>no one believes that an archemedean position is
> possible, but lthey do think methods can get you closer to such a position.
> [of course, political praxis is one such method so that mucks things up a
> bit]
a citation from balibar in another post, but some additional comments:
I don't think political praxis can be divorced from the terrain of the material constitution of subjects, including that of their history, and this includes by definition the subject of political action and analysis. that, I thought was the gist of my previous post on the relation between class composition, the 'party' and ideology, which I thought covered the relation, but no matter, we will take it to a slightly different terrain.
ken remarked that there is a separation but it is an aporetic one. I might go a little ways else and suggest that the separation, including its aporetic character, is very historically specific. it has nothing to do with egos _per se_, but it does have much to do with the formation (both true and false, ideologically and really) of workers as objects in the immediate production process, with the split between this and capital fetishised (and indeed, really effective) as subject, with the emergence of techniques of superintendence, management and control. in this sense, methodology, in particular that of the social sciences, is only possible as part of this split, as the seemingly neutral technology of control and study of those already deemed objects, made over once again into the objects of sociological research and ethnographic observation. methodology assumes a separation between these the techniques and the object. so, a belief in methodology is already a belief in this separation as a principle, or prelude to, analysis.
the separation between map and cartographer is there, but it is a separation that can only be thought (by us) as inherently connected and premised on a logical and historical split, ie., _not divorced_. it is aporetic because constant work is required to transform and reproduce subjects into objects and vice versa, and this is never fully successful, as it isn't either in the formation of capital.
as for rorty, you can pick on him as much as you like. neo-liberal pragmatists such as rorty have very little to offer other than a defense of the liberal philosopher's enjoyment against the challenges of poststructuralism, marxism and deconstruction: ie., it seeks to exempt the academy from the ravages of unlimited critique. I'm a little surprised that you'd mention rorty in my virtual presence, given my previous rants about him...
but back to Sennett momentarily. here is a guy, who enters an exotic (for him) world of work he has never done, pretends to really listen as if this in itself is a virtue, taking on all the aura of the priest in the confessional, then, finding that the 'data' is 'insufficient' to produce a coherent narrative (which he defines as having a beginning, middle and an end), goes on to produce one that reads more or less like this: once upon a time, workers had to work hard for little pay but they didn't complain. today, workers don't have to work as much, they complain all the time and they are unhappy. they are unhappy for many reasons, not least because they are afraid of being unemployed. I (sennett says) think they were happier when they worked all of their lives in one job, when the hierarchical line of authority was clear...
now, there may well be useful and interesting things that sennett has to say to us, but his politics and narrative are not amongst them. if his latest offering is titled _the corrosion of character_, and his first offering was _the fall of public man_, aren't we in fact seeing the outline already of a reactionary politics, one which experiences the passing of time as the erosion of all that was wholesome? in fact there is nothing in the 'data' that suggests this narrative, it is entirely of Sennett's own creation and background, and one which slides nicely into the conservative role of social psychology, urban studies and anthropology as the observation of those who are 'other' than the researcher. in the more emphatic moments of the critique of sociology, such people were called police agents. in a foucauldian critique, they would be called part of the panopticon. what do we call them today? chris b made me think of wigan pier... in my review of sennett's recent offering, I called him a risk analyst for capitalism...
ok, I'll stop now. you can tell I'm feeling grumpy today? but if no one mentions sennett or rorty (even habermas most probably) again for a while, I think I can manage to calm down.
Angela _________