Dear Alison, I agree with you. 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
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