File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-11-06.190, message 55


Date: Mon, 4 Nov 1996 11:47:56 -0500 (EST)
From: "Paul E. Amar" <pqa7096-AT-is4.nyu.edu>
Subject: M-I: Ross-Sokal Debate


Dear Friends,
I am shocked and troubled by the desperate and mouth-foaming character
of discussion emanating from the "anti-pomo" gang.  The fact that Louis
Proyect and friends have not yet addressed any of the intellectual issues
at hand, and have focussed only on "body-type and fashion "
reaffirms my worst fears.  Could it be true that the hateful attacks by
the 'positivist left' upon the 'critical left' -- its supposed
'fashionable' postmodernism and 'fancy' language -- is nothing more than the
trembling doubts of a challenged and illegitimate form of masulinity.  

YOU WANNA TALK ABOUT THE ENLIGHTENMENT !!  Remember that the 'left,'
according to my investigation and interpretation, did not begin with
the Jacobins; it began with the satirists and cultural vanguard of
theater, street and cafe.  Newton did not spark the Democratic
Revolution -- Voltaire did. (and, by the way, Voltaire's work on
Newton's refraction- optics is a very interesting predecessor to
Heisenberg's principle and a certain perspectival empiricism. . .). 

The Democratic (and liberal-socialist) Left of the Enlightenment and
Revolution also included working class social movement critics and
theater writers such as Olympe De Gouges who worked with Toussant
L'Ouverture's people in Paris to end slavery and patriarchy
simultaneosly.  Positivist science and all absolute forms of knowledge
arose with absolutist crowns during the period from Hobbes to the
Physiocrats. 

The Enlightenment as I understand it was a period of rejecting
absolutism, even in the realm of truth.  The project of human rights
and the democratic aspirations of the Enlightenment
'liberal-socialists' made up a political package.  This politics
included claims about nature, and the nature of participation, but was
founded on an agnostic-deist or wholly secularist standpoint toward
truth. 

That is, the anti-absolutists believed that politics should not seek
to establish a church, or an absolute divine-right king, or a god, and
should insist on continuously, politically negotiating the Right, and
the True.  Rights and Law were/are not constructed by these radicals
to serve as universal ends and absolute foundations for truth, but
serve as procedural-practical tools for ensuring that truth and power
is never monopolized or absolutized.  Freedom of speech and freedom of
religion are not truths in themselves but is a political project aimed
a ensuring the contiunous flexibility of truth, in the interest of
pursuing justice in a complex and variable universe, and for
stimulating participation and creativity in all human endeavors. 

Marx, like Voltaire, chose to live in England for a time, because of
his need and respect for the liberal values of liberty -- freedom to
radically critique prevailing truths.  I remember Marx was critiquing
the major scientific truths of his day: the nature of the human being,
the origin of the family (w/Engles), the trajectory of history, and of
course the ideological character of knowledge and the academy. 

Proto-feminist Isabelle de Charriere, writing just after the French
Revolution, and debating with her colleague Immanuel Kant, insisted
that freedom and a moral 'foundation' for progressive politics need
not rest on a 'categorical' basis.  France during the epoch of
Thermidor was trying to discipline and order the working classes,
activist peasants, and revolutionary caribbean slaves after the
tempest of the Revolution.  The 'post-Revolutionary' regime was
rejecting democracy and participation in favor of producing rigid
Academies which would organize, classify and rearrange the production
of 'culture' and 'knowledge' along strictly centralized top-down
structures.  These Academies produced much of what we think of as
'modern' science.  They constructed as a direct response to the
'cultural' and critical insurgency of the 'popular Enlightenment.' The
mission of these academies was to crush the pamphlet, theater, and
street culture of the Revolutionary period, and to return to the
project of absolutizing and centralizing knowledge and power.

The Jacobins had created the Terror and justified the execution of
feminists, queers, artists, anti-colonials, comic-book writers and
free-slaves -- as well as 'fashionable' and principled aristocrats and
radical street vendors.  The Thermidorian restoration of absolutist
knowledge, and the Jacobin purge of the critical Enlightenment marked
the foundation of the 'postivist-left.'

Absolutisms today include neoliberalism and its 'religion of the
market,' and the Stalinist essentialisms of the Old Left and its
veneration for the 'Divine Right' of science.  As a liberal-socialist,
in the proud tradition of Enlightenment critique and activism, I
reject absolutist regimes and remember the centuries-long history of
attacks upon the bodies of the 'fashionable' (women, gays), on the
'cultural' (anthropological 'others' and colonized peoples), and the
'critical' (the purges of intellectuals and activists under statist
regimes). 

When the positivists talk of putting the 'pomos' to "the sword" I am
less than amused.  Two hundred years ago one of my ancestors,
Jean-Baptiste Amar, who alternated as President of the Jacobin French
Assembly with Robespierre, signed the order of execution for feminists
such as Olympe de Gouges and sent prostitutes, actors, writers,
intellectuals and anti-colonialists to the Guillotine by the
thousands.  Robespierre once said "There is only one Truth, Virtue,
and its emanation is Terror." 

There are certain traditions within the left which I find repugnant. 
If you want to talk about postmodernism, read it first and understand
the stakes of the debate.  If you want to talk about the
Enlightenment, fine, because it has yet to come. 

--Amar



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