lbo-talk-digest V1 #4732

kelley kwalker2 at gte.net
Mon Aug 13 00:49:44 PDT 2001


At 01:37 PM 8/12/01 -0700, Miles Jackson wrote:
>I guess you still don't get my question. Why the incessant need for
>the normative ground? People for tens of thousands of years have
>successfully communicated without it; relatively egalitarian societies
>in the past have not required it to create communication among equals.
>To assume that we must find some "normative grounding" for
>communication is a symptom of life in contemporary capitalist societies;
>it is not the antidote.
>
>Miles

it's about metatheory--philosophy, epistemology, ontology, etc. it's NOT about substantive theory. it's the difference between marx's writings on human nature vs. his historical sociology of the French Rev. or his work in Das Kapital. it's not symptomatic of modernity to search for a normative ground since that's what philosophers have been doing for centuries, yes? in fact, many would argue that postmodernism and poststructructuralism have rejected any possibility of locating a normative ground upon which to engage in social theory and empirical research.

like i said to carrol, marxists have typically provided a normative ground in a standpoint theory: the working class, the intellectual vanguard, organic intellectuals, marginalized intellectuals (horkheimer and adorno), marcuse's great refusal (brain farting on what he calls these), materialist feminists once argued that women would be the source of 'truth', and black marxists have argued for that the social location of blacks as the most revolutionary (and, therefore, possessing the 'truth').



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