Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2002 22:39:32 -0400
From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain-AT-igc.org>
Subject: Re: A Marcuse Renaissance????


Just this for now:

Positivism and value-free objectivity are now as dead as liberalism and the 
end-of-ideology.  All that stuff and the rebellion against it belongs to 
the 60s.  We have been living with right-wing ideology for over two decades 
now.  Technocratic liberalism is as dead as a doornail.  Positivism has 
already been obliterated from the right.  You do realize things have 
changed since the 70s, don't you?

In fact, some of you were there during the change and saw things happen 
that I can only guess about.  For example, at the time I was last in 
contact with university life in 1977, liberalism still held sway, as did 
positivism, Keynesianism, etc., and not all the radicals and hippies had 
been purged.   I disappeared for 2 1/2 years, and started hanging out again 
in Jan. 1980 just to attend public lectures.  The intellectual climate was 
totally different.  Something drastic happened while I wasn't paying 
attention.  It is incumbent upon those of you who were in the ivory tower 
to tell the rest of us what happened.

And speaking of responsibilities, understanding what happened in history is 
more than citing Foucault.  There is an obligation to get very specific 
about the cultural and ideological changes going on in society beneath the 
veneer of the theory industry.

At 12:27 AM 9/7/02 +0000, matthew piscioneri wrote:
>Critical Theory has never shied away from making normative judgments on 
>capitalist society, and part of its attack on positivism and academic 
>social science is that the pretense of value-free objectivity serves the 
>existing society by eschewing the practice of evaluation and critique.

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Ralph Dumain's "The Autodidact Project":
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"Nature has no outline but imagination has."
                           -- William Blake