So my argument there is that you have to break analogies because a lot of the ways we build the world is to make this is like this and this is like this and this is like this.
Why Chasing The Good Life Is Holding Us Back With Lauren Berlant [Ppdd2R46Eh4] transcribed via zamzar
And then you can just start refusing analogies, right?
Like you could say, well, actually, it’s not like this.
Like you, that whole, there’s a normativity to the kinds of connections that you make.
But I’m interested in like the rhetorical question and the kind of the politics of refusing the rhetorical question.
Because someone will often say, well, why, like Milton Friedman would say, why would we, why would we give the state the opportunity to organize our lives?
The state is like the worst possible institution for organizing our lives.
And he thought it was a rhetorical question and it isn’t.
You could say, oh, for these 10,000 reasons.
And then you would have to have the argument, you know, you break normativity by refusing.
It’s right to ask a rhetorical question.
You break normativity by refusing its sense that we know what the evidence of democracy is because we can put different objects near it.
And that’s a thing that I think is so important about why scholarship matters and why scholarship and the humanities matters and why just experimental thought matters is the way you break something
isn’t to just find a better object.
It’s to loosen up the object and transform it from within itself.
And so what we have to do, kind of as artists and writers and teachers is to ask the question, are there other concepts of the good life that would be more satisfying than the ones that you have been trained to pay attention to?
