File spoon-archives/deleuze-guattari.archive/deleuze-guattari_1996/d-g_Jun.96, message 13


Date: Sat, 1 Jun 1996 12:29:09 -0400 (EDT)
From: Tom Blancato <tblan-AT-telerama.lm.com>
Subject: Re: Pro-Anti: Skokal, the trial of the century... 




It goes somewhere, and I can give you tons of empirical evidence. I just 
don't feel like it right now.

Tom B.


On Sat, 1 Jun 1996, D Hugh-Jones wrote:

> 
> I just want to be a bit more explicit about my ideal of theory, and my 
> argument with 'theory'. 
> 
> First, I don't when I demand that theory should be useful mean that it 
> should launch rockets, or even be directly and simply applied to 
> practice. Still less that it should be useful 'in the categories of the 
> present regime'. But it should go somewhere. It should deepen our 
> understanding. And ideally it should be comprehensible in some form to 
> anyone. It's worth noting that fifty years ago you could buy books on 
> '100 great philosophers' and even Kant - even Hegel (on whom I support 
> Popper's views) - were explained simply and clearly in a few pages. Not 
> perfectly, but with a noticeable relationship to the original work. If 
> you look today at introductions to e.g. Derrida you get phrases like 
> 'meaning rests on a difference from itself'. Without a great deal of 
> elucidation, this is incomprehensible.
> 
> Second, I wish that poststructuralists et al. would use empirical 
> evidence. I don't demand that they should become positivists (tho' F. 
> describes himself as a 'happy positivist'); but they tend to use 
> empirical examples in a totally casual way. Theories are 'proved' by a 
> single instance, or in a new scholasticism by referring to some grand 
> French thinker. I think the best theory engages consistently and 
> seriously with the world. Yes, the real world. There! I've said it!
> 
> Dave Hugh-Jones
> A Rush and a Push and the Land is ours
> dash2-AT-cam.ac.uk
> 
> 
> 

_______________________________________________________________________

"...no cut should be made till the mills have ceased to make any profit 
and are obliged to fall back upon their capital for continuing the 
industry. There should be no cut till the wages have reached the level 
adequate for maintenance. *It is possible to conceive a time when the 
workmen have begun to regard the industry as if it were their own 
property and they would then be prepared to help it out of a crisis by 
taking the barest maintenance consisting of a dry crust and working night 
and day. That would be a voluntary arrangement. Such cases are irrelevant 
to the present consideration.*" M. K. Gandhi (my emphasis --tb)
_______________________________________________________________________



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