Date: Thu, 4 Apr 1996 10:12:18 -0500 (EST)
Subject: Re: theories


In another vocabulary, "framework theories" might simply be called 
dialectics, in the Hegelian sense which carries with it the imperative to 
think totality.  Viewed in this light, I would refer to Fred Jameson's 
brief ideological critique of the hostility to dialectical thinking that 
gets formulated from within what he calls "that mixture of political 
liberalism, empiricism, and logical positivism which we know as 
Anglo-American philosophy":  "the bankruptcy of the liberal tradition is 
as plain on the philosophical level as it is on the political:  which 
does not mean that it has lost its prestige or ideological potency.  On 
the contrary:  the anti-speculative bias of that tradition, its emphasis 
on the individual fact or item at the expense of the network of 
relationships in which that item may be embedded, continue to encourage 
submission to what is by preventing its followers from making 
connections, and in particular from drawing the otherwise unavoidable 
conclusions on the political level." (Marxism and Form, p. x)

I might add that Jameson's analysis of 20th c. marxist cultural critics 
(Adorno, Lukacs, Benjamin, Marcuse, Bloch, and Sartre) by no means takes 
the demand to think totality as an excuse for abandoning attention to the 
formal and material specificity (the inner dialectical logics) of the 
various "individual facts" under examination.  Dialectics can't do 
without some form of particularized empiricism, I think, but it isn't 
dialectics if it doesn't think it's way beyond the results of such thought.

Best,

Santiago

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Santiago Colas					e-mail:	scolas-AT-umich.edu
Asst. Professor					phone:	(313) 763-4352
Latin American and Comparative Literature	fax:	(313) 764-8163
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI  48109-1275
USA



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