Date: Tue, 21 Jan 1997 12:10:08 -0800 From: "Gary B. Palmer" Subject: Logic, Bourdieu Sender: owner-linganth@cc.rochester.edu To: linganth@cc.rochester.edu, gbp@pioneer.nevada.edu Precedence: bulk Mark Peterson writes: >Bourdieu offers the concept of "hexis" to refer to the ways in which he believes even many basic physical experiences are shaped by cultural experience. Our ways of organizing space, of articulating and many other physical activities are shaped from early childhood by the ways in which we are held and touched, carried or put in play pens, the shapes of our homes, the loudness of our environments and so forth.

Cultural determination of physical experiences, such as those you mention, are undeniable and they are probably given insufficient recognition by Lakoff and Johnson. Nevertheless, all humans share at least a few physical experiences, the experience of gravity, the sight of whatever is common to human faces and bodies, light and dark, etc. It is these universally shared experiences that could provide the schematic basis of a universal human logic.

>In this use of logic, we can no more find a common underlying logic that enables interpretation between otherwise incommensurate languacultures than we can find a common underlying language from which to interpret between different languages. On the contrary, it is from the differences that better understandings arise both of our own languaculture and of the languaculture of the other/Other.

Agreed that culturally determined differences can not provide the basis for a common logic, but wouldn't it be more accurate to say that better understandings arise from discovering what is shared as well as what is different? The ambience of postmodernism seems to allow no space for shared culture and convention, or for universal physical or psychobiological experience, preferring instead to catch all meaning on the wings of discourse, or finding it just as it emerges into being, or totally relativising it to cultural discourses; nothing is stable and reliable. I just don't think that difference alone provides an sufficient basis for communication. There is no commun(ion) in difference itself.

My own position on this is that there is much in our physical, social, and discourse experience that we share with other humans, and much of this that we share with other primates. At the same time, these common fields of experience are colored, and often even strongly shaped, by cultural fields of experience, and cultural discourses.