> Glad that we can amuse you, Angela. The one thing that we wouldn't
> want haapen is for you to become bored by this debate. -:)
glad to be amused.
> BTW where did Marx say that ideology is true?
see other post. but i'll note here that it's not possible to think of capital as false. it's both true and false.
> Are not man and society a part of nature or do you support the idealist
> thesis that they constitute a separate realm of reality that is
> not susceptible to scientific inquiry?
i'd say with the shift to the capitalist mode of production it's more accurate to say that "nature" is a part of "man and society", though i wouldn't use quite those terms. ie., it's nature which becomes "susceptible" to society. but the whole distinction between nature and society is a quite recent one isn't it? it gets posed as a distinction around the same time as that distinction is traversed by the organisation of capitalist production. a bit like the distinction between intellectual and manual labour, which comes into its own (at least in aust) around WW1, and from that moment on is all but transformed so that few occupations remain somewhere like australia where such a distinction would make sense. i'd much rather think these issues through than wonder about whether or not i can find some transcendental rules which govern truth -- a proposition which has its own precise history, since it hardly rated a mention as a problem prior to the emergence of absolutism and capitalism in europe.
> Marx after all thought that
> with his materialist conception of history, he had laid the basis
> for a science of history. Is it your opinion that Marx was in error
> on these points?
marx rejected any reading of his writings as a "historico-philosophic theory of the general path which every people is fated to tread, whatever the circumstances in which it finds itself" (in Feuer, L. _Marx and Engels: Basic Writings in Politics and Philosophy_, pp.440-41). i'd say this brings him closer to foucault than is readily admitted if by 'science of history' or 'materialist conception of history' you mean to imply a transhistorical validity to marxism. i would also say that marx is quite clear throughout _capital_ that the object of his analysis is capitalism, not history per se. as for the science bit, marking oneself out as a scientist was de rigeur at a time when science was still (esp in germany) regarded as the opponent of religious mystification. for us, only the US seems to be steeped in this combat between rationalism and religion, and probably for good reason. but even marx changed his approach toward religion (see michael hoover for this one), and maybe we should drop the heavy distinction too. what goes by the name of science also includes many religious elements, cosmology, etc. i think an adherence to this 'marxism is a science' has too many difficulties to be negotiated easily where 'science' is hardly an agreed-upon term. does it mean as in the natural sciences? if so, the whole issue of epistemology gets revisited and not in a very interesting way we're back to the neo-kantians and their distinction between the realm of values and validity, the question of how the subject of knowledge is not part of the object of knowledge... all those interminable debates, that can only lead to the question of whether or not you think that society is akin to nature, and hence another interminable round of go-nowhere-fast epistemology.
> This BTW intersects with the discussion of
> Freud a little while back concerning whether Freud was in error in
> thinking of psychoanalysis as a scientific psychology.
here you go with that error thing again. there are good reasons why freud and marx would insist that what they were doing was science, but unless we're going to define science as (say) the application of quite particular conventions and procedures of verification (which not all so-called hard sciences share or have shared across history), then it makes little sense to talk about it in this way. not all procedures of verification rest on observation, for instance. and it's simply not possible to verify those procedures of verification themselves. it seems to me when people start talking about whether something is scientific or not, it's usually a rhetorical gesture which seeks to relegate something else into the realm of non-science and has little to do with x or y procedures.
but on the freud/lacan discussion, i would have thought that psychoanalysis is a very robust kind of rationalism, since it insists that the irrational is amenable to rational interpretation. if that's a hermeneutic, it's a very rationalist, enlightenment one. which is why it also makes little sense to talk about lacan as a postmodernist, other than in order to make rhetorical distinctions. there are certainly criticism of psychoanalysis, but whether or not it's a science seems to me the least proximate and least interesting.
> However, it is the pomos that manage to
> combine this with the denial of the science/ideology distinction
> (which was as I pointed out derived from a reading of Nietzsche).
does nietzcshe talk about science in this way? he was an affirmer of science as well, wasn't he? the science/ideology distinction comes much later on the scene, after the distinction between truth/ideology, which i think is perhaps what you want to assert here and would at least not be bogged down in the confusions that emanate from a particular division of the academy (a la the neo-kantians) and the definition of science that comes from there.
> Is it sufficient to merely assess the soundness or lack thereof
> of theological ideas? From a Marxian standpoint, no, because
> an adequate critique of religion must go beyond merely assessing
> the intellectual soundness of religious ideas to begin exploring
> the roles that religion plays in the lives of believers in order
> to determine why people feel the need to create another
> supernatural realm to supplement the natural world. Marxists
> being naturalists and materialists do not believe in the existence
> of a supernatural realm but they realize that they must explain
> why people nevertheless feel the need to posit such a realm.
okay, so if postmodernism is akin to theology in your version, then why isn't this the same approach you would take to the above? but i would go further than calling religion a funtioning distortion. i'd call it a distorted relationship to real circumstances in which distortion is already an inherent moment, a la the old marx's account of religion. i'd say and have said the same about postmodernism. there is a truth within the emergence of postmodernism that we should be attending to, and not in the crude way of denouncing it as a mysitification in order to posit marxism as a truth -- that would be a game no one should or could take seriously. ie., where is the historical materialist explanation of postmodernism? i offered one which no one seemed willing to debate. it seems too easy for people to prefer to wander around in the silliness of epistemological 'debates' which can never be solved (hence, kant's valliant non-solution, and why marx did not bother with trying to work out the conditions under which statements or propositions could be true in a 'transfactual'/transhistorical sense).
[snip]
> That is of course a not so elegant way for shortcircuiting
> the debate over pomo.
i thought it was an inelegant way of shortcircuiting epistemological diatribes which go nowhere fast. i wasn't shortcircuiting a discussion on postmodernism. i've already said why i thought this discussion was stupid in various lengthy and reasoned ways, and now i'm just saying it's stupid -- 'stupid' as an immanent critique, since it seems less than obvious to me why so many self-declared marxists would worry themselves over postmodernism in such a epistemological and rhetorical way without once considering seriously a materialist and dialectical account of postmodernism.
> Angela (or Ted) what would an episteme that was lacking in
> "absolute integrity" be like? And how would be able to distinguish
> one kind from the other?
that Q can go to ted. he'll be able to give a more sustained elaboration of foucault than i would.
Angela _________