Date: Mon, 3 Oct 1994 07:52:53 -0400 (EDT) From: Philip Goldstein <pgold-AT-brahms.udel.edu> Subject: Re: More about that relative autonomy thing Thanks, Lulu, for your thoughtful response to my critique of ideology (Ideology) as a totalizing practice. You are right to say that Althusser draws the distinction between little ideology and big Ideology but in his later work -- positions, Reading Capital -- he gives it up (I forget which work it is) in favor of ideological critique as limited to particular discourses with their own histories and sciences. You are also right to say that my position -- there are only ideologies, not Ideology -- is Foucauldian. I think Althusser and Foucault come to adopt comparable positions on this question. The issue for me is whether or not I can legitimately call this Foucauldian position Marxist. LaClau and Mouffe have argued that what we learn from the communist experience in the USSR is that the scientific position which justifies an objective, totalizing Marxism turns remarkably dictatorial and oppressive -- the pronouncements of the party come to embody a truth which nothing can contradict (This is not to say that the Soviet communists did not do good things, as some are arguing). LaClau and Mouffe say that the critique of this scientific stance returns us to the politics of Hegemony, where hegemonic struggles take place in diverse terraigns. Hence the move to a Foucauldian position. Is this Marxist? inherently non-Marxist? a meaningful issue? I don't know what you mean by "non-knowledges." This notion sounds teleological , to me, if you can only identify a non-knowledge by what is a knowledge today. Paul Cockshott tells me that academics are comfortable, well off, privileged, unexploited, never radical, with no interests different from the ruling class. I have friends who work at ten schools a year and still don't get benefits, who lost their jobs or were terrorized during the McCarthy years, or who teach four or more courses each term and don't get paid overtime. I have friends who have suffered from the right-wing campaign against political correctness, who can't or won't say their views -- too radical -- for fear of losing their jobs. I will let them know that they are rreally as comfortable as the major scholars at the elite private schools and that they should stop supporting union efforts and radical politicians because they don't really sell their labor power and are not genuine workers. Sorry to be sarcastic, Paul, but I just don't believe that the only radical group is the blue collar workers. Philip GOldstein ------------------
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