Time to flood this community with educational memes! We have to meet the people where they are, and memes are the true art form of the people.
It's the best since it allows argumentation so well.
Is knowledge really inseperable from the conditions that produced it, though?
I mean that's one of the chief contentions of Marxism. There is no out of context, everything is historicized and dependent on material conditions, even "knowledge."
But that doesn't condemn the knowledge to some sort of moral corruption. We can utilize that knowledge, if we understand the material context. The contention of the meme seems to be that we can glean nothing and learn nothing from it.
I would encourage you to read the paper and book in that last frame to see this in more detail (links are here), but they talk about how you totally can use anthropological knowledge, but it's useless and reproduces colonialism if you don't combine that knowledge, critique or none, with material changes for the communities they're about. Decolonization isn't just a metaphor for academic purposes, and if the communities that have been "anthropologicized" aren't given autonomy, land, and some form of reparations, all that "decolonization" is for nothing. It's basically a riff on Marx's famous declaration "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it," but applied to a colonial context.
So what's the context of 1+1=2 and how does it exclusively empower the ruling class?
1+1=2 is a manifestation of algebra, which itself is a subset of mathematics. The point I'm trying to make here is that even if particular mathematical (or physics, or chemistry, or...) discoveries were made by individuals with their own particular ideologies and agendas the distilled discoveries themselves hold no bias or ideological preference besides just turning out to be factually wrong later on at times. The knowledge that the earth orbits the sun is a free for all and divorced from its application.
The operation is the knowledge. There is no esoteric or metaphysical "knowledge" - what you see is what you get. In order to be knowledge it needs to have explanatory power. In order to be practical knowledge it needs to have predictive power. That's it, that's the requirement. Whatever navel gazing you may engage in about whether it is "true" or what is "the nature of truth" (hint, there is no nature, only what is observed and verified, and itself can be overturned by new observations and so on) is both irrelevant and impotent in terms of conscious existence.
The only thing I ignored was the piling up of words on top of other words. If you retrace the steps you will see that the discussion was about whether any specific item of knowledge can be divorced from the context it was first discovered in. My contention is that not all knowledge automatically assumes ideological character. One could even argue that all ideological knowledge is possibly not knowledge at all but rather a creed, though the discussion never even went that far, nor am I going to push it there (others might). If anyone it's the person in question who can be more credibly accused of side-stepping the discussion as they went at length about colonialist book-keeping, ancient Greek grasp of mathematics, property relations etc, but no matter how far down the philosophical or philosophy of science rabbit hole you've sunk the fact remains that when you add two items together you get the sum of those two items. Trivial but true and true in any context. To imply the opposite is to engage in magical thinking (you see actually 1 + 1 is not 2 but...). The same goes for the earth orbiting the sun. It was worked out in its modern elliptical form by a deeply religious man trying to better understand god's plan and safeguard the sanctity of the divine. That was the context of Kepler's discoveries. Yet it has zero bearing on a communist society using the calculations standing on the shoulders of that knowledge to launch rockets into space and have them land where they want to. The same goes for pretty much all knowledge.
I'm reading and re-reading your last sentence but can't make heads nor tails of it, can you please expand on what you mean there?
As to the 1+1 thing - reads like pure sophistry to me. It doesn't matter if the chairs are part of the room or not, it doesn't even matter if there are any chairs at all, the fact remains that if you take an item, a purely abstract item, a totally shapeless and formless item that has the completely arbitrary assigned value of one and add to it another item that has the same arbitrary value you get the sum of those values when you group them together. Yes, this is predicated on an axiom but the axiom is for us, in our general reality in this universe undeniably true. Until it maybe isn't in some hypothetical future but until such a time we have no reason to assume so and thus such a hypothetical overturning of the axiom is completely irrelevant, a navel gazing exercise. The example of adding items is a very apt one because it demonstrably applies to non-human species as well. Many kinds of birds can count, apes can too, as well as elephants and highly probably many many other animals throughout the animal kingdom. This operation transcends not only any ideological stance both geographically and historically but even entire species. What more reasonable proof of universality do you want that knowledge is not tethered to its historical origins?
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.2016.0513 https://www.cell.com/trends/ecology-evolution/fulltext/S0169-5347(20)30055-0 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/science/animals-count-numbers.html https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-animals-have-the-ability-to-count/ https://www.friendsofanimals.org/counting-capabilities-in-nonhuman-animals/
We certainly are and I never implied that the gathering and application of knowledge is an exclusively human practice or ability, quite the contrary.
I honestly can't believe our newest struggle session is over whether or not the sum of one and one is two. Smh my damn head.
1+1=2 includes a lot of assumptions, that a binary operation in a ring produces this algebra (we could easily define "+" to mean "s+r+2" in our regular parlance, and thatd met all the requirements for it to be an algebra along with regular mutliplication). It includes definitions of what "1" and "2" are along with this rather mysterious thing called "=" is. If you read through principia mathematica, they dont get to "1+1=2" until well into the book, and even then it ultimately failed. Classical Greek mathematicians would have no idea what "1+1=2" is supposed to mean, but would show you how to add 2 measures instead. Mathematics is a wondefully mysterious subject that isnt encaspulated in equations, even the simplest equations belie some shaky ground we all take for granted. For instance, looking into something as simple as the interval between (0, 1) tells us something about the supremum of the set and we must introduce a new axiom of completeness to deal with it.
The fact that your base idea of knowledge without context is a simple equation shows how your education has led you to be automaton-like or calculator-like, you have been reduced to instead of a fully formed free thinking, creative, curious human into a creature that can recite simple mathematical observations without deeper reflection.
I read this and it really just looks like pedantic wankery for the purpose of showing off knowledge of modular arithmetic and set theory. I don't disagree that even in mathematics, context matters and there are nuances that usually aren't known or appreciated by people who haven't studied it in depth, but to imply that the sum of one and one is two is some kind of nebulous idea that is only true within a certain framework of biases is flat wrong and imo disingenuous of you. That is some hardcore "well akshualy" style pedantry.
Classical Greek mathematicians would have no idea what “1+1=2” is supposed to mean
Nonsense. Obviously they wouldn't have any idea what that specific set of symbols means because language. But the concept would absolutely make immediate sense to them. The fact that their mathematics was based on physical geometric relationships doesn't change this.
Making these kinds of claims doesn't help people understand how extremely context-dependent anthropological "knowledge" is. It does the opposite by implying that such knowledge is on a similar footing as mathematical knowledge.
Also, good job insulting Rev as being an incurious, shallow, uncreative "creature" for making a perfectly valid and reasonable point. Ugh.
Thank you for the history lesson (I mean it).
That said, it is quite laughably presumptuous of you to pontificate on my creativity and curiosity without knowing anything about me save for the participation in this forum. For someone seemingly valuing a holistic approach to knowledge this is awfully inconsistent.
The main thing that bugs me here though is what you mean exactly by "deeper reflection"? What is being reflected, what is the reflecting medium and where is the reflection re-directed? How can you tell the depth from the surface, is there a quantifiable axis and how is it subdivided so you know where "shallowness" ends and "depth" begins? Or is it just poetical speech aiming to manipulate emotions rather than explain? (The manipulation itself, or more precisely the ability to do so itself being the fruit of some specific knowledge)
Old stories of archaeological digs can be depressing as fuck. There's a ton of medieval era middle eastern artifacts and architecture just lost because some 19th century British mustache wanted to get to the ancient Egyptian and Greek stuff underneath.
The reason why we have so few mummies from Egypt is because 17th century European nobles used to eat them as medicine.
This would be so cool in some Dark Souls kinda shit, but it's very sad in real life.
Mexico has a good policy. They know that there are hundred of undiscovered pyramids and Mayan structures underground in the Yucatan. But once they are uncovered, they cost money to maintain and protect. Stuff might have to go into museums, or else it will be looted. There can be weather damage. There isn't enough tourism to justify opening more sites for visitors. So the policy is archeological digs are only allowed if they are very likely to increase either tourism revenue, or help better understand the history of the Mayans and the mystery of their collapse. I think thats pretty cool.
Yeah, most of what happens now is focused on village life and infrastructure, which is pretty awesome. The mayans had well maintained roads.
The mayans had well maintained roads.
Cue chuds repeating "Mayan no wheels" as they rock back and forth in fetal position.
YES YES YES YES I LOVE THIS! BRING THE KNOWLEDGE TO THE PEOPLE IF THEY WON'T READ IT THEMSELVES!
Here's the Tuck & Wang paper the meme cites, it's a good read. And here's the Coulthard book, Red Skin, White Masks : Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. I highly recommend it—he does a fantastic job of combining native radical traditions and Marxism to oppose liberal anthropology and "recognition" theories.
EDIT: Nice name, frater!
Kingly government seems to comprehend all authority in itself, and kings are consecrated with the most awful ceremonies; yet the citizens expelled Tarqin, when his administration became iniquitous, and, for the offense of one man, the ancient government, under whose auspices Rome was erected, was entirely abolished. So a tribune who injures the people can be no longer sacred or inviolable on the people’s account. He destroys that power in which alone his strength lay. If it is just for him to be invested with the tribunal authority by a majority of tribes, is it not more just for him to be deposed by the suffrages of them all?
My mom went to Barnard when he was teaching there. She never had him as a professor, but she said all the women wanted to fuck him.
Which, I really wish I didn't hear that from her, but yeah
I mean, I know that and I try to be mature about that knowledge. But that doesn't mean that I want her actively telling me about the people she wanted to fuck
Damn that must suck to hear. Your dad was almost Edward Said, I'm sorry she chickened out.
Oh don't worry, I'll be posting plenty more of these!
Oh just to note, this isn't my work, it's just in my meme folder from a long time ago. I will start churning out OC though, don't you worry.
