CoreIdeas – Dialogistics | CoreIdeas
— Read on coreideas.co/coreideas-dialogistics/
— I am pondering a word which will describe the study of why human beings don’t get along. I’m thinking that dialogistics could be that word but it seems an intellectual faction of Christianity grabbed it up a few years ago.
Nonetheless, if you goto that link, you might get an foreshadowed idea of what I am talking about.
Let me take you through what got me here today.
(This might be one of my longer posts)
Feminism.
Yup. I consider and have long considered myself a male feminist, but I am beginning to ponder relinquishing that self-title (and indeed other women called me that before I thought of myself as one). Being a feminist to me means two things of which I am lately becoming aware seems not what anyone commonly thinks about it. Whether Right-wing or Left, whether a conservative, mysoginist social justice advocate, or what have you, I feel am starting to feel, what we might call, the “feminist social justice” ideal might be starting to mean something that is counter productive to its real meaning.
I’m not going to go into a history of feminism because 1) you can find such a history anywhere, and 2) such resort to histories can tend to miss what is really happening now, since we perpetually then start our analysis in a context which (as I will get to here) is more and more problematic in itself.
My self identifying feminism:
- I do hold to in the shift that occurred from ancient paganism, female, goddess-based to the masculine, patriarchal stance. The details don’t really matter here, even though they are interesting. And, I do not believe it was necessarily a world-wide event, like, all cultures stem from a female base cultural ideology. Maybe they did, but the results (our modern world) at least seem to enjoy this sensibility when we look at the records.
- This first shift (what we now call a pivot), what I could call a strictly historical shift, was necessary.
- The second shift, which I would call cultural-ideological, and generally the “posts” from the 20th century, i.e., post structuralism, post modernism, but stemming back even to a noticeable shift in Marx. It is the shift in the ability to think about things, from ‘rule-bound’, which we generally associate with colonialism and patriarchy, and what I guess we would call ‘experience opened’, which I would say is about, again, what could be termed the ‘divine feminine’ but is really merely a different manner of engaging with the universe than the rule-bound, ‘masculine’ manner.
- This could be a good explanation of the reactionary, over-determination of 20th century critical theories that abounded then.
- Then, grouping that ideal (the 1st and 2nd kind of shift that encompassed the masculine-feminine idea of history) into a class in-itself, we can notice the basic, and I’d say, more mundane and real, on-the-ground difference between men and women, whether it be social, biological, task-based, behavioral, cognitive, or what have you.
- I consider myself a feminist because I feel that to consider both the masculine and feminine as a form that creates the ideologically sound individual in our world is a feminist position. Men and women tend or appear to think differently, feel differently, embody different tasks, experience the world differently, are biologically bound to universal tasks (e.g., making babies, but with technology maybe one day this will change). The discussion and involvement with this general truth, to me, is the embodiment of the feminist position, to be open to being challenged as an existential approach to life.
- This, to me, is not merely being critical, as I see being critical has a tendency to develop more effective oppressive ideologies.
- The true stance of being critical is actually more in line with Heidegger’s. destruction, but again, the 20th century inadvertantly distorted this mode and had pushed a tendency of criticism into an ideological vehicle of oppression for the 21st century.
The issue or problem that I am coming across now is that the cultural, practical, and social issues of oppressed women (let alone people in general) across the world is conflated with the intellectual analysis of gender and sex across localities. The assumption that the on-the-ground, very real, political structure of women, say, in the severe poverty stricken areas of Africa, say, equals or can be directly conflated with the condition of women’s ideological oppression, say, in New York City, New York, or Boulder, Colorado, I say is simple too simple a traversal of idea. I would even say that they cannot be traversed without implementing an injustice. The tendency to see a grand explanatory arc creates a motion of closure such that, in our case here, the feminist theory begins to justify itself to be allowed to be critical of everything but its own theory, in as much as the theory draws the ideological line by which all other discussion about social justice is allowed to be presented. It is the over-reliance upon theoretically established norms that creates a further embeddedness of a mechanism of oppression.
…but with respect of feminist social justice, no one, especially a man, as allowed to say that.
I feel somewhat sad when I say that the very word feminism and social justice more and more is beginning to feel like another institution of oppression.
I will repeat, it is the over-application of theoretical norms that establish feminist social justice (if I could call it that) establishes is as another instrument of oppression because it begins to occupy and live in a theoretical state of privilege that it creates for itself.
In mind of Courageous Conversations about Race and Justice, this kind of ideology prevents difficult discussion by virtue of the investment (faith) that the person develops for the terms of the ideology. Its seems to me that Feminism, as an academic and intellectual ideal, it is appearing more in more in my area of the woods to embody an air of intolerance and resistance – not against ideological oppression – but against discussions that require courage. It becomes a source for unreflective ideological assertion, to exactly opposite of what feminism as an approach to real conditions of injustice is about.
The Noticing of the Reality of Problem.
I started there because I recently have experienced very real oppression because I am a man. In certain social environments I am not allowed to speak, and if I speak, I am ostracized by what I call the “culture of silence”. Now, keep in mine, I am very knowledgeable about the situation and I feel am very aware and responsible in how I show up in various social situations. Nonetheless, I have since encountered many very liberal, open minded and kind, men who have experienced the same kind of silencing and shunning. We are basically lumped into a category peremptorily of “MAN” and never allowed to say anything that questions anything about social justice if advocated in certain spaces. In certain environments that are assumed to be advocates of social justice, no voice of challenge is permitted to sound. and that’s OK, but when it comes to creating an unsafe environment by a sort of systemic militancy, then things are getting out of whack.
- And I could not help but ask how this could be the case that so many people just want to get along and live their lives in relative peace yet then move as a matter of course, it seems, to argue and fight.
The usual comment about men is that we are complaining because we are being made to feel our privilege and so are trying to reassert the oppressive patriarchy.
That sounds to me like a logical fallacy most noted in the 20th century Nationalist Socialist Rhetoric – some Emporor’s New Clothes.
It closes discussion down before it even begins.
However, I indeed understand the backlash and tenancy to be cautious and I am not thereby saying that anything is wrong. I am merely commenting on the reality of my situation as indeed it is the reality that I (at least) have to and indeed am contending with as the condition of real existence.
The interesting thing is there really is no argument to be made that could open a line of communication into such ideological states. For, once the ideological makes sense in a certain way to a person, no other discourse is able to make its way into the ideological faith because such discourse is indeed inscribing the subject into is ideological existence.
Because we are able to notice this activity, the state itself becomes an object. The problem then becomes how objects interact.
Well, the way the objects that are the modern subjects interact is to fight with other subjects. Objects define themselves by the own limitations which are not ideologically defined; rather, it is the limitations of attitude and orientation which impeller people to arrive in the world through ideological sets, to then believe that set as though the whole world must and indeed does arise only as the terms of the ideology they themselves have faith in.
Dialogistic Ideological Engagement.
I say that human beings behave this way all the time and there is no global way to overcome this existential mandate except to have – yet again – a faith in your own ideological religion. In is due to this mandate that we have the proposed solutions as well as the continuing problem, and always.
Similar to the approach that the Christians in the link advocate for their faith, but in slight contrast to their intention, the purpose of dialogistic engagement would be to stay out of the falling back into arguing my (any) necessary (ideological) position. Christianity and feminism are functioning the same, in this way. This noticing of problem, I would say, is the point of Courageous Conversations: to open a space and actively and in relationship with others who think differently, work to keep the lines of communication open even though everything in me (or you) might be screaming to close it back down so I (and you) can feel comfortable again. So we can begin to fight again, with is what human beings always do.
This is less dialectical in as much as we are not attempting to find some peaceful truth between us, but indeed are working with the intention of disrupting the reality by which I find you in contempt of my ideological court (see Jean-Francois Leotard, The Differend on this note of finding justice in a court that is unable to hear your case, but think it is). This demands courage.
The post-modern/ feminist ideal is that we are always embedded in ideology. While this might be the case, the point now is when we realize this, we have de facto found ourselves in relief of such ideology, separated from it due to the fact that we are faced with the task of behaving in a responsible and ethical way. Not that we are always consumed by it with no way out, or may only rationally react to this situation with absurdity, social justice is the realization of activity that my ideas do not transcend political limits, but the reality of the political sphere is always conditioned by what is considered local. It is this irony that we must contend with responsibly.
…But that being said, I am a white male, and my words have no validity.