harvey young
The New Culture Forum
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Comments by "harvey young" (@harveyyoung3423) on "Proud to Be British? A New Vision for Britain Live from New Culture Forum's Annual Conference" video.
I was there, but most of the talks were subliminally below hearing, probably due to a combination of my hearing loss and a poor sound system. Ironic for a group described by the left as composed of privileged louder voices. It was in sharp contrast to Communist meeting i went to ten years ago, which, also in a kind of self irony, felt like being subjected to the "1572 Vagabonds Act" of punishment of being "bored through the ear".
There are possibly more parallels to come going by some Labour guy on what's her names Sunday Morning BBC show, which was moved onto BBC Two today due to the "London Middle Class "Stop Obesity" quick march spectacle. It seems Labour are intending some kind of "forced back to work Universal Program for the idol undeserving poor. It has to be said that this Victorian Industrial Era program did improve on Tudor Programs where there was a hanging for "those without land or master...or explainable income". This of course was, in turn, an improvement on the previous system since "In this newly established definition of what constituted a vagabond, men who had been discharged from the military, released servants, and servants whose masters had died were specifically exempted from the Act's punishments." (Wikipedia).
At the NCF conference i did speak to some interesting people though, I agreed with one who said something like: its like we have no political home. Another lead me to revisit for the first time in some ten years since that Marxist conference: the history of the Red Cross.
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On reflection I imagine it might be inappropriate to reference a conversation. My references were not a quotes or authored, and the context of the discussion in which they were made was not given. They of course were statements in a chain within statements before the and after them. A such then they were not citations. But the very idea of saying they are not citations, risks its self, blurring the distinction between speech and writing. Even in denying that it was a citation, i appear to place speech and writing in related semantic space. That of course is just what Critical Theory and Practice do. Historically they began the "technique" of deconstruction by working on written texts first in literature and literal criticism and then in philosophy, and from there into legal theory and discourse and communication theory. So called political correctness in speech then has an more immediate context from its "intervention" into the already existing disciplines of speech pragmatics and discourse linguistics. It is fine to relate it historically to the Soviet Union, Communist China and Orwell, but the argument must really meet the road. I believe there is already a problem with discourse theory in that it attempts to provide formal like structure to conversation, that is a structure to time constructed with statements. Much of this was influenced by the work of Oxford philosopher Paul Grice as well as various structural and grammatical theories. But the move by the left is from Derrida's work on Speech and Writing on Husserl in "Speech and Phenomena" and another Oxford philosopher J. L. Austin in "Signature Event Context" (SEC). This follows his work on literary criticism and i think allows him to apply the textual deconstruction tactic, now a discipline on public writing straight into private speech, apparently without loss of incongruence. Of course these are really incongruent semantic spaces. No one gets to address the writers of the American Constitution to disagree with it and I'm sure there was much talk around it that was necessarily private and not intended for publication, let alone the application of legal Criteria and Standards of precision. The structuralist "method" allows parts of sentences to be swapped over and interchanged, the words are substitutional, and so by their congruence so is speech. the difference is the substitution is now a transitive anaphoric cataphoric move, like someone correcting someone in their use of words with their next follow on statement. Or indeed the punishment and strategy of character attack. I say strange because the post structuralist denies an author and agent in the analysis of speech so really its a infelitisious inference to an intention, a impermissible ad hominin. its a very mechanical way of viewing langue and speech. but now everybody does it even if by negations and reversed substitution. I'm not French but also am I not not French.
In SEC Derrida introduces the term iteration, that a signature as a public act of identity and authorship must be necessarily repeatable, but then as such is possible to forge (given much habit and practice eg Picasso's Dove, rather than an attempt at a one off perfect copy representation, or a trace). So while Austin claims that in a play on stage two actors may preform a marriage ceremony these are infelicitous as the priest is not a real priest and its is not serious but a mere performance, and parasitic on the real meaning of being married. Derrida argues that the characters are married and this kind of performance is at the heart of all so called illocutionary acts. Thus I guess Napoleon can crown himself King or Emperor. This is argued as Derrida denaturalising the status authority Right to perform a successful Speech act that brings about The "Crowning of a King" event. It is this that inspired Judith Butler's Gender Theory and LGBTQ praxis. But really I would say it is a de normative or re normative move. I guess Hobbes is the omni-normative mover then. Kind of like Liam Neeson in the film i saw last night "The Grey"
Now the next bit has to be transitive of its true context, because i am no expert so better make the move in relative privacy.
There is a famous Formal axiomatic semantic theory by Tarski called the redundancy Theory of Truth. So the meaning of the sentence: "Snow is white is true" if and only if snow is white. but "snow is white" means the same as snow is white. So the "is true" bit, or "Truth" is redundant. Its adds nothing to the meaning of "Snow is white". So a formal system need not have external reference to truth, to have meaning. Now statements mean in relation in relation to their value in a formal logical structure independently of the world and the speaker and the context etc. This was intended to solve Russell's Set Theory Paradox of sentences referencing themselves or speakers like in the Liar Paradox. it is curious that the philosopher of Law Peter Suter has approached this as a way of articulating the problem of changing the constitution from within the constitution, that Rights are like axioms sets of sets not members of themselves. (by memory it needs me revisiting this on line).This I think is only one way to think of the problem though. Derrida's term "iteration" has meaning in mathematics and computer science. that of the approach of a limit though a process not by the imposition of a model in advance. Here then movement and the space of possibility is not laid out in advance but constructed and reconstructed as discussion moves along. it can be a dynamic model of things like promise or contract or agreement. The question of normativity though is now within a changing space of degrees of freedom not determined like a formal system or rails to infinity from the start. As new people join the conversation and others leave the iterative space changes. The question of truth and justice now is not redundant but transformed into maybe hope and a future of greater prosperity. perhaps its like the theological shift from the Old Testament "Covenant" to the New Testament "inheritance".
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