Bit of a neglected garden, this blog. Eventually I shall post notes on several good books I’ve read recently, like Jean Boydston’s history of housework and Amy Dru-Stanley’s book on contract and freedom and labor and gender. For now, I want to rant a moment about goddamn theory. I’m not, of course, anti-theory. I love the stuff. But sometimes it drives me nuts - in part because I love it, in that sort of “oh I love you, and damn you drive me nuts!” or “oh I love you and that’s why you get to me so” kind of way.
I just read Joan W. Scott’s article “Women’s History” (in Peter Burke’s New Perspectives on Historical Writing). I value Scott’s narrative of changes in the field of women’s history in the US, but I find the theoretical aspects of her piece - and rhetorical moves she makes in relation to these theoretical aspects - incredibly frustrating. These elements are not idiosyncratic on her part but are indicative of wider problems and habits that drive me up the wall.
First, I find Scott’s appeal to Jacques Derrida (50) frustrating in that she invokes a number of terms (”decontructing,” “western metaphysics,” “binary opposition,” “dialectical resolution,” “undecidability,” etc) and quotes passages without explaining them. In my experience, this often functions as a conversational powerplay and/or as a way to portray a leap as the product of a logical inference (rather like invocations of the will of God in works of religious writers, invocations like this serve to move people to a new idea via literary or rhetorical means rather than the use of argument, defined narrowly as something like a syllogism). This kind of rhetorical move also functions as a sort of status marker in an implied meritocracy: if I read an incredibly dense quotes, use difficult terminology, and cite the names of thinkers all without explaining, I imply that my interlocutor should already know the material. Those who don’t know the material should trust me that it is both important and correct.
Second, I find Scott’s appeal to larger theoretical questions frustrating, such as the assertion that women’s history “opens to critical scrutiny the very nature of history as a subject-centred epistemology.” (52.) In general, I find appeals to “the very nature” of anything rarely compel me personally. The various ways people make jokes, the reasons they do so, and the conversational, interpersonal, and social functions of those jokes are all very interesting. Reflection on “the very nature” of humor, however, is less so. More importantly, it’s not at all clear that reflection on the nature of humor enriches inquiry into the function of jokes in any given context. Similarly, it’s not at all clear that inquiry into “the very nature” of epistemology will _necessarily_ enrich history or any other pursuit of knowledge production.
It’s doubly frustrating that these are all a matter of debate in philosophy. Philosophers have argued about epistemology, subjectivity, and their relationships for many, many years. Scott’s remarks are no more valid than if a philosopher were to make offhanded remarks about gender relations in some unspecified past. Scott’s remarks strike me as off-handed, overly certain, and frankly dilletantish. If a philosopher were to claim “the working class lies at the heart of historical inquiry into society,” it would be very fair to ask for clarification and qualification of this claim. This claim is not strictly true with regard to a great quantity of work in history: many works of good historical inquiry into society are written which don’t look at the working class or use the category “working class” as a part of their analysis. To my mind, this suggests that remarks like “”the working class lies at the heart of historical inquiry into society” should only be made if one qualifies and explains them. Along the same lines, I find Scott’s remark that “[d]ifference lies at the heart of linguistic theories of signification” to be frustrating, in an indicative sense (58). If “theories of signification” is taken in a narrow sense to refer to a certain mid-20th century body of thought produced in France and among French reading Anglo-American academics in humanities department, then this is true. If the phrase is taken in a more common sense understanding to refer to work which involves theoretical reflection on language - including work done in the fields of linguistics and Anglo-American philosophy - then this is simply false. Without unpacking the term, it does little positive work in the essay and instead serves a rhetorical rather than legitimate analytical or argumentative function.
Third, I find Scott’s use of the term “radical” to be either unclear or dishonest. Scott repeatedly refers to “radical” consequences, such as the “radical implicatioms” of women’s history for “the methodological presuppositions of the discipline.” (53.) Scott means here questions of epistemology and other theoretical matters. These concerns are radical in one sense, in the sense of “extreme” or “far-reaching.” In this sense, the theoretical issues Scott raises would have important consequences for the discipline of history if she is correct. (It’s interesting to note that Scott never really argues in this essay for the correctness or truth of her theoretical positions.) The second sense of “radical,” of course, means something like “very far to the left.” Perhaps Scott doesn’t mean this, but it’s hard not to read her repeated use of the term “radical” as a rhetorical move making use of this ambiguity, in a way which will provide her theoretical arguments with a political valence. That is to say, the ambiguity in the term radical allows Scott to imply that she is not merely reflecting on abstract questions of knowledge, but that there are important consequences to her theoretical arguments, consequences outside the realm of theoretical debate.
Fourth, I find frustrating Scott’s resort to the term “binary opposition” in a way which implies that all binary oppositions are bad. Scott isn’t the worst culprit on this by far and I may be unfairly over-reading her remarks (such as her criticism of binary oppositions between theory and politics on page 59). Theoretical opposition to all binary oppositions is a performative contradiction. To say “I reject all binary oppositions!” involves an implied binary oppostion either between binary oppositions and oppositions which are non-binary or between binary oppositions and something which is not an opposition. That is, rejection of binary oppositions is not theoretical coherent and I suspect is really the rejection of _some_ binary oppositions, a rejection which is unwilling to state and defend its motivating values.
I realize this is off topic about the issue of history and gender. I don’t believe it’s entirely off topic, though. I was in a reading group once on Marx’s _Capital_ a few years ago in Chicago. All of us in the group were active in the anti-war movement and anti-globalization movements and had a background in sectarian organizations. One of the members, the person who organized the reading group, was an afficnionado of the philosophy of Hegel and of Hegelian Marxism. He routinely monopolized discussion with an emphasis on the character of what he called “Marx’s dialectical logic.” At one point he read a passage from chapter 1 out loud and said with a beatific grin, “that’s a syllogistic mediation!” That may be so, but it was certainly beside the point in terms of at least my own interest in reading Marx, which was a desire to better understand the structural forces involved in my many unpleasant experiences at various jobs. This is how Scott’s theoretical arguments feel to me as well. I think it’s a very serious problem when debates about some issue - such as the lack of adequate attention to women in historical scholarship and the connection between this inattention and continuing hierarchies in the world today - become debates about the terms that issue was phrased in - such as debates about the meaning of “adequacy” and “attention” and ‘’women” and “the historical” and “the scholarly.” I think it’s also the case that very often these sorts of theoretical debates, like when Scott speaks of women’s history as following a “logic of supplementarity,” involve an implied injunction. This is an injunction by the speaker, “speak like I speak; ground your claims on the same vocabulary and worldview that I do.” I don’t see what that accomplishes. (As in, I don’t see what good and legitimate thing that accomplishes.)
Oh yeah, speaking of theory problems, I just started Negri’s book The Savage Anomaly. Holy crap.
Comment by Nate — October 16, 2007 @ 1:08 am
“At one point he read a passage from chapter 1 out loud and said with a beatific grin, “that’s a syllogistic mediation!” That may be so, but it was certainly beside the point in terms of at least my own interest in reading Marx, which was a desire to better understand the structural forces involved in my many unpleasant experiences at various jobs.”
kruschevite revisionism!
Comment by todd — October 16, 2007 @ 10:14 am
Hi nate; it’s like a mashup. Maybe academic mashups could have a mashup name, like “Spinozoffs”.
Comment by chabert — October 16, 2007 @ 3:46 pm
That’s hilarious. The difference is that I like mashups.
Comment by Nate — October 16, 2007 @ 5:58 pm
Amen to that. At the same time there are genuine complexities in most fields that take time and effort to get to grips with. It’s not all jargon. But the problem is that once people get to grips with them there is a temptation to pull up the ladder and only talk with people who have already climbed.
Of course that’s impoverishing for everyone, because there are so many fields with so many complexities that even if we get to grips with one or a few as individuals, we’re always going to be ignorant of a great swathe of human learning.
Comment by Mike Beggs — October 16, 2007 @ 8:59 pm
Great post.
My experience is that the lion’s share of obfuscatory writing and vocabulary is bound up with (someone’s situation within a system of) academic/disciplinary valorization. For those whose interest in labor history, capitalism, and theory more generally lies substantively (or has serious aims if not claims) outside the academy, something like a double discourse–if not a(n academically) self-defeating clarity–seems to be necessary. That is, one must be able to perform theory academically, and then “translate” what’s valuable of that into non-academic realms.
One of my favorite Michael Parenti talks take this up brilliantly (mp3):
http://www.radio4all.net/index.php?op=program-info&program_id=2021&nav=&
Comment by Andrew — October 16, 2007 @ 11:40 pm
hi nate,
i like this post. lately i’ve been on a bit of an uncontextualized abstraction-hating kick. it’s such an easy thing to hate, but you’d think that would mean people (myself included) wouldn’t still do it all the time.
Andrew -
haven’t listened to the parenti thing yet, but what do you mean by academic/disciplinary valorization? what kinds of interests are the purview of the academy and aren’t also relevant outside of it? it seems to me that if something is of ‘academic interest’ instead of useful for ‘non-academic’ matters — like understanding labor history and capitalism — then doesn’t that simply make it useless except as a means of professional advancement? is it a utopian desire to want to dispense with this apparatus?
i actually find theory mashups entertaining when they’re written pretty. but i’m thinking of something more like deleuze/guattari, in the way they excerpt large chunks of text and let them run together, while spontaneously inventing new jargon to serve as linking or ‘chunking’ devices. what you’re talking about here sounds like how the ’scary movie’ series works, where they just reframe various signifiers in random order, like ads, to create the illusion of satiric commentary and ‘cultural’ immersion.
Comment by traxus4420 — October 17, 2007 @ 4:59 pm
Hey Andrew,
I listened to the Parenti talk, it’s great. I note he deliberately makes a distinction between ’simple’ and ‘clear’, and that writers should aim for the latter, not necessarily the former.
I think that’s really important. The world is pretty complex and I think sometimes it’s difficult to judge if a writer is being needlessly complex or talking about something that is inherently complex.
I tend to think about economics since that’s what I’m always reading. All the maths is impenetrable to someone who hasn’t studied it. It looks like it is just trying to be obfuscatory. Of course, economists will argue that the function of the maths is actually clarity, that it’s much harder to bullshit in maths than it is with words. And there’s some truth in that. Also, the complexity exists in the object being studied, not in how you study it, and maths is a useful tool for dealing with the complexity. And it doesn’t take that much maths to get to understand it, so they say, learn a bit of maths and try again in a week.
But the fact that most people will never do that allows economics to develop as a specialist field with a powerful in-built mechanism for protecting its core from lay criticisms. Even though most ordinary people are certainly in a position to understand and criticise much of that core. Then because economics has such a powerful role in political life as a science of governance, it’s easy to lock people out, and even make them accept certain ‘economic realities’ without undertanding what they are based on, because of the belief that the experts know what they are talking about.
And yet the language of economics is not entirely obfuscatory, it has real content as a social science.
Comment by Mike Beggs — October 17, 2007 @ 7:02 pm
traxus4420
Sorry for being unclear. I think you know what I mean, when you identify “professional advancement”; provided we look to the institutional mechanism by which mastery and development of specialized vocabulary and discourse becomes inextricable from academic distinction and success; yet through which laziness, slipperiness, and bad writing flourish.
What I don’t intend is the tired (populist-reactionary) complaint against “jargon” or “meaningless 50-cent words” or theory itself. Just that theory is a Master Discourse which, in the bulk of its iterations, is bound up with disciplinary distinction and legitimation as much as with radical knowledge production.
I know many grad students who work within the leftist discourses of High Theory, yet whose active politics are essentially liberal capitalist. Their investment in a master discourse, that is professedly “radical,” is best understood in terms of an academic field of production than radical knowledge production. Yet, I wouldn’t even say it’s a matter of bad faith or hypocrisy much of the time; it’s simply that clarity and democratic communication are often actively suppressed in and by the academy.
Comment by Andrew — October 17, 2007 @ 8:27 pm
…and the anxiety this causes in me apparently reduces my own writing to convoluted muck! Ack.
Comment by Andrew — October 17, 2007 @ 8:30 pm
hey friends,
First off let me just say - it makes me wicked happy when people talk to each other on here, so thanks y’all. Thanks as well for the substantive comments. I’m worn out (man school and life are kicking my ass lately) so I may not make a ton of sense, but -
Mike, I’m totally pro-useful technical vocabularies. I’m sure you’re familiar with the activist alphabet soup speak of this and that sectarian group (such as: I once was close to PLP, after that I did TBTN and GLBT work, had relationships with folk from N&L and DAN - around the time of the WTO and IMF protest cycle, which IMHO kind of got fucked up by people from ISO, SWP, etc - while nowadays I’m IWW, also a supporter of NEFAC and member of WSA). I think that’s analogous. As is talk about falling rates of profit and organic composition of capital and so on, or in another context, talking about labor law and organizing models. That stuff’s useful, like substantively. It can also serve for less positive ends, like excluding people and playing one upsmanship and so on. Or, like Andrew said, the ends of one’s academic career. Not that that’s always incompatible with substantive work, but I think we’d all agree that some stuff has it’s main or sole end as its function in that context. (I tried to write about this a while ago in a few posts, like this one - http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2006/11/02/am-i-doing-here/ and the two linked from it, in which I noticed that one of the things that I’ve been doing in uni is turning my extra-academic experiences in left circles and from working in the “social justice” industry into something I can use at work in the education industry - stuff like leading discussions, public speaking, etc. I also worry in these posts about some of the occupational hazards of that, which are less likely to damage my body than my moral character.)
Andrew, I agree about the career relatedness of some of what I complain about. I’m not anti- people having academic careers, of course - the course I’m teaching we just spent about5 or 6 weeks slowly reading the first bits of v1 of Capital, it’s fantastic (the teaching as an experience for me I mean, not making a claim to my excellence as a teacher nor do I think it’s a radical thing to do, it’s just really enjoyable). I also agree about translating stuff from an academic to a non-academic context. There’s also finding inspiration and new intellectual problems in one’s extra-institutional life and trying to work on that stuff (either out of interest or because it may be rewardable in the university, or both). I’ll listen to the Parenti ASAP - it’s late here and my wife’s asleep (and our apartment is small), so can’t do it now. I couldn’t possibly agree more strongly about the implication of theory with institutional matters like disciplinary distinction. It’s tremendously galling to me that that’s not commented on more often, especially from people who will otherwise insist on the historicization and contextualization of knowledges and how they are bound up with power etc. I also agree completely about academic radicalism often being little more than liberalism. In my experience it’s also often naive leftism of a sort that many (often much younger) people with less formal education but with experience in movement circles are well beyond. Just cuz someone has big words and big books doesn’t mean they know anything about day to day problems and how to respond to them. Nothing wrong with that, but pretending that’s not the case is tremendously wrong. I agree that it’s often not hypocrisy, too, I think it’s more often good faith confusion or the product of desperation and insecurity.
Trax, I’ve concluded that I dislike D&G after much travail. I do like theory and any mashup that sounds good is fine by my (like the one of “Smooth Criminal” with “Smells Like Teen Spirit” or the ones of female pop singers with guitar driven indie rock, or anything with a good beat). What actually bothers me more is like … invocations of or exhortations toward theory: like the use terms w/ out unpacking them, dropping names w/ out explaining their relevance, etc, in a way which doesn’t seem to advance theoretical or other inquiry — the career stuff, the conversational powerplay stuff. And I can’t stand stuff that feels to me like it confuses profundity and obscurity (like the Smashing Pumkins: this is confusing and hard to follow, it must be deep!) That is of course all in the eye of the beholder and people get things from sources that don’t work for me (like Deleuze and Derrida) and more power to people - as long as there’s no “You can’t think X problem or type of problem or insight without Y theorist.”
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 17, 2007 @ 11:32 pm
ps - Mike, thanks for your kind comment on WITH…? over at Roughtheory. That’s mostly a deliberate choice on my part, which is part of why NP’s comments on being or not being a real academic really resonate with me. It’s also something I did when I decided to go back to uni because I was intimidated as hell about writing. Anxiety made me put things off which made my writing worse which made me doubt myself which made me anxious … (A-P-W-D-A’). The blog was a way to be like “I can write, it’s no big deal.” It worked well for me. I do it now more for other reasons - in the hope of trying to keep myself from adopting some of what I take to be easy bad habits (the occupational hazards I mentioned above), to interact w/ people I wouldn’t get to otherwise, to deal with issues and material that I don’t get to work on as much as I’d like in my uni work (to some extent, my main intellectual interests were a hobby pursued in spare time before returning to school and they remain a hobby now), and to pre-write or cogitate on both stuff I read for uni and stuff that’s troubling me or just on my mind for whatever reason. I rarely use the blog deliberately for crafting rough drafts for academic work, but I have been able to recycle stuff a bit of stuff from here into my uni work on occasion, and I sometimes slap up the things that came as I was doing uni work where the stuff I wrote was really more like a tangent and wasn’t what I should have been writing. Knowing that that stuff will have a home makes me more able to keep writing and to return from tangents (that’s particularly good for keeping my morale up since the tangents are often more what I’m really interested in).
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 17, 2007 @ 11:44 pm
Andrew — don’t worry about lack of clarity too much on here, it happens all the time and what you said hardly counts. i got what you were getting at, i was just poking and prodding. part of my attempts to figure out what High Theory jargon is still for.
my sense is that it began as the result of a particular intellectual trajectory, a set of responses to particular (philosophical, political, historical) questions that were then gradually decontextualized and used to spark thought in other areas. Now other disciplines/approaches have begun to or already have approached similar ends, and the complexity of the HT seems less and less necessary for practical ends. it seems more possible now to rephrase the HTheorists’ basic insights in simpler language, and advance them in different ways. it doesn’t seem to me that this has been done very thoroughly yet. i think it remains useful for communicating across disciplinary boundaries within the academy, but it would probably be better if there were some other way.
i guess that’s all sort of an elementary observation, but i still remind myself of it from time to time, just because i haven’t seen a lot of evidence that it has been widely recognized in my neck of the intellectual woods.
nate, thanks for documenting your struggles with university culture, i find it useful and sort of comforting.
Comment by traxus4420 — October 18, 2007 @ 12:26 am
i should also add that i’m not confident i know what i’m talking about when i say ‘high theory.’
Comment by traxus4420 — October 18, 2007 @ 12:57 am
…but all of this relates back to the huge series of discussion btw. roughtheory, kugelmass, and now-times, and it’s probably not necessary to leap back into that now. i’m not ready for it, anyway.
Comment by traxus4420 — October 18, 2007 @ 1:43 am
I think there is a matter of importance that gets obfuscated when the jargon querelle programme is run. Which is simply the question of content. Jargons are necessary often (Peter Hallward is a good example of someone using specialised vocab for clarity’s sake; Richard Dienst manages to use two difficut-to-combine specialised jargons - theory and mediaspeak - together in the interest of clarity). Jargons do encourage content tendencies of course but you can’t blame the jargon for a vapid text. The problem is more than people in certain industries are pressured to produce text when they have nothing to say, so one option is a sort of extended self-identification, a kind of crypto biography (”i’ve read x, y, z, i like a, b, c”), and another is to translate some commonplaces into the newest style. It’s not unique to academia.
Look at this thing. Its really similar to the academic mashup of the inferior or empty sort. Someone trained in one of the departments that put out academic mashups made this for a report about media futures. It has the appearance of one thing - of the kinds of charts and things you see in reports about industries or markets written for investment bankers - but it really is missing an aspect - the main feature, the raison d’être - of those things. One could laugh at the form but it is not the form which has made it silly; its the absence of any content in the old-fashioned sense.
Comment by chabert — October 18, 2007 @ 8:21 am
Colonel, sorry your comment got moderated. I can’t tell the rhyme/reason for what does and doesn’t get sent to moderation (it happens to Mike B all the time here). I agree w/ you about jargon - it’s not a matter of is jargon good or bad, it’s a matter of good or bad jargon. One thing: I think you meant “that” instead of “than” in this sentence, is that correct? “The problem is more than people in certain industries are pressured to produce text when they have nothing to say (…)” it makes more sense to me as “that” than “than.” I think the source is in part production quotas - one has to produce X amount of material in a certain period of time, etc, and may be in part an attempt to identity with this or that camp (crypto biography, as you put it) either because power in the discipline or just to try to be down with some people who one wants to be liked by (also something not limited to universities).
Trax, what type of department are you in? I’m currently in a comp lit and cult studies dept. In that context I associate ‘high theory’ with mostly anglophone reception of french derived stuff - deleuze, lacan, althusser, foucault, derrida, etc (not all of which I’m hostile to, I always feel the need to qualify in that way). I’m also not at all hostile to folk picking things up from other disciplinary homes and using or misusing it productive for different ends in other locales - I actually think that’s fantastic. It can serve to help people talk to each other, as you say (someone who reads Foucault to talk about medical technology can perhaps talk to someone who reads him to talk about identity in novels, etc - this is also a function that marxism used to play and maybe still does in some contexts, letting literary critics and philosophers and economists and others talk to each other in some sense, and in that case I think there was often a larger claim that these different pursuits could converge on common problems in addition to common vocabularies - ie, problems of capitalism) and it can serve to help people find or become excited about new problems. This is a truism, but I guess I’d say I like that stuff when it helps open things up and build bridges. When it closes off and burns bridges, then not so much. Theory as in “oh here’s another place we might go, more people we might talk to” = double plus good, theory as in “we know the real problems unlike those others, and you there! get back in your seat!” = ungood. The latter while overstated is how the “to understand Marx you must first have read and understood Hegel” thing always felt for me. This is part of why Deleuzian (and Althussirian etc) anti-Hegelianism never moved me - it felt like almost exactly the same move just with the names and the terms changed: you can’t do X thing that is important to you without first reading Y, Z, etc books and you not only must read them but understand them (and you can’t tell when you’ve understood, only I can tell you).
It feels funny to recommend a book after that bit of rant, but a work that really helped me to crystallize all this, move it from vague intuitions and unpleasant feelings in my stomach in the face of certain things into words and claims (and greater confidence) is The Ignorant Schoolmaster by Jacques Ranciere. I think it’s well written just as prose - very pretty and reads fast - and was very useful for me in starting to formulate some of this for myself. Not that it’s the only route to that end.
Routes and ends - that’s part of the issue I think. The bad feelings I get around theory stuff (and not only theory stuff of course, but that’s the place I most encounter these things because of what I do for a living) generally come up when it functions either to say “you should only go to this destination” (ie, all that’s worth anything or what is most worthwhile is the study of X) or “if you want to get to that destination the only (or, the royal) road is this one” (ie, you can’t understand Marx without Hegel or Spinoza etc). Both of those drive me up the wall. Not that there aren’t better and worse places to go and better and worse routes to go places, but there’s a way of adopting a role of “I know what’s the best route/destination” that really rankles and which theory serves to help facilitate. (This is a historical matter, not something inherent in theory of course.)
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 18, 2007 @ 10:51 am
“that”, yes. sorry.
i meant just to say surely a kind of commodification of the jargon is the problem, but this begins with an enclosure of existing value. the pity is this state of things depletes the usefulness of the jargon for those who would deploy it in the quest for clarity/complexity and content communication, because it gets encrusted faster than the clichés and familiar vocab whose encrustations of assumptions it was invented to evade or replace. But I think there is also a difference between jargon arising in communities and that which debuts as private property (as is now increasingly common, neologisms or branded phrases from branded thinkers, homo sacer, l’hantologie, biopolitics, multitude, etc).
Comment by chabert — October 18, 2007 @ 11:13 am
yeesh, i don’t like apologizing for things i write unless they’ve insulted someone, but that last little flurry was in pure late-night channel-flipping mode.
i’m glad you all have worked out something more sensible.
about all this theory/jargon — nate, we have the same idea of what high theory is, i was just goofing off. these debates, and the inter-blog ones on self-reflexivity and radical theory, always make me uncomfortable because i tend to think, read, and write as if there is a real difference between ‘theory’ and jargon in the general sense of a specialized or culturally specific vocabulary. i think chabert’s and nate’s descriptions fit jargon quite well, where words can become commodified, used to exclude the uninitiated, etc. etc. especially like the point that people who work as writers are often pressured to write when they have nothing to say. these all seem to me the inevitable consequences of professionalism.
theory though i think is another question. what derrida for example writes about things, especially ‘political’ things, is almost always less important than the way he writes. same with hegel, same with deleuze/guattari (this applies less to deleuze alone; one has to be specific on this). i take pepperell’s point that there isn’t really a ‘content’ of ‘ideas’ that is imperfectly communicated. i think it’s telling that all participants in that debate (if i’m not mistaken) ended up on some sort of ethical or moral ground for using this sort of Theory, as a supplement to or even in place of what seem to be more ‘direct’ scholarly or political writers like foucault or ranciere. or marx. or even the non-celebrity scholars or journalists we rely on for specialized problems.
i am not really satisfied with this moral position. it feels like a fallback. there is an (admitted) idealism at work here, where thought needs to be prepared before certain kinds of social action, and eventually social change, can take place — which seems sort of ‘true,’ but i can’t shake the sense something is being left out. to be vulgar, it begs quesitons about cognition, the role of abstraction, and how what are called ’social changes’ actually take place. these are not all theoretical questions.
in sum i don’t think any activity is usefully defined as fundamentally ‘moral,’ just like the importance of a novel is not fundamentally ‘literary.’ these are just the names of institutions.
nate, i am in one of those fancy interdisciplinary humanities programs that doesn’t even pretend to be comp lit. it is basically a theory program full stop, though my little corner is more or less english lit/cultural studies. so we are in roughly similar academic environments.
as an amusing ethnographical aside, i find that in conversation the older grad students use theoryspeak more frequently than the full professors, and that in writing the ratio is about the same.
Comment by traxus4420 — October 18, 2007 @ 4:10 pm
Chabert, I agree completely about the ‘hollowing out’ effect. It’s kind of like when the president says ‘humane’ and ‘liberate’ and so on to justify things that are the opposite of other meanings of those words. It can make them taste like ashes. Ditto for communism as used by many Communists, etc and similarly I have a really hard time not using the phrase “social justice” except in scare quotes after working in the “social justice” industry. I think this is all contextual, though, it’s conversational moves, not in the words themselves. Multitude, for instance, was in use in debates in the Italian far left since at least the mid 90s. I know I’ve seen references to that in Italian and/or Spanish, but I can’t recall off the top of my head as I’m not as engaged with that material as I used to be. (I do know, for instance, that ‘exodus’, another big Negri et al term which it might be tempting to place in the same category started being used the way it is now at least as early as 1992, details here - http://www.arpnet.it/chaos/steve.htm). I’d guess that’s probly true for a lot of other terms too. (Thinking of an analogy with music, it’s easy to hear corporate radio rock music and think “this is all manufactured” but a lot of those bands do have local histories etc and aren’t artificially assembled a la boy bands and stuff.) That doesn’t necessarily make the uses of the terms in a lot of contexts any better.
Trax, I’m not sure I follow your two paragraphs starting “theory though” and “i am not really satisfied”. I’m not sure I follow the distinction you’re making about Derrida, Hegel, etc, or them vs Marx et al. I actually feel pretty strongly that academica writing about Marx isn’t a political thing (I think political-ness is contextual). I’d also like to hear more about the idealism and thought-before-activity thing. I think I agree but I’m not totally sure. I’m a firm believer that all kinds of activities other than writing demonstrate that thought is happening (organization involves thought, so to speak), and also that a lot of explicity formulation of ideas comes after the fact and serves a justificatory role.
More later.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 18, 2007 @ 5:12 pm
thanks nate - multitude was good shorthand evoking Machiavelli and Spinoza, drawing on a tradition, but its been enclosed, by the Big Hit (like “Jurassic”); it is encrusted with stuff (a lot of neoliberal world-imagining) you have to scrape off if you want to use this word now in a certain kind of discussion. Basically now we have been trained to giggle or cringe at the sound of every word that could have referred to a large group of exploited and propertyless people, that is, to the collectivity, the majority, which could overthrow capitalist ruling class and has an interest in doing so. There is actually now no word you can use without a lot of disclaimers and without marking yourself in somebody’s eyes as a clown or a fiend. It’s significant, almost like the referent is an obscenity.
Comment by chabert — October 18, 2007 @ 7:24 pm
Nate -
Sorry, did you read the blog debate I was referencing? I was assuming that gave me liberty to write in semi-shorthand. The distinction I’m making btw. Derrida, Hegel, parts of Deleuze/Guattari and Marx et al. is that I think the latter could be described in terms of a ‘content,’ often empirical content, communicated through a language that includes various specialized jargons. I’m not worrying about whether or not their writing is ‘political’ — I took your critique of Joan W. Scott’s article to be the obscurantist, superficial, and overly professionalized way she employed theoretical discourse, such that it distracted from her historical narrative. An argument about the language’s relation to its communicative content.
The reference to Pepperell’s arguments made on her blog (which I thought you commented on but maybe I remembered wrong, no time to check up on it now) was to suggest that Derrida and Hegel (I’m just going to stick with them, but the argument is about a common genre) are important more for the way they approach questions, or their ‘mode of questioning’ than for their treatment of well-defined topics or problems. We don’t go to Hegel so much for analyses of particular historical episodes but for his style of reading History. Derrida doesn’t tell us anything MORE about the writers he reads, he is writing them differently. Marx on the other hand produces a theory of capitalism, what he took to be a really existing mode of production and set of social relations, and tried to explain how it worked. I’m making the distinction cleaner than it really is of course but hoping you can understand me anyway.
the quasi-idealism/change-thought-before-changing-reality part was a reference to a Now-Times (Alexei?) post where he ends with arguing that theory and theoretical instruction has an ethical foundation…..here, I’ll just link to it since I remember right where it is:
http://nowtimes.wordpress.com/2007/09/16/philosophy-and-social-change/
Sorry again for assuming this was all as fresh in your mind as it was in mine.
“I’m a firm believer that all kinds of activities other than writing demonstrate that thought is happening (organization involves thought, so to speak), and also that a lot of explicity formulation of ideas comes after the fact and serves a justificatory role.”
this is my usual position as well, I just am not sure that Theory is compatible with it, whereas the use of theoretical jargon as a mode of description/analysis can be.
Comment by traxus4420 — October 18, 2007 @ 10:01 pm
My blogo-sense was tingling….
First, let me say, Nate, great post. I totally agree with you about the rhetorical abuses of theory/philosophy. I’m equally frustrated by the invocation of a thinker for little-to-no apparent reason, or the use of sweeping claims that have become near dogma for a certain sect of theoretically inclined readers. They remind me of a Character from Goethe’s faust, who said something to the effect, “Why think, when you have a word to do the work for you.” (And, just to add to the list of frustrating theory-writer ticks, the two tendencies that drives me utterly batty are [1] writing an overly tortuous sentence, which uses every punctuation mark available, and then including some thinker’s name in parentheses — again without explanation, but used, presumably, in lieu of a concrete reference. And [2] the phantom reference, i.e. a parenthetical reference to some text, usually well known, in the middle of an argument/discussion for no apparent reason).
This said, let me address traxus’ reference to my post. First off, I’m an Idealist in the sense that I don’t buy the distinction between theory and praxis. If it helps to clarify matters, I understand theory and practice as constituting something like a habitus, as Bourdieu describes it in Outline for a Theory of Practice.
That is to say, Changing the way you think changes one’s practices, and hence changes the world, which constitutes and reinforces certain practices and ways of thinking. Expressed as a motto: Save thinking, save the world. And so I do think that theory has an important role to play precisely because, on the one hand, it criticizes poor modes of thought and action, and, on the other, tries to develop new modes that address the deficits of our current engagements with the world, and with others. To this end, then, Theory is Ethical and Political: it has an eye on ‘The good’ of the Greeks.
But I think I should leave off here, since I don’t want to hog time and Space. Cheers
Comment by Alexei — October 19, 2007 @ 5:44 am
Alexel,
It’s strange to me that your name for the inseparability of theory and praxis is “idealism.” With the exception of your last sentence, what you say strikes me as basic dialectical materialism.
I think there’s a fairly commonplace reading of Marx’s materialism as one which privileges action over theory. Arendt made this claim in the 50s. For my part, I like the way Etienne Balibar addresses this claim.
He explains that where praxis for the Greeks meant strictly that “free” action of self-realization and transformation only available to the citizens of the polis (ie the all-male ruling class)–and which must be held distinct from poiesis
(“making”)–Marx, by the time he wrote The German Ideology, *identified the two*.
This was his revolutionary break from the taboo: not an inversion of thought and action, but a revolutionary identification of praxis with poiesis.
Balibar: “There is never any freedom which is not also a
material transformation, which is not registered historically in exteriority. But nor is there any work which is not a transformation of self, as though human beings could change their conditions of existence while maintaining an invariant ‘essence.’”
The third term (with poiesis and praxis) in the “classical
triptych” is theoria, understood as contemplation (or for
Arendt, “thought”). Marx identified theoria with a “production of consciousness,” aka ideology. In so doing, Marx proposed that philosophy “view itself in the mirror of practice” (Balibar). Ideology, Balibar remarks, is that concept for which Marx has never been forgiven by philosophy.
The appeal to capital ‘E’ and ‘G’ Ethics and The Good is maybe terminologically opposed to a Marxist-oriented materialism, but can you say more about why you are see yourself as an idealist?
Comment by Andrew — October 19, 2007 @ 7:46 am
Trax, Alexei, I’m running late for the bus to get to teaching, but briefly: I read part of the exchanges in questions b/w Roughtheory and elsewhere but read it fast and didn’t retain much, I filed it away in my head to return to but that came right when life got too busy for me to write here let alone read elsewhere. I do plan to get back to all that (and much else, like NP’s running series on ch1 of Capital), but I don’t know when. More soon…
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 19, 2007 @ 7:47 am
Isn’t, Andrew, the idealism clear here: “That is to say, Changing the way you think changes one’s practices, and hence changes the world, which constitutes and reinforces certain practices and ways of thinking.”? It seems Alexei is saying - it seems to me - theory and practise are seperate but linked and theory or thinking is dominant and determining of practise; there is a sequence…chnage your mind and this will change your practise…consciousness determines being, as it were.
That’s shoorley not materialism!
I like to leave this in comments boxes when the least opportunity arises, I hope Nate doesn’t mind:
“Perhaps the sole characteristic common to all contemporary varieties of Western Marxism is, with very few exceptions, their concern to defend themselves against the accusation of materialism. Gramscian or Togliattian Marxists, Hegelian-Existentialist Marxists, Neo-Positivizing Marxists, Freudian or Structuralist Marxists, despite the profound dissensions which otherwise divide them, are at one in rejecting all suspicion of collusion with ‘vulgar’ or ‘mechanical’ materialism; and they do so with such zeal as to cast out, together with mechanism or vulgarity, materialism tout court. Much of the polemical debate between various Marxist groups turns precisely on the selection of the most effective safeguard against the danger of falling into vulgar materialism: whether this safeguard is to be the dialectic or historicism, an appeal to Marxist humanism or an association of Marxism with an empirio-critical or pragmatist or Platonist epistemology….
This anti-materialism is not, in fact, a new phenomenon in revolutionary thought, in the West. In the period after the First World War, Leninists in Germany and Italy professed, in philosophy, ideas very different from those of Lenin: for them, the main enemy in the sphere of philosophy was not idealism, but materialism, which they considered as a positivist and social-democratic deformation of the thought of Marx. Whereas Lenin was already fighting in 1908 against the triumphant new bourgeois ideology of reborn idealism, the Leninists of the twenties and thirties were seeking to bring Marxism up to date with the development of idealism, by accepting a formulation of gnoseological problems and of relations between structure and superstructure that was in step with the contemporary bourgeois ideologies: Karl Korsch’s Marxism and Philosophy is one of the clearest expressions of this orientation. Their philosophy was thereby defined as a radicalism of the intelligensia rather than a doctrine of the revolutionary proletariat.
Thus today not even the antithesis between reform and revolution coincides on the philosophical plane with the antinomy between idealism and materialism. On the contrary, in Western Europe, both political camps are situated within the ambit of anti-materialism. It is significant that in the long debate between Marxist philosophers in Italy that occurred in 1962, in the pages of Rinascita, the only point on which all contending parties were in agreement from the outset was the need to emancipate Marxism from the ‘incrustations of vulgar materialism’. [ᾠ] It should be added that the initiator of this discussion, Cesare Luporini, had in the previous years formulated a limpid and rigorous materialist position in his work Verità e Libertà, conspicuous for its originality and courage in the philosophical panorama of the last few decades. [1] Subsequently, however, the pressure to bring Marxism up to date and enrich it intellectually (in other words to make contact with dominant currents in Western culture, such as psychoanalysis and structuralism) prevailed over him, so that he no longer persisted in that direction.
The Predominance of Idealism within Bourgeois Culture
It is true that in themselves polemics against vulgar materialism in no way constitute an idealist deviation from Marxism, but rather, as is well known, form part of the original nucleus of its doctrine. But the strange thing is that the insistence on this polemic has for many decades now no longer corresponded to any important influence or even effective presence of vulgar materialism in the West, which has never recovered from the crisis it underwent at the end of the last century. Today the struggle within bourgeois culture is—to put it very schematically—between two idealisms: a historicist and humanist idealism and an empirio-criticist and pragmatic idealism. The ‘two cultures’ so much bruited, are—broadly speaking—identifiable with these two idealisms.” - Sebastiano Tmpanaro, Considerations on Materialism
Comment by chabert — October 19, 2007 @ 12:49 pm
Thanks Alexei, everyone -
Andrew, I’ll take another look at the German Ideology, but I think it’s clear from your/Balibar’s interpretation that yes, privileging ‘action’ over ‘theory’ is naive and reductionist, but if poeisis/praxis are inseparable then one really cannot accept that ‘changing the way you think changes one’s practices.’ Any style or mode of thinking is a practice that leads to other practices, all of which involve an ongoing poiesis.
So if one is going to discuss some genre of Theory as above all a ‘theory about theory,’ or a theory that is important more for its performance of a certain style of thought, writing, or questioning (i.e. pure dialectic, deconstruction), than for some other thing that it is ostensibly ‘about’ or attempting to influence — and I think this is a fair reading of some Theorists — then what kinds of poieses/praxes does it reproduce? How are they to be evaluated? What is thought/writing that is supposed to ‘do’ do? As I stated above I’m referring to the roughtheory post (the link is included in the post of Alexei’s that I linked to) that most participants seemed to agree with. But also many theorists, Derrida, Baudrillard, and Deleuze included, have at various points defined their writing along at least superficially similar lines, where ‘jargon’ or ’style’ is not a way of describing, referring to, or even addressing a particular thing but is the thing itself.
Comment by traxus4420 — October 19, 2007 @ 2:36 pm
i’ll try to find some good references and get back to this.
chabert that last couple lines of timpanro’s seems especially important to keep remembering, and reminds me again of bruno latour’s thesis that modernity is a false problem derived from the false distinction between nature and culture.
Comment by traxus4420 — October 19, 2007 @ 2:41 pm
Thanks for responses.
I get the privilege thought holds in the “Save thinking, save the world” slogan, but it seems clear to me that saving thought (and doing any thinking at all) involves social practices, including forms of struggle and contest, which are materially instantiated.
I mess myself up (am to “literal-minded” I guess) because consciousness and thought are such deeply social and material phenomena (in my understanding); I forget the formal distinctions between idealism and materialism, in part because I don’t work in a discipline (I’m in English Lit) that holds them very dear (or that devotes consistent rigor to basic ontological and epistemological understandings at all(let alone to Marx’s thought)). Hence, it would seem that the material (disciplinary) practices in which much of my thinking occurs inhibit me from doing my part to actively save thought. Heh.
Anyway, thanks for humoring me… if people honestly think deconstruction or meta-theory is the chief answer to liberating life and the earth from capitalization (and that these forms of thought encourage everyday practices which validate the original thought beyond places like the academy), I don’t know what to say other than, “that is fucked up.” I mean, if during the course of my PhD the grad student union we’re trying to organize is established, I am reasonably confident that organization will do more social good than my dissertation ever will. What’s more, the relationships I build and conversations I have, in writing the diss. (my contingent material practices), will likely be as important as–and inextricable from–the end result.
I simply cannot wrap my head around idealism.
Comment by Andrew — October 19, 2007 @ 7:35 pm
Andrew, your final paragraph (beginning “Anyway, thanks for humoring me…”) hits the nail on the head as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t find theory vs practice a very helpful distinction, nor do I find theoretical practices vs other types of practices a very helpful distinction.
Some theory is clearly really important in some times and places - important outside of in terms of consequences it has on the world and people’s lives beyond how they think. Marxism was the vocabulary for some really important mass organizations in some places. Anarchism in others. Big parts of feminism. Etc. All of that involves theory. I would argue that there’s a sort of theorizing that goes on in “everyday” speech in a number of instances - where “theorize” means “reflect critically upon in a fashion which suggests that things could be made otherwise.” In that sense, movements generate theories in relation to their other activities and some theories are accumulations of lessons learned in this or that context/moment. The important bit with this is that theory in this positive sense isn’t monopolizable - people do it in all sorts of idioms in all sorts of locations outside universities.
At the same time, while some theory is clearly important, that doesn’t mean theory-as-such is important. No more than practice-as-such. Some types of theory in some contexts are really valuable. Some types of non-theory practice in some contexts are really valuable. And in some contexts not, for both. Doing a study on Althusser’s reading of Spinoza (say) is not likely to prove to be a really useful response to domestic violence in the life of a friend who lives in another country (where “useful response” would mean “something which helps the friend escape this bad situation”). So is organizing a union in your own workplace.
That said, there may well be unpredictable effects. Studying Spinoza’s influence on Althusser (say) may well change one’s life in some other way that impacts power in the workplace, like giving one the confidence one used to have (my mom got a lot of confidence from taking math classes and pursuing her BA over the years one class at a time while she raised my brothers and I, which ended up making a big difference in her life), just as being involved in workplace struggles may give one new intellectual perspectives such that one reads hard books in a different way. But these are unpredictable effects, such that it’d be silly to say “I’m going to make myself more effective in fighting my employer by studying Spinoza” just as it would be silly to say “I’m going to make myself understand Spinoza better by starting a union.”
Comment by Nate — October 19, 2007 @ 8:32 pm
I hit the post button too soon.
Alexei, I like your additions to the theory-name-dropping move etc. That stuff is all really annoying. And don’t worry about taking up space or time. Post as much and at as much length as you like.
Colonel, I like that quote, thanks.
Andrew - where’s that Balibar quote from? Balibar is one of the Althusserians who never went through a Maoist phase, is that right? I associate the whole “struggle implies thought” kind of thing with (among others) Ranciere and Badiou specifically in relation to their ties to French Maoism. The Maoist slogan was (is?) “it is right to revolt,” which in French is something like “on a raison de revolter” (Colonel, a little help?), which I like to mistranslate back into English as “one has reason to revolt”, meant both in the sense of “we have reason so that we may revolt” as in to use reason is to conclude that revolt is what we should do - a bit rationalist and maybe teleological but I have those impulses - and in the sense of “to revolt is reasonable” as in revolt involves using reason.
Gotta run.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 19, 2007 @ 8:39 pm
Hey all — what a lively discussion!
So, a few remarks about my ‘Idealism,’ as opposed to (dialectical) materialism: First off I’m not overly fond of labels for theoretical camps in general, since they usually end up being nothing more than rallying cries for folks rather than actual ‘differential properties.’ I’ve started using ‘idealism’ only lately, and then only to try to distinguish between two modes of intervention. I.e. idealism is a more mediated - though inherently public — effort aimed towards reconciling ourselves with the basic structure that’s in place, rather than (dialectical) materialism’s emphasis on struggle, conflict and revolution, which challenge the relations and forces that are constitutive of the basic structure itself. Contra the caricature of the Trotskyite slogan, ’smash the state,’I would like to ‘understand it’ first.
Second, (and no one I’ve ever met likes this argument), I tend to think that Dialectical Materialism is Idealism. For in the first instance, and in much the same way as the closed cycle of commodity exchange (i.e. one without the introduction of surplus value) can be parsed as either M-C-M or C-M-C, I think that Materialism and Idealism form a circuit; Idealism-Materialism-Idealism and Materialism-Idealism-Materialism are equivalent expressions of the same basic movement. The question, then, is whether the circuit itself is to be understood in Materialist or Idealist terms. Now, I think that the only coherent way to understand it, is in post-metaphysical, Idealistic terms (briefly, any ‘ontology is nothing more than a historically determinate conceptual frame that makes things intelligible; materialism has such a frame, it just treats ‘ontology’ in a more traditional sense–i.e. as the itemization of the really real) That is, since the Materialist’s understanding of ‘material’ is delineated by forces and relations of production, which are definitive of various needs and the basic stuff that can fulfill them, ‘material,’ qua ontological category, is already an Idealized notion. Again, since the production of needs and their satisfaction is the ground of materialist philosophy (at least of Marx’s version), then its very theorization places the basic stuff of the world within an Idealistic frame. And hence, the only difference between Idealism and Materialism that I can see, is whether we choose a theoretically justified violence, or whether we choose the intellectualized process of reconciliation. And I’m not much for violence.
Past that, I’m also very suspicious of dialectical materialism, because of two ‘orthodox’ claims: (1) it’s a science, which strikes me as false; (2) the tendency to push it into the very workings of nature (as Engels did). Neither of these claims can possbly be correct.
So, to come back to your point, Andrew, about the material instantiation of practices as being the driving force behind some phenomenon like consciousness, I can only agree. My concern, I guess, is that insofar as we conceive of these practices, this conception is not ‘material.’ Insofar as we change the direction of practices, or institute new ones (raise an idea in our mind, and set to work to make it actual, as Marx would say), I can’t consistently — i.e. on pain of performative contradiction — understand this latter process in purely material terms.
And when I try, I fall into a kind of vulgar Marxism, — but notice, even ‘cause’ (and especially structural cause) has an idealist flair, at least since Kant — which can only generate a kind of theoretical pessimism. I don’t take my self to be denying something like ‘the world’ in all of this, or the material instantiation of practices. I simply think that the significance of our worldly situation is expressed in our conceptualization of the world — its worldliness for us, so to speak. And I think that, at the risk of sounding like a bad phenomenologist, that what’s at stake for us all is the worldliness of the world — the intelligibility of the world that license us to think and act, and which justifies various inequalities and their entrenchment within our day to day lives.
So, how practical is all this? I don’t know. But it strikes me that, for all the material practices of protest, organization, and struggle, all we get is a more entrenched status quo. “The system works” thus becomes the mantra of those who oppose radical change. I’m thinking that perhaps we need something a little less radical, and something a little harder, subtler and more difficult to brush aside.
But now I’m about to frustrate myself. So I better leave off for now. Does this clarify things? Cheers
Comment by Alexei — October 20, 2007 @ 6:45 am
hi Alexei,
I think this may be at a tangent from your comment, I’ll come back later (maybe not till after Tuesday) - materialism vs idealism took a major blow for me when I read something, I think Richard Rorty, talking about thinking of the world as one substance and a physical substance. The distinction’s harder to make sense of (at least in a vulgar way) in relation to that view. I think it could be reframed in terms of what I think goes by the name ‘anomalous monism’ - there is one world, and it’s describable in terms of mental events and physical events, each vocabulary is useful for some ends. We don’t know how to square the two and we lose something if drop either, so we use each vocabulary as appropriately as we can while recognizing that neither is entirely adequate. All of that makes plenty of sense to me, and part of what I’ve concluded is a sort of relative autonomy of different vocabularies roughly analogous to the relative autonomy of the examples I made before (forming a union vs studying Spinoza, both of which aren’t necessarily relevant to solving domestic violence) where the “autonomy” functions like the question “is it _really_ a useful response to domestic violence elsewhere to form a union/study Spinoza here?” while the “relative” allows some room for unforeseen benefits that we know can on occasion happen. With perhaps less reductive and strawperson like examples - this means that I’m no longer convinced that investigation along the lines of “what is consciousness?” (in terms of the philosophy of mind) is relevant to issues of what some people call “class consciousness.” Put differently, I’m for a marxism which is philosophically minimalist or indifferent - one which can be accepted by people holding the widest possible range of (meta)theoretical perspectives and worldviews on subjects other than the economy and production etc.
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 20, 2007 @ 11:03 am
Hey Nate,
I tend to agree with your overall position. And I especially like the idea of a minimalist Marxism. ONe question though: when you write,
are you saying that the only two area that are determinative of our lives are economics and production? could you clarify this a bit for me?
Cheers,
Comment by Alexei — October 22, 2007 @ 7:06 am
hi Alexei,
No, not at all, though I can see how I gave that impression. This may be incoherent, but my intuition is that one can stitch together a coherent story from nearly any material if one uses enough of it. (There’s some Quine quote that I always get wrong, something to the effect that you can make any theory hold if you import enough subsidiary theories.) Put differently, if we revise (distort?) the definitions of “determine” and “our lives” sufficiently, then anything could be said to determine them. Implied in all this a matter of problem choice or theory/worldview choice. That’s tremendously important stuff I think, but I don’t have very much to say about it. (To finally get to your question - ) I think economics and production are tremendously important areas of our life, which is what recommends theories that look at them, and I think they’re the primary focus of Marxism as I understand it (I mean this in a normative sense as well - better Marxisms attend to these things).
Put differently, the problems I’m concerned with are primarily problems related to having a job or having to have a job (or having to have access to someone else’s wage, as with children and stay at home parents) and the various power relations and conflicts around all of that (including related ones like issues with landlords and creditors and so on), and on a related note matters of organization. I think these sorts of problems and attending to them don’t require commitment to any particular philosophical perspective, hence ‘philosophically minimalist’. Just as one can look closely at how jokes work or what’s involved when someone implies something in conversation while holding to a variety of perspectives (or no perspective at all) on the nature of language. I sort of use this as a test case as well - if some theoretical perspective would rule out these problems (not fail to address them, but say they don’t exist, like with a very strong - probably caricatured - version of anti-realism or linguistic idealism) then that perspective is flawed.
Again though, it’s not that the economy is all that matters. For instance, I think it’s tremendously important that people’s loved ones die. Some of that has nothing to do with the economy and everything to do with biology. Once all the social problems Marxism is concerned with are solved, problems like that will remain and philosophical (or any other) work that helps deal with them is valuable stuff. The problems marxism is concerned with are of another order, though, in that they are soluble (we could coherently imagine a world without exploitation, whereas I don’t know that we could really coherently imagine a world where no one dies or where no one gets sad about death).
Is that clearer?
take care,
Nate
Comment by Nate — October 22, 2007 @ 8:06 am