What is "decenter"?
What is "decenter"? The idea for this blog came from a blog I read on what it meant to be a "centrist"...None of the bloggers could decide what being "center" meant.
The reason being there is no center. You can give one question to everyone and claim the center as the majority answer. One question will beget another, and another about itself. Abortion for example. Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life? Lets say for argument Pro-Life is the answer. Then the question is pro-life from conception? When is conception? Is abortion okay if medically necessary? or rape, or incest? Is 1st trimester permitted? 2nd?
The point is to illustrate the idea of "decentering"...the more dynamic life becomes the further from a political center(any center for that matter) we become...Life is not a simple yes/no question/answer. An individual can have a center because there is no reference points. Again we don't live in a vacuum by sheer numbers the center comes apart.
So what's the big deal about "decenter", it is the concept that holds promise, it is the idea of treating all questions without preconceptions that might come with them. The preconceptions are labels. Labels are the lazy way out of making choices and decisions. He is a liberal so I don't have to listen to him. She is a bible-thumper, she lives in the stone age.
The illusion of center is that idea of something being set in stone...abortion is murder or abortion is choice...these are just examples of absolutes....
This doesn't mean that we can't have opinion about subject matter, it just means that we need to deconstruct foundations of the subject before we can come to a pragmatic answer.
"Decenter" comes from wordplay on being a "centrist"...it also comes from the writings of Derrida. He wrote entensively on the idea of "deconstruction" and "decentering"...
The reason being there is no center. You can give one question to everyone and claim the center as the majority answer. One question will beget another, and another about itself. Abortion for example. Pro-Choice vs. Pro-Life? Lets say for argument Pro-Life is the answer. Then the question is pro-life from conception? When is conception? Is abortion okay if medically necessary? or rape, or incest? Is 1st trimester permitted? 2nd?
The point is to illustrate the idea of "decentering"...the more dynamic life becomes the further from a political center(any center for that matter) we become...Life is not a simple yes/no question/answer. An individual can have a center because there is no reference points. Again we don't live in a vacuum by sheer numbers the center comes apart.
So what's the big deal about "decenter", it is the concept that holds promise, it is the idea of treating all questions without preconceptions that might come with them. The preconceptions are labels. Labels are the lazy way out of making choices and decisions. He is a liberal so I don't have to listen to him. She is a bible-thumper, she lives in the stone age.
The illusion of center is that idea of something being set in stone...abortion is murder or abortion is choice...these are just examples of absolutes....
This doesn't mean that we can't have opinion about subject matter, it just means that we need to deconstruct foundations of the subject before we can come to a pragmatic answer.
"Decenter" comes from wordplay on being a "centrist"...it also comes from the writings of Derrida. He wrote entensively on the idea of "deconstruction" and "decentering"...
posted by BigBuddhaPuppy at 4:16 PM
1 Comments:
You ever read Piaget?
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