What you call "practical-critical" activities from a Marxist perspective and what I call discourse/practice from a post-marxist/poststructural standpoint may be more similar than many people would assume. Actually, your point about contradictions within and outside a system is quite well taken. I personally don't work in the dialectical tradition any more, but I came from that political-philosophical background, cut my teeth in theory through Marxist activism, and have respect for people who are trying to interpret the world from that framework. ( I am a post-marxist, not an anti-marxist, my politics is very much embedded in a radical marxist vision, but I digress).
Of course, people from different discourses can communicate. Other wise human communication beyond a minuscule primordial community would not have been possible. To use Gadamer's expression, human interaction is possible through "fusion of horizons." Actually, discourses don't have well defined, precise boundaries (we all have to be careful not to take the spatial metaphors too literally). We participate in multiple overlapping discourses simultaneously. There is always an element of human agency (something that is undertheorized in Foucault and Derrida) in sorting out those discourses for ourselves, whether we consciously articulate them or not.
But the funny thing is that just because I use the language of Enlightenment modernity (e.g., internal logic) it does not make logic or the law of identity a universal phenomenon. We can communicate only through the language that is available to us. But that does not make that language a a transparent representation of some sort of a universal axiom. Laws and logics are metaphors whose origin we have forgotten, as Nietzsche argued. Even the statement "we can never be certain about truth and knowledge" itself is an uncertain, irreducibly metaphorical statement. And I don't think language offers us any way out of that eternal trap. The difference between true believers and epistemological-anarchist types like me is that, in stead of trying to develop a meta-narrative of certainty to wish away that messiness of knowledge and reality, we recognize our sense of helplessness.
Manjur
Charles Brown <cbrown at michiganlegal.org> wrote:
CB: But how do we move from one , certain cultural-civilizational milieu and power-knowledge nexus to another one ? Humans have interpreted the world in a number of ways; how do they change from one way of interpreting to another ? How do they get from one historical period to a new one ?
The concept of identity - a is a - is transhistorical . It is the first principle of formal logic.
The various discursive-communicative contexts in different moments of history that you refer to all have the internal logics you refer to. What all the logics have in common is the law of identity. Otherwise , you couldn't say they have "internal logics" and be referring to the same thing. They all follow sets of rules.
The sets of rules don't have "rules" for changing the set of rules. That occurs when the rules are applied in practice and contradiction arise, requiring a change in the system of rules itself. Thereby practice changes consciousness, or the logical system of that particular historical moment.
Systems of rules don't change by thinking them. They change by practicing them.
One , certain culutural-civilizational milieu and power-knowledge nexus changes to another one when ,in the _practice_ of the milieu-nexus, contradictions arise in the internal logics of the milieu-nexus , not by just _thinking_ about the milieu-nexus.
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