File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9802, message 563


Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 19:38:57 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: being determines consciousness ?


... Back from a wet lunch ...

>May I ask what the purpose of this post is?  Aside from reading such
>luminaries as Wittgenstein and Barthes, have you actually taken the trouble
>to study some real linguists and linguistics, or do you think that
>philosophers of language are the big authorities on the role of language in
>human cognition and cognitive development?  Is real science relevant to your
>concerns?

Okay, so money is an institution, institutionalised *through* language, but
*by* a mode of production characterised by great complexity (ie. capable of
producing enormous ranges of enormous amounts of goods, and based on not
only private property, but also specialisation).  As Marx says (or so I
believe), what better an institution than money to obviate the practical
problems of distribution in such an economy, and what more dangerous
abstraction in its capacity to distance actual production from socially
optimal determinations?

Now I've taken Marx to be saying, and I was under the impression Ralph
agreed, that scientific modes of analysis are appropriate to those aspects
of human behaviour which are conditioned by phenomena and relations of
which they're not aware.  Humans made conscious of something will employ
reason with respect to that something, and, as humans, we become much less
predictable when such a circumstance comes about (not least because we tend
to reason in language).  Scientific Marxism stops for me at the dawning of
consciousness.

Humans will worship money and sell their life potential for it because
they're in an institution we call capitalism, based on an institution we
call exchange.  They don't know people much like 'em institutionalised
these enabling constraints, so they're not conscious of the capacity to
decommission these institutions or even transform 'em.  This is where
notions like 'reification', 'mystification' and 'naturalisation' apply.
Malcontents like us seek to delegitimise such institutions, but my point
about language comes in just here.  *We can only do so by deploying other
institutions*.  You gotta throw 'democracy' at 'em, or 'subjecthood', or
'fairness', or 'the environment', or 'freedom' - whatever - it depends on
your diagnosis and your take on the culture within which you're trying to
strike a chord.

To be understood, you must operate in an *already* existing institution.
You can inculcate the notion of the dialectic, but only by reference to the
'known' - y'know, do what Novack did: apply formal logic to empirical
knowns to show the apparent changes can not be catered for or explained by
that logic.  'Class' theory has a good foundation in a society trained to
approach every complex whole by reducing it to categories.  Questioning the
exchange relation can base itself on extending the 'best things in life are
free' logic and applying it to empirical commodification trends.  And so on
...

My belief that we can't predict reliably in the case of a conscious (ie. of
the actual manifestations of the exchange relation) population is muchly
rooted in the belief that language is as much a site of struggle as the
shop floor.  Language is a system of meanings, some residual, some emergent
(Gramsci and Williams each said something like this) - as we reason,
institutionalise and deinstitutionalise through language, this seems
important to me.

But I don't think Habermas gets it right when he divorces 'interaction'
from 'labour' altogether - each is reflecting the same basic category.  But
they do not do so in neat synchrony.  Tensions between the forces and
relations of production appear when the conditions of our labour and
material living contradict the institutions that live in our words - try as
the system might to introduce the 'consumer' as synonomous with 'human',
for instance, the suddenly discordant 'citizen' is still around in
language, defined by a meaning system that suddenly seems wholly removed
from the system that affords 'consumer' its meaning.  And I reckon the
'citizen' is consequently a revolutionary subject.

Here endeth my unsubstantiated rave.  If Ralph wants to talk scientific
linguistics, he might start the ball rolling by articulating the premises
he sees as important.

And I notice he's just beeped at me - I might be working back tonight.

Cheers,
Rob.


************************************************************************

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

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

************************************************************************

'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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