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	SD! : Web boards : IE Theory : "Enslavement: Continuum? Binary State? Category?" Enslavement: Continuum? Binary State? Category? (10) Tue 15 Apr 08, 6:18 PM Yarakot 3 yrs little_linnet wrote: I have trouble wrapping my head around enslavement as occurring on a continuum because -- well, would you say it's possible for someone to be "more owned" than someone else? I don't know how that could be unless "owned" is radically redefined to mean something not at all absolute (and you yourself embrace that absolutism in your relationship). On the other hand, as you say, internal enslavement occurs over time, with every landmark bringing a deeper feeling of being owned. It seems to me like you ... hmm, not "confuse", because you don't seem confused in the least ... like you mesh together the process of internalizing enslavement and the (to me) binary state of being owned. Maybe the binary state lies more with the owner in the relationship, and the continuum/process state with the owned? In other words, either someone is in a relationship with a dominant who has absolute authority over them, or they aren't (binary). *And*, their internalization, or their perception or realization, of that authority is a process (continuum). Krista I gave a great deal of thought to this while I was away from TSR. I finally found a theory of mind that I think explains things better. I wrote about this more extensively in my blog, but here is a summary of how I now think about this. First, I think that I was wrong when I said that enslavement occurs on a continuum, which implies a linear progression rather than as a family within a category. The idea of enslavement is better explored using Wittgenstein and Rosch's views of categories than either a continuum or a binary state. Wittgenstein proposed that category membership is determined by family resemblance. For example, black hair is something that all members of my family share and is part of what defines us. However, someone could be part of my family, have every other trait we share except black hair and still be part of us. This view would see enslavement as a category with people sharing a list of traits. According to Eleanor Rosch something can be more or less a category member, rather than being all or none. There are shades of membership, degrees of fit to a category, and subtle shadings. Is an apple a fruit? Most people would answer yes. Is a tomato a fruit? Many people would say yes but would add that tomatos are not very good examples of fruit, nor typical of the category. From The Body Has a Mind of Its Own wrote: Wittgenstein showed that categories do not always have clear boundaries--they have fuzzy boundaries. Questions of membership are a matter of debate and there can be differences of opinion: Is white a color? Is hip-hop really music? If the surviving members of Queen perform without Freddie Mercury, am I still seeing Queen (and is it worth $150 a ticket)? None of this means that how we define “slave” here on TSR is wrong. I think a better way of looking at it is to understand it as a conceptual model, a static picture of enslavement, that is useful to look at and compare to what goes on in reality. It is very difficult to understand complex systems (and there are few systems as complex as M/s relationships) by trying to intuit the whole thing in one gulp. Analyzing it in pieces is often necessary. But when we analyze something using a static snapshot, we also lose something. Categories are dynamic. They shift around. Identifying something that changes in time and space is difficult. The scientific method requires control of all non-experimental variables, but by controlling too much, we sometimes change the essence of what we are studying. Levitin identifies this as a similar problem with music (i.e. something can be part of a musical genre but not share all the traits of that genre). I believe that we encounter the same thing when we talk about what a slave within a M/s relationship is and is not. The practice of condensing the definition down to specific traits is useful in a number of ways, but it ignores the dynamic nature of these relationships, how they differ from each other but are nonetheless within the same family of categorization, and how they change over time while still remaining in the same category. We change in our M/s relationships over time, sometimes to the detriment of M/s, sometimes improving M/s, and sometimes things are just different, neither better or worse. Our relationships are not static and cannot be. They are living systems. So, I think a good way to think about this is to look at the defining characteristics of the prototype of the category "TPE slave" or “TSR slave”. From there we can think about how well we fit with the prototype, always understanding that no one fits exactly, in every detail, every moment of every day. This way of thinking has the advantage of being both precise as a way of defining things and open to the fuzziness and dynamism of reality. Carolyn And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. --Erica Jong * * * Interested in meeting me or other TSR people? Come to the TSR Meet & Greet at MsC in DC (August, 2008). Edited Tue 15 Apr 08, 6:38 PM by Yarakot 15 Apr 08, 9:32 PM little_linnet US, 3 yrs Ooooo, yes. Category seems to me like exactly the way to describe it. In my mind I usually think about the relationship types we discuss being "baskets" -- we can sort relationships into one basket or another based on various characteristics they have. My frustration mostly comes from people who seem to think these "baskets" are defined by the labels people put on their relationships. That is, one basket is labeled "M/s" and therefore everyone who calls their relationship M/s hops into that basket, the result of which is a basketful of higgledy-piggledy mixed up relationships that have little in common besides the label. I have trouble understanding why people resist the concept of examining their relationships for identifying traits and climbing into the basket that *describes* them most accurately rather than simply matching the label they prefer. It seems so obvious to me that this makes for the groupings most conducive to usefully discussing those relationships. I don't think "enslavement as category" necessarily contradicts Tanos' definition of enslavement. If anything Tanos' studies and writings have revealed that relationships meeting the binary definition also, almost without exception, have a number of traits in common that would place them into a category with each other. Krista No feminist thinks men and women are exactly the same. But what we reject is the notion that the difference between men and women is that men are human and women are objects. 16 Apr 08, 1:35 PM anjuli UK, 18 mths Seems almost ideal to me, with the proviso, as raised by Krista, that people will be flexible enough to follow definition/characteristics rather than labels (or... picture of higgledy-piggledy baskets of people...(!) spring to mind). This way of thinking has a sound scientific basis too - don't we think of light as discrete parcels or continuous waves depending on whether we're working in the macro Einsteinian world or that of quantum physics? Accepting different sets of rules that allow us to understand and make sense of how things work, works. I need to absorb the ideas but intuitively I think I like getting away from a continuum and on the surface this seems more 'inclusive' and more accepting of differences and variations without implying 'less/more, worse/better' and so on. Thanks both. anjuli ~~~ “I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” - Anais Nin ~~~ 16 Apr 08, 1:53 PM Yarakot 3 yrs Hi Krista, I'm glad you like it. When I first heard of the idea it completely bowled me over and I kept murmuring “Yes, yes, yes, yes, that's it”. One of the most powerful things about this idea is that a thing can be in a category but not be the best representative of the category because it shares so few of the defining traits (like the example of a tomato in the fruit category). So a penguin can still be in the bird category even though it doesn't fly and isn't the best example of a bird (in the Aristotelean ideal of birdness). A thing can also be in many categories (so a tomato is in the category of fruit, vegetable, things that are red, things to plant in the garden, and so forth). I think that this is the source of some of our difficulties here. A thing that exists along the boundaries of one category and the boundaries of another category are difficult to categorize since they don't neatly slot into one or the other. This becomes especially difficult when those categories are being contrasted. For example, my owner and I both read Bujold's A Civil Campaign and it was the topic of several of our walks. My owner loved the book. He can go on and on about the expert characterization, the subtle tonal shifts, the deft description of political intrigue, the humor, and so forth. I was disappointed. “It's not even science fiction. It's just a stupid romance novel,” I told him. He listed all the ways it qualified as science fiction. I listed all the ways it encompassed the standard elements of romance fiction that date all the way back to Richardson's Pamela and pointed out how little it retained of either the hard science model or the heroic model of the SF genre. The problem, of course, is that A Civil Campaign falls into both categories and it is not a good representative of either. (Though with Catherine Asaro's romantic SF, it is clear that SF has made room for romance fiction within the genre.) Similarly, most people fall within the basket labeled M/s by having several traits that are characteristic of M/s. It depends on how much weight we give to each of the traits. In the Tanosian model, there are two traits that are weighted much heavier than all others: “can't leave” and “owner has ultimate authority”. We also seem to agree that the following traits are indicative of enslavement relationships in the Tanos paradigm, though not everyone has these or has these at any given moment: co-resident, obedience, service to owner, control by the owner of all possible sources of power, initial consensuality, etc. I think my owner did a very nice job outlining these in the post he wrote about clashing paradigms. In addition, one of the traits we value highly “can't leave” is really hard to see. It's really not a trait, but the absence of one. We are not set up cognitively to perceive absence with the same degree of salience. So, what does it mean that one “can't leave”? How does one know that one possesses that trait? Perhaps, one can't leave today, but what about tomorrow? It is endlessly frustrating because it doesn't mesh with how human perception and cognition work. Another issue with the M/s basket is the one my owner points out. Two competing paradigms evaluate that basket differently and prioritize certain elements as more or less important. So, when we look at ourselves or at others and evaluate whether or not they fit into the M/s basket, we may not use the same metric and this leads to difficulty. As you pointed out, it is easy to identify and weed out people who are obviously not doing M/s (they're writing one-handed) or who are obnoxious trolls. But the greater difficulty is dealing with people whom we perceive are on the margins of the category, especially when those people are articulate and polite. My personal experience with trying to figure out whether I fit into the Tanosian M/s basket was that I couldn't be sure. Eventually, I stopped caring whether I did or didn't, defined myself as definitely D/s, perhaps M/s at times (provisionally, understanding that the “can't leave” issue would always be a stumbling block for my understanding) and moved on. I'm pretty analytical, I've got a lot of experience, and I'm pretty serious about this stuff. If it took me a long time and a great deal of angst to decide whether or not I fit into the M/s basket, we shouldn't be so quick to assume that others can make this determination easily either. It's not a problem with the people trying to make the assessment. It is the nature of the problem of categorization. Carolyn And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. --Erica Jong * * * Interested in meeting me or other TSR people? Come to the TSR Meet & Greet at MsC in DC (August, 2008). Edited 16 Apr 08, 2:10 PM by Yarakot 16 Apr 08, 2:06 PM Yarakot 3 yrs anjuli wrote: This way of thinking has a sound scientific basis too - don't we think of light as discrete parcels or continuous waves depending on whether we're working in the macro Einsteinian world or that of quantum physics? Accepting different sets of rules that allow us to understand and make sense of how things work, works. I need to absorb the ideas but intuitively I think I like getting away from a continuum and on the surface this seems more 'inclusive' and more accepting of differences and variations without implying 'less/more, worse/better' and so on. Hi anjuli, It has a very sound scientific and philosophical basis. It is based on the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein and the work in cognitive psychology done by Eleanor Rosch and it has plenty of experimental data supporting it. In addition, Roger Shepard, suggests that it has an evolutionary/adaptive basis in the need of all organisms to be able to categorize the world they perceive and the desperate need to be able to understand and categorize new objects that they encounter. Imagine if you couldn't identify a new threat to you until it had eaten you! I think it is an amazing insight and upon learning of it I immediately regretted all the nasty things I had said about Wittgenstein last year. I'm glad that you see it as I do, as a way to accept and understand variations and understand how we can classify and communicate. Carolyn And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more. --Erica Jong * * * Interested in meeting me or other TSR people? Come to the TSR Meet & Greet at MsC in DC (August, 2008). Edited 16 Apr 08, 2:28 PM by Yarakot 16 Apr 08, 3:07 PM anjuli UK, 18 mths Yarakot wrote: Hi anjuli, It has a very sound scientific and philosophical basis. It is based on the philosophical ideas of Wittgenstein and the work in cognitive psychology done by Eleanor Rosch and it has plenty of experimental data supporting it. In addition, Roger Shepard, suggests that it has an evolutionary/adaptive basis in the need of all organisms to be able to categorize the world they perceive and the desperate need to be able to understand and categorize new objects that they encounter. Imagine if you couldn't identify a new threat to you until it had eaten you! I think it is an amazing insight and upon learning of it I immediately regretted all the nasty things I had said about Wittgenstein last year. I'm glad that you see it as I do, as a way to accept and understand variations and understand how we can classify and communicate. Carolyn Thanks for this - very interesting. I have some scientific background but almost none in philosophy so you can see my problem but I think you have given us an enlightening set of thoughts here which are also, practically, useful and attractive in the context of TSR. I have more thinking and reading to do! anjuli ps. I have to share this. Apologies for silliness but I am deeply amused by my misreading of an earlier para (your quote insertion) referencing Wittgenstein, as I read it, asking whether hip hop was music and musing on whether Queen is still Queen without Freddie and worth the same ticket price! <laughs> Little things do please little minds eh? ~~~ “I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes enormous demands on me, who does not doubt my courage or my toughness, who does not believe me naive or innocent, who has the courage to treat me like a woman.” - Anais Nin ~~~ 16 Apr 08, 9:22 PM Mistress_Tiara UK, 2 yrs I love your threads like this Carolyn. you bring an additional element to this board which encourages an extension of, and diversity of thought which encourages the boards growth. Long may it continue ~ *Mistress Tiara* 16 Apr 08, 9:36 PM Steve_Vakesh 2 yrs Yarakot wrote: In addition, one of the traits we value highly “can't leave” is really hard to see. It's really not a trait, but the absence of one. We are not set up cognitively to perceive absence with the same degree of salience. So, what does it mean that one “can't leave”? How does one know that one possesses that trait? Perhaps, one can't leave today, but what about tomorrow? It is endlessly frustrating because it doesn't mesh with how human perception and cognition work. The latter is what has always bothered me about making "can't leave" a key part of the definition. It is not fixed in time. Owners assume, and slaves surrender, particular types of authority at specific times. Relationships are spelled out at their beginning and evolve, change, and hopefully grow over time. One can generally point to key events and changes and note when they occurred. BA, I am certain, remembers when he chained L into the house, and presumably when he re-chained her following their recent move. "Can't leave" is not only nebulous, it looks toward a possible but not predictable future. It is forever intangible. It is also the one part of what I labeled the Tanos-Inspired Paradigm that actually resembles the opposing American Scene Paradigm and its emphasis on daily recommitment to the relationship: 'today is a day during which I did not leave my owner, therefore I must still be enslaved.' Steve 16 Apr 08, 10:01 PM Mistress_Tiara UK, 2 yrs Steve_Vakesh wrote: "Can't leave" is not only nebulous, it looks toward a possible but not predictable future. It is forever intangible. It is also the one part of what I labeled the Tanos-Inspired Paradigm that actually resembles the opposing American Scene Paradigm and its emphasis on daily recommitment to the relationship: 'today is a day during which I did not leave my owner, therefore I must still be enslaved.' Steve I like this interpretation because it seems to Me to based upon a more tangible life wide reality rather than abstract feelings. I understand it when some slaves say 'I cannot leave, why do you not understand that'? and feel misunderstood, and that their slavery is being invalidated by people who make this argument. Peoples lives, psychologies, and feelings change over time, to Me this is a fact of life. When a slave says 'I cannot leave' they are stating a commitment in the present tense and a commitment they *wish* to make for the future, and genuinely expressing their mental and emotional responses at the time. They are not being denigrated or devalued by the rejection of the ideal of being 'unable' to leave. Rather the opposite, if viewed as as an ongoing recommitment that adapts to lifes hurdles and changes. ~ *Mistress Tiara* 16 Apr 08, 11:26 PM 688-764-833 US, 2 yrs Yarakot wrote: None of this means that how we define “slave” here on TSR is wrong. I think a better way of looking at it is to understand it as a conceptual model, a static picture of enslavement, that is useful to look at and compare to what goes on in reality. It is very difficult to understand complex systems (and there are few systems as complex as M/s relationships) by trying to intuit the whole thing in one gulp. Analyzing it in pieces is often necessary. But when we analyze something using a static snapshot, we also lose something. This made me think of astrophysics, specifically black holes and dark matter. Neither are visible; you have to look at the gravitational effect on visible matter to observe them. While we have some basic criteria as to what makes something a black hole or the properties of dark matter, our understanding of them, though progressing, is limited and what they 'are' is continually being rethought and/or redefined. Yarakot wrote: So, I think a good way to think about this is to look at the defining characteristics of the prototype of the category "TPE slave" or “TSR slave”. From there we can think about how well we fit with the prototype, always understanding that no one fits exactly, in every detail, every moment of every day. This way of thinking has the advantage of being both precise as a way of defining things and open to the fuzziness and dynamism of reality. I think the “TSR slave” is a really good idea. But perhaps the prototype should be something none of us is: the “perfect world” slave that is the fantasy ideal because that way the defensive reactions and hurt feelings may be kept to a minimum? Also quite like Krista's basket theory. Still mulling (thanks for the chewy topic).... Cheers, Leesie 18 Apr 08, 12:21 AM Lord_Laraby US(NY), 3 yrs Y! I don't have much to add to this ages old discussion or debate on who is a slave, except perhaps to add this one little thought: We can pretty darn near define what is meant by "a slave". However, I defy anyone here to be able to define a person. For instance, we can define animal pretty well so the definition fits just about everything we would consider to fit the label of animal. And we can even perhaps define what is a dog, or what is a Siberian Husky, or a 75lb grey male Siberian Husky with the understanding that it well belongs in the dog category. But, what is involved in actually defining a person, say my angel? Can she be shown to exhibit each and every characteristic that we have included in the definition of a slave? Can we at any time say what, if any, characteristic denies her membership in that category? Can we even define the antithesis of the slave category, such that if it has all or most of the set of traits S, then it can not be a slave? What then is angel exhibits some of the traits of S? So, you see, it is clear that not even fuzzy set theoretic reasoning can fully qualify, or more telling, disqualify a person as a slave. Now, that I see this written out, it seems like just a bit of rambling. Please forgive. It seems that no school of thought can fully bring meaning and consensus to this ancient debate? For me, my detemination is simple. Do I know own her, and does she know that she is owned by me? Lord Laraby (owner of chained_angel et al)