Determinism

Introductory paragraph to an assignment in a class about "Transnational Literature" whith a professor who is also keen in discussing "Ethnic Literatures" as opposed to non-ethnic, "normal" literature.

When addressing the question whether a writer does or not present colonial traits, we must at all times remember to be open to either of the possible answers. Deterministic materialism very often assumes that all writers born in a first world country will necessarily be doomed to write in the name of the empire, even if they claim the opposite. If this was so, we would already have the answer to the quality of an author's work before reading it. Any literary discussion on the contents of his writing would be pointless, since the outcome is already predefined. In the best of cases, we would only look for details that confirm what we already know - but we would not be open to whatever the text might actually bring forth itself. This attitude is frequent within cultural studies and shows contempt towards literature and art itself.

Even in spite of this, I had a fruitfull discussion with the professor and it was particularly fun how we both kept switching back and forth between German and English. However, my interlocutor also came back to state again, even after reading and discussing this, that there is no way a person in America would not be limited and reabsorbed by their context, no matter what they did, they still remained white males and this was what made up the whole of their discourse.

It's amazing how passionate determinists can be in defending what in the end is their own impotence as humans. They smile greatly while stating that they'll never really make any difference because they are predestined by race, gender, class and nationality. Everything is determine, everything is political, everything is sex, whence everything is acording to my theory and I've won before we start talking, cause I never meant to let you talk in the first place. They trust in those determining concepts aprioristically more than in their own eyes as if they were some positivist "concrete base". Positivism is a dogma, it has never proved anything but its own ignorance. Maybe determinists entertain the belief that no matter how wrong they act, things will always be the same. That might make some lifes easier.

As for me, I now see myself much clearer on the side of idealism, starting from the infinite relativity of perspectives, out of which my own is in the first place the only acces I have to the universe and other relatives perspectives of it. Every mind is so complex it can hardly understand itself. How would someone else attempt to understand me any better from without? At best, he has just another perspective, one with less information. Concepts, too, are a matter of perspectives, and every mind is creating new definitions through the act of speech. But there cannot be all-encompassing concepts, as they would in themselves be meaningless by having no delimitation, no definition. A concept is something that splits posibilities in two or more, just as I split idealism from materialist determinism.