> Uh, Ted, to use the oldest and most cliched phrases from any grad
> school
> class, could you unpack this?
It's the same question as before.
You claim that "knowledge needs a conceptual framework in order to be produced" by which I understand you to mean that there are many "knowledges" each one "produced" (in a sense that excludes any form of self-determination let alone the rational self-determination elaborated by Engels in the passage from Anti-Duhring) by "regulative discourses," "frameworks of intelligibility," "disciplinary regimes."
But, you don't treat the "knowledge" you attribute to Butler in this way, e.g. the "knowledge" that:
"Fundamentally, heterosexuality is not an 'urge.' Its a set of knowledges and institutional structures that structure society."
You characterize it as the "product" of "rational argument." This is self-contradictory.
The assumption that experience is subjectively constituted in a way that prevents it from being direct experience of reality necessarily implies that the only possible "knowledge" in the sense of belief grounded in rational argument is "solipsism of the present moment." You can find this argument in Husserl's Crisis (as well as in Whitehead's Symbolism) where it takes the form of a reductio ad absurdum argument against the interpretation of experience found in Hume and Kant. Husserl and Whitehead answer this absurdity by calling into question the interpretation of experience that implies it.
Foucault claims to know about "all knowledge" that "all" “forms of scientific consciousness" are “aspects of the will to knowledge,” of a “rancourous”, “malicious”, “murderous” “instinct for knowledge” that he identifies with “violence” and “the inquisitor’s devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice.” But, what is true of "all knowledge" must also be true of this "knowledge," his "knowledge."
“But if it [‘historical consciousness’] examines itself and if, more generally, it interrogates the various forms of scientific consciousness in its history, it finds that all these forms and transformations are aspects of the will to knowledge: instinct, passion, the inquisitor's devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice. It discovers the violence of a position that sides against those who are happy in their ignorance, against the effective illusions by which humanity protects itself, a position that encourages the dangers of research and delights in disturbing discoveries. The historical analysis of this rancorous will to knowledge reveals that all knowledge rests upon injustice (that there is no right, not even in the act of knowing, to a truth or a foundation for truth) and that the instinct for knowledge is malicious (something murderous opposed to the happiness of mankind). Even in the greatly expanded form it assumes today, the will to knowledge does not achieve a universal truth; man is not given an exact and serene mastery of nature. On the contrary, it ceaselessly multiplies the risks, creates dangers in every area; it breaks down illusory defenses; it dissolves the unity of the subject; it releases those elements of itself that are devoted to its subversion and destruction. Knowledge does not slowly detach itself from its empirical roots, the initial needs from which it arose, to become pure speculation subject only to the demands of reason; its development is not tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject; rather, it creates a progressive enslavement to its instinctive violence.” pp. 162-3 <http://www.rlwclarke.net/Courses/LITS3304/2005-2006/05AFoucaultNietzsche,Genealogy,History.pdf
>
This is an explicit rejection of Marx's idea that the development of knowledge is “tied to the constitution and affirmation of a free subject” (i.e. in Marx’s language, to the constitution and affirmation of “a universally developed individual” with the "freedom of the will" elaborated in the Engels passage) in favour of the idea that this development “creates a progressive enslavement to its [knowledge’s] instinctive violence.”
Some "forms of scientific consciousness" can, without self- contradiction, be claimed to express a significant degree of unmastered instinctive sadistic aggressiveness.
For instance, Keynes's ontological and anthropological ideas belong, as do Marx's and Engels's, to the tradition that has logical space for what Keynes calls "the universal element in the soul of man," the element that allows for consistent treatment of human being as the being capable of rational self-determination of thinking, willing and acting and hence of "knowledge" in the sense of rationally grounded belief. This element is in conflict, however, with "instincts." Where instincts are incompletely mastered they will produce irrationality in thinking, willing and acting and in experience itself. Keynes implicitly claims this explains dogmatic attachment to ontological and anthropological ideas that, self-contradictorily, leave no logical space for a being capable of rational self- determination. He does this in his psycho-biographical portrayal of Newton as an extreme obsessional neurotic.
Understood as Keynes understood it, i.e. psychoanalytically, this psychopathology derives from a weak unintegrated ego dominated by unmastered instinctively rooted sadistic aggressiveness, as expressed, for example, in the misidentification of "reason" with "remorseless logic." The experience of such an ego will be delusively fragmented into externally related atomic bits providing no evidence for the existence even of the self let alone of reality (thus Hume claimed he could find no evidence in his experience of his own existence, of his own "personal identity"). It will also be dominated by paranoid suspiciousness, mistakenly universalizing through projection its own unmastered sadistic aggressiveness.
Ted