"Relativism: So What?": So What?

[koganbot]

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.

Comments

[koganbot]

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.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

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