Even the romantic revolution is evolutionary in this scenario This came out of my work on Liam Gillick and the idea that art is a situated practice - that it is indexically context bound
On 11/15/09 6:31 PM, "William Conger" <[email protected]> wrote: Dense, but convincing. Evolution. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: Saul Ostrow <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Sun, November 15, 2009 5:19:01 PM Subject: Where do opinions come from Any consideration of the apparatus of critical judgment today, requires a reprise of its sociological dimensions found within Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu's views on the construction of social knowledge and its relation to its material base. Foucault in his book The Order of Things is premised on the view that each historical epoch has an episteme , or "a historical a priori ", which forms the fundamental assumptions, conventions or rules that structure, organize and perpetuate the discourses (network-systems) that form the basis of social knowledge. These principles by setting the preconditions for making sense of propositions, utterances, or speech acts emerges from and exists within a field of discourse, play a role in constituting individual and collective subjectivity. Within this economy of a succession of a priori and posterior statements, the meaning and potential truth of a statement depends on the general rules that characterize the discursive formation to which it belongs. These structures are not neutral but which carry with them a (ideological) content that is simultaneously abstract (values) and concrete (practical.) Because these structures and pervade the technical <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technic><http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technic> and pedagogical activities of society, they become normative and nearly invisible to the people operating within them. The systems of thought and social interactions ordered by the dominant epistemology are not stagnant, but because they are always generating new statements, opposing theories and themes come into existence. Consequently, several different epistemes may co-exist and interact; yet in the majority of cases invariably are sub-ordinate to the dominant one, or constitute a variant. Yet, the emergence of such propositions, come to describe what types of statements (patterns of inquiry, thought, or subjectivity) that the system can and cannot sustain. This permits us to speak of, or understand a proposition and measure its value, and utility against these learned social norms. In those cases were these differences accrue, develop over time and are sustained, a paradigmatic shift emerges causing an "epistemological rupture ," which results in a change in the theoretical outlook which frames our world-picture. Though such periods of transition, or reformation are few (Foucault identifies 4; the Ancient /metaphysical, the Medieval/ scholastic, the Renaissance/ humanist and the enlightenment/ rationalist,) they are set into motion when the dominant rules of thought no longer enable, nor are capable of ordering productivity and its social relations. If Foucault, the historian/genealogist looks at thought in terms of epochs, or eras establish the 'apparatus' which makes it possible to separate what may be characterized as categorically logical from what is not, Pierre Bourdieu, the sociologist is concerned with process of induction and naturalization of such paradigmatic structures into a system that establishes the social norms by which we lives. In doing so Bourdieu, identifies the episteme as a habitus - a term which is a contraction of to inhabit (dwell within) and habit (an action or pattern of behavior unconsciously repeated). For Bourdieu, these patterns of behavior and thought to which we subjectively subordinate our intentions and to actions, order our world. These patterns of perception , thought , action , behavior, and discernment ordered and sustained various cultural and social institutions such as those of class, education, professional life, etc. which in turn is instills within our subjectivity the epistemological system embedded with in them. Because this process of indoctrination is neither wholly voluntary, nor completely involuntary the everyday behavior of individuals and communities cannot be reduced to prescribed, formal rules because these domains are not only effected by resistance, sublimation and compliance but are also responsive to the dynamic of their own dispositions and conventions leading us to the adherence to insipid, or self-defeating values. Subsequently, the way people dress, their hairstyle, tattoos, earrings, piercings, etc., reinforce well-defined social practices. So even if we aren't all playing by the same rules (given our social location), we all seem to formulate rules in the same manner and use them similarly. For Bourdieu, the ongoing divergences and variations generated by individuals and groups to implement new patterns of behavior and belief in accord with changing material conditions of these domains come to be reconfiguring their habitus. The process by which this occurs is both viral and indeterminate- because it is cumulative and because within such a heuristic model all such actions modify all others, yet in the last instance what determines the dominant rules of thought is the necessity to produce a relatively stable framework which will enable and order social productivity. --
