She dismisses anything American, and I'm ethnocentric. Also white and male, very bad. I'm an American, yuck, a former Rorty student, and a confessed neo-prag. Almost as bad. I am probably a closet US nationalist who likes to fly the flag. Really awful. Worse, I am an academic. Well, an ex-academic, actually, really a lawyer, but what's the difference. Lawyers are bad too, everyone knows that. And worst of all, I am incredibly ancient, I mean, really old, I am so old, you can't believe it. Definitely, really, uncool.
I've obviously been more interested in the French texts and even the don't-count American pomo than Angela is in the Anglo-American philosophy she dispises without reading, because I have read and thought about a good lot of it, while she hasn't bothered to look at Anglo-American philosophy, Rorty apart, and isn't going to. Very good, she doesn't have to. But I'm not interested in providing full scholarly apparatus on a discussion list, either.
Anyway, we are talking past each other and we better stop, since we are neither convincing each other, nor learning from our disagreements, nor edifying anyone else.
--jks
In a message dated Wed, 2 Feb 2000 11:51:34 AM Eastern Standard Time, rc-am <rcollins at netlink.com.au> writes:
> Justin wrote: "I was mystified with your analogizing whatever it was you
> were analogizing to R/F subsumption, which I thought had to do with the
> rise of the factory system in the industrial revolution. You never
> explained what you mean in terms I could understand."
>
> Marx's concepts of formal and real subsumption are not reducible to the
> rise of wage labour, nor the emergence of industrial production, or factory
> discipline, though they do include these. Unlike the concepts of absolute
> and relative surplus value, which are confined to struggles around the
> punctual moments of production (in particular work time), r/f subsumption
> characterises a passage wherein the very concept and practice of
> 'production' is reworked -- what constitutes productive labour, the
> distinctions between the economic and the aesthetic that might
> characterise, for instance, a neokantian deloyment of the conflict of the
> faculties (science, culture, production and so on), et cetera. So, not an
> analogy of the concepts of r/f subsumption, but an application.
>
> Justin wrote: "Rorty, btw, does not think that the 'solidarity' he imputes
> to "Americans" is self-evident but that its inescapable for 'Americans.'"
>
> I meant "self-evidence" in the sense of being evident to one's self and as
> the final, discrete and axiomatic evidence of the presentability of one's
> self. That is, no sense of the differences upon which "American" is
> constituted and by which the speaking of the proper name, properly, creates
> and enforces a certain bounded 'American' -- thinking about those processes
> would be little more than a "nuisance" to Rorty's pragmatism. In other
> words, Rorty simply does not want to be troubled with the kinds of
> discussions Balibar remarks on in as the construction of internal and
> external borders in fichtean nationalism, not that is, unless these
> differences are quantifiable differences and open to a quantifiable
> restitution. (Which is also why Rorty thinks of progress as the linear
> accumulation of goods.)
>
> Justin wrote: "Pomos don't goa round analysing thing in terms of race and
> gender? The subject positions of various (particularly) subordinate groups,
> women., Black womwn, Latina women, etc isn''t the mainb topic of discussion
> when they get together? The Rortyians aside, of course."
>
> 'Rortyans aside, of course' -- but Rorty seems to expend quite a bit of
> energy flying the flag at the same time as denouncing those "who talk about
> black women, latina women" -- hence why it's quite easy to think of Rorty
> as a kind of low-grade Fichte. But precisely how many of those writers
> we've listed so far "talk about black women, etc" whenever "they get
> together"? Derrida's written about South Africa, does that count? Leaving
> that aside, I fail to understand the kind of anxiety that might require the
> iteration of 'particularisms' as 'black women', and the simultaneous
> universalisation of 'we, americans' in which 'race and gender' are fated to
> appear only as an impediment to the formation of 'we, americans'.
>
> Justin can't cite any 'pomos' who think that the terms of debate are
> theoretical versus observational, but he can refer to this as a big
> hollapalooza in anglo-american philosophy! And that is my point. Justin,
> neopragmatist, self-evidentiary, Homo Americana Academicus that he is reads
> everything as a species of anglo-american debates even though he admits "I
> think the inference is bad, but it has been kicking around for a long
> time." Well, I haven't been in anglo-american philosophy land, and have
> little inclination to regard it as a serious aspiration. But I agree, it
> is a bad inference, and it's one that stems from placing an anglo-american
> grid on Foucault as much as others cited here to represent the
> _anglo-american canonical version of 'pomo'_. (As an aside,when I read
> Derrida and Deleuze, one of the mose emphatic things they do share is a
> hostility to the canonical, to the kinds of theoretical and institutional
> practices that generate and require canons. Their canonisation within the
> US and on this list not only obscures this particular shared sense of
> theoretical practice, but also the very sharp differences between them.
> One might appraoch those differences with a view to reconciling them, so
> much the better to enable a smooth canonisation and systematisation; or one
> might instead take the Spinozist approach, and resist the temptation toward
> the abolition of singularities.)
>
> As for Justin's charge of being "disingenous" when I insist that it is not
> in fact a claim shared by Derrida, Baudrillard, Foucault that, as he puts
> it, "there is no extralinguistic reality apart from the way we talk about
> it" -- I admit to nothing but an insistence that he cite where this is the
> case. As far as I can ascertain, not a few of these writers would contend
> that what counts for and as reality cannot be separated from 'language',
> that what interests Foucault, for instance, are the combinations of the
> visible and the articulable. That doesn't look to me as the same thing as
> "there is no extralinguistic reality apart from the way we talk about it",
> though it might include, as it does for Foucault, a claim that there is
> nothing _behind_ 'language'.
>
> So, when along similar lines I write, "Anyways, I think you're reading
> 'pomo' as an amplified species of social constructionism -- which is part
> of the problem I keep mentioning, [that is]'pomo' as the way in which a
> whole host of writers got inserted into the US academic factory and its
> pre-existing disputes.", Justin replies, "Yeah, I'm talking about realw
> orld pomo, the way it plays out here in America." Well, duh. And, if you
> can't reduce something to this 'real world', to make of it a sub-branch of
> the US academic industry, then it doesn't exist because it's
> incomprehensible, sayeth the neoprag philosophy prof. And, it's not the
> same 'US academic pomo' tune sung a little differently elsewhere, but a
> different tune being sung altogether. I might mention something about the
> imperial embrace, not only by the bland conflicts of the US faculties but
> by the US itself, but I can see incomprehensibility looming. I might also
> mention that I doubt very much, given the assertions about 'pomo taking
> over women's studies and ethnic studies in the US', that, whatever it is,
> it bears no relation to various movements outside the academy. Certainly
> the names of Deleuze and Foucault and Derrida appear in discussions ranging
> from prisons to the zapatistas to queer politics to the recent campaigns to
> close refugee prisons to the anti-wto campaigns in various places, mostly
> not the US. But, kids and foreigners! Who can understand them?
>
> Angela
>
> - who is not, thankfully, in the real world of anglo-american philosophy
> and so does not exist.