Post-modernism/structuralism and radical politics

[Palmares]

So I've been reading bits and pieces of post-modernist/structuralist (yes I know they aren't exactly the same...) writings, and have become somewhat interested in these ideas.

To me, it seems there is useful things to get out of Delueze and Guattari's deconstruction, for example.

However, then I read an anarchistic critique of these ideas, and then it really made me think more about what relation such philosophies (or philosophy at all, perhaps) has to a radical politic.

Does anyone here have there own ideas on this? I definitely know various people who do link such philosophy to anarchist praxis, but still don't quite grasp it.

I apologise if this isn't very in depth, I'm quite un-versed in such philosophies.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Cthenthar:


However, then I read an anarchistic critique of these ideas, and then it really made me think more about what relation such philosophies (or philosophy at all, perhaps) has to a radical politic.

Well, it has no influence at all on revolutionary politics, no matter how much academics might go in for this sort of stuff.

[apathy maybe]

Do you have any links to these anarchist critiques? I would be interested in seeing them.


As for philosophy and revolutionary politics generally, well, it depends on what you mean by the terms.

I would say, that philosophy does have a role to play in deciding how to live your life, and, when it comes, how to live your revolution. Ethics can be decided on through rational thought, and ethics can tell you whether or not you should shoot that person or not.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

AM:


I would say, that philosophy does have a role to play in deciding how to live your life, and, when it comes, how to live your revolution. Ethics can be decided on through rational thought, and ethics can tell you whether or not you should shoot that person or not.

I'd like to see one example where philosophy affects revolutionary practice (ignoring negative effects, of course).

[Palmares]

apathy maybe:

I didn't initially want to mention the author of the critique, as most (at least on this site) would discredit the critique almost automatically because of its source. But... because it's you who is asking...:





The Catastrophe of Postmodernism

John Zerzan
Madonna, "Are We Having Fun Yet?", supermarket tabloids, Milli Vanilli, virtual reality, "shop 'till you drop," PeeWee's Big Adventure, New Age/computer `empowerment', mega-malls, Talking Heads, comic-strip movies, `green' consumption. A build-up of the resolutely superficial and cynical. Toyota commercial: "New values: saving, caring -- all that stuff;" Details magazine: "Style Matters;" "Why Ask Why? Try Bud Dry;" watching television endlessly while mocking it. Incoherence, fragmentation, relativism -- up to and including the dismantling of the very notion of meaning (because the record of rationality has been so poor?); embrace of the marginal, while ignoring how easily margins are made fashionable. "The death of the subject" and "the crisis of representation."
Postmodernism. Originally a theme within aesthetics, it has colonized "ever wider areas," according to Ernesto Laclau, "until it has become the new horizon of our cultural, philosophical, and political experience." "The growing conviction," as Richard Kearney has it, "that human culture as we have known it...is now reaching its end." It is, especially in the U.S., the intersection of poststructuralist philosophy and a vastly wider condition of society: both specialized ethos and, far more importantly, the arrival of what modern industrial society has portended. Postmodernism is contemporaneity, a morass of deferred solutions on every level, featuring ambiguity, the refusal to ponder either origins or ends, as well as the denial of oppositional approaches, "the new realism." Signifying nothing and going nowhere, pm [postmodernism] is an inverted millenarianism, a gathering fruition of the technological `life'-system of universal capital. It is not accidental that Carnegie-Mellon University, which in the '80s was the first to require that all students be equipped with computers, is establishing "the nation's first poststructuralist undergraduate curriculum."
Consumer narcissism and a cosmic "what's the difference?" mark the end of philosophy as such and the etching of a landscape, according to Kroker and Cook, of "disintegration and decay against the back- ground radiation of parody, kitsch and burnout." Henry Kariel concludes that "for postmodernists, it is simply too late to oppose the momentum of industrial society." Surface, novelty, contingency -- there are no grounds available for criticizing our crisis. If the representative postmodernist resists summarizable conclusions, in favor of an alleged pluralism and openness of perspective, it is also reasonable (if one is allowed to use such a word) to predict that if and when we live in a completely pm culture, we would no longer know how to say so.

The primacy of language & the end of the subject
In terms of systematic thought, the growing preoccupation with language is a key factor accounting for the pm climate of narrowed focus and retreat. The so-called "descent into language," or the "linguistic turn" has levied the postmodernist-- poststructuralist assumption that language constitutes the human world and the human world constitutes the whole world. For most of this century language has been moving to center stage in philosophy, among figures as diverse as Wittgenstein, Quine, Heidegger, and Gadamer, while growing attention to communication theory, linguistics, cybernetics, and computer languages demonstrates a similar emphasis over several decades in science and technology. This very pronounced turn toward language itself was embraced by Foucault as a "decisive leap towards a wholly new form of thought." Less positively, it can be at least partially explained in terms of pessimism following the ebbing of the oppositional moment of the '60s. The '70s witnessed an alarming withdrawal into what Edward Said called the "labyrinth of textuality," as contrasted with the sometimes more insurrectionary intellectual activity of the preceding period.
Perhaps it isn't paradoxical that "the fetish of the textual," as Ben Agger judged, "beckons in an age when intellectuals are dispossessed of their words." Language is more and more debased; drained of meaning, especially in its public usage. No longer can even words be counted on, and this is part of a larger anti-theory current, behind which stands a much larger defeat than the '60s: that of the whole train of Enlightenment rationality. We have depended on language as the supposedly sound and transparent handmaiden of reason and where has it gotten us? Auschwitz, Hiroshima, mass psychic misery, impending destruction of the planet, to name a few. Enter postmodernism, with its seemingly bizarre and fragmented turns and twists. Edith Wyschograd's Saints and Postmodernism (1990) not only testifies to the ubiquity of the pm `approach' -- there are apparently no fields outside its ken - - but also comments cogently on the new direction: "postmodernism as a `philosophical' and `literary' discursive style cannot straightforwardly appeal to the techniques of reason, themselves the instruments of theory, but must forge new and necessarily arcane means for undermining the pieties of reason."
The immediate antecedent of postmodernism/poststructuralism, reigning in the '50s and much of the '60s, was organized around the centrality it accorded the linguistic model. Structuralism provided the premise that language constitutes our only means of access to the world of objects and experience and its extension, that meaning arises wholly from the play of differences within cultural sign systems. Levi- Strauss, for example, argued that the key to anthropology lies in the uncovering of unconscious social laws (e.g. those that regulate marriage ties and kinship), which are structured like language. It was the Swiss linguist Saussure who stressed, in a move very influential to postmodernism, that meaning resides not in a relationship between an utterance and that to which it refers, but in the relationship of signs to one another. This Saussurian belief in the enclosed, self-referential nature of language implies that everything is determined within language, leading to the scrapping of such quaint notions as alienation, ideology, repression, etc. and concluding that language and consciousness are virtually the same.
On this trajectory, which rejects the view of language as an external means deployed by consciousness, appears the also very influential neo-Freudian, Jacques Lacan. For Lacan, not only is consciousness thoroughly permeated by language and without existence for itself apart from language, even the "unconscious is structured like a language."
Earlier thinkers, most notably Nietzsche and Heidegger, had already suggested that a different language or a changed relationship to language might somehow bring new and important insights. With the linguistic turn of more recent times, even the concept of an individual who thinks as the basis of knowledge becomes shaky. Saussure discovered that "language is not a function of the speaking subject," the primacy of language displacing who it is that gives voice to it. Roland Barthes, whose career joins the structuralist and poststructuralist periods, decided "It is language that speaks, not the author," paralleled by Althusser's observation that history is "a process without a subject."
If the subject is felt to be essentially a function of language, its stifling mediation and that of the symbolic order in general ascends toward the top of the agenda. Thus does postmodernism flail about trying to communicate what lies beyond language, "to present the unpresentable." Meanwhile, given the radical doubt introduced as to the availability to us of a referent in the world outside of language, the real fades from consideration. Jacques Derrida, the pivotal figure of the postmodernism ethos, proceeds as if the connection between words and the world were arbitrary. The object world plays no role for him. The exhaustion of modernism & the rise of postmodernism ut before turning to Derrida, a few more comments on precursors and the wider change in culture. Postmodernism raises questions about communication and meaning, so that the category of the aesthetic, for one, becomes problematic. For modernism, with its sunnier belief in representation, art and literature held at least some promise for providing a vision of fulfilment or understanding. Until the end of modernism, "high culture" was seen as a repository of moral and spiritual wisdom. Now there seems to be no such belief, the ubiquity of the question of language perhaps telling as to the vacancy left by the failure of other candidates of promising starting points of human imagination. In the '60s modernism seems to have reached the end of its development, the austere canon of its painting (e.g. Rothko, Reinhardt) giving way to pop art's uncritical espousal of the consumer culture's commercial vernacular. Postmodernism, and not just in the arts, is modernism without the hopes and dreams that made modernity bearable.
A widespread "fast food" tendency is seen in the visual arts, in the direction of easily consumable entertainment. Howard Fox finds that "theatricality may be the single most pervasive property of postmodern art." A decadence or exhaustion of development is also detected in the dark paintings of an Eric Fischl, where often a kind of horror seems to lurk just below the surface. This quality links Fischl, America's quintessential pm painter, to the equally sinister Twin Peaks and pm's quintessential television figure, David Lynch. The image, since Warhol, is self-consciously a mechanically reproducible commodity and this is the bottom-line reason for both the depthlessness and the common note of eeriness and foreboding.
Postmodern art's oft-noted eclecticism is an arbitrary recycling of fragments from everywhere, especially the past, often taking the form of parody and kitsch. Demoralized, derealized, dehistoricized: art that can no longer take itself seriously. The image no longer refers primarily to some `original', situated elsewhere in the `real' world; it increasingly refers only to other images. In this way it reflects how lost we are, how removed from nature, in the ever more mediated world of technological capitalism.
The term postmodernism was first applied, in the '70s, to architecture. Christopher Jencks wrote of an anti-planning, pro-pluralism approach, the abandoning of modernism's dream of pure form in favor of listening to "the multiple languages of the people." More honest are Robert Venturi's celebration of Las Vegas and Piers Gough's admission that pm architecture is no more caring for people than was modernist architecture. The arches and columns laid over modernist boxes are a thin facade of playfulness and individuality, which scarcely transforms the anonymous concentrations of wealth and power underneath.
Postmodernist writers question the very grounds for literature instead of continuing to create the illusion of an external world. The novel redirects its attention to itself; Donald Barthelme, for example, writes stories that seem to always remind the reader that they are artifices. By protesting against statement, point of view and other patterns of representation, pm literature exhibits its discomfort with the forms that tame and domesticate cultural products. As the wider world becomes more artificial and meaning less subject to our control, the new approach would rather reveal the illusion even at the cost of no longer saying anything. Here as elsewhere art is struggling against itself, its prior claims to help us understand the world evaporating while even the concept of imagination loses its potency.
For some the loss of narrative voice or point of view is equivalent to the loss of our ability to locate ourselves historically. For postmodernists this loss is a kind of liberation. Raymond Federman, for instance, glories in the coming fiction that "will be seemingly devoid of any meaning...deliberately illogical, irrational, unrealistic, non sequitur, and incoherent."
Fantasy, on the rise for decades, is a common form of the post- modern, carrying with it the reminder that the fantastic confronts civilization with the very forces it must repress for its survival. But it is a fantasy that, paralleling both deconstruction and high levels of cynicism and resignation in society, does not believe in itself to the extent of very much understanding or communicating. Pm writers seem to smother in the folds of language, conveying little else than their ironic stance regarding more traditional literature's pretensions to truth and meaning. Perhaps typical is Laurie Moore's 1990 novel, Like Life, whose title and content reveal a retreat from living and an inversion of the American Dream, in which things can only get worse.

The celebration of impotence
Postmodernism subverts two of the over-arching tenets of Enlightenment humanism: the power of language to shape the world and the power of consciousness to shape a self. Thus we have the postmodernist void, the general notion that the yearning for emancipation and freedom promised by humanist principles of subjectivity cannot be satisfied. Pm views the self as a linguistic convention; as William Burroughs put it, "Your `I' is a completely illusory concept."
It is obvious that the celebrated ideal of individuality has been under pressure for a long time. Capitalism in fact has made a career of celebrating the individual while destroying him/her. And the works of Marx and Freud have done much to expose the largely misdirected and naive belief in the sovereign, rational Kantian self in charge of reality, with their more recent structuralist interpreters, Althusser and Lacan, contributing to and updating the effort. But this time the pressure is so extreme that the term `individual' has been rendered obsolete, replaced by `subject', which always includes the aspect of being subjected (as in the older "a subject of the king," for example). Even some libertarian radicals, such as the Interrogations group in France, join in the postmodernist chorus to reject the individual as a criterion for value due to the debasing of the category by ideology and history.
So pm reveals that autonomy has largely been a myth and cherished ideals of mastery and will are similarly misguided. But if we are promised herewith a new and serious attempt at demystifying authority, concealed behind the guises of a bourgeois humanist `freedom', we actually get a dispersal of the subject so radical as to render it impotent, even nonexistent, as any kind of agent at all. Who or what is left to achieve a liberation, or is that just one more pipe dream? The postmodern stance wants it both ways: to put the thinking person "under erasure," while the very existence of its own critique depends on discredited ideas like subjectivity. Fred Dallmayr, acknowledging the widespread appeal of contemporary anti-humanism, warns that primary casualties are reflection and a sense of values. To assert that we are instances of language fore- most is obviously to strip away our capacity to grasp the whole, at a time when we are urgently required to do just that. Small wonder that to some, pm amounts, in practice, to merely a liberalism without the subject, while feminists who try to define or reclaim an authentic and autonomous female identity would also likely be unpersuaded.
The postmodern subject, what is presumably left of subject-hood, seems to be mainly the personality constructed by and for technological capital, described by the marxist literary theorist Terry Eagleton as a "dispersed, decentered network of libidinal attachments, emptied of ethical substance and psychical interiority, the ephemeral function of this or that act of consumption, media experience, sexual relationship, trend or fashion." If Eagleton's definition of today's non-subject as announced by pm is unfaithful to their point of view, it is difficult to see where, to find grounds for a distancing from his scathing summary. With postmodernism even alienation dissolves, for there is no longer a subject to be alienated! Contemporary fragmentation and powerlessness could hardly be heralded more completely, or existing anger and disaffection more thoroughly ignored.

Derrida, deconstruction & diff'rance
Enough, for now, on background and general traits. The most influential specific postmodern approach has been Jacques Derrida's, known since the '60s as deconstruction. Postmodernism in philosophy means above all the writings of Derrida, and this earliest and most extreme outlook has found a resonance well beyond philosophy, in the popular culture and its mores.
Certainly the "linguistic turn" bears on the emergence of Derrida, causing David Wood to call deconstruction "an absolutely unavoidable move in philosophy today," as thought negotiates its inescapable predicament as written language. That language is not innocent or neutral but bears a considerable number of presuppositions it has been his career to develop, exposing what he sees as the fundamentally self-contradictory nature of human discourse. The mathematician Kurt G”del's "Incompleteness Theorem" states that any formal system can be either consistent or complete, but not both. In rather parallel fashion, Derrida claims that language is constantly turning against itself so that, analyzed closely, we can neither say what we mean or mean what we say. But like semiologists before him, Derrida also suggests, at the same time, that a deconstructive method could demystify the ideological contents of all texts, interpreting all human activities as essentially texts. The basic contradiction and cover-up strategy inherent in the metaphysics of language in its widest sense might be laid bare and a more intimate kind of knowing result.
What works against this latter claim, with its political promise constantly hinted at by Derrida, is precisely the content of deconstruction; it sees language as a constantly moving independent force that disallows a stabilizing of meaning or definite communication, as referred to above. This internally-generated flux he called `diff‚rance' and this is what calls the very idea of meaning to collapse, along with the self-referential nature of language, which, as noted previously, says that there is no space outside of language, no "out there" for meaning to exist in anyway. Intention and the subject are overwhelmed, and what is revealed are not any "inner truths" but an endless proliferation of possible meanings generated by diff‚rance, the principle that characterizes language. Meaning within language is also made elusive by Derrida's insistence that language is metaphorical and cannot therefore directly convey truth, a notion taken from Nietzsche, one which erases the distinction between philosophy and literature. All these insights supposedly contribute to the daring and subversive nature of deconstruction, but they surely provoke some basic questions as well. If meaning is indeterminate, how are Derrida's argument and terms not also indeterminate, un-pin-downable? He has replied to critics, for example, that they are unclear as to his meaning, while his `meaning' is that there can be no clear, definable meaning. And though his entire project is in an important sense aimed at subverting all systems' claims to any kind of transcendent truth, he raises diff‚rance to the transcendent status of any philosophical first principle.
For Derrida, it has been the valorizing of speech over writing that has caused all of Western thought to overlook the downfall that language itself causes philosophy. By privileging the spoken word a false sense of immediacy is produced, the invalid notion that in speaking the thing itself is present and representation overcome. But speech is no more `authentic' than the written word, not at all immune from the built-in failure of language to accurately or definitely deliver the (representational) goods. It is the misplaced desire for presence that characterizes Western metaphysics, an unreflected desire for the success of representation. It is important to note that because Derrida rejects the possibility of an unmediated existence, he assails the efficacy of representation but not the category itself. He mocks the game but plays it just the same. Diff‚rance (later simply `difference') shades into indifference, due to the unavailability of truth or meaning, and joins the cynicism at large.
Early on, Derrida discussed philosophy's false steps in the area of presence by reference to Husserl's tortured pursuit of it. Next he developed his theory of `grammatology', in which he restored writing to its proper primacy as against the West's phonocentric, or speech-valued, bias. This was mainly accomplished by critiques of major figures who committed the sin of phonocentrism, including Rousseau, Heidegger, Saussure, and Levi-Strauss, which is not to overlook his great indebtedness to the latter three of these four.
As if remembering the obvious implications of his deconstructive approach, Derrida's writings shift in the '70s from the earlier, fairly straightforward philosophical discussions. Glas (1974) is a mishmash of Hegel and Gent, in which argument is replaced by free association and bad puns. Though baffling to even his warmest admirers, Glas certainly is in keeping with the tenet of the unavoidable ambiguity of language and a will to subvert the pretensions of orderly discourse. Spurs (1978) is a book- length study of Nietzsche that ultimately finds its focus in nothing Nietzsche published, but in a handwritten note in the margin of one of his notebooks: "I have forgotten my umbrella." Endless, undecidable possibilities exist as to the meaning or importance-if any-of this scrawled comment. This, of course, is Derrida's point, to suggest that the same can be said for everything Nietzsche wrote. The place for thought, according to deconstruction, is clearly (er, let us say unclearly) with the relative, the fragmented, the marginal.
Meaning is certainly not something to be pinned down, if it exists at all. Commenting on Plato's Phaedrus, the master of de-composition goes so far as to assert that "like any text [it] couldn't not be involved, at least in a virtual, dynamic, lateral manner, with all the words that composed the system of the Greek language."
Related is Derrida's opposition to binary opposites, like literal/metaphorical, serious/playful, deep/superficial, nature/culture, ad infinitum. He sees these as basic conceptual hierarchies, mainly smuggled in by language itself, which provide the illusion of definition or orientation. He further claims that the deconstructive work of overturning these pairings, which valorize one of the two over the other, leads to a political and social overturning of actual, non- conceptual hierarchies. But to automatically refuse all binary oppositions is itself a metaphysical proposition; it in fact bypasses politics and history out of a failure to see in opposites, however imprecise they may be, anything but a linguistic reality. In the dismantling of every binarism, deconstruction aims at "conceiving difference without opposition." What in a smaller dosage would seem a salutary approach, a skepticism about neat, either/or characterizations, proceeds to the very questionable prescription of refusing all unambiguity. To say that there can be no yes or no position is tantamount to a paralysis of relativism, in which `impotence' becomes the valorized partner to `opposition'.
Perhaps the case of Paul De Man, who extended and deepened Derrida's seminal deconstructive positions (surpassing him, in the opinion of many), is instructive. Shortly after the death of De Man in 1985, it was discovered that as a young man he had written several anti-semitic, pro-Nazi newspaper articles in occupied Belgium. The status of this brilliant Yale deconstructor, and indeed to some, the moral and philosophical value of deconstruction itself, were called into question by the sensational revelation. De Man, like Derrida, had stressed "the duplicity, the confusion, the untruth that we take for granted in the use of language." Consistent with this, albeit to his discredit, in my opinion, was Derrida's tortuous commentary on De Man's collaborationist period: in sum, "how can we judge, who has the right to say?" A shabby testimony for deconstruction, considered in any way as a moment of the anti-authoritarian.
Derrida announced that deconstruction "instigates the subversion of every kingdom." In fact, it has remained within the safely academic realm of inventing ever more ingenious textual complications to keep itself in business and avoid reflecting on its own political situation. One of Derrida's most central terms, dissemination, describes language, under the principle of difference, as not so much a rich harvest of meanings but a kind of endless loss and spillage, with meaning appearing everywhere and evaporating virtually at once. This flow of language, ceaseless and unsatisfying, is a most accurate parallel to that of the heart of consumer capital and its endless circulation of non-significance. Derrida thus unwittingly eternalizes and universalizes dominated life by rendering human communication in its image. The "every kingdom" he would see deconstruction subverting is instead extended and deemed absolute.
Derrida represents both the well-travelled French tradition of explication de texte and a reaction against the Gallic veneration of Cartesian classicist language with its ideals of clarity and balance. Deconstruction emerged also, to a degree, as part of the original element of the near-revolution of 1968, namely the student revolt against rigidified French higher education. Some of its key terms (e.g. dissemination) are borrowed from Blanchot's reading of Heidegger, which is not to deny a significant originality in Derridean thought. Presence and representation constantly call each other into question, revealing the underlying system as infinitely fissured, and this in itself is an important contribution.
Unfortunately, to transform metaphysics into the question of writing, in which meanings virtually choose themselves and thus one discourse (and therefore mode of action) cannot be demonstrated to be better than another, seems less than radical. Deconstruction is now embraced by the heads of English departments, professional societies, and other bodies-in-good-standing because it raises the issue of representation itself so weakly. Derrida's deconstruction of philosophy admits that it must leave intact the very concept whose lack of basis it exposes. While finding the notion of a language-independent reality untenable, neither does deconstruction promise liberation from the famous "prison house of language." The essence of language, the primacy of the symbolic, are not really tackled, but are shown to be as inescapable as they are inadequate to fulfilment. No exit; as Derrida declared: "It is not a question of releasing oneself into an unrepressive new order (there are none)."

The crisis of representation
If deconstruction's contribution is mainly just an erosion of our assurance of reality, it forgets that reality -- advertising and mass culture to mention just two superficial examples -- has already accomplished this. Thus this quintessentially postmodern point of view bespeaks the movement of thinking from decadence to its elegiac, or post-thought phase, or as John Fekete summarized it, "a most profound crisis of the Western mind, a most profound loss of nerve."
Today's overload of representation serves to underline the radical impoverishment of life in technological class society -- technology is deprivation. The classical theory of representation held that meaning or truth preceded and prescribed the representations that communicated it. But we may now inhabit a postmodern culture where the image has become less the expression of an individual subject than the commodity of an anonymous consumerist technology. Ever more mediated, life in the Information Age is increasingly controlled by the manipulation of signs, symbols, marketing and testing data, etc. Our time, says Derrida, is "a time without nature."
All formulations of the postmodern agree in detecting a crisis of representation. Derrida, as noted, began a challenge of the nature of the philosophical project itself as grounded in representation, raising some unanswerable questions about the relationship between representation and thought. Deconstruction undercuts the epistemological claims of representation, showing that language, for example, is inadequate to the task of representation. But this undercutting avoids tackling the repressive nature of its subject, insisting, again, that pure presence, a space beyond representation, can only be a utopian dream. There can be no unmediated contact or communication, only signs and representations; deconstruction is a search for presence and fulfilment interminably, necessarily, deferred.
Jacques Lacan, sharing the same resignation as Derrida, at least reveals more concerning the malign essence of representation. Extending Freud, he determined that the subject is both constituted and alienated by the entry into the symbolic order, namely, into language. While denying the possibility of a return to a pre-language state in which the broken promise of presence might be honored, he could at least see the central, crippling stroke that is the submission of free-ranging desires to the symbolic world, the surrender of uniqueness to language. Lacan termed jouissance unspeakable because it could properly occur only outside of language: that happiness which is the desire for a world without the fracture of money or writing, a society without representation.
The inability to generate symbolic meaning is, somewhat ironically, a basic problem for postmodernism. It plays out its stance at the frontier between what can be represented and what cannot, a half-way resolution (at best) that refuses to refuse representation. (Instead of providing the arguments for the view of the symbolic as repressive and alienating, the reader is referred to the first five essays of my Elements of Refusal [Left Bank Books, 1988], which deal with time, language, number, art, and agriculture as cultural estrangements owing to symbolization.) Meanwhile an estranged and exhausted public loses interest in the alleged solace of culture, and with the deepening and thickening of mediation emerges the discovery that perhaps this was always the meaning of culture. It is certainly not out of character, however, to find that postmodernism does not recognize reflection on the origins of representation, insisting as it does on the impossibility of unmediated existence.
In response to the longing for the lost wholeness of pre-civilization, postmodernism says that culture has become so fundamental to human existence that there is no possibility of delving down under it. This, of course, recalls Freud, who recognized the essence of civilization as a suppression of freedom and wholeness, but who decided that work and culture were more important. Freud at least was honest enough to admit the contradiction or non-reconciliation involved in opting for the crippling nature of civilization, whereas the postmodernists do not.
Floyd Merrell found that "a key, perhaps the principal key to Derridean thought" was Derrida's decision to place the question of origins off limits. And so while hinting throughout his work at a complicity between the fundamental assumptions of Western thought and the violences and repressions that have characterized Western civilization, Derrida has centrally, and very influentially, repudiated all notions of origins. Causative thinking, after all, is one of the objects of scorn for postmodernists. `Nature' is an illusion, so what could `unnatural' mean? In place of the situationists' wonderful "Under the pavement it's the beach," we have Foucault's famous repudiation, in The Order of Things, of the whole notion of the "repressive hypothesis." Freud gave us an understanding of culture as stunting and neurosis-generating; pm tells us that culture is all we can ever have, and that its foundations, if they exist, are not available to our understanding. Postmodernism is apparently what we are left with when the modernization process is complete and nature is gone for good.
Not only does pm echo Beckett's comment in Endgame, "there's no more nature," but it also denies that there ever was any recognizable space outside of language and culture. `Nature', declared Derrida in discussing Rousseau, "has never existed." Again, alienation is ruled out; that concept necessarily implies an idea of authenticity which postmodernism finds unintelligible. In this vein, Derrida cited "the loss of what has never taken place, of a self-presence which has never been given but only dreamed of..." Despite the limitations of structuralism, Levi-Strauss' sense of affiliation with Rousseau, on the other hand, bore witness to his search for origins. Refusing to rule out liberation, either in terms of beginnings or goals, Levi-Strauss never ceased to long for an `intact' society, a non-fractured world where immediacy had not yet been broken. For this Derrida, pejoratively to be sure, presents Rousseau as a utopian and Levi-Strauss as an anarchist, cautioning against a "step further toward a sort of original an-archy," which would be only a dangerous delusion.
The real danger consists in not challenging, at the most basic level, the alienation and domination threatening to completely overcome nature, what is left of the natural in the world and within ourselves. Marcuse discerned that "the memory of gratification is at the origin of all thinking, and the impulse to recapture past gratification is the hidden driving power behind the process of thought." The question of origins also involves the whole question of the birth of abstraction and indeed of philosophical conceptuality as such, and Marcuse came close, in his search for what would constitute a state of being without repression, to confronting culture itself. He certainly never quite escaped the impression "that something essential had been forgotten" by humanity. Similar is the brief pronouncement by Novalis, "Philosophy is homesickness." By comparison, Kroker and Cook are undeniably correct in concluding that "the postmodern culture is a forgetting, a forgetting of origins and destinations."

Barthes, Foucault & Lyotard
Turning to other poststructuralist/ postmodern figures, Roland Barthes, earlier in his career a major structuralist thinker, deserves mention. His Writing Degree Zero expressed the hope that language can be used in a utopian way and that there are controlling codes in culture that can be broken. By the early '70s, however, he fell into line with Derrida in seeing language as a metaphorical quagmire, whose metaphoricity is not recognized. Philosophy is befuddled by its own language and language in general cannot claim mastery of what it discusses. With The Empire of Signs (1970), Barthes had already renounced any critical, analytical intention. Ostensibly about Japan, this book is present- ed "without claiming to depict or analyze any reality whatsoever." Various fragments deal with cultural forms as diverse as haiku and slot machines, as parts of a sort of anti-utopian landscape wherein forms possess no meaning and all is surface. Empire may qualify as the first fully postmodern offering, and by the mid-'70s its author's notion of the pleasure of the text carried forward the same Derridean disdain for belief in the validity of public discourse. Writing had become an end in itself, a merely personal aesthetic the overriding consideration. Before his death in 1980, Barthes had explicitly denounced "any intellectual mode of writing," especially anything smacking of the political. By the time of his final work, Barthes by Barthes, the hedonism of words, paralleling a real-life dandyism, considered concepts not in terms of their validity or invalidity but only for their efficacy as tactics of writing.
In 1985 AIDS claimed the most widely known influence on postmodernism, Michel Foucault. Sometimes called "the philosopher of the death of man" and considered by many the greatest of Nietzsche's modern disciples, his wide- ranging historical studies (e.g. on madness, penal practices, sexuality) made him very well known and in themselves suggest differences between Foucault and the relatively more abstract and ahistorical Derrida. Structuralism, as noted, had already forcefully devalued the individual on largely linguistic grounds, whereas Foucault characterized "man (as) only a recent invention, a figure not yet two centuries old, a simple fold in our knowledge that will soon disappear." His emphasis lies in exposing `man' as that which is represented and brought forth as an object, specifically as a virtual invention of the modern human sciences. Despite an idiosyncratic style, Foucault's works were much more popular than those of Horkheimer and Adorno (e.g. The Dialectic of Enlightenment) and Erving Goffman, in the same vein of revealing the hidden agenda of bourgeois rationality. He pointed to the `individualizing' tactic at work in the key institutions in the early 1800s (the family, work, medicine, psychiatry, education), bringing out their normalizing, disciplinary roles within emerging capitalist modernity, as the `individual' is created by and for the dominant order.
Foucault, typically pm, rejects originary thinking and the notion that there is a `reality' behind or underneath the prevailing discourse of an era. Likewise, the subject is a delusion essentially created by discourse, an `I' created out of the ruling linguistic usages. And so his detailed historical narratives, termed `archaeologies' of knowledge, are offered instead of theoretical overviews, as if they carried no ideological or philosophical assumptions. For Foucault there are no foundations of the social to be apprehended outside the contexts of various periods, or epistemes, as he called them; the foundations change from one episteme to another. The prevailing discourse, which constitutes its subjects, is seemingly self-forming; this is a rather unhelpful approach to history resulting primarily from the fact that Foucault makes no reference to social groups, but focuses entirely on systems of thought. A further problem arises from his view that the episteme of an age cannot be known by those who labor within it. If consciousness is precisely what, by Foucault's own account, fails to be aware of its relativism or to know what it would have looked like in previous epistemes, then Foucault's own elevated, encompassing awareness is impossible. This difficulty is acknowledged at the end of The Archaeology of Knowledge (1972), but remains unanswered, a rather glaring and obvious problem.
The dilemma of postmodernism is this: how can the status and validity of its theoretical approaches be ascertained if neither truth nor foundations for knowledge are admitted? If we remove the possibility of rational foundations or standards, on what basis can we operate? How can we understand what the society is that we oppose, let alone come to share such an understanding? Foucault's insistence on a Nietzschean perspectivism translates into the irreducible pluralism of interpretation. He relativized knowledge and truth only insofar as these notions attach to thought-systems other than his own, however. When pressed on this point, Foucault admitted to being incapable of rationally justifying his own opinions. Thus the liberal Habermas claims that postmodern thinkers like Foucault, Deleuze, and Lyotard are `neoconservative' for offering no consistent argumentation to move in one social direction rather than another. The pm embrace of relativism (or `pluralism') also means there is nothing to prevent the perspective of one social tendency from including a claim for the right to dominate another, in the absence of the possibility of determining standards.
The topic of power, in fact, was a central one to Foucault and the ways he treated it are revealing. He wrote of the significant institutions of modern society as united by a control intentionality, a "carceral continuum" that expresses the logical finale of capitalism, from which there is no escape. But power itself, he determined, is a grid or field of relations in which subjects are constituted as both the products and the agents of power. Everything thus partakes of power and so it is no good trying to find a `fundamental', oppressive power to fight against. Modern power is insidious and "comes from everywhere." Like God, it is everywhere and nowhere at once.
Foucault finds no beach underneath the paving stones, no `natural' order at all. There is only the certainty of successive regimes of power, each one of which must somehow be resisted. But Foucault's characteristically pm aversion to the whole notion of the human subject makes it quite difficult to see where such resistance might spring from, notwithstanding his view that there is no resistance to power that is not a variant of power itself. Regarding the latter point, Foucault reached a further dead- end in considering the relationship of power to knowledge. He came to see them as inextricably and ubiquitously linked, directly implying one another. The difficulties in continuing to say anything of substance in light of this interrelationship caused Foucault to eventually give up on a theory of power. The determinism involved meant, for one thing, that his political involvement became increasingly slight. It is not hard to see why Foucaultism was greatly boosted by the media, while the situationists, for example, were blacked out.
Castoriadis once referred to Foucault's ideas on power and opposition to it as, "Resist if it amuses you -- but without a strategy, because then you would no longer be proletarian, but power." Foucault's own activism had attempted to embody the empiricist dream of a theory- and ideology-free approach, that of the "specific intellectual" who participates in particular, local struggles. This tactic sees theory used only concretely, as ad hoc "tool kit" methods for specific campaigns. Despite the good intentions, however, limiting theory to discrete, perishable instrumental `tools' not only refuses an explicit overview of society but accepts the general division of labor which is at the heart of alienation and domination. The desire to respect differences, local knowledge and the like refuses a reductive, totalitarian-tending overvaluing of theory, but only to accept the atomization of late capitalism with its splintering of life into the narrow specialties that are the province of so many experts. If "we are caught between the arrogance of surveying the whole and the timidity of inspecting the parts," as Rebecca Comay aptly put it, how does the second alternative (Foucault's) represent an advance over liberal reformism in general? This seems an especially pertinent question when one remembers how much Foucault's whole enterprise was aimed at disabusing us of the illusions of humanist reformers throughout history. The "specific intellectual" in fact turns out to be just one more expert, one more liberal attacking specifics rather than the roots of problems. And looking at the content of his activism, which was mainly in the area of penal reform, the orientation is almost too tepid to even qualify as liberal. In the '80s "he tried to gather, under the aegis of his chair at the College de France, historians, lawyers, judges, psychiatrists and doctors concerned with law and punishment," according to Keith Gandal. All the cops. "The work I did on the historical relativity of the prison form," said Foucault, "was an incitation to try to think of other forms of punishment." Obviously, he accepted the legitimacy of this society and of punishment; no less unsurprising was his corollary dismissal of anarchists as infantile in their hopes for the future and faith in human potential.
The works of Jean-Francois Lyotard are significantly contradictory to each other -- in itself a pm trait -- but also express a central postmodern theme: that society cannot and should not be understood as a whole. Lyotard is a prime example of anti-totalizing thought to the point that he has summed up postmodernism as "incredulity toward metanarratives" or overviews. The idea that it is unhealthy as well as impossible to grasp the whole is part of an enormous reaction in France since the '60s against marxist and Communist influences. While Lyotard's chief target is the marxist tradition, once so very strong in French political and intellectual life, he goes further and rejects social theory in toto. For example, he has come to believe that any concept of alienation -- the idea that an original unity, wholeness, or innocence is fractured by the fragmentation and indifference of capitalism -- ends up as a totalitarian attempt to unify society coercively. Characteristically, his mid-'70s Libidinal Economy denounces theory as terror.
One might say that this extreme reaction would be unlikely outside of a culture so dominated by the marxist left, but another look tells us that it fits perfectly with the wider, disillusioned postmodern condition. Lyotard's wholesale rejection of post-Kantian Enlightenment values does, after all, embody the realization that rational critique, at least in the form of the confident values and beliefs of Kantian, Hegelian and Marxist metanarrative theory, has been debunked by dismal historical reality. According to Lyotard, the pm era signifies that all consoling myths of intellectual mastery and truth are at an end, replaced by a plurality of `language-games', the Wittgensteinian notion of `truth' as provisionally shared and circulating without any kind of epistemological warrant or philosophical foundation. Language-games are a pragmatic, localized, tentative basis for knowledge; unlike the comprehensive views of theory or historical interpretation, they depend on the agreement of participants for their use-value. Lyotard's ideal is thus a multitude of "little narratives" instead of the "inherent dogmatism" of metanarratives or grand ideas. Unfortunately, such a pragmatic approach must accommodate to things as they are, and depends upon prevailing consensus virtually by definition. Thus Lyotard's approach is of limited value for creating a break from the everyday norms. Though his healthy, anti-authoritarian skepticism sees totalization as oppressive or coercive, what he overlooks is that the Foucaultian relativism of language-games, with their freely contracted agreement as to meaning, tends to hold that everything is of equal validity. As Gerard Raulet concluded, the resultant refusal of overview actually obeys the existing logic of homogeneity rather than somehow providing a haven for heterogeneity.
To find progress suspect is, of course, prerequisite to any critical approach, but the quest for heterogeneity must include awareness of its disappearance and a search for the reasons why it disappeared. Postmodern thought generally behaves as if in complete ignorance of the news that division of labor and commodification are eliminating the basis for cultural or social heterogeneity. Pm seeks to preserve what is virtually non-existent and rejects the wider thinking necessary to deal with impoverished reality. In this area it is of interest to look at the relationship between pm and technology, which happens to be of decisive importance to Lyotard.
Adorno found the way of contemporary totalitarianism prepared by the Enlightenment ideal of triumph over nature, also known as instrumental reason. Lyotard sees the fragmentation of knowledge as essential to combatting domination, which disallows the overview necessary to see that, to the contrary, the isolation that is fragmented knowledge forgets the social determination and purpose of that isolation. The celebrated `heterogeneity' is nothing much more than the splintering effect of an overbearing totality he would rather ignore. Critique is never more discarded than in Lyotard's postmodern positivism, resting as it does on the acceptance of a technical rationality that forgoes critique. Unsurprisingly, in the era of the decomposition of meaning and the renunciation of seeing what the ensemble of mere `facts' really add up to, Lyotard embraces the computerization of society. Rather like the Nietzschean Foucault, Lyotard believes that power is more and more the criterion of truth. He finds his companion in the post- modern pragmatist Richard Rorty who likewise welcomes modern technology and is deeply wedded to the hegemonic values of present-day industrial society.
In 1985 Lyotard put together a spectacular high-tech exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris, featuring the artificial realities and microcomputer work of such artists as Myron Krueger. At the opening, its planner declared, "We wanted...to indicate that the world is not evolving toward greater clarity and simplicity, but rather toward a new degree of complexity in which the individual may feel very lost but in which he can in fact become more free." Apparently overviews are permitted if they coincide with the plans of our masters for us and for nature. But the more specific point lies with `immateriality', the title of the exhibit and a Lyotardian term which he associates with the erosion of identity, the breaking down of stable barriers between the self and a world produced by our involvement in labyrinthine technological and social systems. Needless to say, he approves of this condition, celebrating, for instance, the `pluralizing' potential of new communications technology -- of the sort that de-sensualizes life, flattens experience and eradicates the natural world. Lyotard writes: "All peoples have a right to science," as if he has the very slightest understanding of what science means. He prescribes "public free access to the memory and data banks." A horrific view of liberation, somewhat captured by: "Data banks are the encyclopedia of tomorrow; they are `nature' for postmodern men and women."
Frank Lentricchia termed Derrida's deconstructionist project "an elegant, commanding overview matched in philosophic history only by Hegel." It is an obvious irony that the postmodernists require a general theory to support their assertion as to why there cannot and should not be general theories or metanarratives. Sartre, gestalt theorists and common sense tell us that what pm dismisses as "totalizing reason" is in fact inherent in perception itself: one sees a whole, as a rule, not discrete fragments. Another irony is provided by Charles Altieri's observation of Lyotard," that this thinker so acutely aware of the dangers inherent in master narratives nonetheless remains completely committed to the authority of generalized abstraction." Pm announces an anti-generalist bias, but its practitioners, Lyotard perhaps especially, retain a very high level of abstraction in discussing culture, modernity and other such topics which are of course already vast generalizations.
"A liberated humanity," wrote Adorno, "would by no means be a totality." Nonetheless, we are currently stuck with a social world that is one and which totalizes with a vengeance. Postmodernism, with its celebrated fragmentation and heterogeneity, may choose to forget about the totality, but the totality will not forget about us.

Deleuze, Guattari & Baudrillard
Gilles Deleuze's `schizo-politics' flow, at least in part, from the prevailing pm refusal of overview, of a point of departure. Also called `nomadology', employing "rhizomatic writing," Deleuze's method champions the deterritorialization and decoding of structures of domination, by which capitalism will supersede itself through its own dynamic. With his sometime partner, Felix Guattari, with whom he shares a specialization in psychoanalysis, he hopes to see the system's schizophrenic tendency intensified to the point of shattering. Deleuze seems to share, or at least comes very close to, the absurdist conviction of Yoshimoto Takai that consumption constitutes a new form of resistance.
This brand of denying the totality by the radical strategy of urging it to dispose of itself also recalls the impotent pm style of opposing representation: meanings do not penetrate to a center, they do not represent something beyond their reach. "Thinking without representing," is Charles Scott's description of Deleuze's approach. Schizo-politics celebrates surfaces and discontinuities; nomadology is the opposite of history.
Deleuze also embodies the postmodern "death of the subject" theme, in his and Guattari's best-known work, Anti- Oedipus, and subsequently. `Desiringmachines', formed by the coupling of parts, human and nonhuman, with no distinction between them, seek to replace humans as the focus of his social theory. In opposition to the illusion of an individual subject in society, Deleuze portrays a subject no longer even recognizably anthropocentric. One cannot escape the feeling, despite his supposedly radical intention, of an embrace of alienation, even a wallowing in estrangement and decadence.
In the early '70s Jean Baudrillard exposed the bourgeois foundations of marxism, mainly its veneration of production and work, in his Mirror of Production (1972). This contribution hastened the decline of marxism and the Communist Party in France, already in disarray after the reactionary role played by the Left against the upheavals of May '68. Since that time, however, Baudrillard has come to represent the darkest tendencies of postmodernism and has emerged, especially in America, as a pop star to the ultra-jaded, famous for his fully disenchanted views of the contemporary world. In addition to the unfortunate resonance between the almost hallucinatory morbidity of Baudrillard and a culture in decomposition, it is also true that he (along with Lyotard) has been magnified by the space he was expected to fill following the passing, in the '80s, of relatively deeper thinkers like Barthes and Foucault.
Derrida's deconstructive description of the impossibility of a referent outside of representation becomes, for Baudrillard, a negative metaphysics in which reality is transformed by capitalism into simulations that have no backing. The culture of capital is seen as having gone beyond its fissures and contradictions to a place of self-sufficiency that reads like a rather science-fiction rendering of Adorno's totally administered society. And there can be no resistance, no "going back," in part because the alternative would be that nostalgia for the natural, for origins, so adamantly ruled out by postmodernism.
"The real is that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction." Nature has been so far left behind that culture determines materiality; more specifically, media simulation shapes reality. "The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - - it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." Debord's "society of the spectacle" -- but at a stage of implosion of self, agency, and history into the void of simulations such that the spectacle is in service to itself alone.
It is obvious that in our "Information Age," the electronic media technologies have become increasingly dominant, but the overreach of Baudrillard's dark vision is equally obvious. To stress the power of images should not obscure underlying material determinants and objectives, namely profit and expansion. The assertion that the power of the media now means that the real no longer exists is related to his claim that power "can no longer be found anywhere"; and both claims are false. Intoxicating rhetoric cannot erase the fact that the essential information of the Information Age deals with the hard realities of efficiency, accounting, productivity and the like. Production has not been supplanted by simulation, unless one can say that the planet is being ravaged by mere images, which is not to say that a progressive acceptance of the artificial does not greatly assist the erosion of what is left of the natural.
Baudrillard contends that the difference between reality and representation has collapsed, leaving us in a `hyperreality' that is always and only a simulacrum. Curiously, he seems not only to acknowledge the inevitability of this development, but to celebrate it. The cultural, in its widest sense, has reached a qualitatively new stage in which the very realm of meaning and signification has disappeared. We live in "the age of events without consequences" in which the `real' only survives as formal category, and this, he imagines, is welcomed. "Why should we think that people want to disavow their daily lives in order to search for an alternative? On the contrary, they want to make a destiny of it...to ratify monotony by a grander monotony." If there should be any `resistance', his prescription for that is similar to that of Deleuze, who would prompt society to become more schizophrenic. That is, it consists wholly in what is granted by the system: "You want us to consume -- O.K., let's consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose." This is the radical strategy he names `hyperconformity'.
At many points, one can only guess as to which phenomena, if any, Baudrillard's hyperbole refers. The movement of consumer society toward both uniformity and dispersal is perhaps glimpsed in one passage...but why bother when the assertions seem all too often cosmically inflated and ludicrous. This most extreme of the postmodern theorists, now himself a top-selling cultural object, has referred to the "ominous emptiness of all discourse," apparently unaware of the phrase as an apt reference to his own vacuities.
Japan may not qualify as `hyperreality', but it is worth mentioning that its culture seems to be even more estranged and postmodern than that of the U.S. In the judgment of Masao Miyoshi, "the dispersal and demise of modern subjectivity, as talked about by Barthes, Foucault, and many others, have long been evident in Japan, where intellectuals have chronically complained about the absence of selfhood." A flood of largely specialized information, provided by experts of all kinds, highlights the Japanese high-tech consumer ethos, in which the indeterminacy of meaning and a high valuation of perpetual novelty work hand in hand. Yoshimoto Takai is perhaps the most prolific national cultural critic; somehow it does not seem bizarre to many that he is also a male fashion model, who extols the virtues and values of shopping.
Yasuo Tanaka's hugely popular Somehow, Crystal (1980) was arguably the Japanese cultural phenomenon of the '80s, in that this vacuous, unabashedly consumerist novel, awash with brand names (a bit like Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 American Psycho), dominated the decade. But it is cynicism, even more than superficiality, that seems to mark that full dawning of postmodernism which Japan seems to be: how else does one explain that the most incisive analyses of pm there -- Now is the Meta-Mass Age, for example -- are published by the Parco Corporation, the country's trendiest marketing and retailing outlet. Shigesatu Itoi is a top media star, with his own television program, numerous publications, and constant appearances in magazines. The basis of this idol's fame? Simply that he wrote a series of state-of-the-art (flashy, fragmented, etc.) ads for Seibu, Japan's largest and most innovative department store chain. Where capitalism exists in its most advanced, postmodern form, knowledge is consumed in exactly the way that one buys clothes. `Meaning' is pass‚, irrelevant; style and appearance are all.
We are fast arriving at a sad and empty place, which the spirit of postmodernism embodies all too well. "Never in any previous civilization have the great metaphysical preoccupations, the fundamental questions of being and the meaning of life, seemed so utterly remote and pointless," in Frederic Jameson's judgment. Peter Sloterdijk finds that "the discontent in culture has assumed a new quality: it appears as universal, diffuse cynicism." The erosion of meaning, pushed forward by intensified reification and fragmentation, causes the cynic to appear everywhere. Psychologically "a borderline melancholic," he is now "a mass figure."
The postmodern capitulation to perspectivism and decadence does not tend to view the present as alienated -- surely an old-fashioned concept -- but rather as normal and even pleasant. Robert Rauschenberg: "I really feel sorry for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly, because they're surrounded by things like that all day long, and it must make them miserable." It isn't just that "everything is culture," the culture of the commodity, that is offensive; it is also the pm affirmation of what is by its refusal to make qualitative distinctions and judgments. If the postmodern at least does us the favor, unwittingly, of registering the decomposition and even depravity of a cultural world that accompanies and abets the current frightening impoverishment of life, that may be its only `contribution'.
We are all aware of the possibility that we may have to endure, until its self-destruction and ours, a world fatally out of focus. "Obviously, culture does not dissolve merely because persons are alienated," wrote John Murphy, adding, "A strange type of society has to be invented, nonetheless, in order for alienation to be considered normative."
Meanwhile, where are vitality, refusal, the possibility of creating a non-mutilated world? Barthes proclaimed a Nietzschean "hedonism of discourse;" Lyotard counselled, "Let us be pagans." Such wild barbarians! Of course, their real stuff is blank and dispirited, a thoroughly relativized academic sterility. Postmodernism leaves us hopeless in an unending mall; without a living critique; nowhere.


I nevertheless think this is a critique that seems to hold some valid points.

It is infact the essay that has inspired my interest in reading Mirror of Production by Jean Baudrillard.

Rosa Lichtenstein:


Well, it has no influence at all on revolutionary politics, no matter how much academics might go in for this sort of stuff.

I guess I lean in that direction too, as intellectuals have a tendency to simply talk to themselves (whether actually to themself, or people literally just like them - other intellectuals).

However, the purpose of this thread was two things: see how someone with a radical politics might conflate it with to create a post-structuralist politic; and also other critiques of post-structuralism.

But then again, but it will simply amount to more inaccessible intellectual dribble...

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

C:


However, the purpose of this thread was two things: see how someone with a radical politics might conflate it with to create a post-structuralist politic; and also other critiques of post-structuralism.

But then again, but it will simply amount to more inaccessible intellectual dribble...

I tend to agree with you, too, but now, thanks to your post, we can add Zerzan's confused ramblings to the case for the prosecution.

[black magick hustla]

Jesus zerzan can't write at all. He just namedrops a bunch of academia superstars and their quotes. Of course, all in the name of "anti-civilization". :laugh:

[Palmares]

Unfortunately this thread is going where I hoped it wouldn't...

I'm not a primitivist, but I actually got something out of Zerzan's intellectual dribble. Namely, post-structuralism is somewhat of a distraction from actual radical politics, especially in it's weird mixture of liberalism and non(anti?)-materialist linguistic fixation.

I dunno, that's what I got out of it.

[apathy maybe]

@ Rosa, I already mentioned ethics, which according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics

Ethics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to address questions about morality, such as what the fundamental semantic, ontological, and epistemic nature of ethics or morality is (meta-ethics), how moral values should be determined (normative ethics), how a moral outcome can be achieved in specific situations (applied ethics), how moral capacity or moral agency develops and what its nature is (moral psychology), and what moral values people actually abide by (descriptive ethics).

Assuming we are going to have any morals or ethics at all, how should we determine what they should be?

Most of us here would say that it is wrong for capitalists to exploit workers, we object to imperialist wars etc. If a member of the working class "makes good", and becomes a capitalist, many of us think of them as a "traitor".

Now, many people would say, "because it is in my interest, and the interest of my class", or some such to the question of "why do you want revolution?". Me, I would say, because I object to hierarchy, oppression, and desire freedom.

There are others who also come to socialism, not through Marxism (and the "historical inevitability" of working class revolution), nor through sheer self-interest, but through a sense of injustice.

Take from that what you will.

@Cthenthar, you claim not to be a primitivist, but I know you. You chiselled that onto rock, and handed it to someone else to type up for you...
And thanks for the article, I'll have a look at it.

[Hyacinth]

Ethics can be decided on through rational thought...
How?


Assuming we are going to have any morals or ethics at all, how should we determine what they should be?
It isn't a question of right or wrong as such—at least not so directly—it's a question of power, as it is those with power who decide what is right or wrong. The ethics of a society are merely, thus, a part of its superstructure, a reflection of the power relations of society. Insofar as you feel a sense of injustice at oppression and exploitation it is because, chances are, you are among the oppressed and exploited. A capitalist is likely not to feel such a sense of injustice, but rather the opposite, a sense of entitlement (this isn't to say that there cannot be exceptions, there are people who are motivated by their moral sentiments to act against their class interests, but these are the exception, one cannot base a revolutionary theory on them).

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

AM:


Assuming we are going to have any morals or ethics at all, how should we determine what they should be?

Howsoever we do this, I have yet to be convinced that philosophy is of any use, even here.


Most of us here would say that it is wrong for capitalists to exploit workers, we object to imperialist wars etc. If a member of the working class "makes good", and becomes a capitalist, many of us think of them as a "traitor".

Now, many people would say, "because it is in my interest, and the interest of my class", or some such to the question of "why do you want revolution?". Me, I would say, because I object to hierarchy, oppression, and desire freedom.

There are others who also come to socialism, not through Marxism (and the "historical inevitability" of working class revolution), nor through sheer self-interest, but through a sense of injustice.

Take from that what you will.

What I take from this is that there is precious little philosophy, probably none at all, in there.

[apathy maybe]

How?
Well, I guess you first have to assume some things, such as what is most important (freedom? greater good? etc.). Then, you go from there.


It isn't a question of right or wrong as such—at least not so directly—it's a question of power, as it is those with power who decide what is right or wrong. The ethics of a society are merely, thus, a part of its superstructure, a reflection of the power relations of society. Insofar as you feel a sense of injustice at oppression and exploitation it is because, chances are, you are among the oppressed and exploited. A capitalist is likely not to feel such a sense of injustice, but rather the opposite, a sense of entitlement (this isn't to say that there cannot be exceptions, there are people who are motivated by their moral sentiments to act against their class interests, but these are the exception, one cannot base a revolutionary theory on them).
Interesting points. But I never said you could base a revolutionary theory on it. I was just pointing out that I thought that ethics (a type of philosophy) could be used positively to affect revolutionary politics. You need ethics, or at least logic (also from philosophy) to decided, for example, whom to shoot, whom to save, what to do with that person, etc.

AM:
Howsoever we do this, I have yet to be convinced that philosophy is of any use, even here.
Oh well. Do you think that ethics should be counted as a branch of philosophy?


What I take from this is that there is precious little philosophy, probably none at all, in there.
As you will.


Do you think that logic should be considered a branch of philosophy? (Wikipedia thinks it should be.)

[RHIZOMES]

Chomsky on post-modernism:


There are lots of things I don't understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

And this sums up my views on postmodernism as well:


Fredric Jameson (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredric_Jameson), American literary critic and Marxist political theorist, attacks postmodernism (or poststructuralism), what he claims is "the cultural logic of late capitalism," for its refusal to critically engage with the metanarratives of capitalization and globalization. The refusal renders postmodernist philosophy complicit with the prevailing relations of domination and exploitation

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Arizona, where did you get this Chomsky quote from?

[apathy maybe]

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html looks like a good spot, but you could also have just done a search for the text...

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks -- and you are right; I normally perform such searches, but this time, for some unknown reason, I didn't!:o

[Palmares]

I'm really interested to see what Chomsky has to say on post-modernism, so thanks for the info.

If anyone else knows of some radical leftist (preferably anarchist) critiques of post-modernism/structuralism I would interested in knowing those aswell.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Try this:

Alex Callinicos, (1989), Against Postmodernism (Polity Press).

But, be warned, Alex tries to defend a version of scientific realism based on Davidson's theory of meaning and the correspondence theory of truth, neither of which work, and neither of which are compatible with one another (as Davidson himself points out).

[Hyacinth]

I was recently going through "Calculation in-Natura, from Neurath to Kantorovich'' (Cockshott) when I came across something intriging, and relevant to the discussion at hand:



[W]hile in the 1930s (say) one might have expected the "typical" Marxist intellectual to have a scientific training—or at least to have general respect for the scientific method—by the turn of the century one would be hard pressed to find a young Marxist intellectual (in the dominant Western countries) whose background ws not in sociology, accountancy, continental philosophy, or perhaps some "soft" (quasi-philosophical) form of economics, and who was not profoundly skeptical of (while also ignorant of) current science.


If this is the case—and, alas, it is the case at least among the people I know, most of whom do theory and criticism—I'm curious as to why? Why has the left sought to ally itself with a patently nonsensical and bankrupt pseudo-philosophical movement that can, in no way, actually assist in either bringing about revolution nor in understanding the world. Likewise for dialectics, there seems to be a history of this sort of thing. It has—rightly—make much of the left the laughing stock of our opponents.

[Invader Zim]

Cthenthar:



Well, it has no influence at all on revolutionary politics, no matter how much academics might go in for this sort of stuff.

Which "academics"? As far as I can see, out side of the 'artiest' of 'arts', academics typically find no use for post-modernism.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Invader:


As far as I can see, out side of the 'artiest' of 'arts', academics typically find no use for post-modernism.

I agree. You will note, however, that my reference to 'academics' is left indefinite, hence I was not referring to all academics.

[Hit The North]

re. Cockshott's claim: 1) Marx was trained in philosophy; Lenin in law; neither Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg had scientific training. 2) What's so good about the Marxist intellectuals of the 1930s? Most were apologists for Stalinism. 3) If Cockshott can't find any contemporary young marxist intellectuals who have a general respect for scientific method, he's surely not looking hard enough.

[JimFar]

In France at least, wasn't it the case that postmodernism really began to take off after the defeats of 1968? And in the US, it seems to me that postmodernism really began taking off after 1980, when Ronald Reagan got elected president of the United States, signaling a major defeat for the social movements that came out of the 1960s.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Indeed, Jim. But Marxist intellectuals, certainly in the UK, became infatuated with the Frankfurt School and with French 'Philosophy' post-1956.

I cannot say whether this was true in the USA or eleswhere, but it would not surprise me.

[aAMma]

There are lots of things I don't understand — say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. — even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

This really says more about Chomsky's intelligence than the merits of "postmodernism." Derrida may very well be full of shit, but Lyotard and Lacan make perfect sense... assuming that you have a very good knowledge of Freud, Kant, Wittgenstein, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas.

[Hit The North]

I've split the posts concerned with dialectics in order to prevent this thread from being hijacked. The split posts can be found here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/should-we-allow-t107348/index.html

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Moved to the other thread.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

aAMma:


assuming that you have a very good knowledge of Freud, Kant, Wittgenstein, Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas.

Well, my PhD was on Wittgenstein, but I agree with Chomsky: the French 'philosophers' you mention are largely incomprehensible -- and so are several of the others you list (for example, Heidegger).

Moreover, Freud was a complete charlatan (which means Lacan is too).

[JimFar]

Indeed, Jim. But Marxist intellectuals, certainly in the UK, became infatuated with the Frankfurt School and with French 'Philosophy' post-1956.

I cannot say whether this was true in the USA or eleswhere, but it would not surprise me.

Well in 1956, we had Khrushchev's "de-Stalinzation" speech which led to lots of disillusionment with the pro-Moscow CPs, especially when Khrushchev later on that year, invaded Hungary. I think that had a lot to do with the growth of interest in the Frankfurters among left-leaning people. It became fashionable among US intellectuals, who were of a progressive character, to write and talk a lot about alienation. Interest in the "young" Marx began to appear at this time too.

In the US, at least, "French philosophy" back then meant mostly the existentialism of Sartre and Camus.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Thanks for that Jim, it agrees with a point I made earlier.

[Invariance]

...neither Trotsky or Rosa Luxemburg had scientific training Just to point out, Luxemburg had a PHD in economics, and Trotsky considered studying pure mathematics but declined (and who can blame him!).

[Vincent]

This really says more about Chomsky's intelligence than the merits of "postmodernism."

Chomsky's point here, I think, is that the post-structuralism is inherently incoherent. For post-structuralists, to understand something, you need to examine that something itself and the systems of knowledge that went together to produce that something. But, and I think this is what Chomsky wants to say, post-structuralists can't turn that mode of critique on themselves.. yet are happy to have the rest of knowledge 'explained away'.

For 'radical politics', or whatever you like to call it, I think post-structuralism really cannot make a positive contribution. Practicable political theories need to engage with debates over justice, freedom, and so on, rather than simply examine them.

Post-structuralists might help us understand, in some sense and on one interpretation, 'what is going on' with leftist political ideology and can do that great magic trick of academia 'explaining away', but because of that I think it implicitly tries to makes itself 'apolitical'. And there is the contradiction... post structuralists cannot, by their own admission, be 'a-' anything. Yet, if underlying political sentiments are to be discovered in post-structuralist texts, I would expect them to be a passive reflection of the climate in which the author is working, rather than a positive statement of politics.

Just my two-cents. Though it's probably more like .4 of a cent because I really can't stand continental philosophy.

[Hiero]

aAMma:



Well, my PhD was on Wittgenstein, but I agree with Chomsky: the French 'philosophers' you mention are largely incomprehensible -- and so are several of the others you list (for example, Heidegger).

Moreover, Freud was a complete charlatan (which means Lacan is too).

I think Lacan is very interesting. I tried to start a debate on this topic of how to read Lacan, anyway.

The book I am reading about Lacan is writen in the 1970s. At this point Lacan is definitely a structuralist, and the author positions Lacanian though within the structuralist understanding of linguistics (Saussure, Chomsky) and culture (Levi-Strauss).

So it is interesting that Chomsky criticised Lacan as a post-structuralist, when there is a structuralist reading of Lacan, much the way Zizek takes on Lacanian thought. I think there is something usefully in showing the dimension of Symbolic, Real and Imaginary in human behaviour and action, but in a more anthropological way.

[Black Dagger]

post-structuralists can't turn that mode of critique on themselves.. yet are happy to have the rest of knowledge 'explained away'.

I find this sort of critique very puzzling. Good post-structuralist praxis is premised on self-reflexivity, which is precisely the kind of self-critique you are claiming post-structuralists collectively flee from - it's just not true. This paradox in praxis is at the very heart of post-structuralist thinking and is engaged with on a constant basis, particularly in histories. Identifying and deconstructing the subjectivity of others is not the same as renouncing one's own subjectivity (indeed that is precisely the sort of thing post-structuralism attacks). Rejecting universalist logic, 'truth', does not negate one's ability to make a persuasive argument, whilst fullly acknowledging the subjectivities and limitations of one's own research and writing.
Post-structuralism aims at understanding the world better by plotting out the linkages, contradictions, subjectivities, and dynamics of power that shape our perspectives on the world. This can be applied in narrow and abstracted settings, or in more politically expedient fields such as marxism or feminism.

Whilst i agree for the most part post-structuralists are woefully irrelevant to revolutionary praxis let alone class struggle, the ideas and techniques that are a part of post-structuralist praxis do have relevance to concrete struggles and 'radical politics', like the intersection of class with race, gender and sexuality - a concept explored by many post-structuralist influenced post-colonial feminists.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Hiero:


So it is interesting that Chomsky criticised Lacan as a post-structuralist, when there is a structuralist reading of Lacan, much the way Zizek takes on Lacanian thought. I think there is something usefully in showing the dimension of Symbolic, Real and Imaginary in human behaviour and action, but in a more anthropological way.

Well, you are welcome to all this a priori dogmatism, largely based on the fabricated work of that charlatan, Freud.

[Hiero]

Hiero:



Well, you are welcome to all this a priori dogmatism, largely based on the fabricated work of that charlatan, Freud.
I don't know what that means.

[black magick hustla]

I don't know what that means.

Of course you know. Even I know.

[Hiero]

So where do we go from here?

Let's just not discuss anything anymore.

[black magick hustla]

So where do we go from here?

Let's just not discuss anything anymore.

:shrugs:, you were the one being a smartass. You could have looked apriori up or just made sense of the words roots.

[Hiero]

:shrugs:, you were the one being a smartass. You could have looked apriori up or just made sense of the words roots.

I know what a priori means.

[counterblast]

AM:



I'd like to see one example where philosophy affects revolutionary practice (ignoring negative effects, of course).


Without philosophy, the objective of revolutionary practice becomes unclear, and sometimes outdated or irrelevant.

Feminism is one of the clearest examples of this.

Since we're on the subject of postmodernism; lets take postmodernist feminists like Helene Cixous or Julia Kristeva and compare them to modernist feminists like Mary Wolstonecraft or Elizabeth Stanton.

Helene and Julia argue that gender as a category tends to "essentialize" womanhood into a fixed category, creating problematic tendencies to liberate woman, while simultaneously limiting her. Their solution is emancipating woman by abolishing gender/gender roles and therefore abolishing the limitations they put on her.

Mary and Elizabeth, on the other hand, argue that gender is supposed to essentialize womanhood. Their solution is emancipating woman by expanding upon traditional aspects of womanhood therefore challenging male dominance and counteracting sexism.

Both, although having a similar objective (eliminating sexism) require very different, (and sometimes counteractive) practices to be implemented.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Counterblast:


Without philosophy, the objective of revolutionary practice becomes unclear, and sometimes outdated or irrelevant.

Much as we'd like to take your word for it, I'm afraid we are going to need proof of this rather bold and, if I may say so, dogmatic claim.

And this isn't it:


Helene and Julia argue that gender as a category tends to "essentialize" womanhood into a fixed category, creating problematic tendencies to liberate woman, while simultaneously limiting her. Their solution is emancipating woman by abolishing gender/gender roles and therefore abolishing the limitations they put on her.

Mary and Elizabeth, on the other hand, argue that gender is supposed to essentialize womanhood. Their solution is emancipating woman by expanding upon traditional aspects of womanhood therefore challenging male dominance and counteracting sexism.

Both, although having a similar objective (eliminating sexism) require very different, (and sometimes counteractive) practices to be implemented.

This reads like two sets of confused women, exchanging what appear to be a priori opinions laced with rather obscure jargon.

[No wonder feminism has run into the ground over the last thirty years. Hence my comment about negative effects.]

In fact, this is yet more proof that Chomsky was right -- see earlier in this thread.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Heiro:


I don't know what that means.

Then you can't have read Anti-Duhring, since in that book, Engels accuses Hegel and Duhring of this very crime (but then proceeds to do the same himself!).

I'll post the passage when I can find it.

-----------------

Ok, here we go (in fact this whole section of Engels's book is relevant):


Part I: Philosophy

III. Classification.

Apriorism

What he is dealing with are therefore principles, formal tenets derived from thought and not from the external world, which are to be applied to nature and the realm of man, and to which therefore nature and man have to conform. But whence does thought obtain these principles? From itself? No, for Herr Dühring himself says: the realm of pure thought is limited to logical schemata and mathematical forms {42} (the latter, moreover, as we shall see, is wrong). Logical schemata can only relate to forms of thought; but what we are dealing with here is solely forms of being, of the external world, and these forms can never be created and derived by thought out of itself, but only from the external world. But with this the whole relationship is inverted: the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter, and Herr Dühring's contrary conception is idealistic, makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of ideas, out of schemata, schemes or categories existing somewhere before the world, from eternity — just like a Hegel. [p.43.]

Bold added.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch01.htm

I did say that I knew your Holy Books better than you mystics seem to...

[counterblast]

Much as we'd like to take your word for it, I'm afraid we are going to need proof of this rather bold and, if I may say so, dogmatic claim.


This appears to a battle of TWO dogmatic claims to me...

Yours and my own.




This reads like two sets of confused women, exchanging what appear to be a priori opinions laced with rather obscure jargon.

[No wonder feminism has run into the ground over the last thirty years. Hence my comment about negative effects.]

In fact, this is yet more proof that Chomsky was right -- see earlier in this thread.

This all seems like an interpretive response to me.

[counterblast]

Ok, here we go (in fact this whole section of Engels's book is relevant):

Part I: Philosophy

III. Classification.

Apriorism

What he is dealing with are therefore principles, formal tenets derived from thought and not from the external world, which are to be applied to nature and the realm of man, and to which therefore nature and man have to conform. But whence does thought obtain these principles? From itself? No, for Herr Dühring himself says: the realm of pure thought is limited to logical schemata and mathematical forms {42} (the latter, moreover, as we shall see, is wrong). Logical schemata can only relate to forms of thought; but what we are dealing with here is solely forms of being, of the external world, and these forms can never be created and derived by thought out of itself, but only from the external world. But with this the whole relationship is inverted: the principles are not the starting-point of the investigation, but its final result; they are not applied to nature and human history, but abstracted from them, it is not nature and the realm of man which conform to these principles, but the principles are only valid in so far as they are in conformity with nature and history. That is the only materialist conception of the matter, and Herr Dühring's contrary conception is idealistic, makes things stand completely on their heads, and fashions the real world out of ideas, out of schemata, schemes or categories existing somewhere before the world, from eternity — just like a Hegel. [p.43.] And yet Engels himself in his analysis, relies solely on personal observation; making his analysis, by his own admission (and yours), unreliable and dogmatic. Unfortunately, the same rules that apply to me apply to Marx and Engels as well.

[black magick hustla]

If you want to be a postmodern dickhead and abuse the term apriorism you can make the argument and then any sort of discourse collapses. What makes psychoanalysis aprioristic is the willingness to embark on a discourse outside the limits of our senses (and thus the logical limits of language). How the fuck do psychoanalysts know what is happening inside something as private as a mind?

[Jimmie Higgins]

And yet Engels himself in his analysis, relies solely on personal observation; making his analysis, by his own admission (and yours), unreliable and dogmatic. Unfortunately, the same rules that apply to me apply to Marx and Engels as well.

No. Engel's observations come from the material world, not observations based solely on immaterial ideas. Observations based on understanding society and the historical development of class and the oppression that accompany it.

This is the whole problem with postmodernism: ideas (right or wrong) are just as valid as empirical evidence. According to postmodernism, intelligent design is just as valid as evolution - both are based on observations right? Except one is based on observations taking into account other theories and observable trends in nature while the other is based on the idea that there is a god who makes things and buried dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith in his intelligent design (which was then made up 200 years after the bones were found).

I hate postmodernism.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Counterblast:


Yours and my own.

Which part of my post is dogmatic/a priori?


This all seems like an interpretive response to me.

And which part is incorrect?


And yet Engels himself in his analysis, relies solely on personal observation; making his analysis, by his own admission (and yours), unreliable and dogmatic. Unfortunately, the same rules that apply to me apply to Marx and Engels as well.

Not so, he relies on an
a priori schema he pinched from Hegel.

You can find the evidence for that a posteriori claim here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/anti-duhring-t80412/index.html

And even more at my site, here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2002.htm

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gravedigger:


No. Engel's observations come from the material world, not observations based solely on immaterial ideas. Observations based on understanding society and the historical development of class and the oppression that accompany it.

As far as dialectics is concerned, his ideas came from Hegel (who in turn lifted them from other mystics).

Evidence for this allegation can be found at the links posted in my response to Counterblast

[Hit The North]

How the fuck do psychoanalysts know what is happening inside something as private as a mind?

What makes you think that minds are always private?


What makes psychoanalysis aprioristic is the willingness to embark on a discourse outside the limits of our senses (and thus the logical limits of language). Which would be ironic if true, given that psychoanalysis is sometime referred to as the "talking cure".

But are you really claiming that we have no words to describe how we feel or what we dream or remember? Do you have no powers of self-reflection? Do you only experience what is in front of you?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


Which would be ironic if true, given that psychoanalysis is sometime referred to as the "talking cure".

Freud's theory is certainly a prioristic -- hence he had to invent the 'evidence' he said supported his views.

You can find that allegation substantiated in the books and links I listed here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1339862&postcount=55

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=970189&postcount=5

[Hit The North]

Gravedigger,

that is indeed Engels' contention that the general laws are based on empirically verifiable particular examples and can be tested by future empirically testable particular examples. Therefore, they are not a priori as they are based on prior evidence.

I think the real question isn't whether they are a priori, but whether they have the universality of 'laws' of nature.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


that is indeed Engels' contention that the general laws are based on empirically verifiable particular examples and can be tested by future empirically testable particular examples. Therefore, they are not a priori as they are based on prior evidence.

Does this mean that you now accept his 'three laws' as applied to nature?

However, based on a few trite and anecdotal examples (which do not work anyway), he generalised his three 'laws' so that they applied to all regions of space and time.

In fact, he lifted them from Hegel, who similarly applied them to reality in an a priori and dogmatic manner.

Proof of this can be found at the links I listed above, in this post:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1443523&postcount=48

[Hit The North]

Does this mean that you now accept his 'three laws' as applied to nature?

How dare you.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


How dare you.

I dare, because it follows from this comment of yours:


that is indeed Engels' contention that the general laws are based on empirically verifiable particular examples and can be tested by future empirically testable particular examples. Therefore, they are not a priori as they are based on prior evidence.

If so, you must agree that his 'laws' are supported by the evidence he gave. If not, then you must agree with me that the 'laws' are dogmatic and derived only from Hegel, not nature.

Anyway, I'd not say this too often, or too loud in response to my question, if I were you:



Does this mean that you now accept his 'three laws' as applied to nature?

How dare you.

Since:

1) It will get you into trouble with your fellow monks over at the Dialectical Seminary, and,

2) You will be ostracised in the SWP-UK.

[Hit The North]

BTB:

I dare, because it follows from this comment of yours:

The comment was a crude summary of Engels' position vis a vis the a priori accusation.



Anyway, I'd not say this too often, or too loud in response to my question, if I were you...

Since:

1) It will get you into trouble with your fellow monks over at the Dialectical Seminary, and,

2) You will be ostracised in the SWP-UK. There you go again, with your nightmare scenario :lol:

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


The comment was a crude summary of Engels' position vis a vis the a priori accusation.

Crude or not, what I alleged about your views follows from it.


There you go again, with your nightmare scenario

Ok, prove me wrong by:

1) Telling your fellow acolytes over at the Dialectical Cathedral that you reject Dialectical Materialism as applied to nature.

2) The next time Chris Harman, or Alex Callinicos, or another comrade writes an article on DM in Socialist Worker, or Socialist Review, or International Socialism, or they give at talk at Marxism 2009 (or whenever), write a letter or make a contribution from the floor denying that this 'theory' applies to nature, and see what happens.

But, be ready for the same sort of abuse and ostracism I received...

[Hit The North]

R:
Ok, prove me wrong by:

1) Telling your fellow acolytes over at the Dialectical Cathedral that you reject Dialectical Materialism as applied to nature.

They already know. They know everything about me. I've even invited them to my birthday party. You can't come.


2) The next time Chris Harman, or Alex Callinicos, or another comrade writes an article on DM in Socialist Worker, or Socialist Review, or International Socialism, or they give at talk at Marxism 2009 (or whenever), write a letter or make a contribution from the floor denying that this 'theory' applies to nature, and see what happens.



Only if, in return, you promise to stove in Max Eastman's head with a fire extinguisher next time you see him in hell.

[Black Dagger]

This is the whole problem with postmodernism: ideas (right or wrong) are just as valid as empirical evidence. According to postmodernism, intelligent design is just as valid as evolution - both are based on observations right? Except one is based on observations taking into account other theories and observable trends in nature while the other is based on the idea that there is a god who makes things and buried dinosaur bones in the earth to test our faith in his intelligent design (which was then made up 200 years after the bones were found).

I hate postmodernism.

I think you have a very narrow conception of post-modernism - as if it had a universal program of ideas that are applied identically in all circumstances. It is nothing against post-modernism for a post-modernist to argue in favour of evolution on the basis of persuasiveness. I'm not sure why you think that a post-modernist framework would leave one stuck in limbo, incapable of making arguments for things or adopting positions based on a judgement of two sides (say intelligent design vs. evolution). That is some kind of weird vulgar post-modernism, where the mind becomes frozen by the possibilities of deconstruction.

Questioning objectivity (identifying subjectivity), (analysing the) interpretation of evidence, etc. none of these traits of post-modernist philosophy are incompatible with the scientific method. Nor does eschewing final judgements (or 'closures of knowledge') prevent a post-modernist from taking positions. That individuals make judgements and position themselves in relation to knowledge is inescapable, indeed analysing/understanding the processes behind this is a common facet of post-structuralist praxis for example (sounds a bit materialist!). So there is nothing stopping a post-modernist from taking a position on evolution, and considering the arguments of both sides it is quite clear who makes a more persuasive argument.

[Hiero]

If you want to be a postmodern dickhead and abuse the term apriorism you can make the argument and then any sort of discourse collapses. What makes psychoanalysis aprioristic is the willingness to embark on a discourse outside the limits of our senses (and thus the logical limits of language). How the fuck do psychoanalysts know what is happening inside something as private as a mind?

I am not sure if that abuse was aimed at me.

I said I don't know what that means, because as usually Rosa always makes wide sweaping arrogenent remarks with no room for dialague. Basically we are just meant to assume she is right and not investigate for ourself. I don't know how to comeback to her claim about apriorism and Frued, which is Rosa tactics.

Anyway, the pschoanalysis of Lacan incorporated Levi-Strauss' structural anthropology. The popular concept of Psychoanalysis is the idea of pyschologist explaining how human actions are a product of some hidden or repessed idea inside the brain. There is alot of pop-pyschoanalysis out there, and it is quite easy to do, especially say in a university course on the media.

The more structuralist pyschonalysis sets out to explain human actions in their constituent properties and the structural process of (symbolic order) ordering and finding meaning to actions. If my limited understanding is correct, like in structual linguistics the concept of the sign like a morpheme has two parts, a signifier (sound) and signified (meaning). And then there is a whole processes of language that connects the two so we can make sense of it and use it in whole process of language.

The reason why Structural anthropology and Lacanian thought expanded from structural linguistics because it was often thought that this was a scientific revolution in social sceinces. In all three both function in a similar way, explaining how structural mechanism order and give meaning to a thing. Linguistics is easier to see or agree with, especially someone like yourself who comes from a science background. Now it would be ridicilous to say that language has no rules, or system to order sounds or words. It is just as ridicilous to think the same for human culture or the processess of the mind.

Of course this things are outside the senses, they can not be measured as such as in other pyhscial sciences. The whole human world is immaterial, but it does exist. There is something that helps us order our senesations, nature is so non human that we need some human understanding. I don't like psychology at all, but pyschonalaysis can explain that space between human individuals, that part of the human world that involves the interaction of humans on a daily basis. Just the same way structural analysis can explain such things as myth or kinship relations, the selection process for how individuals should be related and how that effects human behaviour.

The claim that pyschoanalysis has no basis because of the assumption that people can't understand what is happening in our mind, is just bland empiricism. Just like how scientific methodology has been applied to economics (Marxism), politics (Marxism-Leninism) Linguistics (Saussure) it can be applied to other aspects of the human world.

edit: Also I am not a post-modernist.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


They already know. They know everything about me. I've even invited them to my birthday party. You can't come.

If they do, how come yoiu are so reluctant to admit this here?


Only if, in return, you promise to stove in Max Eastman's head with a fire extinguisher next time you see him in hell.

Yes, it has been apparent since you joined RevLeft that you are a mystic and closet Christian.

[Hit The North]

Yes, it has been apparent since you joined RevLeft that you are a mystic and closet Christian.

Says Revleft's answer to Dan Brown :lol:

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


Says Revleft's answer to Dan Brown

I disagree; you write far too well for that comparison to stand.

[black magick hustla]

i am not sure if that abuse was directed at me
it was against counterblast

[Hit The North]

So you admit it was abuse?

[black magick hustla]

So you admit it was abuse?

:shrugs: I didn't say he was a postmodern dickhead, I said that if he wanted to be one. Maybe it was abuse, I don't think it was terribly mean though.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Gravedigger:



As far as dialectics is concerned, his ideas came from Hegel (who in turn lifted them from other mystics).

Evidence for this allegation can be found at the links posted in my response to Counterblast

Hegelian dialectics is not the same as materialist dialectics as used by Marx and Engels. Hegel was an idealist and his use of dialectics involved a great deal of unpsidedown spiritual mumbo-jumbo. He fits in well with the post-modernists.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Gravedigger:


Hegelian dialectics is not the same as materialist dialectics as used by Marx and Engels. Hegel was an idealist and his use of dialectics involved a great deal of unpsidedown spiritual mumbo-jumbo. He fits in well with the post-modernists.

Thanks for that, but I am aware of that alleged fact.

However, I deny the traditional tale that Marx used 'materialist dialectics' in Das Kapital.

Evidence and argument can be found here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1158574&postcount=73

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1158816&postcount=75

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1161443&postcount=114

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1163222&postcount=124

[Jimmie Higgins]

I think you have a very narrow conception of post-modernism - as if it had a universal program of ideas that are applied identically in all circumstances. It is nothing against post-modernism for a post-modernist to argue in favour of evolution on the basis of persuasiveness. I'm not sure why you think that a post-modernist framework would leave one stuck in limbo, incapable of making arguments for things or adopting positions based on a judgement of two sides (say intelligent design vs. evolution). That is some kind of weird vulgar post-modernism, where the mind becomes frozen by the possibilities of deconstruction.

Questioning objectivity (identifying subjectivity), (analysing the) interpretation of evidence, etc. none of these traits of post-modernist philosophy are incompatible with the scientific method. Nor does eschewing final judgements (or 'closures of knowledge') prevent a post-modernist from taking positions. That individuals make judgements and position themselves in relation to knowledge is inescapable, indeed analysing/understanding the processes behind this is a common facet of post-structuralist praxis for example (sounds a bit materialist!). So there is nothing stopping a post-modernist from taking a position on evolution, and considering the arguments of both sides it is quite clear who makes a more persuasive argument.

Post-modernism is the philosophy of failure. It rejects the notion of progress and is anti-enlightenment: I believe postmodernism is pro-endarkenment.

Sure this is a huge generalization and sure many post-modern artists and thinkers have made great contributions, but like it's ancestor, Romanticism, it comes from an anti-humanist, anti-change view of the world. Post-modernism is simply modernism's hangover and came out of the intellectual pessimism following the rise of Stalin, Hitler, and Nuclear weapons.

Post-marxism is not marxism, post-feminism is sexism, and tell workers in factories on the US Mexico border that they are post-industrial. Post-modernism is bunk.

I believe post-modernism is as much a barrier to progress and radical change as faith in divine providence or fate.

The Tate finnaly began saying that post-modernism in art is over and many intellectuals have come to the conclusion that post-modern thought no longer suits the world we live in. Good Riddence.

[Black Dagger]

Post-modernism is the philosophy of failure. It rejects the notion of progress and is anti-enlightenment: I believe postmodernism is pro-endarkenment.:huh:

If you're not being sarcastic then i would say your view of post-modernism seems to be premised on a fundamental misunderstanding of what post-modernism actually is.

'Post-modernism is the philosophy of failure'

No idea what that means so i guess, yeah? It could be?


It rejects the notion of progress and is anti-enlightenmentDo you know why it rejects the notion of 'progress'? And why it criticises 'the enlightenment'?

(And please don't reply with some kind of cop-out like, 'because it is bourgeois' or something. I want to explore your understanding of post-modernism not your opinion of it.)

Let there be no mistake, these aren't political positions or principals, like 'anti-imperialism' - a post-modernist is not 'anti' what you conceive to be 'progress' but rather the narratives that people craft and label 'human progress'. That fundamental point (that europe and what they call 'human progress' isn't all that) is not even the invention of post-modernists, but has roots in the works of anti/post colonial marxists such as Fanon.


I believe postmodernism is pro-endarkenment. Then clearly we are talking about two different things.

'Post-modernism' is essentially a set of critical tools, in an abstracted form it advocates nothing more than a critical understanding of reality; as a set of tools in the hands of a marxist it can advocate social revolution. As critical theories post-modernism and post-structuralism by their very nature attack institutions, power/authority - the ruling class and their ideas, social control (e.g. Foucault). The same tools of analysis can be applied in less plainly 'revolutionary' contexts, like literary criticism for example - but even there the impetus is nevertheless to undermine ruling class hegemony (as they are the class which most strongly asserts their view of the world).


Sure this is a huge generalization and sure many post-modern artists and thinkers have made great contributions, but like it's ancestor...That would be first line of argument, yes.

Secondly, here you are conflating the 'postmodernism' of artists with that of history, linguistics, social theory etc. The 'postmodern' movement in art and architecture has nothing to do with what this thread is about.


but like it's ancestor, Romanticism, it comes from an anti-humanist, anti-change view of the world. 'Post-modernism' is not 'anti-humanist' by principal, it doesn't come from an 'anti-humanist' view of the world but as a critic. A critic of grand-narratives, truth claims, essentialised/ing views of the world, of society, humanity etc. It's as much 'anti-humanist' as it is 'anti-christianity' or anyone trying to claim some kind of divine truth about the world.

How is post-modernism 'anti-change'? :sleep:



Post-modernism is simply modernism's hangover and came out of the intellectual pessimism following the rise of Stalin, Hitler, and Nuclear weapons.That's not an analysis it's an assasination attempt.



Post-marxism is not marxism, post-feminism is sexism, and tell workers in factories on the US Mexico border that they are post-industrial. Post-modernism is bunk.Er... Post-marxism and post-feminism are not subtheories of 'post-modernism'... Post-structuralist feminism, and contemporary post-colonial feminism are more so - but no they're not 'sexist' (actually they have some pretty good stuff, and like many people living after the 1960s also critique the European 'Enlightenment' and liberal 'humanism').



I believe post-modernism is as much a barrier to progress and radical change as faith in divine providence or fate.You sounds like Gertrude Himmelfarb (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Himmelfarb) ... or any number of bitter bourgeois historians, 'they're challenging our ideas!'



The Tate finnaly began saying that post-modernism in art is over and many intellectuals have come to the conclusion that post-modern thought no longer suits the world we live in. Good Riddence.I'm not a post-modernist but i do enjoy how much it makes the ideologues of the world squirm :lol: It's like intellectual heresy! It also produces this beautiful scene, totally in-fitting with post-modernisms position intellectually - where you have the big old schools of human thought embodied by twitchy marxists, conservative historians and more - bloated but weathered - swiping wildly but comically at this little menance... and not one throw lands. Good critiques of post-modernism or post-structuralism come from people who actually understand it (usually this means post-structruralists critiquing post-structuralism), the alternative just plays right into the hands of the post-modernist critique itself.

[black magick hustla]

I profess I don't know that much about post-modernism, and I do agree with a criticism of enlightenment and democracy and whatever other ideological gimmick the ruling class has attached itself to. I wish nothing but bringing down the present social order. However, I honestly think that in regards how jumbled and obscurantist is the prose of a lot of "post-structuralists", I think their ideas are probably much simpler than the language they use. I don't think its intellectual heresy. It is well known that academics always try to obscure their prose to the point that while the ideas might not be that difficult, it gives them a special place in the social order of things.

Also, it seems to me that very few "post-structuralist marxists" were political militants at all. The only one that I can think about might be Negri. I think their position as spectators in academia also signals the way they speak, which is obscurantist in the same way Hegel and his companions did in the 18th century. Obscurantism a lot of the times is an excuse for lousy language, and as such I suspect that a lot of the time the stuff they say might be compared to what Hegel said - a lot of sound and fury of nothing.

[Black Dagger]

However, I honestly think that in regards how jumbled and obscurantist is the prose of a lot of "post-structuralists", I think their ideas are probably much simpler than the language they use.

In many cases you would be right, in many cases i think 'post-structuralist ideas' are reworkings of previous ideas...but i don't think a post-structuralist would deny that, given the post-structuralist POV on 'unique' knowledge/re:inter-textuality. I also understand and agree that much post-structuralist writing is very confusing and too complex for most non-academics to understand in its original form (though the same could be said for most philosophy or economics even). I have no interest in defending 'post-structuralists' as individuals or even as a general thing - i freely admit their flaws. My interest is in developing my intellect, and understanding the world, people, events, society, shit - better, and from a critical perspective. Post-structuralist thinking provides some tools of analysis and perspectives on knowledge that i find to be quite insightful and intelligent (particularly in relation to history and historiography, gender and sexuality but also ruling class hegemony, power and control).



It is well known that academics always try to obscure their prose to the point that while the ideas might not be that difficult, it gives them a special place in the social order of things.

No doubt.


Also, it seems to me that very few "post-structuralist marxists" were political militants at all.

I don't see how the failure of individuals can be seen as a direct comment on the validity of the ideas they were interested in? It's not as if post-structuralist thinking has a paralytic effect on the human body. I would suggest that those individuals may never have been militants regardless of the idea they were interested in. By militants here i assume you mean 'active' revolutionaries as opposed to university shut-ins.


I think their position as spectators in academia also signals the way they speak, which is obscurantist. Obscurantism a lot of the times is an excuse for lousy language, and as such I suspect that a lot of the time the stuff they say might be compared to what Hegel said - a lot of sound and fury of nothing.

Again, i'm not really interested in defending academics here. Their failings have nothing to do with the utility or worth of post-structuralist perspectives.

[Hit The North]

BD

Again, i'm not really interested in defending academics here. Their failings have nothing to do with the utility or worth of post-structuralist perspectives.

This isn't meant to be a hostile intervention, but in what sense does post-structuralism exist outside the academy?

[Black Dagger]

This isn't meant to be a hostile intervention, but in what sense does post-structuralism exist outside the academy?

I'm not sure i understand your question... are you asking whether the perspectives that entail post-structuralist criticism are produced by anyone who is not an academic?

If so, then i would say 'yes! Me'.

Moreover, post-structuralist feminism is also produced by feminist and queer activists of various political tendencies; from liberal to radical feminists.

I'm not really sure what you're getting here though... i mean we're talking about some principals of critique, i don't really see how their validity or usefulness is limited by their popularity.

[Hit The North]

BD:

Moreover, post-structuralist feminism is also produced by feminist and queer activists of various political tendencies; from liberal to radical feminists. In other words, its used by folks who don't have a revolutionary agenda (excepting yourself, of course)?


I'm not really sure what you're getting [at] here though... I'm questioning its utility outside of academic debate. How does post-structuralism add to the feminist critique and then inform the practice of feminists? From what I can see, the main utility of post-structuralism is to divide and fragment.

[black magick hustla]

Again, i'm not really interested in defending academics here. Their failings have nothing to do with the utility or worth of post-structuralist perspectives.

I was simply pointing out that there is nothing "heretic" about post-structuralism - it is quite integrated in the social order of things and it is quite trendy between the mouthpieces of ruling class ideology.


though the same could be said for most philosophy or economics even

That is why a lot of philosophy and economics is trash.

[Black Dagger]

In other words, its used by folks who don't have a revolutionary agenda (excepting yourself, of course)?

Again, "i don't really see how [the] validity or usefulness [of post-structuralism] is limited by popularity [amongst revolutionaries]".

I find critical theories useful, so i use them - their use by others is worth mentioning but not fundamentally significant to me.


How does post-structuralism add to the feminist critique and then inform the practice of feminists?

Post-structuralis[m] in various strands, expands on a feminist critique of gender as social-construct (as well as conflations of gender/sex in theory and practice); a feminist critique of 'western' feminists (as in post-colonial feminism) and of european philosophies like 'humanism', whilst also adding a tendency to eschew politics based on 'essentialising' 'women'/men' - which is central to a critique of radical or cultural feminism for example, in favour of politics that are conscious of the intersections between race, sex, class etc. and that don't assume that members of particular groups share unitary interests (this point made a very long time ago by socialist feminists in regards to liberal feminism) or a common core essence or what-have-you.

Indeed, post-colonial feminist Chandra Talpade Mohanty proposes something of a post-structuralist feminist praxis in 'Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism' (an excellent critique of western feminism IMO) - the idea of an 'imagined community' of oppositional struggles (in the context of her book) by third world women - not a 'real' community but an 'imagined' one because it points to potential political 'alliances and collaborations across diverse boundaries'.

"And 'community’ because in spite of internal hierarchies within third world contexts, it nevertheless, suggests a significant, deep commitment to what Benedict Anderson, in referring to the idea of the nation, calls ‘horizontal comradeship’.

The idea of imagined community is useful to the exent that it leads us away from essentialist notions of third world feminist struggles. Rather, it is the [I]way we think about race, class, and gender — the political links we choose to make among and between struggles. Thus, potentially, women of all colors (including white women) can align themselves with and participate in imagined communities."
-----------------------

I also found this (http://machines.pomona.edu/marxwiki/index.php/Imagined_community)page when i was looking for the above quote (which refers to this concept and provides an example):


On a more positive note, Anderson's concept of imagined communities has been expanded upon by feminist theorist Chandra Mohanty (http://machines.pomona.edu/marxwiki/index.php/Chandra_Mohanty). A third-world feminist imagined community relies upon political rather than biological or cultural bases for alliance. Mohanty sees the possibility of alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries through the political links we choose to make between struggles against forms of domination that are pervasive and systematic. (Feminism Without Borders, 2003)

One good example of Mohanty's/Anderson's ideas of imagined communities put to work for progressive political purposes were the pamphlets circulated by Japanese female labor organizers in the 1920's in support of an ongoing strike at the Toyo Muslin Factory:

In order to . . . stem the raging tide of rationalizations which threatens our one million sisters throughout the country, the 3,000 sisters at Toyo Muslin have been united in strike action for 26 days. Stated another pamphlet: The victory of the factory women of Toyo Muslin, will, in the end be a victory for all proletarian women.

The emphasis on a specifically Japanese community of working women, while also invoking the idea of a transnational community of proletarian women exemplifies the ability of female labor organizers to invoke imagined communities in order to embody the liberation of an entire class of women, both nationally and transnationally, in the demands of a small group of striking women. Suddenly local feminist struggles become global.

Post-structuralist perspectives on essentialism do have implications for radical politics, beyond feminism even (esp. where they are centred on a narrowly defined identity). Essentialist constructions of identity homogenise the oppressed - asserting that group X constitutes a unitary group with one set of interests (in reality experiences of 'oppression' differ depending on class, sex etc. and these should not be trivialised) - asserting a very specific (and basically unchanging or at least inflexible) understanding of the oppression we face has a tendency to produce exclusions (a fundamental consequence of essentialist logic) - people who do not fit the prescribed essence of the group, or whose interests or experiences remain absent from the dominant expressions; of what is being presented as the interests of a particular group.

Moreover, if one accepts that identities are constructed and re-constructed via discourse, than any attempt to assert an unchanging, unitary essence or 'core' identity will be doomed to irrelevance over time. For example to acknowledge that 'the working class' does not have the same meaning today as it had in the 19thC, some a-com and marxist folks like those at prole.info produce propaganda that addresses this - Who are 'we'? What does it mean to be working class today? Trying to conceptualise class in a way that better reflects conditions today.

A critique of essentialist identity is part and parcel of the work of post-structuralist feminism. It's also worth mentioning that a critique of essentialist (and univeralist) 'womanhood' is not a new development - nor was it innovated by post-structuralists.

For example, Second-Wave Socialist feminists critiqued liberal and radical/cultural feminists on the same grounds decades before post-structuralist feminism emerged - I.E. that cultural feminist etc. slogans like 'sisterhood is global' homogenise the experiences of women - ignoring the effect of class in shaping a woman's experience under patriarchy. Similarly Indigenous feminists in oz and other places have criticised white feminists for their tendency to ignore the intersection of race and sex when making universalist claims about 'female experience' etc.

[Some of the above is a re-post of comments i've made previously on the site, i think they are relevant to the questions asked here.]


I was simply pointing out that there is nothing "heretic" about post-structuralism - it is quite integrated in the social order of things and it is quite trendy between the mouthpieces of ruling class ideology.

These seems more like rhetoric than anything else. Post-structuralism is quite literally 'heretical' for many people, especially conventional historians, marxists, liberals and others whose world view is premised on modernist concepts and principals. As a matter of course modernism is a key subject of post-modernist and post-structuralist criticism. In the realm of history, these critical theories are routinely attacked on the basis that they undermine the integrity of History as a discipline (which is true).

Now whether these theories are 'integrated into the social order of things' is not really a matter for debate, of course they are - it would be foolish to pretend otherwise, or to suggest that any knowledge transcends this.


That is why a lot of philosophy and economics is trash.

I disagree. Theory isn't 'trash' because it's hard to understand, when i acknowledged that some critical theory is hard for non-academics to comprehend it was not meant exclusively as a criticism of these theories. I don't think there is anything inherently 'bad' about complex theory - indeed in most cases it is not really a question of complexity but jargon, it's the same with marxist political economy.

[Invariance]

That is why a lot of philosophy and economics is trash. Because physics, or mathematics, is notorious for being understandable for the non-physicist/non-mathematician, right? :confused:

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

Because physics, or mathematics, is notorious for being understandable for the non-physicist/non-mathematician, right? :confused:

Science has many problems, but don't tell the scientists that. I'll give it credit though. Most of its conclusions are pragmatic. Of course, it helps when any conclusion that becomes demonstrative is considered science by default, and the original hypothesizer gets no credit. If Karl Marx philosophically predicted a communist society, and we have a communist society, will he get credit for his prediction? I doubt it. If yes, you can draw on experimental data in nature. If this is the case, we all have access to a wide variety of data, and we can draw a great deal of conclusions.

Given that mathematics is universal, this is supposed to be special. However, mathematics isn't universal. Logicians tried to make mathematics fundamental and ended up with Godel's incompleteness theorem. Not to mention the seemingly universality of mathematics. Is every mathematical methodology necessarily possible for explaining all situations, and why does this matter? Does a shovel necessarily need to be able to perform a heart surgery to be useful as a shovel?

Philosophy doesn't satisfy the criteria of science, in many respects, because it recognizes that pragmatic concerns are not necessarily interconnected. If believing two contradictory viewpoints is convenient, the presence of a contradiction is not necessarily a justification for dismissing a theory. Rather, it's only a justification for searching for answers.

[black magick hustla]

Because physics, or mathematics, is notorious for being understandable for the non-physicist/non-mathematician, right? :confused:

I knew someone was going to raise this and I already had an answer for this. I have a few things to say.

1)There is a similar problem iin the physics community about this. But its different in nature. The belief that some pretty obtuse and arcane mathematics represent nature. This is the dilemma of string theory. Its similar to the problem attested by philosophy in so far that it exchanges obscurantism for substance.

2) Physicists are probably the most "accessible" of the scientific community. There is literally, a ton of popular science literature dealing with this. I don't think the physics community is as isolated as the critical theory community. I never hear about critical theorists in campus giving lectures to the public about deconstruction. A lot of ideas of physics are completely intuitive - especially classical physics. Even the math itself - the differential equation - is extremely intuitive if you understand it. Quantum mechanics is a different can of worms though.

3)I've taken a few upper level philosophy courses. I also have taken a few upper level math courses. I don't think the "obscurantism" of philosophy is the same with the complexity of mathematics. I think the obscurantism in the former is arbitrary and a lousy use of language. Mathematics is a game with its own rules and the conclusions of a lot of mathematical work follows logically from certain axioms. (Like 2+2=4). Continental philosophy is not like this at all. Mathematics is crystal clear and makes no reference to literary allusions or anything else except pure logic.


hese seems more like rhetoric than anything else. Post-structuralism is quite literally 'heretical' for many people, especially conventional historians, marxists, liberals and others whose world view is premised on modernist concepts and principals. As a matter of course modernism is a key subject of post-modernist and post-structuralist criticism. In the realm of history, these critical theories are routinely attacked on the basis that they undermine the integrity of History as a discipline (which is true).

Now whether these theories are 'integrated into the social order of things' is not really a matter for debate, of course they are - it would be foolish to pretend otherwise, or to suggest that any knowledge transcends this.

:shrugs: I reply rhetoric with rhetoric (your claim that "post-structuralism is heretical). My claim is that post-structuralism is as mainstream as it can get in literature and critical theory circles and has nothing dangerous or heretical about it. It might offend some people. Porn offends a lot of people. I don't think porn is heretical or "subversive". I don't think atheism is "heretical" either.


I disagree. Theory isn't 'trash' because it's hard to understand, when i acknowledged that some critical theory is hard for non-academics to comprehend it was not meant exclusively as a criticism of these theories. I don't think there is anything inherently 'bad' about complex theory - indeed in most cases it is not really a question of complexity but jargon, it's the same with marxist political economy.

Theory is garbage when it is not clear. Complexity does not mean it is unclear. When I meant something is "hard to understand" I meant it it is unclear.

[Black Dagger]

I reply rhetoric with rhetoric (your claim that "post-structuralism is heretical).

Post-modernism does have an antagonistic relationship with the dominant ideas of modernism (conventional historians regard postmodernism as destroying history/rendering it meaningless for example), whether or not that justifies some previous hyberbole doesn't really concern me.



My claim is that post-structuralism is as mainstream as it can get in literature and critical theory circles

Sure, i agree with that - though i love how you've got as 'mainstream' as it can get... in 'literature and critical theory circles' - yeah so not really mainstream in other words.



and has nothing dangerous or heretical about it.

Dangerous? No, i never said that. Heretical? In a sense, yes. Post-modernism targets for deconstruction the intellectual fabric of bourgeois ideas.



Considering It might offend some people. Porn offends a lot of people. I don't think porn is heretical or "subversive". I don't think atheism is "heretical" either.


Ok...



Theory is garbage when it is not clear. Complexity does not mean it is unclear. When I meant something is "hard to understand" I meant it it is unclear.

Well in that case i have to disagree with you. Sure some post-structuralist linguistics is difficult to understand... for people who know little about linguistics (like me!), but post-structuralist history or feminism? Not really. If you know something about the subject in which the writer is based, no - i wouldn't say that post-structuralism is prohibitively difficult to understand. But whatever, i don't think there is an 'objective comprehension test' that can be applied here so...

[Hiero]

Well in that case i have to disagree with you. Sure some post-structuralist linguistics is difficult to understand... for people who know little about linguistics (like me!), but post-structuralist history or feminism? Not really. If you know something about the subject in which the writer is based, no - i wouldn't say that post-structuralism is prohibitively difficult to understand. But whatever, i don't think there is an 'objective comprehension test' that can be applied here so...

What constitutes post-structural linguistics?

I would imagine that is the one area that post-structuralism could not touch.

[berlitz23]

I have recently become disillusioned with Orthodox Marxism Post-Marxism employing what I believe is the archaic and obsolete dialectics that to my view is a reductionistic outlook on history. It does not seem rational only that two antagonistic forces on opposite poles generate reality, opposed to different quantitative forces and dynamic phenomena that constitute the world. Reading up on the ranks of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard i find myself becoming resolutely anti dialectical and find Marxism become a totalizing and authoritarian narrative that espouses theoretical frameworks that to me are becoming increasingly irrelevant and impertinent. I am not denying there is class struggle, adept ideological dissemination, and the narcotization of the masses, however I think we need to emphasize multiplicity and plurality in our fabric of criticism of institutions. This is where Foucault and Guttari have emerged as poignant, trenchant and innovative thinkers that yes you may dismiss as esoteric, circutious, self-indulgent but I have extracted and extrapolated a greater idea of how in a sense institutions operate and function. Foucault and Deleuze concept of power,desire and its deceptive layers of imprint on society demonstrate that we as leftists need to understand our environment and settings to a greater extent in a more comprehenisve manner than following a dogma that for years yielded effective results like Gramsci, Marcuse and Althusser's analytical approach to modern society, but ultimately have not resolved why there is still more conflict and turmoil. Now I am not implying there is any philosophy or philosopher who possesses an unequivocal, unvarnished insight onto society or the world, yet I think Marxism should revamp its 'class struggle notion' and many others on a 'regular' basis, not every 10-15 years, but on a regular basis where one can aggreggrate and consolidate substantial information to apprehend our world. Also, philosophers social thinkers don't need to adhere to any label that pigeonholes them into the category 'anarchist' 'marxist' whatever what has this done anyway? Yes you can state it has defined their framework for analysis it has constituted their views as well, but anymore 'anarchist' or 'marxist' does not mean anything to me, I am proposing if we are here want to make even a minute change we need to strive for more anti-essentialist, anti-humanist, anti-dialectical approache where we can have a free unfetteed flow of ideas. I have noticed we are prone to derride, marginalize and exclude from this website discourse that simply does not embrace the marxist or anarchist rhetoric, hence the 'opposing ideology board'which to me is hampering our ability to lay down a real discussion and real dialogue. We don't need to follow any of our favourite philosophers or thinkers rigorously, every one of us on this website possesses and wields the ability to think constructively and make incisive observations on how different apparatuses are carrying out their operations and territorializing new boundaries for modern man. So get thinking!

[Vincent P.]

Wow that's one brick of a post.:rolleyes:

There is good points, but I may be the only one who is brave enough to read it. Try to make paragraphs, for god sake...

But I agree with most of what you said.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Berlitz23, whether or not you are right about us Marxists, I hardly think that turning to that extended train wreck sometimes known as 'French Philosophy', its forebears and/or its off-shoots, is going to help. Quite the opposite in fact. Dialecticians are confused enough as it is; hitting them with 'French Philosophy' would be like taking a baseball bat to their heads.

[black magick hustla]

french continental philosophy isnt that terrible. some of the ideas are useful and are based on people who werent huge pretentious dicks like nietzche. the project against metaphysics and ideology is a quite noble one, but in order to combat it it requires to be quiet about it. The use of obscure language is not the solution for metaphysics.

[black magick hustla]

I have recently become disillusioned with Orthodox Marxism Post-Marxism employing what I believe is the archaic and obsolete dialectics that to my view is a reductionistic outlook on history. It does not seem rational only that two antagonistic forces on opposite poles generate reality, opposed to different quantitative forces and dynamic phenomena that constitute the world. Reading up on the ranks of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard i find myself becoming resolutely anti dialectical and find Marxism become a totalizing and authoritarian narrative that espouses theoretical frameworks that to me are becoming increasingly irrelevant and impertinent. I am not denying there is class struggle, adept ideological dissemination, and the narcotization of the masses, however I think we need to emphasize multiplicity and plurality in our fabric of criticism of institutions. This is where Foucault and Guttari have emerged as poignant, trenchant and innovative thinkers that yes you may dismiss as esoteric, circutious, self-indulgent but I have extracted and extrapolated a greater idea of how in a sense institutions operate and function. Foucault and Deleuze concept of power,desire and its deceptive layers of imprint on society demonstrate that we as leftists need to understand our environment and settings to a greater extent in a more comprehenisve manner than following a dogma that for years yielded effective results like Gramsci, Marcuse and Althusser's analytical approach to modern society, but ultimately have not resolved why there is still more conflict and turmoil. Now I am not implying there is any philosophy or philosopher who possesses an unequivocal, unvarnished insight onto society or the world, yet I think Marxism should revamp its 'class struggle notion' and many others on a 'regular' basis, not every 10-15 years, but on a regular basis where one can aggreggrate and consolidate substantial information to apprehend our world. Also, philosophers social thinkers don't need to adhere to any label that pigeonholes them into the category 'anarchist' 'marxist' whatever what has this done anyway? Yes you can state it has defined their framework for analysis it has constituted their views as well, but anymore 'anarchist' or 'marxist' does not mean anything to me, I am proposing if we are here want to make even a minute change we need to strive for more anti-essentialist, anti-humanist, anti-dialectical approache where we can have a free unfetteed flow of ideas. I have noticed we are prone to derride, marginalize and exclude from this website discourse that simply does not embrace the marxist or anarchist rhetoric, hence the 'opposing ideology board'which to me is hampering our ability to lay down a real discussion and real dialogue. We don't need to follow any of our favourite philosophers or thinkers rigorously, every one of us on this website possesses and wields the ability to think constructively and make incisive observations on how different apparatuses are carrying out their operations and territorializing new boundaries for modern man. So get thinking!

1)The marxist project has always been "anti-essentialist".

2)Without "narratives" there is no discourse. You might as well bring down thinking with it.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Marmot:


french continental philosophy isnt that terrible. some of the ideas are useful and are based on people who werent huge pretentious dicks like nietzche. the project against metaphysics and ideology is a quite noble one, but in order to combat it it requires to be quiet about it. The use of obscure language is not the solution for metaphysics.

Nietzsche is in fact one of the few 'continental' philosophers worth reading (not least for his devastating attack on metaphysics).

The rest you are welcome to.

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

Marmot:



Nietzsche is in fact one of the few 'continental' philosophers worth reading (not least for his devastating attack on metaphysics).

The rest you are welcome to.

I don't know what the necessary criteria for being a continental philosopher is. You seem to have to be pessimistic and miserable. That's about all I can see. That being said, I think it's useful to explore the negative side of humanity. If you face the devil, so to speak, and defeat him, you might be stronger because of it - Nietzsche, basically.

Continental philosophy appeals to natural pessimism, I would suggest. It seems somewhat political. If you can't convince someone, leave them a miserable heap.

I don't understand continental philosophy. From my perspective, Neopragmatism seems to deal with these worries. It seems like the possibility of imperfect knowledge necessarily disturbs people. I sympathize with that reaction.

Isn't math just metaphysics that's pragmatic? Many people value answers to metaphysical questions to provide meaning. Is meta-ethics is included in your rejection of metaphysics?

Scientific method rejects non-scientific methodologies because it necessarily entails itself. It has no epistemological justification. If metaphysics has pragmatic use, it's not necessarily worthless. I'll agree that science has been shown much more effective at acquiring results, but I wouldn't say the same about meaning.

[berlitz23]

I was not advocating the elimination of 'narratives' that would be asinine, it is an inevitable ramification of any narrative, what I reproaching is grand narratives are employed to instantiate or justify what is ostentisbily legitimate actions or responses to events that in reality are examples of coercion, oppression, despotism. I am espousing for a multiplicity of interpretations and ideas to penetrate through any discourse which seems occluded from Marxist discussion.

[berlitz23]

'anti-essentialist' that is contingent on whether we are speaking about marxism in a philsophical or historical perspective. Also, It is not a matter if am I right or wrong I simply do not subscribe to dichotomies like that, conversely it is one perspective from a myriad.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Dooga:


I don't know what the necessary criteria for being a continental philosopher is. You seem to have to be pessimistic and miserable. That's about all I can see. That being said, I think it's useful to explore the negative side of humanity. If you face the devil, so to speak, and defeat him, you might be stronger because of it - Nietzsche, basically.

1) I deliberately put the word "continental" in 'scare' quotes, since it is not a word I like to use, but it is widely used in the profession.

2) However, thanks for the amateur 'psychoanalysis' -- I am in fact neither pessimistic nor miserable.

Don't give up your day job.

3) Are you pissed again? Exhibit A for the prosecution:


Scientific method rejects non-scientific methodologies because it necessarily entails itself. It has no epistemological justification. If metaphysics has pragmatic use, it's not necessarily worthless. I'll agree that science has been shown much more effective at acquiring results, but I wouldn't say the same about meaning.

I am sure that will make more sense after a couple of bottles of wine...


Isn't math just metaphysics that's pragmatic? Many people value answers to metaphysical questions to provide meaning. Is meta-ethics is included in your rejection of metaphysics?

Mathematics itself isn't metaphysics, but the prose mathematicians come out with often is.

And metaphysics is just self-important hot air; proof here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/rosa.l/page%2012_01.htm

[Hiero]

I have recently become disillusioned with Orthodox Marxism Post-Marxism employing what I believe is the archaic and obsolete dialectics that to my view is a reductionistic outlook on history. It does not seem rational only that two antagonistic forces on opposite poles generate reality, opposed to different quantitative forces and dynamic phenomena that constitute the world. Reading up on the ranks of Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard i find myself becoming resolutely anti dialectical and find Marxism become a totalizing and authoritarian narrative that espouses theoretical frameworks that to me are becoming increasingly irrelevant and impertinent. I am not denying there is class struggle, adept ideological dissemination, and the narcotization of the masses, however I think we need to emphasize multiplicity and plurality in our fabric of criticism of institutions. This is where Foucault and Guttari have emerged as poignant, trenchant and innovative thinkers that yes you may dismiss as esoteric, circutious, self-indulgent but I have extracted and extrapolated a greater idea of how in a sense institutions operate and function. Foucault and Deleuze concept of power,desire and its deceptive layers of imprint on society demonstrate that we as leftists need to understand our environment and settings to a greater extent in a more comprehenisve manner than following a dogma that for years yielded effective results like Gramsci, Marcuse and Althusser's analytical approach to modern society, but ultimately have not resolved why there is still more conflict and turmoil. Now I am not implying there is any philosophy or philosopher who possesses an unequivocal, unvarnished insight onto society or the world, yet I think Marxism should revamp its 'class struggle notion' and many others on a 'regular' basis, not every 10-15 years, but on a regular basis where one can aggreggrate and consolidate substantial information to apprehend our world. Also, philosophers social thinkers don't need to adhere to any label that pigeonholes them into the category 'anarchist' 'marxist' whatever what has this done anyway? Yes you can state it has defined their framework for analysis it has constituted their views as well, but anymore 'anarchist' or 'marxist' does not mean anything to me, I am proposing if we are here want to make even a minute change we need to strive for more anti-essentialist, anti-humanist, anti-dialectical approache where we can have a free unfetteed flow of ideas. I have noticed we are prone to derride, marginalize and exclude from this website discourse that simply does not embrace the marxist or anarchist rhetoric, hence the 'opposing ideology board'which to me is hampering our ability to lay down a real discussion and real dialogue. We don't need to follow any of our favourite philosophers or thinkers rigorously, every one of us on this website possesses and wields the ability to think constructively and make incisive observations on how different apparatuses are carrying out their operations and territorializing new boundaries for modern man. So get thinking!

I think if you try reading Mao's On Contradiction (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-1/mswv1_17.htm) you will see that mulitple contradictions exist at the same time, however there are principal contradictions that take priority over other contradictions.

Then take Aluthussers stuff on dialectics, Contradiction and Overdetermination (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1962/overdetermination.htm) you can see the specifics of what point these contradiction must reach before you have a social revolution.

I think these two documents you can "re-vamp" Marxism, also including the economic works of 3rd world writers on imperialism. I too do get sick of the Marxist retelling the same old story, when I tend to view the contradiction in the class system in the 1st world as being static at the moment. This however does not lead me to post-modernist perspectives on class and the global system, rather the other way an understanding on the class sytem in a global perspective from a Marxist-Leninist perspective and how this system of global expliotation affects class antagonism in the centre of imperialism.

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

I was insulting continental philosophy as being pessimistic - not you. I should've clarified that. I'm not pissed. I just think something can be useful without being justified by anything except pragmatics. If someone is happier by believing a metaphysical theory, it's not necessarily undesirable if the belief has no consequences to the community.

Unjustified beliefs in the absence of scientific answers are not necessarily undesirable. Evolution hypothesized a missing link based on evidence, but there was no material evidence. Why can't metaphysics make a theoretically assumption based on evidence without justification? What about physics? Physics seems full of metaphysics.

I am skeptical that scientific methodologies have any property that makes them necessarily more accurate unless, that is, you appeal to pragmatism as the measure of accuracy. If that is the case, metaphysics provides satisfactory explanations to unresolved problems. You tell a child about the stork to shut it up.

Humans are curious. When we don't have the facts, we should seek them. However, we can't except all the answers in one life time. Sometimes, people just want something that satisfies their curiosity.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Hiero:


I think if you try reading Mao's On Contradiction you will see that mulitple contradictions exist at the same time, however there are principal contradictions that take priority over other contradictions.

Except, the things Mao lists aren't contradictions to begin with (unless he is using this word in a new and as yet unexplained sense); and we already know that Mao's 'theory' would make change impossible:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=986357&postcount=2


Then take Aluthussers stuff on dialectics, Contradiction and Overdetermination you can see the specifics of what point these contradiction must reach before you have a social revolution.

Same with Althusser; he helps himself to this word, but he is plainly using it in a new and as yet unexplained sense, too -- having pinched it from Hegel without giving it much thought.

In fact, he might as well have been using 'coffee grinder' for all the sense it makes.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Dooga:


Why can't metaphysics make a theoretically assumption based on evidence without justification? What about physics? Physics seems full of metaphysics.

But it doesn't, and it can't, and I have already explained why:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1408653&postcount=46


Humans are curious. When we don't have the facts, we should seek them. However, we can't except all the answers in one life time. Sometimes, people just want something that satisfies their curiosity.

That's how some religious nuts defend belief in 'god'.

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

Belief in God could be rational if it's pragmatic. I don't think it's pragmatic. Ultimately, I think I'm in some sort of metaphysical denial and/or we disagree on the importance of language.

I can see how competition creates the idea that separation of powers is an absolute truth. However, I don't see how this generalizes into "truth is power" or "truth is egoist." It's rather pessimistic about the human condition.

There are some values that are necessarily accessible a priori. Given the choice between death and a pleasurable life, a rational individual will choose life. If happiness is acquirable by killing others or cooperation, and there are no consequential differences, cooperation is preferable. This is precisely why individuals conceive of themselves as having "dirty hands" despite committing a necessary action.

These views are our natural inclinations. We see individuals who violate this rules, but we continue to abide by them. They may have no metaphysical justification in a certain sense, but they do provide useful fictions. We can dismiss them if we realize they're false and non-pragmatic. Linguistic falsity is not sufficient justification for denying a pragmatic assumption. Feyerabend gets at this idea.

Of course ideas are based on nature. If a person performs evil actions and is miserable, we say the person simply isn't an evil individual. They can modify their actions and live according to their nature. Whenever a person repents and becomes happier, we say "that's just who they are." Almost everyone uses their self-discipline to overcome their inclinations. Following our inclinations is not our complete nature. Our rationality has access to desirable ends. What is good given facts about the world - ethics. What is good if we could change the world and ourselves - morality.

In theory, one might have the means to change themselves and the world. The perfect world for a murderer, christian, atheist, communist, et cetera. Why presume a lack of answers? Science necessarily believes in possibilities. If we can't alter all parts of the human brain, there are necessary qualities that lead to a common morality. They may have conflicts due to other factors, but we could change those with science.

If the human brain is alterable, we can make individuals anything. We will choose based on what the world is at the time. If we can change both, we will necessarily fix them. A clinically depressed person is not maximizing his happiest in the best possible world. He is still depressed.

Plato is a classic metaphysician. He argued that the person who has experience three types of lives is best able to choose the best one. His conclusions were poor, but his methodology was legitimate.

If someone employs a methodology we think is "useless," let them as long as it's harmless. Plenty of discoveries are made by people who reject a scientific paradigm in favor of a "less rational" conclusion. The might've just gotten lucky, but luck doesn't change results.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Dooga:


Belief in God could be rational if it's pragmatic. I don't think it's pragmatic.

How can it be rational if it's pragmatic? Irrational ideas can seem to work (look at the way religion can work as an opiate).

Anyway, you did not mention 'pragmatic' earlier, you said:


Humans are curious. When we don't have the facts, we should seek them. However, we can't except all the answers in one life time. Sometimes, people just want something that satisfies their curiosity.

Here you were trying to justify metaphysics on the grounds that it satisfies soemone's curiosity.

On that basis, you could justify, say, the inavsion of Iraq on the grounds that it satisfied someone's curiosity whether or not there were WMD there.

Alas, much else of what you say does not seem to me to address the viability of metaphysics, so I will not respond to it; except perhaps this:


Plato is a classic metaphysician. He argued that the person who has experience three types of lives is best able to choose the best one. His conclusions were poor, but his methodology was legitimate.

This makes little sense; how can his method be sound/legitimate it the results were poor?

Anyway, his method was unsound, as I have shown (link in my previous post).


If someone employs a methodology we think is "useless," let them as long as it's harmless. Plenty of discoveries are made by people who reject a scientific paradigm in favor of a "less rational" conclusion. The might've just gotten lucky, but luck doesn't change results.

But, in 2400 years of traditional philosophy, there has not been one single solution; in fact we are no nearer than Plato was.

And this is not surprising, since traditional philosophy delivers non-sensical results, as Marx indicated:


The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognise it, as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realise that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life. [Marx and Engels (1970) The German Ideology, p.118. Bold emphases added.]

Distorted language makes no sense.

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

I suppose his entire methodology wasn't good. I meant in the sense that he was using a hammer to hit nails. He just kept missing with the hammer - if that analogy helps explain my point. I think you essentially are suggesting missing with the hammer is what metaphysics necessarily does. I'm still curious if meta-ethics falls under the same criticism as metaphysics.

What makes scientific reasoning valid? Evidence? If all the premises of an argument are true, it follows a logical form, and there is no evidence to the contrary, why isn't it acceptable? If there is inconclusive evidence, you can debate about whether one is justified in believing something.

Science rarely gets unanimous agreement. What makes one person have a better interpretation of evidence of another? I'll agree with you hands down that science has produced more results than philosophy - by scientific standards. If we're talking about metaphysics specifically, I'd agree based on pragmatic standards.

I just don't see how science resolves its methodological disagreements except with appeal to pragmatics. With that said, I don't think metaphysics is necessarily useless if it provides necessary fictions.

I can't think of a compelling reason for metaphysics. I like metaphysics is all I have that satisfies me. If most rational evidence suggested that despite being happy, I should kill myself, I wouldn't do that. The tenacity with which one holds a view makes it require significant pragmatic appeal to reject it. That's why it takes so long to convince religious people. It's not that they don't realize your argument is better. They deny it because one criticism is not enough for them to reject the view.

Reality is, but there is no reason to presume it can necessarily satisfy our epistemological worries. If the simplest explanation does not satisfy a question of knowledge, we can add other premises. If these are unsupported, it's only the results that matter. Delusion is not inherently bad. We can presume science can solve all problems, but we can hypothesize other solutions, too.

What if we proved we can't know what goodness is? How would we satisfy our desire for complete knowledge without explanatory fictions? How is the reality/fiction distinction even justified by anything?

Maybe you have someone I can read on science. I don't know how to understand the distinctions every seems to make.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Dooga:


I meant in the sense that he was using a hammer to hit nails. He just kept missing with the hammer - if that analogy helps explain my point. I think you essentially are suggesting missing with the hammer is what metaphysics necessarily does. I'm still curious if meta-ethics falls under the same criticism as metaphysics.

A better analogy would be: Plato was using the Form of a Hammer to hit the Form of the nail -- so no wonder he failed, he was an Absolute Idealist.


What makes scientific reasoning valid? Evidence? If all the premises of an argument are true, it follows a logical form, and there is no evidence to the contrary, why isn't it acceptable? If there is inconclusive evidence, you can debate about whether one is justified in believing something.

Well, you'd need to look at an example of 'scientific reasoning' before you could answer that one.


I'll agree with you hands down that science has produced more results than philosophy - by scientific standards. If we're talking about metaphysics specifically, I'd agree based on pragmatic standards.

Even if science had produced just one result in 2400 years, that would still be more than that which traditional philosophy has managed in the same interval.


I just don't see how science resolves its methodological disagreements except with appeal to pragmatics. With that said, I don't think metaphysics is necessarily useless if it provides necessary fictions.

The only use for metaphysics is to fill books, and thus provide fuel for Hume's bonfire.


I like metaphysics is all I have that satisfies me. If most rational evidence suggested that despite being happy, I should kill myself, I wouldn't do that. The tenacity with which one holds a view makes it require significant pragmatic appeal to reject it. That's why it takes so long to convince religious people. It's not that they don't realize your argument is better. They deny it because one criticism is not enough for them to reject the view.

I concede that traditional philosophy fills a need, but that need is more or less the same as this one:


The foundation of irreligious criticism is: Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man -- state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo." [Marx (1975b), p.244. Bold emphasis alone added.]

Just replace 'religion' by 'philosophy', 'oppressed creature' by 'confused theorist', and 'people' by 'intellectuals' and the above is on the money.


Reality is, but there is no reason to presume it can necessarily satisfy our epistemological worries. If the simplest explanation does not satisfy a question of knowledge, we can add other premises. If these are unsupported, it's only the results that matter. Delusion is not inherently bad. We can presume science can solve all problems, but we can hypothesize other solutions, too.

And yet, when it comes to traditional philosophy, all that the above will yield is yet more non-sense.


What if we proved we can't know what goodness is? How would we satisfy our desire for complete knowledge without explanatory fictions? How is the reality/fiction distinction even justified by anything?

I wouldn't try to prove any such thing myself, just examine use of 'good' in everyday sentences. No need to go any further, as Marx indicated.


Maybe you have someone I can read on science. I don't know how to understand the distinctions every seems to make.

The very best thing to read on science (by a long way) is this:

Norwood Hanson, (1969), Perception And Discovery (Freeman, Cooper & Company).

If you can get hold of it.

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

Why not adopt the position of Quietism as the purpose of philosophy? Psychology suggests cognitive dissonance is harmful to individuals. If conflicts between reality and philosophy exist, the denial of philosophy itself is more of an opiate. That's essentially pretending their is no dissonance rather than resolving it. Pretending you're happy doesn't make you happy in psychology. Why assume rejecting philosophy outright has a benefit?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Dooga (I hear very distinct bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping noises):


Why not adopt the position of Quietism as the purpose of philosophy? Psychology suggests cognitive dissonance is harmful to individuals. If conflicts between reality and philosophy exist, the denial of philosophy itself is more of an opiate. That's essentially pretending their is no dissonance rather than resolving it. Pretending you're happy doesn't make you happy in psychology. Why assume rejecting philosophy outright has a benefit?

That's like arguing: anti-capitalism is a form of pro-capitalism.


If conflicts between reality and philosophy exist

There can be no 'conflict' between non-sense and the world; what 'conflict' is there between 'BuBuBu' and the continent of Africa (or anywhere else for that matter)?

Sure, philosophical theses are not as obviously non-senseical as 'BuBuBu', but the only difference is that it takes a little more work to show the one is as bad as the other.


Why assume rejecting philosophy outright has a benefit?

I do not assume anything; all I say is that I have an argument that shows that every philsophical thesis is non-sensical (so no wonder the 'discipline' has made no progress in 2400 years).

If you want to pursue a non-sensical hobby, that's up to you. Speaking for myself, I'd rather watch my toenials grow...

[Dooga Aetrus Blackrazor]

Do you mean philosophy is a form of anti-science or that philosophy which "puts things into context" isn't actually what we call philosophy? Like Wittgenstein, for instance, might be unfairly called a philosopher?

I find philosophy puts things into context. I'm also suspicious of its inability to find truth given that, once it does, it's no longer philosophy - at least in Kant's view. If that's the case, I'd say it's a language issue that makes philosophy "useless." The "unnamed process" that happens between philosophy and the discovery of a new science, then, is what is useful, perhaps.

I also find it interesting that scientific methodologies are now able to use available evidence to reach "unverified conclusions." Even without verification, scientists presume these conclusions as true. Given that there conclusions become verified more often than we would expect by mere chance, it seems like there is, at minimum, a probabilistic methodology for determining truths without verification. If that is the case, I would say that methodology is an overlap between science and philosophy and in some realm of "pure reason," to use an arbitrary term.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Dooga:


Do you mean philosophy is a form of anti-science or that philosophy which "puts things into context" isn't actually what we call philosophy? Like Wittgenstein, for instance, might be unfairly called a philosopher?

1) Philosophy is just systematic confusion, so it's neither anti-science nor pro-science.

2) Wittgenstein's philosophy is in fact an anti-philosophy (indeed, he wanted to give the word ("philosophy") an entirely new meaning); his method was aimed at showing that all philosophical problems arose out of confusion, which was itself a consequence of the misuse of language -- as Marx also indicated.

I can't comment on the rest of what you say since I did not follow it too well.

[Hit The North]

If he wanted to give the word "philosophy" a new meaning, this must mean he was hanging on to some positive attribute of this word. So maybe he wasn't as anti-philosophy as some argue, but only anti-some-philosophy?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

BTB:


If he wanted to give the word "philosophy" a new meaning, this must mean he was hanging on to some positive attribute of this word. So maybe he wasn't as anti-philosophy as some argue, but only anti-some-philosophy?

Not really, since his method was aimed at showing that traditional philosophy was little more than self-important hot air.

Not much 'positive' about that.