Re: Re: Re: Re: Dogmatism, and homosexuality

[Doyle Saylor <djsaylor@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Title: Re: [PEN-L:20782] Re: Re: Re: Dogmatism, and homosexuality

Greetings Economists,

Doyle
The discussion thread is about opening up the concept of dogmatism through a concept called "theory of another persons mind".  The way I think dogmatism can be understood better is through examining disabled content in the term, how proximity issues are involved, how a theory of another's mind is a labor process that can be put to use in an architecture of social groups.  So this is a meditation on a party structure that goes beyond an able bodied concept of organizing people, goes beyond the limitations of proximate or shop floor concepts of social groups.  And in that I want to show some elements of the importance of feelings as a means of realizing new forms of working class organization.

Chris Burford,
Jim's 5 year old essay on Aspergers Syndrome is a very personal
examination. The biggest qualification that could be made to it, I think, is
the need for a social context. What many members of the intelligentsia
struggle over internally are the internalised experiences of the processes
of selection that make them members of the intelligentsia. It is a vital
layer of modern capitalist society, and riddled with social contradictions.
Not all of them are the fault of the intellectuals. ...

Doyle
I think one way that I would distinguish myself from your view Chris is that I am seeing how Jim is both talking about disability and being disabled rather than see his membership in the intelligentsia.  So the part about him being a member of the intelligentsia does not matter to me.  About 70% of disabled people are not employed.  That is an important structure to capitalist economic definition of a working class people.  

There are two important ways that Jim talks about this disability.  First he points very carefully at the contingent definition of the syndrome.  Jim makes clear that a sense of the whole is not adequately defined by the categories that describe the syndrome as it is now understood in manuals of symptoms which is typical of science.  This contingency of the whole of the disability is an extremely important marxist element of understanding class structure.  To understand contingency and therefore the importance of disability perspectives I think it relevant to keep in mind what Richard Lewontin writes about biology and genetic structure,

"the Triple Helix, Gene Organism and Environment", Harvard Press, 2000
page 47,
"Darwin's alienation of the outside from the inside was an absolutely essential step in the  development of modern biology.  Without it, we would still be wallowing in the mire of an obscurantist holism that merged the organic and the inorganic into an unanalyzable whole."...

Doyle
This applies to class structure and organizations of the working class which understand workers in an able bodied holism.  Dogmatism as a conceptual critique of the failure of sects to functionally work, rests upon a sense that a holism of able-bodied functioning exists in group structures which makes sects work when they work.  In fact variation in human cognition reflects a need for varying cognitive methods in varying work related activities.  A holism that ignores that variation obscures what is true forces that make up any human social group.

Lewontin, page 75
"The difficulty of applying the simple machine model to the study of organisms arises from three sources.  Organisms are intermediate in size, they are internally heterogeneous in ways that are relevant to their functions, and they enter into complex causal relations with other heterogeneous systems.  There are several consequences of these features that make the simple machine model inappropriate as a mode of understanding or of analysis.  First, there is not a single and obvious way to partition an organism into "organs" that are appropriate for the causal analysis of different functions.  Second, the organism is nexus of a very large number of weakly determining forces, no one of which is dominant.  Third, the separation of causes and effects becomes problematical.  Finally, organic processes have an historical contingency that prevents universal explanations."

Chris Burford
A degree of obsessionality is both a handicap and also a strength in certain
areas. A lot of what Jim describes is no more than that. IMHO. It is clearly
part of a self-regulatory system that is alive and well from what he
described here.

In classical marxist theory the intelligentsia is not a separate class
because it does not have a separate relationship to the means of
production, but it is an extremely important layer of society, which mostly
supports the ideas and practice of the ruling class, but may face towards
the mass of the working people. On their own, members of the intelligentsia
may appear almost handicapped. In the wider social context they are now
indispensible. Perhaps this is part of what Doyle means when he says

>getting away from able bodied thinking is very important in the
>Marxist sense of seeing the dialectical whole of economic systems

Doyle
The whole of the class is about a Marxist seeing that all workers are united by the class system, despite superficial differences in job type.   However the classical concept rests upon shop floor organizing, and an unawareness of able bodied views upon what a worker is.  Dogmatism as it is most frequently used as a simple putdown of somebodys' group problems elicits a sense that craziness is outside the worker group rather than grappling with the issue of access for disabled people into the organization.  

Returning to my original example of jks describing Louis Proyects mind and what jks fears, a theory of mind is an extremely important part of the labor process of group cohesion.  Let me try to clarify what that is again through using Asperge's syndrome.  It is hard for Jim to know another's mind in the sense of understanding feelings.  The capacity to apply a theory of anothers mind to someone is a labor process that reflects how group cohesion is built up.  This cohesion is normally experienced in every day life as related to how close we feel to people.  This structure of the space people occupy with respect to one another is a critical architectural component of human social cohesion in the sense that theory of anothers mind arose from proximate relationships.  Jim's disability gives us a sense of how little we address the sense of the architecture of social cohesion in terms like dogmatism, because we don't realistically understand how people with a disability actually function in situations that require "theory of anothers mind".  Social groups will have intensely felt theories of another groups mind.  What is possible to look more closely at is the factor of how feelings contribute to that, and especially where disability gives us insight into the larger sense of the whole of social groups.

Proximity is very clear in terms of the social cohesion of homosexual partnership.  Strong feelings are involved, but in jks' comments where the relationship between jks and Louis is through e-mail, proximity has been removed as the source of "theory of anothers mind".  So in some sense we can see that proximity is irrelevent to the construction of social group understanding as jks expresses his view of "orthodox" Marxism.  In other words returning to the concept of dogmatism, proximity is not what makes dogmatism what it is.  We can certainly see how social cohesion arose out of a need for human feelings to cohere people together in a group.  We can see how people define themselves as homosexual is like a dogmatic view of sexual connection as the quote I gave from the book "Sex Between Men".  That is that the one and only one way I can form sexual relationships is with other men.  Or substitute heterosexual.  But these artificial structures arise as Jim points out at a particular point in modern economies over past systems.  They reflect in my opinion how production forces allow elaboration of the possible theories of anothers mind into channels not previously possible.

The problem with a labor process (constructing a theory of another's mind) that jks used is that writing systems do not carry information about human feelings well (jks doesn't really know what Louis thinks).  Terms to describe feelings like I feel angry are not realistically tied to the reality of feelings.  That is you don't know my actual state of feelings when I use the word.  Motion pictures which show the human face give us more direct information about human feeling, and therefore are more realistic than is writing systems in conveying human feelings.  But such conveyance of information in a movie is still conceptually tied to proximity structures in human social cohesion.  It is possible to see in the economy how methods to convey human feeling directly (lie detectors), and the influence that has upon economic activity through things like marketing research.  Focus groups are about trying to gauge how people feel as well as talk about commodities.  Measuring human feelings through electronic means by-passes the difficulty in really knowing what other people feel through interpreting their words, or how their bodies appear.   And this is a strong force upon any business to try to control.  What they want to do is ensure that a theory of a products mind is associated to the product.  Branding is a good example of the relative movement away from social groups that can be made by business using the processes that arise from the theory of another's mind.

>From our point of view, creating working class organizations that open up the holism of party structure to the labor process of knowing anothers mind is a new way of understanding creating working class movement social structures.  There is much to be learned about what is possible to do.  Especially where proximity structures no longer hold the most important influence.  By seeing the labor of knowing anothers mind as the way to get at the concept of dogmatism deeply we can approach recreating working class structures that meet our needs, and which capitalism enjoys some shelter from understanding their theory of anothers mind. 

To summarize, I propose we can open up the concept of dogmatism and understand workers organizations by using three sorts of tools, one seeing how disability is important to human social groups, two understanding the labor process of a "theory of anothers mind", three examining how removing proximity allows new forms of social organization to emerge given the input from the other areas like a theory of anothers mind which explode the conceptual boundaries of labels like dogmatism.
thanks,
Doyle Saylor