PTSD

Genealogy of a blog, Part the Seventh

P: actually like the blog name. most likely because it is so marvelously meaningless. let's have it. yay. i will try to follow your style of replying...

E: I already told A that we might decide to keep it, so she should be warned. It has nothing to do with anything, but does that really make it meaningless? Can't we assign some meaning to it?

P: Yes, we should. And yes, we should keep it. Two normative statements in one go. That is pretty good for me. Probably a remnant of having to listen to this annoying guy talk about the EU as a normative power

E: eh? EU power is relatively non-normative, I thought. Deliberately non-normative, in fact. Then again, there are lots of normative assumptions about religion, culture, etc.

Wait, did he mean that the EU used normative power to control outside its borders? That's something completely different. That, I could get on board with.

P: and conflate ideas of social construction/social constructivism/ideational stuff all in one go. And he did say EU was a normative power.

E: Nope, stepping back off the bus now.

P: for some reason hotmail refused to let me reply all about the blinking blog. i had comments about the scary ahnuld one though i think the bush one is the scariest by far. not being able to reply to all was probably a sign that my not v exciting comments should not be shared with the masses.

E: but mine should be? that seems wrong, somehow.

P: life is full of wrong things. wrongs add up to become a big big wrong. and then habermas takes over. sorry, it is the first really nice day outside and i can feel frivolity creeping up on me :-)

E: I'm pretty sure people who joke about Habermas get smited (smitten?) by god. Or something.

P: the scary habermasian god who lives on top of the critical theory mountain and parachutes down to emancipate those in need. and maybe smited? i like smited. or even smote.

about blog name, yes, let's ask GSpice. maybe we can have a nameless blog since i realise i want to start it though i have no idea what its name should be. i found the idea of whingeing about repeated (yet similar?) conversations on "our" blog funny esp since, at the time i opened it, i was trying to explain (again) to one of my colleagues here why foucault is NOT a structuralist!! grrr. they kept on going on about how "but in the archaeology of knowledge, he is...." and i kept on wishing the bloody library here had power/knowledge so i could demolish their silly foundations. silly i say. sillly.

E: amazon.com will send you power/knowledge. I would send it, but I'm not sure where my copy went. It's here somewhere, I think. It seems to have disappeared into the structure of my shelving system (yeah, I know, it isn't funny to joke about foucault)

P: it is hilarious to joke about the big F. or the big N. i am reading N and realizing that i like the big N. though he would probably not like himself called the big N.

E: nah, I think he'd be okay with that. He'd probably prefer "super N" but the idea is the same.

P: i like super N. like a new superhero in the comic series i am thinking of writing when my PhD stalls. like now. it is stalling, i think.

E: think of it as a plateau. not a stall, just a brief pause on the climb to academic success. But I still think we should add a comic strip to the blog. just for fun. we could call it "WeberMan and the theoretical wonder bunch"

P: anyway, i can deal without P/K for now since the library here has heaps of books on N Ireland and i feel like i can quote dates and people (well, hopefully by the time i get back) on all this business. but it seems like the whole world and its neighbours have written on NI. Nothing on Nepal though. Not too sure if that is good or bad.

E: good. that means you can write whatever you want, and who's going to disagree with you? Nobody, that's who. But I bet there's some anthropology and development stuff out there on Nepal--I'm pretty sure RandomProf was just back from a project there last fall, so somebody must be writing about it.

P: yeah, there's heaps of development rubbish and also some (a couple of good ones I have found but mostly terrible) anthropological stuff. the anthropological stuff seem to be more along the lines of describing Nepali "tribes" and all that stuff. Not much Geertzian stuff but more invoking ideas of difference (if I may use I and B)

E: I don't know if you're allowed to both reject them on principle and also engage their criticisms when useful. Oh, wait, I'm a pragmatist again. So go ahead, invoke away. But you'd better have a good reason. (I know, it's not theoretical pragmatism, it's popular pragmatism, and I really should be more careful about my assumptions. But tough luck.)

P: got a couple of books out on heidegger...but thought i wouldn't understand him so got books written by other people about H. thought i'd try H later, if i felt like it. have you read H? should we discuss H in our own independent study? or is that too much H?

E: seriously, ever time I think about heidegger all I can hear is that monty python song...so I'm all for discussing him, but don't be surprised if I burst out laughing occasionally.

P: hehe. agreed. i am still on the NI part and haven't actually taken a break to read any theory people yet. Am having heaps of fun trying to learn dates and read up on the Prevention of Terrorism Act and all that. Might borrow your books when I get back to the USA

E: no problem. I think they're in a pile in my dining room. I esp. like the one that's a set of interviews about the experience of the Troubles. Not sure how much they talk about the discourse, but it's interesting stuff.

P: my next project is kierkegaard, mainly because they have a HUGE section on him (prob because he was the only dane they know who became famous)

E: wasn't Bohr Danish? but that's physics, not philosophy.

P: yeah and he was born in copenhagen so they are apparently heaps of sites dedicated to him. though he had to leave during the nazi years. which the danes do their best to forget, it seems. but i suppose that is usual.

E: yeah. Mention Ezra Pound in the US, and see what you get. i swear it took four college poetry classes for someone to even mention St. Elizabeth's.

P: just had my polish colleague yell vehemently at me for saying that Super N was once used by the Nazis.

E: why? is he some sort of revisionist historian? or does he think Super N was a Nazi?

P: also, hans christian andersen is a famous dane. though i never liked his stories much and think that the ugly duckling was rather silly since the UD had to change before the others liked him but the others remained as they were (rather like self/other in inayatullah and blaney but in reverse!)

E: The little matchstick girl made me cry when I read it in the first grade. And the little mermaid dies at the end. I quit reading after that. Children shouldn't be allowed to read that stuff unsupervised.

P: realise i am most likely turning into a fundamentalist...maybe i should start a cult called "defenders of poststructuralist foucault"

E: can you be a fundamentalist about poststructuralism? that seems wrong, somehow. against the spirit of the thing. Like being an empirical postmodernist.

P: hehe. true. but the people here amaze me. actually, i am amazed about the brits and their PhDs since my british colleague here doesn’t seem to get that there can be different types of DA (she calls herself a critical realist and assumes that is separate to DA. But DA is a methodology, i thought while CR is an espistemology/ontology thingy.)

E: sounds right to me. but we've been indoctrinated by the same people, so it could just be a shared fallacy.

P: most likely. i like our indoctrinators though, i've decided. even StructureMan and RegionDude though i can't think of what RegionDude indoctrinated me with. prob dullness.

E: ugh. Anybody but RegionDude. Although I'm much less impatient since he complimented my entrance essay (however misguided).

P: i realise i know not much either but that the University which is not to be Named was actually fairly good in drilling these ideas into my head---notice usage of violent term "drilling".

E: duly noted.

P: and then these people end up getting jobs at the Uni of Wales and all...why not us? us? us? (though i realise that, unlike me, you may have no desire to work at the Uni of Wales...)

E: not so much, no. I'm sure it's a lovely place, but probably not for me.

P: meemememememe. .not too keen on going back to nepal right now since apparently newspapers are now full of what the biggest veggie grown in the district is and reports of what wonderful thing the king/his ministers/his family did.

E: sounds like the local press in my hometown. except there's no king. but there are big vegetables. and council members who do v. important things. Like decide whose vegetable is biggest.

P: and indiscriminate arrests with the latest being an uncle who is head of a (relatively critical) media organisation who was arrested for "being in contact with terrorists" while he was on a trip to India. Love how the Ts keep popping up nowadays everywhere.

E: ouch. Any word on what's going on? Anything we can do?

on a related note, RandomStudent turned in a paper analyzing the role of critical theory in discussions of global religions. Not sure what DialogueMan thought about it--critical theory doesn't come up that often in anthropology. I was just surprised to see someone else use Habermas in a sentence.

P: haha. didn't see RandomStudent as a habermasian. must be all that working for the defender of the Habermasian faith, The Communicator.

E: yeah. yet another case of infectious theory (sort of like chicken pox--you break out in a rash of habermasian spots, spread it to everyone around you, and eventually you're cured.)

P: Euuuh. Hopefully there is innoculation available.

E: I'm sure somebody's working on a vaccine. Probably one of the constructivists.

As a side note, my computer doesn't recognize constructivist as a word. Little red squiggles everywhere. So I guess they must not exist.

P: btw, about william james, i am sure you will find it amusing (but you prob know about it already) that social construction (or constructionism or that stuff we are not calling constructivism) was based on james' works.

E: yep. not that WeberMan would ever admit that (wait, I seem to remember a conversation about this…nope, it’s gone). I'm not sure he's ever forgiven me for refusing to pick one of the epistemologies we covered in class for my final paper that year. Then again, it could be that the paper I turned in was crap. I'm still not convinced that I can't use pragmatism for epist. and system dynamics for methodology. After all, pragmatism argues that people use what works until it doesn't, and my argument is that linear causality doesn't work anymore.

P: yes, sounds like it makes sense to me. i reckon WeberMan would admit that too but he likes his old dead germans. but then we like old dead americans/frenchmen too so we will have to keep that in mind. i am still trying to get through the articles in this journal since too much SC at one time is not recommended.

E: think of how hard it must be to proofread that stuff. maybe they read it backwards, and it says things about satan, like the heavy metal 80s records.

P: which they like in Denmark. I don't think I have ever heard as much AC/DC as since I came here since even shops seem to be playing it. Maybe it is some widespread ideological revolution of some sort, about which i was not informed.

E: That's a little (a lot) scary. The entire Danish populace is a big metalhead convention.

P: have not done any other writing type work though and it is already one month since i was here. grrrrr. feel like a lazy slob (which i am)

E: join the club. although I have a lovely diagram about turkish economic growth as it relates to the money supply and international debt. looks like the opening of a black hole (you know, if we could see them).

P: I have become addicted to the "next blog" button on Blogspot (your fault, really, since I had not seen it until you pointed it out to me). This is an example of a particularly bad one, esp all that rot about freedom

http://ladywhitespirit.blogspot.com//

E: yes, the next blog button is evil. not as evil as John Bolton as the US amb. to the UN, but still, definite signs of nastiness in the way it sucks perfectly good chunks of time away from useful projects.

P: shotter and gergen (pioneering sc people) admit that and shotter even has this article on how much james' work has influenced his version of pragmatism (sc, that is). so there. we are somehow doing the same thing :-)

E: or, at least, what you're doing fits fine into what I think we should be doing...and vice versa.

P: indeed. yay. let's blog.

E: I get it. I'll sign up on blogspot, then? I think it has to be set up by one person, and then other people can be invited to join.

P: okay. sounds perfect. let me know if i can sign up or do something productive instead of sitting on my arse and typing...

E: so you know that blogging is pretty much sitting around and typing, right? There's no aerobics involved. (Is there? Did someone forget to tell me that part? I am SO not doing more than sitting and typing. Maybe some research, but nothing involving jogging or jumping jacks.)

P: i found this entire edition of a journal on social construction and what it is and all and am trying to read it, in between wishing i wouldn't spend so much time emailing...though if we had a blog, this would be blogging and thus "work". so let's have one v soon!

E: rationalizing. That's what you're doing. Not that I disagree with that, but still. Always best to make our assumptions clear.

P: that's the weber in you coming out (had vision of small wizened weber jumping out of elizabeth and grinning away).

E: now I'm going to have nightmares. And snicker all through my next meeting with WeberMan (I think his inner weber hides behind the office door)

P:...and yells "boo" at unsuspecting students when they walk in through the door.

E: you're paying for me to clean tea out of my keyboard. just so you know.

P: or at least WeberMan’s version of weber, which i realise after being here is a totally different version of weber to what everybody here seems to have of weber.

E: but we knew that. you met StructureMan’s weber, didn't you?

P: a dour, boring type who droned on about iron cages and rationality and was immersed in structures until the structure grew hard and then his weber was permanently encased (encaged?) within

E: ah, so you have met. nothing like a first impression.

P: so there are many webers but once you can quote weber, you are set. I have realized I can be highly annoying and quote from "'Objectivity' in the ...." and also from "Science as a vocation" and even (thanks to this research I did for StructureMan) from various parts of Economy and Society and that stumps people who want to argue about W since, often, they can't back up their notions of W as a huge structuralist who should be discredited and ignored while I am blithely (and annoyingly) quoting at them.

E: picturing you running blithely through the fields of denmark (does denmark have fields? or fjords? no, wait, that's norway--I read that in H2G2) shouting out weberian wisdom.

P: hehe. we have fjords too. but then i realised that i will prob miss the movie version of H2G2 when it opens. though i read (in those intellectually stimulating web sites i frequent) that it was fairly bad. but then thre's the new star wars...and i will miss its opening too. not too sure if that is a good or a bad thing.

E: I'll let you know how it is. Not the star wars one, since I'm working on only seeing one out of six, but the h2g2 movie, sure. Right now all I've seen is the previews. But they have the geranium, so how bad could it be?

Speaking of assumptions--is it possible that people can use both Foucault and standpoint theory? Seems a little wonky to me, but maybe I've misread standpoint stuff. I wouldn't think they'd allow for the iffyness of Foucault's analysis.

P: yeah...but F is a method (or methodology), i think and he would agree with standpoint analysis since that would be all that rot about looking at the local instead of the global. that is when you can even talk abotu structures since there can be local structures, just not universal, general ones that MAKE you do stuff or have causal powers (bhaskar now falls off the bus and tries to run to catch it but is impeded by many random meaningless words dropping down after him and trips and falls...).

E: poor bhaskar. hope he doesn't get run over by the habermas train.

P: hehe. no sympathy for bhaskar since he writes long-winded rubbish that is difficult to read.

E: Come on, he gets hit by the Habermas train. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. Not even Popper. Well, maybe Popper. I'd like to see if the engine bounces off his impenetrable armor of the scientific method.

P: instead, local structures, which arise in the context of social relations, are acceptable (remember Kondo?). at least that is how i read it. then, standpoint theory is also to clarify your assumptions (as you said) since it was because assumptions/contexts were unclarified that the whole bloody Enlightenment project happened.

E: got it. although I take issue with local structures being acceptable (acceptance doesn't figure in--they either are or aren't, without any sort of permission.) must be a better word.

P: allowed? can be described? exist? are constituted locally?

E: Didn't say I knew the right word. Besides, not sure that better or right is legitimate either, being so tied to universal norms. Hey, wait--how about legitimate?

P: just finished revising my awful paper on the boundedness of freedom in hobbes and tocquevile. it sounds like i am writing on some sort of BDSM ritual but that is definitely not the case. though at this rate, i doubt what i was writing on since i have re-written parts of it so many times. thought i'd bung it at WeberMan and let him make of it what he will since i cannot think of anyone else who may have read both books and would like to comment on it and don't feel confident enough to send it off to a journal without getting comments.

E: comments are good. I like comments. I'm sending the WHO mess to HRDiva for comments, which I'm sure will be along the lines of "you can't check discourse against interviews to find out if it's right." Which I know, but nonetheless. Comments are good. They make people feel influential, and therefore kindly disposed to other things that you write. Like dissertations.

P: or they will get pissed off at having to read such rot (mine, that is) and rethink their decision to be chair of PhD thingy. hope not. am sending it off today or tomorrow.

E: nah. he's had fair warning. at least you don't send him powerpoints about raccoons.

P: that sounds like far more fun. off to do some more re-working on the BF paper and then send it off today. have decided will save myself $9 by not going to the pub and will watch football on the 'net. not much fun but neither is spending that much money for ONE bloody pint. ONE. notice bitterness about the expense of alcohol in Danish pubs...

E: Should we be airmailing you guiness? Oh, and you should be looking for the camera soon--I think Patient Husband sent it to your flat, since that's the address I could find last week.

P: about blog...if we want people to look at it and give us comments, then maybe something to do with our PhDs, etc for the name...but what? foucault/james/pragmatism/systems/etc etc.

off to do some work...or at least email The One Who Knows All and ask her what happened with my comp of long ago..

E: How about the name "pragmatic systems of terror discourse?" meaningless, but gets everything in. And the meaninglessness of the title speaks about the subjects of the blog and their inherent subjective realities...

P: yay. let's have this. i like it because it is so meaninglessly marvelous, as i said. maybe we can even add a few more random words...what ARE pragmatic systems anyway? hehe...or pragmatic discourses about systems and terror or discursive pragmatism of terrible (!)/ terrifying systems... but i like yours. let's do that.

E: oh, wait, you weren't talking about the stinky cat's prozac emporium idea, were you. ah well.

P: i like your name. blog blog blog

E: Wait, which name are we talking about again?

yeah, I know, I'm full of crap. But the only one who would call us on it is WeberMan.

P: nah. he will like it since i reckon he does have a sense of humour. or he had better if he is to work with me (us?). i really can't be as intense as TheoryGuy seems to be but then he gets along with GSpice so...though i remember that X1 did not like him (had this discussion with X2 who now calls himself X3 since he has re-discovered his authentic self)

E: um. I've only just started to remember that his name is X2. I wish people would just self-identify and get it over with. None of this fuzzy boundary crap when it comes to what we're supposed to call each other. How are we supposed to build up shared systems of meaning if we don't know who we're talking to?

P: indeed. will lead to a morass (word choice?) of misunderstandings where we all call each other whatever we want. do we WANT to build shared systems of meaning though? or do we just want to impose our meanings on others? i admit to a sneaking fondness for the latter but i will never get to exercise my imposing-ness since i will be describing not prescribing. but i will restrain my neocolonial tendencies.

E: Yeah, no imposing from me either. Although I do admit to a desire to impose my methodological assumptions and techniques on IR as a discipline. But I don't want shared systems of meaning. At least not yet.

P: prob shows i should be applying for asylum in the USA which will fit my neocolonial tendencies...though why i should need asylum is a question yet to be answered...

E: You're more likely to need asylum from the US.

Comps take forever to grade. Especially when ISA is going on. Then again, maybe your graded comp is sitting in your SIS mailbox in a big yellow envelope.

P: no, TOWKIA said they took a month to decide who would read them and so the readers have only had them for a week. typical.

E: I'm sure you did fine. I still have to talk to UberPeace about the IPCR comp.

P: no, i sucked. i tried to follow the party line before i gave in and started babbling about weber, geertz and even wendt in each and every answer. also babbled a lot about epistemology/ontology. not recommended in a CRS comp, i believe.

E: Not so much. Sort of like my declaration that nuclear deterrence is a big waste of time on the IP security question. noble, but possibly misguided under the circumstances.

When we do start the blog, we should post these emails (minus various snarky comments about The University which shall not be Named, profs, etc.) as the genesis of it (an MTV making the video, all about political science theory)

P: esp minus snarky comments about profs, esp since i added new ones about new profs and about students. a "making of the blog..." should be fun.

E: we should still make the snarky comments, though. just not with the names attached. we could create all new names! code names, as it were.

P: ohhhh...am v excited about creating code names idea. esp if based on mutually shared understanding of literature and comics...then we can bring that part of it in :-)

ps: yes, i did think the drinkingaboutlife blog was about drinking...i confess. but then foucault would say this confession itself is within the bounds of discourse so confessing is creating a self that would feel guilty if it (I) did not confess...hmm.

P: do you have any recommendations for any old time ("classic") writers who were amusing? i feel like i need some amusing literature amidst this onslaught of SC and N. Ireland but the library here, as i said, does not have wodehouse. darn them. i thought of kingsley amis but he is hit and miss, from what i remember. they do have a wide range of american literature so maybe something there? any recommendations would be gratefully accepted. i am currently finishing off their only volume of agatha christie poirot novels. not amusing but quite engrossing at times.

E: Let me think about it. You could start with Fitzgerald, and I always liked Flannery O'Connor, but they're both fairly recent. Wilkie Collins wrote terribly victorian murder mysteries...

P: i remember seeing a couple of films based on collins' books. will go in search of them...WeberMan told me about this article on the web recently which portrayed dracula as a revolutionary activist. maybe it was The Activist who wrote it.

E: nah. I'm sure he doesn't read fiction. Rots the activist brain.

P: these emails could be v long if we do this reply thingy...how do you get yours to have nice separations, btw? prob some cool Mac thing :-(

E: nah. I just hit the space bar before and after (so it's space...type...space) I'm trying to see how many colors it turns the text.

P: mine is black. only black. boring black.
i guess i should do some work...onwards to the BF paper. Again. yuck.

posted by Priya @ 7:21 AM