Damn, I really am too busy. But if Alaric quotes Stanley Fish on law,
something of which I have read, I have to comment back. Fish essentially sees
truthfulness in law as arrived at via competition between discourses, if I
remember, and has a similar approach in his reader-response theories. I'm not
personally happy with this because it only works if all "truth" (not trying to
define that) appears in linguistic form. As Coetzee shows in "Waiting for the
Barbarians", if you see someone about to torture another person you don't
start interpreting whether that is justified or not -- not if you have a "good
heart" and haven't blanked off your emotional and visual responses. What
those last two phrases mean cannot be defined -- because you fall back into
language -- and that's a large part of the problem. Malus est robustus puer,
as Diderot used to say.
My sense of responsibility as being "answerable to" depends exactly on my
position as assembled: when we interpret via language (law language, say), any
single truth cannot be attained and we have Fish's position. But when we
perform the thought or action (originate it), something much more mysterious
takes place (as in the Schroedinger probabilities), which cannot be defined
except via probability, yet a determined outcome results. See Penrose's "The
Emperor's New Clothes", or any other work of quantum theory popularisation,
for a description of the problems.
In our human questions, such as law, what the significance of the determined
outcome is depends on our interpretation of it; and then again we fall back
into all that Fishy stuff -- that is, the post-modern, reader-response stuff
that clusters round any attempt to fix discourse into final meaning. It
remains, in my view, that the moment of origination, which I do not call
instantaneous or immediate necessarily -- only "mysterious" --, escapes
discourse, results in determined outcome, and incurs responsibility in my own
sense. (Surely Duncan should have said "respondability", Pierre, because we
do need the original word too.) Shouldn't that smartassy tone of Fish warn us
that processes of simplification are taking place in what he says?
Happy Winter Solstice and New Year to all pagans as I enter hibernation.
And yeah, Randolph, yeah: we could do with Nick in France, too.
Doug
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