Date:     Tue, 21 May 1996 13:29 EST
From: 044724240-AT-ucis.vill.edu (ED KAZARIAN)
Subject:  Re: Ideology:  or, the "real" problem here...



Two quick responses:

To crispin:  there is a huge difference between people buying your
book (and reading it) and NYT interviews.  In the first, your 
performative gestures/what D calls (in LS) couter-actualizations
are mixed up in the rest of what you say.  In the second, this is
much less likely to be the case.

To Ron:  I had no intention of bashing science.  I do think that conditions
of reality are different from reality to the extent that they show that
reality (no matter whose construct you are talking about, science, politics,
etc) has a history and, as a discursive function, is a result of a process
of selection.  This is not to say that what is selected isn't real, just
that it isn't absolutely real. I don't know a single scientist who'd
deny this, frankly.  This is what they mean when they say they're using models.
And I fully agree that scientific models, take seriously, often have very
interesting philosophical possibilities.  What I was talking about was
how certian discourses, the kind we find on this list, or in journals, or
in classrooms, which try to problematize the usual discursive regimes of
"relity" or show that there are implications in some of this work that
people might not have seen, get selected/reduced by the application of
another and much more "normative" reality principle--what I was calling
NYT discourse--to the point where thier openendedness and fluidity is
replaced by a set of rigid, nearly dogmatic claims, and then it is claimed:
'look how ridiculous this is, why are we giving these people money/jobs,
etc..."  I think scientific discourse is one of the most openended there
is, but that it can be, and is reterritorialized in the same way as
academic discourse often is.  All I was tryin to say is that the entire
affair seems to me to be an example of a kind of reterritorialization that
we ought to watch out for. 

ed

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