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 --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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