Date: Tue, 24 Feb 1998 21:49:33 +1100 From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au> Subject: Re: M-TH: being determines consciousness ? Hugh writes: >Money was a very bad example. Social facts (facts of human behaviour in >society) are obviously dependent on human existence and with this you get >language, but they exist not because of language but because of >relationships of production and distribution that are independent of >language and individual will. I did not say money existed because of language - I argued language was necessary to construct the institution that is money. I stressed it was not sufficient. By any scientific definition of causation, language would have to be both necessary and sufficient to claim 'because of language'. To the extent I'm being a 'criminal revisionist' (thanks, Carrol), it is because, while I'm convinced the way we organise ourselves in our material reproduction, ie our mode of production, does bring into being relationships which are independent of our will - I'm also convinced that the exchange relation, and the concomitant institutionalisation of money that has ensued - come about only through the mediation of language. The mode of production is therefore also necessary but not sufficient to institutionalise money. And language can not be relied upon to do everything the mode of production might 'want' of it (although it may end up doing just that - and extant institutions, to the extent they are compatible with the balance of power and interests that pertain, have a lot of power in reproducing language as required - hence students, taxpayers and prisoners are all now 'clients'). Habermas matters to me because, for him, language has in it an inbuilt tendency to get at the truth. This lies in the universalist claim (yet to be unvalidated to my knowledge) that we can, in *all* languages, put propositions and question those propositions. In it we have the past and the future in dialectic play. Norms enable speech (communicative action), but can themselves be brought to book in that act of speech (and H calls the critique of background consensus 'discourse') - and to quote Roderick: 'internal criticism can only succeed if it clarifies to social actors the meaning of their own critical standards which must unequivocally be in social and historical reality.' I ask we not neglect this insight. Hugh also writes: >Either/or gets you nowhere. Well, 'either/or' ain't the currency of dialectics perhaps (and what of 'EITHER formal logic is right OR dialectics is'?). But it is the stuff of the institutions within which we operate. If money is shown to be a social fact as opposed to a brute fact, is there progress? I reckon there might be. What is it that's so outrageous about this (admittedly rambling) line of thought? (thinks) I have of late lost all my mirth ... Marxists give me not joy. No, nor Habermasians either. I need a drink. 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) ************************************************************************ --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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