Another way to think about 'construction' - to crib a wonderful formulation from Stanley Cavell - is that it bears not upon a thing's being so, but upon it's being so. Or, in different words yet again, "An earthquake or the falling of a brick is an event that certainly exists, in the sense that it occurs here and now, independently of my will. But whether their specificity as objects is constructed in terms of 'natural phenomena' or 'expressions of the wrath of God', depends upon the structuring of a discursive field ... What is denied is not that such objects exist ... but the rather different assertion that they could constitute themselves as objects outside any discursive condition of emergence." (Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy).

I'd want to argue that if you're having to try and prevent a totalitarian leader form being elected, then your democracy has already failed, or has been compromised to a massive degree. This to the degree that democracy is less a 'system of government' than it is an impulse to and of government, characterized by - among other things - an attempt to foster a demos (a 'people'), along with it's attendant opportunities for public participation and action (voting being one among a slew of possible democratic institutions that by itself is relatively ineffectual without it's embeddedness among others).

How one wants to respond to a failure of that ethos - or at least a stark sign of it's weakness, as would be the need to worry about a impending totalitarian leader - is itself a matter of political judgement (and not a 'philosophical' one). What effects would such a response have on the contours of the democratic regime as it currently stands? Would a 'tactical' victory over such a leader imply a strategic defeat by undermining further an already fragile democratic situation? Given one's current political situation - the alliances one can forge, the institutional power one wields, the motives and needs of other agents involved - would it be politically expedient to act in this manner or that, for the sake of bolstering democracy? These are the kinds of questions that need to be asked, and I don't think they can - or ought to be - answered in the abstract. There's kairotic (from the Greek kairos, 'opportune moment') element that is irreducible, and needs one to attend to the concrete 'on the ground' aspects of any one situation.

Walter Kaufman's Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist is the usual go-to study, though it's a little dated now. As is Alexander Nehamas's Nietzsche: Life as Literature, actually.

Otherwise, Gary Shapiro's recently published Nietzsche's Earth: Great Events, Great Politics has been very well received, and looks to be up your alley, although I've not read it.

Another classic but dated study is Tracy Strong's Fredrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, which I really like.

Otherwise I know a heap of readings of Nietzsche in the context of political philosophy, but they tend mostly to reside in book chapters rather than full monographs, which I dunno if you're keen on (edit: ah, what the hell - for a substantial one, check out Elizabeth Grosz's The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely, which is a study of Nietzsche, Bergson, and Darwin, but has three sustained chapters on Nietzsche.

Beyond that, two formative, indispensible readings of Nietzsche for me have been William Connolly's in his Identity/Difference, particularly the chapter "Democracy and Distance", and Bonnie Honig's chapter on Nietzsche in her Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics).

One wonderful thing about not having an ignore feature is that now I'm disciplined enough to ignore people all by my lonesome. It's lovely.

I don't see any reason not to talk about Kevin, provided it's a discussion with a minimum of substance - i.e. no boorish name calling and insult throwing. If Kevin is so obviously naughty, then there should be plenty of content to demonstrate said naughtiness. Note too that if Kevin kicks up a fuss, it is perfectly easy to simply ignore Kevin. At some point one simply realizes that most of what a Kevin says is simply beneath one's need to reply. Especially if it's quite obvious to everyone else that said Kevin is a troglodyte. Don't feed the Kevin, as they say.

No, I don't, because conspiracy theorists are nutjobs.

If you have to waste my fucking time to ask a question like that, consider just not posting ever to err on the side of caution.

So don't you have to read the supposed "polemic sexist piece of writing" in the context of the rest of the post, which isn't a polemic sexist piece of writing? — Agustino

Doesn't make a difference. But I've reached the limit of your equivocations. You're on notice for what is and is not considered sexist here, whether you like or agree with it.

Yes, because you left out the polemic, sexist piece of writing with your selective quoting.

You can't honestly be this dense.

I called the polemic, sexist piece of writing a polemic, sexist piece of writing.

Nobody said those passages are sexist.

Herr Nietzsche isn't a member of this forum.

Sure. And?

A polemic, sexist piece of writing.

You are right, it is. That's why I wrote it, to show how disgusting our society is. It's a critique. — Agustino

I'm not sure that you know what self-parody is, but sure, ok.

Oh, so the issues of gender differences must be discussed by postmodernist feminist philosophers, otherwise they're wrong and have to be shamed in public as you advocated right? — Agustino

For someone who complains about being read badly, you sure have a singular inability to, er, read.

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I'll also note that that your Forbes article simply points to the sheer fact that the Stanford team are looking into any such differences; it doesn't say anything about the results of any such investigation. The article itself emphasises that much of the difference in gender behaviour is culturally and not biologically accounted for. Again, so much for your reading abilities.

No, that's not sexist. Context matters. It is polemic writing, hyperbolic at times, to emphasise a point. — Agustino

Nah, it's pretty fucking disgusting, tempered only by the fact the whole piece of writing is so numbingly overwrought and self-unaware that the only way to read any of it is as inadvertent self-parody.

Re: sources, I've no desire to get into a citation war with you. I'll only mention that (1) to think that issues of gender difference can only be legitimately discussed by medical or scientific sources exclusively is already to illegitimately pre-suppose the terms of discussion, and that (2) your (consistent) inability to see past labels and titles leaves any discussion of substance woefully hollow.

A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism by Lee Braver — darthbarracuda

Wonderful book, even if, ultimately, I disagree with it's thrust! The reading of Davidson alongside Heidegger in particular is a tour de force.

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Judith Butler - Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death
Loic Wacquant - Punishing the Poor: the Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity

Some resources for those interested -

On the myth that testosterone largely accounts for differences in behaviour between men and woman:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-03-02/testosterone-rex-stop-blaming-sexism-on-hormones/8310854 [article]
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jan/18/testosterone-rex-review-cordelia-fine [article]
https://www.amazon.com/Testosterone-Rex-Myths-Science-Society/dp/0393082083 [book]

On the institutional basis of gender differences in art:

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Nochlin-Linda_Why-Have-There-Been-No-Great-Women-Artists.pdf [essay, pdf]

On the general myths regarding biological difference and behaviour, with respect to the recent 'Google memo' fracas:

http://www.salon.com/2017/08/08/the-ugly-pseudoscientific-history-behind-that-sexist-google-manifesto/ [article]
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2017/08/men-have-always-used-science-to-explain-why-theyre-better-than-women/ [article]

Other resources re: biological difference and behaviour:

https://www.amazon.com/Delusions-Gender-Society-Neurosexism-Difference/dp/0393340244
https://www.amazon.com/Brain-Storm-Flaws-Science-Differences/dp/0674063511
https://www.amazon.com/Myths-Gender-Biological-Theories-Revised/dp/0465047920

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Re: moderation; I think it is fair to consider the perpetuation of myths regarding the sexes as sexist. I think that within certain limits, it is also fair to allow posts that perpetuate those myths to stand, if only so that others can expose them for the myths that they are. Beyond which, as usual, moderation will be contextual.

This looks fascinating. That said, as a reader with a background in psychoanalysis and post-structuralism, that emotions are 'constructed' or 'made' is so obvious a point that it's a bit of a pleasant shock to be reminded that this in any way remains contentious or even 'new'. Excited to read it though, at some point.

https://m.dailykos.com/stories/2017/8/13/1689254/-Lexington-KY-mayor-announces-all-Confederate-statues-are-coming-down-because-of-Charlottesville

As predicted.

I would have figured that the removal - or not - of a statue ought to have been a relative non-issue regardless of the historical points either way. As if anyone gives two hoots about statues in 2017. In any case all the more reason to remove it now - whatever it's 'merits', in the wake of the Charlotteville thuggery, it should be removed precisely because it has now come to stand for exactly the hate expressed by those lowlifes - whether or not it 'really, historically' does or not.

I think it's something to do with how we tend to think about things. — Moliere

I agree, but then, I also tend to think that 'the way we talk about things' is laden so heavy with metaphysical prejudice that we ought to trust none - not one - of the classical distinctions we are so used to working with, including and especially those between world and self, nature and nurture, inside and outside. If the social is where these distinctions begin to 'look fuzzy', then so much the worse for these distinctions! In any case, part of what I'm trying to do in this thread is get people to be careful about merely paying lip service to the 'realness' of 'social constructions', only to slip in it's 'unreality' through the back door, drawing it up, in the last moment, against 'nature', 'environment', 'non-life' or whathaveyou.

Part of what's so hard about doing this is precisely the prejudices of 'the way we talk about things', which erects a double barrier - that of thinking the social as the 'unnatural' on the one hand, and that of thinking nature as 'the immutable' (to use your term), on the other (or, to use another stricken dualism - between 'the constructed' and 'the found'). This double barrier renders each side of the pseudo-divide all the poorer for it. And I think your question - how to 'reconcile society and the environment' - brings this to the fore quite nicely. And of course, as they say, this is not a problem to be solved, but rather one to be dis-solved.

Finally, part of the resistance to postmodern thought similarly arises from these prejudices, which, when confronted with statements that declare things to be 'social constructions' (a vulgar understanding of postmodernism at any rate...), continue to operate under essentially pre-modern understandings of what a 'construction' is. But of course the whole point is not only to revise our understanding of the thing so declared to be a 'construction', but the very meaning of 'construction' itself.

this is, in part, what it would amount to in practice, — Srap Tasmaner

Ah, but 'in practice' definitions rarely figure into our use of words. Definitions are always derivative, they're still captures, snapshots frozen in time, of language-at-work. Of course 'in practice' pretty much every word is 'define-able' - every 'scene' is 'picture-able' -, but this is always a kind rear-guard action, one that takes place a posteriori. When it comes to concepts, one needs to be in situ instead.

And this is why, while it may be true that definitions don't/can't increase the expressive power of language, the introduction of a new concept, can; and if it is a good concept, it ought to do exactly that. This is why concepts involve stakes; they ought to introduce a difference that makes a difference. Race is a construct and not a...? If so, this implies... ? And not ...? Definitions don't have this implicative structure, they don't point out beyond them to a series of cascading implicative commitments.

This is also why neither history (to which the 'constructionist' appeals - and a faux-constructionist at that, I might add), nor the appeal to 'natural kinds' (that of the 'scientific approach') are of any relevance when evaluating a concept. In a slogan: one evaluates a concept on the basis of the problem to which it responds. Nothing else - natural kinds or history be damned.

Again, Deleuze is my muse here: "There is no point in wondering whether Descartes was right or wrong.... Cartesian concepts can only be assessed as a function of their problems ... A concept always has the truth that falls to it as a function of the conditions of its creation ... Of course, new concepts must relate to our problems, to our history, and, above all, to our becomings. But what does it mean for a concept to be of our time, or of any time? Concepts are not eternal, but does this mean they are temporal? What is the philosophical form of the problems of a particular time? If one concept is "better" than an earlier one, it is because it makes us aware of new variations and unknown resonances, it carries out unforeseen cuttings-out... [distinctions! - SX]".

In the first instance social entities are part of our environment, in the second we are the artists of products and tools. So how is it that any entity has both of these characteristics? — Moliere

I think perhaps the more pertinent question - and I think - I hope! - you agree - is what on earth would make anyone think these two characteristics are in any way incompatible. As if we and our creations do not in the first instance belong to the environment!

On a totally side note, there's nothing less less alien to Deleuze than any kind of psychologism but I won't kick up too big a fuss about this : P

Just because stuff happened in the past doesn't mean stuff'll happen in the future.

I didn't say anything about who started it, so I'm glad we agree.

A society in which brute facts (using Searle's terminology, see my last post)) are ignored will almost inevitably fail. Brute facts are unforgiving.

A society that ignores social facts? Social facts function because we make them function. If social facts are subject to too much flux, they fail. If they are denied, they fail.

At best, denial of social facts might lead to social change. — Banno

I'm not convinced that such a neat division is really very applicable. Consider the recently released telephone transcripts of a certain American executive with other world leaders. It's actually quite clear that said executive knows what 'the truth of things' is. Regarding having Mexico pay for his border wall, what he is insistent upon is not that Mexico actually pay for the wall, only that they not say that they won't. Similarly, regarding the refugee deal between Australia and the US, he is concerned, above all, with the 'optics' of such a deal. Whether the numbers are 1250 refugees (as it in fact is, and which Turnbull keeps reminding him), or 4000 (as he keeps repeating), are in a certain way irrelevant. Here's the telling line:

"I am the world’s greatest person that does not want to let people into the country. And now I am agreeing to take 2,000 people and I agree I can vet them, but that puts me in a bad position. It makes me look so bad and I have only been here a week."

Again, it's not the truth of things that are necessarily in question, but, as it were, the presentation of that truth (which itself may be a lie!). To the extent that a 'post-truth society' means anything at all, I think it bares more on this 'second level' of 'truth-presentation' and not necessarily truth itself, as it were (which is not to say it doesn't also bear on truth). This was brought home to me quite clearly after having a few discussions with those who used the term 'fake news' unironically. If you actually talk to these people, it's quite clear that 'fake news' has nothing or very little to do with 'news that is not factual'. It simply has to do with 'news they don't like/does not represent their worldview'. 'Fake' in the phrase 'fake news' quite literally does not mean what you or I mean when we say 'fake' (i.e. unture, unfactual). It means something else entirely (thus liberals who reply that such and such news story really is true miss the point entirely).

There is a kind of disconnect between action and representation then: At the level of action, 'truth' remains as relevant as ever (kinda); at the level of representation however, truth simply has no status. One can say whatever (even if one does not act accordingly). But this has a kind of efficacy of it's own. And it's not clear that this denial of truth will force any 'world' to collapse under it's own weight, so long as this disconnect remains in place. And I also don't think this topology of truth parses out neatly along the lines of the 'social fact/brute fact' division either, which simply runs tangential to the issues over truth above, which are ultimately more 'political' than 'ontological'.

Heh, I was going to use Caligula as my 'Roman emperor example', but I thought that'd be too easy. Anyway, I guess it depends what one understands by 'fail'. By 'fail' I suppose I mean unsustainable: as if post-truth (or pre-truth?) is simply an aberration of the natural course of truth. But then - I think nothing is natural, and everything must be fought for, worked at, or sustained by some kind of effort - especially truth. I guess I simply want to warn against a kind of political naïvety: the kind that says: 'look at all this post-truth - it's bound to fail eventually'. I think there's no hope - or truth - to be gleaned from this kind of thinking (but perhaps you never meant that anyway. Also, one imagines a radical left position - which I'm sympathetic to - that would say that the last 200 years have been one of unending crises the truth of which has not been properly registered).

One is reminded of a quote from one of Dubya's unnamed associates regarding this as well, speaking to a group of journalists: "[you journalists are part of the] ... reality-based community... people who believe that decisions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.... That’s not the way the world works anymore.... We’re [i.e., the United States] an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will— we’ll act again, creating other realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Don't make me bust out the magic line again guys.

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Anyway, a contribution: Having not read the 69 pages of this thread, I wonder about this line from the OP:

A post-truth world must fail. — Banno

I wonder if this is, uh... true. That truth - understood as veracity and not, say, the Truth of Christ - has any sway in the workings and the governance of society seems to me to be a particularly modern - and thus fragile - achievement. One wonders if Genghis Khan, or Vespasian, or Emperor Huangdi needed to hew to truth in order for their worlds to 'not fail'. One imagines they - and their 'worlds' - simply had more important, or simply other, things to care about.

Basically Banno I'm more pessimistic than you. I see no necessity that a post-truth society must fail. I think it will uphold itself just fine, even if that is to the detriment to all those involved. Without the institutions, cultural pressures and societal demands that valorize truth, I think it is perfectly possible to be indifferent to truth without 'failing' as such. All the more reason to fight for those institutions and exert that pressure of course, but I'm not so convinced about the some natural course of failure in the absence or devalorization of 'truth'. It just could be that things remain awful.

1.4K replies, if the front page metric is to be trusted.

And the magic line is most certainly making it happen.

No worries! The line is magic because posts it prohibits will simply not appear : )

Below this magic line, no more posts about forum personalities will appear.


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In which asking for an argument is now a marker of 'leftist thinking'. Sigh.

Hmm, I want to contend that it's not 'definition' that is at issue though, although it might seem that way on first blush. After all, definitions - stipulative or otherwise - actually tell us surprisingly little about what a concept supposed to do. If one were to define a 'construct' as that which is in some manner created (as a product of artifice? of intention?), as distinct from that which is 'found' - to bring us back again to the OP - this isn't yet to invoke the term as a 'concept' proper. At this point it's just a word like any other, albeit with what may or may not be an idiosyncratic definition.

For it to function as a concept proper it needs to be linked to a problem to which it is meant to respond*. At a very generic level, to claim that say, race is a social construct, is to presumably make the concomitant claim that 'race' is not product of (only) genetics. If so, this in turn opens up a whole train of (possible) entailments: that there are institutional, cultural, economic mechanisms of 'race formation' or whathaveyou. One is then behooved to explain how those mechanisms function in order to make sense of the claim. It's around this point that the concept of the 'construct' begins to take on it's peculiar 'content'. Deleuze will thus call a concept a 'point of condensation' with respect to the various 'components' that make it up, and for which "there are only ordinate relationships [ordinal as opposed to cardinal that is, relations of order and not number -SX], not relationships of comprehension or extension."

Definitions, by contrast, make no reference to the problem to which a concept is meant to respond to; they make of concepts free-floating units of 'meaning' that, in and of themselves, involve no stakes. That is, there is a 'stake' involved in calling race a social construct; we will understand 'race' differently if we accept that it is so constructed. We will understand it differently yet if we do not. Concepts cannot be understood apart from this constallation of relations which alone give them sense, and to change one of these relations is in turn to change this constellation (think of a kaleidoscope).

*Deleuze: "All concepts are connected to problems without which they would have no meaning... concepts are only created as a function of problems".

With the exception of the negro passage, what seems to be the issue? As it stands the OP is just a kind of extended 'I don't like this. Don't you not like this too?'.

1. They are as real as beans. They exist independently of us, in spite of not existing without us.
2. Our actions create, but do not dictate the mechanisms of social entities. We can influence them through action, create them through action, but mechanism is different from this.
3. Here's a way of looking at the social without taking a stance on their ontological status. We can look at how they work and characterize them, in their own terms, without going further and taking a stance on their metaphysical status (aside, of course, from their reality -- but not with respect to whether social entities are the same as physical, for instance, even if they are both real) — Moliere

(L)

Now with words, something almost all of us do is the "in a sense" move. So you could say that "in a sense" rivers "construct" riverbeds, where "in a sense" might as well mean "metaphorically." Or it indicates there is a useful analogy here. But you could also say that "literally" rivers construct riverbeds, and that requires adjusting the received meaning of "construct."

In one sense, that just amounts to skipping a step -- metaphors are just not-yet-literal usages, not yet entrenched, and some metaphors never receive wide enough usage or acceptance to become entrenched as literal. On the other hand, a metaphor that is used widely enough to become literal doesn't usually displace existing usage; it gets added on. Displacing existing usage carries a heavier burden. — Srap Tasmaner

This moves along the right path, but I think that in philosophy it's less a matter of 'in a sense...' than it is a more determine and rigorous 'in this sense...' - where said 'sense' must be filled-in and given exact content. With respect to metaphor, for example, Deleuze was always adamant that nothing he ever wrote ever employed any metaphor: that his use of concepts always took on a consistency of their own, with respect to the particular problematic to which they responded to. This is I think the right attitude, and not only with respect to Deleuze but with philosophy more generally: one does not 'displace' existing usage because 'existing usage' simply responds to other imperatives, other problems which are more or less irrelevant to the problem that one is attempting to respond to (see: http://www.piccolorium.net/2012/12/deleuze-and-metaphor-and-non-metaphor.html)

Neither literal nor metaphorical, concepts ought to be exemplary: they ought to exemplify their own use, their sense forged immanently along with the use to which they are put. This is true of all language, of course, but is especially important in philosophy where 'established use' carries little to no weight whatsoever.

Depends on the problem you're dealing with, depends on the concept created to respond to it.

Um, no.

Then your role would be to simply discern the intention of the speaker. You wouldn't be asking for justification of use. — Mongrel

Explain.

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And no, there's nothing 'private language' about this - the whole point is a commitment to the 'publicity' of meaning, for it's ability to be taken up in a way that would allow 'someone to go on', rather than wander blindly in a forest of equivocation.

You're getting really absolutist about this. You're seeing construction as an unchanging entity. — Mongrel

The opposite actually. It's precisely because what we make of 'construction' is entirely dependant on the use to which we put it that one has to be absolutely rigorous with it's articulation. That there is no absolute, unchanging manner in which 'construction' ought to be understood is the exact reason that it cannot do to appeal to 'common meaning' - or indeed, any meaning that is not explicitly articulated according to the terms specific to it's employment. Not the unchanging but the unequivocal.