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Dear Alison, I agree with you. That's why I wrote my dissertation about as. But to privilege relationship is also to ratify categories. All classification is rhetorical and obviously can be changed, inexorably or otherwise. The Aristotelian boxes have been useful, annoying as it still is to encounter students who understand poems as boxes in which meaning is cunningly concealed and from which it can be painstakingly extracted. The two models of the human body as understood by the Greeks: the male body as hard and firmly bounded, and the female body as soggy and osmotic, still model our ways of knowing in the West. That second model is increasingly useful, which is all that matters in rhetoric. Mairead At 01:06 PM 5/20/01 +1000, you wrote: >I would rather knowledge was built on dynamic relationships, which seem >less static than Aristotlean boxes and (to me) closer to actualities. >The instabilities and inherent transformative qualities of relationships >aren't built into traditional categorical knowledge, or, rather, are >glossed. Rather than a grid laid on top of something, a closer and >specific attention to whatever or however it is and behaves. That's >where the complex sciences are quite interesting, in how they pay >attention to phenomena - turbulence, organic growth, etc - which have >been sidelined by other knowledges; or contemporary approaches to >neurology, which incorporate emotions and feelings as subjects of >investigation and have to incorporate more complex ideas of the studying >subject, therefore... I mean, categories can hardly be regarded as >absolute, or as the only means of knowing. > >Best > >Alison