I don't know if you confused "conventional" and "historical," since your statement was ambiguously put in a way that suggests the identity or at least interchangeability between the two. I simply wanted to use your sentence to highlight the importance of the distinction between them, since the confusion is very common among those who use the phrase "social construction." Pragmatists, postmodernists, Social Contract theorists, etc. generally think of social as "conventional," while Marxists think of it as historical, as I explained. The distinction between "conventional" and "historical" also points to the difference between the idea of historical evolution in liberal political philosophy and historical materialism (see my posts on "Choice" & History). Pace Justin, I think that liberal philosophers he admires and postmodernists make the same mistake here.
>While I agree that Derrida doesn't seem to be interested enough in the
>social-historical scenes of writing (or meaning production, what have you),
>he doesn't treat "conventions" as "purely contingent." It's the opposition
>between pure contingency and pure determination that the whole business
>about _differance_ puts into question--at least from a phenomenological
>point of view.
Perhaps a criticism of phenomenology is in order here, then. But setting it aside, I think that the idea of Contingency as Derrida, et al. create is a false abstraction that makes us unable to see either historical necessity or contingency. With no concept of historical necessity, history becomes one damn thing after another, and in Derrida & Co.'s case, history becomes the _same_ damn thing after another. Hence, no historical explanation is possible (not to mention the tedium of it all; I wonder why a smart guy like Derrida doesn't get bored with it -- maybe it's his version of Tea Ceremony, calming nerves and all).
Curtiss writes:
>Just to toss in my $0.02US: in _French Phil. of the
>Sixties_ (a book I didn't like, but...) Luc Ferry and
>Alain Renaut claim that _differance_ is just
>Heidegger's ontological difference, i.e., the
>distinction between beings and Being, warmed over. If
>this is so, then Adorno's criticism of the ontological
>difference applies to _differance_ as well -- it's an
>arrested, de-historicized moment of dialectics.
>
>On the other hand (and to resist from giving myself
>over to what Doug Henwood called the favorite indoor
>sport of Marxists -- that is, pomo-bashing), maybe all
>this indicates is the scope of the term, and therefore
>its potential use. To put it differently (sorry),
>while _differance_ as a doctrine covers up the
>historical and contingent constitution of language, it
>was proposed and gained currency at a particular point
>in history, and is referred to people whose analyses
>and aims coincide w/Marxian of various stripes, so it
>seems unfair (and undialectical?) to regard it as just
>ideological bunk. So perhaps there's some use
>value/"truth content" to be gleaned there...and I'm
>just wondering out loud what it might be.
I don't disagree with you, except that finding some "truth content" in _everything_ that is bunk is a kind of left-Hegelian exercise that I'm not fond of. Bhaskar calls this exercise a "preservative" and "conservative" dialectic, to differentiate it from a historical materialist conception of dialectic that he seeks to clarify. Some bunk (if not all bunk) becomes a constraint upon the development of human freedom & knowledge (or a metaphorical block, as Stephen Jay Gould puts it), and therefore it must be "absented" as Bhaskar would say.
Yoshie