From an Individual to a Collective… Blog

While I am not sure I am ending this blog, and it may be that some posts appear in both places.  My other leftist project is moving outside of facebook into a real writing space, we are aggregating our ideas, and some of our ideas into a group blog,  Symptomatic Redness.  If would check it out, and we are looking for more contributors there at this stage too, so inform me if you would like to take part. Many of the people I have interviewed and will interview  have been invited as well.

The problem of point of view: False Binaries, Real Dialectics

Reification is a problem, but its always a problem as it is implied in symbolic language.  The signified always has some level of a reification of what it describes.  This leads us to a serious problem though:  the distinctions between views are oven because of different sets of reified conceptual frameworks.

For example, cultural and economic analysis (identity versus class) are often put in a dialectical opposition as is nature versus nurture (biological versus environmental determinism) analysis, but many of these supposed binaries are false. This is not to take the post-modern view that all binaries are false and there are no real universal distinctions, but that the inter-relationship between these things are harder to tease out elements to speak about them.

For example, are cultures just manifestations of economics or economics just manifestation of cultures, the vulgar post-modernist and vulgar conservative often argue the later while vulgar Marxists arguing the former, but neither strictly speaking is true.   Both culture and economy are abstractions of social relationships, but as abstractions they have view real affects.  All of what is at stake is relational, so there is not true dialectical relationship between the concepts.

This means that both the economic analysis and the cultural analysis are different lenses of looking at the same set of social relationships, but the ideas that we look upon the relationships with DO shape, not only our subjective view of those relationships, but the relationship themselves. Therefore, cultural and economic analyses do end up creating real dialectical oppositions in the way we answer certain questions.

Is there a way out of this?