memory recordings of the experience interfere with reasoning and can produce irrational behaviours. Our intelligence becomes gradually less flexible, more rigidly patterned. As these micro-traumas accumulate our minds gradually shut down. As we approach similar situations as adults the early memories and associated feelings are re-awakened. However the opinion was that our intelligence can be reclaimed at any time through the attention of a peer intelligence that agrees to listen non-judgementally. Not to verify our reasoning but rather to allow emotionally charged expression.
Early experiences of micro-trauma undermine our will to power, our ability to think straight.
Peer counselling has the tools to find out why our will was perverted and sometimes enables us to find a resolution. Think Alcoholics Anonymous et al, the dynamic here is peer counselling.
It is now commonplace it seems for people to designate each other on a scale of 1 - 10. Really stupid stuff right? But it rules most of our lives and relationships, and feels like something we have to accept and adjust to. We have to accept our ranking and feel its part of the natural order - We were just born that way - Rather than think of it arbitrary like all the other zones of signification.
Intelligence is a strange idea once you get to break out of the cage of humanistic neo-classical ontologies. Wouldn't it make more sense to think in terms of human ability. We humans do have bodies with much in common. We sense data from the world around us which then passes through a series of mental operations before proceeding to result in some muscular action whether writing with a pen or taking flight. Is it useful to think about intelligence divorced from the biological realities of this whole operation? Global forms of human education, culture, skills and even artefacts can be derived from functional features our common organism. Mind separated from the sensual body and the muscular body is a peculiarly bourgeois concept.
If a working class person goes to higher education they are no longer working class. They are designated of 'higher intellectual achievement' and so cannot be working class any longer. Working class identity being reserved for those without 'intellectual achievement' and presumed as mostly less intelligent. At its worst working class people are labelled as thick or stupid
One aspect of this is that authors are not commonly working class people. W/c people I knew regarded the status of 'author' with a sense of awe. That was not an invitation that ever came their way,
This neoclassical mindset goes along with a set of good tastes. A strict set of je ne sais quois rules. Here is Bourdieu on why he has to censor extreme expressions of class disgust from his seminal book.
"One cannot objectify the intellectual game without putting at stake one's own stake in the game -- a risk which is at once derisory and absolute" Distinction p.163
Its all very well being an autodidact but you still have to select your research in libraries and archives that are formed and structured by the Humanist episteme. What is not on TV and the radio relates to this episteme, but also a related commercial one. Of course this is not an even picture. Once you know the landscape you can pick your way around the catalogue key words, men of letters and radio station directors. But negotiating the knowledge landscape is another meta-skill for the Ignorant Schoolmaster not to teach! This is what besets the emancipated learner. Either adjusting what is in the archives, libraries and Wikipedia - a Sysiphian task, I'm currently engaged in, or trying to get thoughts published as a small fish in a publishing or artworld ocean.
A philosopher who discusses Ranciere's idea of intellectual equality is Nina Power:
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power-en.html
http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2010-07-01-power-en.html
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