>
> Discourse theory scares me when it aspires to exhaustive explanation,
> because I believe we are, inter alia, essentially animals - corporeal
> beings which have developed in mutually constitutive relationship with
> dynamic corporeal settings - and to regulate ourselves according to theory
> that misses this entirely (and I don't say Kelley says anything like this -
> but general warnings are best voiced before rather than after) is to do
> violence against ourselves. It'd be the sort of idealism-inspired
> 'political correctness' the right is always (albeit usually tendentiously)
> accusing us of.
>
Rob, while I agreed with the rest of your post, I think what 'discourse
theory' is needs to be clarified.
The belief that the subject's subjecthood is constituted through discourse does not necessarily (and in fact, in post-structuralism precisely is opposed to) imply an 'exhaustive explanation'. If its post-structuralist discourse theorists you're tilting at here, I think you're a bit off.
It's not that post-structuralists are necessarily politically correct (in the original, Marxist sense :) though. I just think that their basic conclusions are probably more compatable with Marxism than structuralism was.
On the 'exhaustive explanation' things - it is precisely because I (in line with Marx) don't believe in exhaustive explanations that I don't believe that dialectics is a kind of systems theory (the same argument is made by Lewontin in his paper on dialectics and systems theory in Science and Society - the 'negation of the negation' is fancy philosophical terminology for the fact that the subject matter under investigation can slip out of the system you build around it).
The lack of an exhaustive theoretical systems (a total theory) is, I believe, and I think you argued quite lucidly, the cornerstone of freedom. As I think Angela said about sociology, it is interesting to read for where it fails.
Peter
P.S. this is not to say that I'm against what Gramsci called 'totalising' theorising - as in the attempt to incorporate apprehend all facets of a existence in a systematic way. The concept is a difficult and contradictory one (as James Farmelant pointed out, Gramsci seemed to have some idea that in post-capitalist society, a consensus theory of truth might be possible - I tend to think that there is a danger in trusting too much that this might be possible). -- Peter van Heusden : pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk : PGP key available Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. - Karl Marx
NOTE: I do not speak for the HGMP or the MRC.