Date: Sat, 25 Oct 1997 17:09:25 +1000
To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Help


G'day Colin,

Good post, mate!

I'm rather in my cups just now, so I formally issue an 'idle polemic'
alert. Put it down to a caterwauling night on the tiles with a bunch of
smugly immovable pomos.

>My little question, where I was being slightly postmodern myself (that is
>ironic, as good a definition of the postmodern I can come up with for
>now), has generated many replies. Alan, and Oscar wish to extend the hand
>of friendship to our postist colleagues, seeing something (at least for
>Oscar) of a kindred spirit at work between postism and CR. A kind of
>brotherly/sisterly affection that tolerates our wayward kin - we know that
>they mean well, they just have a few minor problems. Some on the left (and
>by this I simply mean anyone still committed to some form of socialism (a
>word according to many postists we should not use)), however, are deeply
>suspicious of this movement. Without truth, argues Geras, there can be no
>injustice.

[Exactly.  As even Levinas admits: no subject; no ethics.  And as Milner
says 'There can be little doubt that the transition from structuralism to
post-structuralism entailed, above all, a retreat both from politics and
from history.'  (My only problem with that is, I can't see what was so
politically useful about radical structuralism in the first place.)
Anyway,  all we're left with now is infinite textualities, logically bereft
of content by that enduring Derridean 'differance' ploy.]

>Now here I reach a major problem. The irony of my question was the
>impossibility of my postist foe being able to conduct such a decentered
>understanding. She clams that there are no agents and no structures only
>practices. But worse than this, she actually sucuumbs to a rampant
>structrualism arguing, "The subject, agent, is determined not
>determinative." Oscar, I suspect, wants to view this as attributable to
>this one renegage postist writer, not part of the postists discourse
>itself. But how can this be, doesn't this imply a sovereign subject able
>to free itself from its place in the signifying chain? If I take Doty at
>her word, it is not _her_ writing the text, she does not exist as such,
>she is determined to write this rampant structuralism as consequence of
>the discourse she is embedded within. Ipso facto, the problem is not Doty,
>but postism.

[And postism is here a structure.  Therefore, to be a postist is to be a
structuralist who does not recognise structure.  But hang on!  Doty, like
all of 'us', is actually a complex of dynamic discursively produced
fragments.  To be consistent, Doty must be at once postist and
structuralist and humanist.  I'm afraid Doty is being quite consistent
here, Colin - and you're far too hard on her.  After all, how can the poor
thing(s) be expected to escape altogether the still institutionally
dominant clutches of modernist categories?]

>Moreover, Oscar, the Kantian/Cartesian subject you refer to is a chimera,
>created by the postist hordes in order to attack modernity. But as Joan
>Copec has pointed out, we have for a long time now being living in the
>graveyard of the subject, and modernity, particularly positivism, was no
>friend of the subject. Doesn't RB even point out somewhere that Marx put
>the final nail in the coffin of the subject.

[Does Bhaskar follow Althusser's line on this?]

The pomo problem comes because wedded to the epistemic fallacy, they fail
to see that the subject, which is basically a philosophical construct, is
not the same as the self, the individual, nor the human.

[I take the subject to be the basis without which knowledge of reality has
nowhere to be.  Foucault demands of the tide of post-structuralist that the
imprint of this subject be swept from the sands.  We cannot, it seems,
'know' without transcending that which allows us to know.  And Foucault
knows this.]

>The irony in my original question was this. How did Doty write the piece?
>How is a decentred understanding possible. After all, she must have got
>herself centered enough to (mis)read the literature, sit at the computer,
>write the article, stick it in the post, reply and attend to referee's
>comments and send it back again. Her position, for all the linguistic
>trappings, boils down to a rampant structuralism where she can but claim
>she is an effect of discourse. Moreover, she claims that agents and
>structures are but effects of practices, and of course, there is something
>to this. But what are the conditions of possibility for practices - agents
>and structures perhaps?

[So you posit a dialectic.  Structuration, no?]

>A further problem occurs when she somehow manages to identify herself as a
>poststructuralist. How does she know this? What makes one a
>poststructuralist? I've read my Derrida, do I qualify? I've read my
>Foucault, does this help? Do I simply have to claim that I am one to be
>one, much like the muslim woman in Bosnia simply has to claim that she is
>a Serb to save herself from rape? Is this all identity is?

[I suppose Doty would assure us that in every apparently muslim woman is,
inter alia, an oppressed Serb dying to get out.  And the rape is the rape
only of one identity.  The oppressed other may, for all we can know,
rejoice in the arms of a soul mate.  We mustn't be too hard on the
perpetrator now, must we?  Structure made him do it.  And, if he's read his
postism, he couldn't even know that.]

>There is and can be no agency in postism because they deny the "is" of the
>world. They resemble the ignorant who exercise their agency by walking off
>the top of a cliff because they know not the "is" of gravity - they can't
>know it because they either deny it or see it as a linguistic construct
>(Marx and drowning men springs to mind here). This is a kind of freedom I
>(speaking tentatively of course) can do without.

[I believe Deleuze utilised just this freedom.]

>Postism is the child of '68. It is the merest surface reflection of a loss
>of intellectual nerve in the face of an all-embracing captialist machine.
>For those Star Trek fans on the list, it is the Borg, and it is showing a
>cinema near you. Remember, as someone once said about war, you may not be
>interested in it, but it is certainly interested in you.

[I'm a Doctor Who fan meself.  I remember one episode where the Daleks and
the Cybremen were at war.  The computer-driven strategy (instrumental
rationality as all-encompassing structure in a perfect state of
information) each side employed was such that an impasse pertained for a
thousand years.  The Daleks kidnapped Dr Who, whose quasi-human and
eccentric agency was identified by the Black Dalek as a potential circuit
breaker.  The good doctor switched off the computer and victory was
assured.  I still don't know whether this is a post-modernist move (a
Lyotardian triumph over scientism) or a humanist one (conscious 'human'
action transforms structure) - but I liked it when I was twelve.  Switching
postism off is not as easy, but I dare say it will one day do what another
of idealism's contributions to the world does in *Hitch-hiker's Guide*:
disappear in a puff of logic.]

Anyway, I gotta find an aspirin.

Sorry for the self-indulgence.
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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