Date: Mon, 5 Jan 1998 18:00:55 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Pragmatism


G'day Justin,

You wrote:

>Well, actually, I think F is not antihumanist. What he means is pretty
>plainly that the modern notion of the individual is constituted in certain
>way, which he spells out in more detail in Discipline and Punish, as the
>subject of various acts of survellience, data in dossiers, and such. In
>the premodern era there were people, all right, but they were not like us
>moderns in this respect. They were anonymous. That's all there is to F's
>alleged antihumanism, in my view. Sociologiaclly it's pretty interesting,
>but it carries no ontological burden.

I think you're far too soft on Foucault here, Justin!  Foucault repeatedly
stresses the importance of rejecting any universally applicable principles;
indeed, there is  'no order of human life, or way we are, or human nature,
that one can appeal to in order to judge or evaluate between ways of life'.

Where on earth would such a position leave critical theory?  Put me in with
Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas.  Foucauldians are dangerous lunatics.
And what about that 'power' nonsense?  F reckoned he was always on about
it, but I never found out what he meant by it - other than there was no
particular benefit in owning the means of production anyway.  Oh, and where
is there hope in 'Discipline and Punish'?  If power needs resistance to be
power, then the panopticon has no power in it - because I'm fucked if I can
see resistance in the model.  Ooops!  I appear to have got carried away ...

>Nowhere, but what do _you_ mean by a positivist epistemology. I am pretty
>sure I know what _I_ mean by it, which is roughly that the basis of
>empirical knowledge is immediate "given" sense impressions. This doesn't
>relate at all to ontology without a lot more work and I don't see that
>bears in any way on what Marx is saying here or elsewhere.

In GI, do we not have a world in which there are humans and the rest of the
world?  Where all is 'relations in process' - a salient,importantly
dynamic, and constantly world-conditioning relationship (or unity) being
that between what Kant called noumenal (unknowable 'in-itselfness' of the
world) and phenomenal (human consciousness defining, variably through
history, perceived objects/relationships/changes that make up that world)?
I see ontology there.  It's realist.  I see epistemology there too - a soft
constructivism, if you like - conditioned but not determined by the
noumenal.  Am I being naive - in the more traditional (derogatory) sense?

Geez, I wish I'd taken Philosophy 101 ...

Cheers,
Rob.


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Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

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'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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