>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>Miles Jackson wrote:
>>>
>>> I don't mean to share inappropriately intimate info onlist, but
>>> I have a point: crude generalizations--"visual fantasies
>>> are important to men", "all men get off on lezzie sex"--aren't
>>> going to help us understand the astonishing diversity of
>>> human sexual activities and desires.
>>>
>>
>>The theories continue to pour in, none of the theorists even nodding in
>>the direction of Miles's argument.
>>
>>And those theories increasingly remind me of what Stephen J. Gould and
>>others in the field of evolutionary biology have labelled "Just So
>>Stories." The beauty of Just So Stories is that as long as they have
>>literary coherence, they cannot be challenged (except by another equally
>>foolish Just-So Story) nor can they usefully explain anything. This
>>incapacity is related to their internal coherence, which is achieved by
>>creating a world inside the poem <g> which is hermetically sealed from
>>contamination from the outer world. One can write critiques of them as
>>poetry, but there is no way to discuss their propsitional adequacy.
>
>So is Marxism the only "true" theory in intellectual history?
I know how these one-line questions annoy you, but for the benefit of other readers, let me expand. As far as I can tell, in political economy you're a fairly orthodox Marxist, maybe even Marxist-Leninist. But when it comes to other forms of psychosocial or cultural theory, you sound like a vulgar postmodernist, going on in so many words about plurivocality, undecidability, and radical incommensurability. Or, since your prose style is quite clear and straightforward, like some standard issue empiricist, taking each thing as it comes and shunning the master narrative. So why does Marx get a pass and nothing else?
Doug