>Hm. Looks like you 'n Yoshie are having a competition for who can quote
>the most.
had it been on line, i wouldn't have transcribed it, of course, and posted
just a URL -- which has always been the point.
>Good quotation, though. Takes the feminist engagement with 'experience'
>to a new level.
yes, it is a critique of both mainstream sociology (both the number crunching kind and the navel gazing kind) and a reply to her feminist followers who often misunderstood her work on "women's standpoint". it was to be taken as a "problematic" -- a starting point--not an end point. her's is a materialist feminist attempt to avoid structuralist reification by utilizing Marx's work on alienation and commodity fetishism:
"Marx, of course, hasn't provided an insider's method. He operates with a dual ontology: what is outside the head--what the head thinks about, analyzes, and transforms into headstuff--exists as people's actual activities; the practices of thinking are addressed at the level of meaning, not of activities in time and place. the standpoint of women, as I've worked from it, insists that as thinking heads=-=as social scientists--we are always inside what we think about; we know it in the first place as insiders. So here we go beyond Marx, extending his materialist method to an exploration of "social consciousness." For knowledge itself is made problematic when we insist that there are knowers "doing knowing" and that we can explore, make explicit, know, the socially organized practices in and through which we accomplish knowledge.
Implicit in Marx's treatment of ideology and knowledge is the possibility of extending his materialism of actual individuals and their ongoing activities to thought and knowledge itself. Ideology, as Marx defines it, separates thought from the actualities of society and history and thus "makes language into an independent realm." Although Marx views consciousness as inseparable from actual individuals, although he analyzes ideology as practices, and although he gives social consciousness a preliminary materialist formulation, he stops short at the investigation of the social relations and organization of consciousness. But we need not. social forms of consciousness exist only in actual practices and in the concerting of those practices as an ongoing process. If consciousness appears as distinct from and determining social action and relations, that appearance is a product of the activity of real individuals. and their material conditions. Marx's epistemology grounds the concepts and categories in and through which the nature of capitalism is disclosed in that historical mode of production itself. In capitalism, a system of economic relations emerges as a differentiated and objectified form. Capitalism itself creates the conditions of political economic analysis. The independent system of relations mediated by money and commodities underlies the category of the "economy" as relations that can be seen apart from other dimensions of social existence. analogously, the objectified and organizational forms that externalize consciousness create possibilities for inquiry that did not exist for Marx. <...> (T)he term structure identifies a conceptual order. it is the "design of the organization". What might be actually observed as what people do in an organization is treated as mere appearance; the conceptual reality is to be discerned through that appearance. As social scientists we ordinarily begin with and return to the conceptual structure. We do not return to or give primacy to the actual, living individuals in their concrete situations of action from which we would, as social scientists, seek a hasty escape, moving perhaps from a set of particular events to find in them a schema that will interpret them and, in interpreting, forget about that original particulars."
Dorothy Smith, _The Conceptual Practices of Power: A Feminist Sociology of Knowledge_
kelley