Date: Mon, 29 Jul 1996 23:27:19 +0100
Subject: Re: Enough Of These Censorship Crap


Leo,

There was nothing substantively political or intellectual about your latest
contribution, not to mention the heading. Like Jerry's posting, it was a
gratuitous attack on a subscriber instead of addressing the issues he
raised, namely:

censorship

use of technology

formal and informal power management

the limits of discourse in relation to certain current ideologies, such as
postmodernism and marxism.


If you think subscribers should have more distance to their own experiences
with these phenomena, say so. If you think it's inadmissible to use
personal experience on the Net as an example, say so.

I don't see why it should be on-topic to indulge in this kind of snarling
against someone officially declared to be off-topic. I thought the
consensus was to avoid all off-topic stuff like the plague.

For myself, I think cases like this show the limits of ideological
discourse in certain frameworks on the Net pretty clearly. Informal control
consists in emotional responses devoid of any reference explicit or
implicit to the policies of the arena of discussion, whatever they might be
for the concrete arena involved. Formal control relates explicitly or
implicitly to the rules of the discussion group, with little or no
reference to the ostensible content, eg Foucault or postmodernism or
whatever.

There appears to be priority given to form over content, and this is a
problem for Marxists.

One of the problems postmodernists have is that their critique of
institutions is often institutionally based, and they end up either cutting
off the branch they're sitting on, or having the institution win.

Marxists don't have a blanket critique of institutions -- they characterize
them and use ones that are adequate to their purposes. An ongoing and open
criticism of all institutions including their own is, however, absolutely
essential to the health of any valid Marxist discussion. Where this is
curtailed for whatever reason, problems pile up. Stalinism is the prime
example here, in all its varieties.

Imagine, say, a School of Marxism in the USA, at a prestigious privately
funded university with its snout deep in the money trough of government
research grants. What sort of Marxism will it promote, if it absolutely
refuses to examine the practice of its own host university, that is to say,
if university policy is a no-go area?

So, ideological discourse is full of contradictions, but that's the
dialectic for you.

Of course I prefer to discuss in a framework where it's possible to
question (did someone say 'problematize'?) the institutional framework
itself. It's an old Marxist tic of mine. Funny the way it riles some
people.

Cheers,

Hugh




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