koganbot | "Relativism: So What?": So What?

I keep telling myself I'm going to write a series of lj posts called "Relativism: So What?" but I keep putting off beginning this. I think a major reason for my block is that, though I can lay out the "intellectual" issues surrounding "relativism," my true goal is to get at "what are people's underlying reasons for thinking there's an issue here?" or to put it better, "people wouldn't bring up the issue of 'relativism' if they didn't think they were taking care of something by doing so, so how do I get them to think and talk about what it is that they think they need to take care of?" A subsidiary question might be, "Frank Kogan thinks he's taking care of something when he tries to get people to think and talk about what they think they're trying to take care of when they raise the issue of 'relativism,' so what is it that Frank Kogan thinks he's trying to take care of when he does this?"

Anyhow, four questions:
(1) What do you mean by "relativism," when you use the word (assuming you use the word)?
(2) Does the issue of relativism matter to you? If so, why does it matter?
(3) What do you think other people mean when they use the word "relativism"?
(4) What do you think they think is at stake?

Don't let your answers by overconstrained by the questions. I want to hear your ideas before giving mine.

By the way, someone on my flist (though I'm not on his) used the term the other day, clearly believed that "relativism" was a potent force in the world.

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1: not sure i've ever used the word -- i suppose i kind of treat it (in the discussion of others) as a marker for "nothing is decided yet"
2: the social issue of what can be taken to be known, and what is still being debated, is an exact cultural map of many (most? all? i don't know) pressing political conflicts
3: by relativists, some people seem to mean "those guys who are too complacently or vaingloriously superior, and/or cowardly, to take a stand on what they believe -- who argue that "the other guy may have a point" even when the "other guy" is some kind of crusading n4zi or similar"
4: what they think is at stake is the secureness of the institutions of established reliable knowledge

yikes the quotemarks in my (3) are breakdancin every whichway aren't they

3: by "relativists", some people seem to mean "those guys who are too complacently or vaingloriously superior, and/or cowardly, to take a stand on what they believe" or "those guys who argue that the other guy may have a point" even when the "other guy" is some kind of crusading n4zi or similar

(bah i hate trying to characterise bad arguments -- it always feels like i'm loading the dice or letting them off the hook)

Well, your characterization feels pretty accurate, except it's really more an answer to (4) rather than (3). Which is to say that the person who espouses it may think he knows who he means by "relativists," but doesn't really know what he means by "relativism." Certainly you don't have to be a relativist to think that someone else might have a point. So the question would be, what is the relationship between a (supposed) doctrine - "relativism" - and thinking that other people may have a point. And what is the doctrine? (But getting such a fellow to answer...)

Would love you to elaborate on your answer to 2.

In regard to your answer to 3 (which is a use I've run across), that's a pejorative use of the term. Have you noticed people ever using the term positively, as if being "relativist" were a good thing?

re positive use: i think you quoted a friend (was it the "those were different times" woman?) hoi'd come across a use of it among students where it was being used as ideological elbow room to escape the mental conflict of having a fundie upbringing but mixing with liberal-arts types, and not wanting to be torn apart inside (but i think this is just a topsyturvy of the pejoriative use)

by 2: i don't mean anything very startling, just that not only do (eg) left and right (or any other embattled polity) have different beliefs, but (alongside these) they have different institutions they trust to deliver or protect the important truths ("science", "the church", "the proletariat", gaia): so that claims about the unreliability of your given vehicle-of-faith -- inc. secular vehicles of faith like universities -- are declarations of political war: you see it when you put sacred truths up for debate --- darwin, glboal warming, the superiority of the free market over the command economy, pick a concrete embattled line and you see a political map behind it

(question that disrupts my claim: what's the politics limned by the teenpop battle?) (in answer i cite m.jacques attali -- "all noise is prophecy" -- and punt wildly: the teenpop battle marks the dim outlines of a politics that has NOT YET BEGUN TO FIGHT)

the social issue of what can be taken to be known, and what is still being debated

Agree, is important social issue, but wonder how it intersects with "relativism," given that what is taken as known is just as contextual, discourse-dependent etc. as what is still being debated. Cf. what I wrote in chapter 25: "that windows function as windows depends on their being distinguishable from walls and ceilings, after all." Yet "window" is a nonproblematic term, and there are no great debates about our knowledge of windows.

Don't see any particular new fight in relation to teenpop. The basic principle is that Ashlee Simpson and John Shanks and Kara DioGuardi - as a class - are as real as other musicians and therefore their musical choices count as choices for better or worse in the same way that real people's choices count. No different in principal from Otis Ferguson deciding way back when that Howard Hawks' and Carole Lombard's and Cary Grant's aesthetic choices counted. What's shocking is how many people still don't get this, but it doesn't require a new kind of politics.

maybe the relationship to "relativism" -- in the panic-swamp-of-hostility sense we're discussing -- comes when the specific discourses relevant to discourse-dependence are at war with one another over the rights to dependency in relation to a given meaning (but of course there's an element of circularity here, isn't there? i think political cleavages intensify the problematisation of definition, where differences in definition may contribute to the initial fact of cleavage...)

(haha there was a window tax levied in queen anne's reign, during which era i bet definitions of window became a lively political and/or legal issue!

i think within the critical community (writers and readers) there's absolutely a small-p politics of "who gets taken seriously", much less negotiable now than it was 40 years ago: i somewhat assume this would map onto wider politics over the same span but i don't clearly see how -- i DO think it relates to the huge debate over who gets into higher ed (and what they do there) which has raged over the same timespan... but i think the link is intricate and complex

"Relativism: So What?": So What?

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