> As I pointed out in an earlier post, the question is not
> whether things exist but whether or not one assumes their existence
> must
> be demonstrated, when it has been "conclusively" "demonstrated" from
> Descartes to the present that they cannot be.
All Descartes "demonstrated" was that if "things" in his sense exist, they are unknowable "things-in-themselves."
In an "internal relations" ontology, as Hegel points out, there is "nothing," i.e. no "substance" in the sense of Aristotle ( a "thing" that bears properties but is not itself a property) or of Descartes (a "thing" requiring nothing but itself in order to exist). In such an ontology what exists are "activities" in "internal relations" and there are no "things" in the senses of Aristotle and Descartes, i.e. no "substances" in "external relations."
It was the latter unquestioned ontology that created the problem for epistemology, the unknowable "thing-in-itself."
Ironically, Descartes had failed to see this because his "doubting" hadn't been sufficient radical; he lacked the "negative capability" that this method requires.
Marx, Husserl and Whitehead put in question ("bracket" to use Husserl's term) all interpretive frameworks including the framework that constitutes reality as "things" and, hence, as unknowable "things- in-themselves."
Through this method Whitehead, in particular, claims to be able to find rational foundations in experience for the knowledge claim that, when freed from the distorting influence of unquestioned interpretive frameworks, the object of self-consciousness can be shown to be what amounts to Marx's idea of "praxis," i.e. self-consciousness is revealed through this method to be self-consciousness of activity in internal relations. This puts an end to the unknowable thing-in- itself because "nothing" with this epistemological implication exists.
As I've unsuccessfully been trying to point out, the ideas Butler appears to be repeating derive, ironically, from a failure fully to "bracket," in this sense, all interpretive frameworks. In particular, she doesn't put in question the interpretive framework that makes it impossible to "bracket" interpretive frameworks.
Thus, she and her list supporters mistakenly treat as self-evident the claim that ""knowledge needs a conceptual framework in order to be produced." This claim does in fact need "a conceptual framework in order to be produced," namely, the conception of experience as necessarily and inescapably constituted by "regulative discourses," "frameworks of intelligibility," "disciplinary regimes." Here is a long extract from "Giving an Account of Oneself' setting out the position, including the idea that the inescapable "epistemological frame" is "an operation of power.".
“I find that the only way to know myself is precisely through a mediation that takes place outside of me, exterior to me, in a convention or a norm that I did not make, in which I cannot discern myself as an author or an agent of its making. In this sense, then, the subject of recognition is one for whom a vacillation between loss and ecstasy is inevitable. The possibility of the ‘I,’ of speaking and knowing the ‘I,’ resides in a perspective that dislocates the first-person perspective whose very condition it supplies. “The perspective that both conditions and disorients me from the very possibility of my own perspective is not reducible to the perspective of the Other, since the perspective is also what governs the possibility of my recognizing the Other, and the Other recognizing me. We are not mere dyads on our own, since our exchange is mediated by language, by conventions, by a sedimentation of norms that are social in character. So how are we to understand the impersonal perspective by which our personal encounter is occasioned and disoriented? … When we ask, by virtue of what exteriority is recognition conferred?, we find that it cannot be the particular endowment of the Other who is able to know and to recognize me, since that Other will also have to rely upon a certain criterion to establish what will and will not be recognizable, a frame for seeing and judging. In this sense, if the Other confers recognition-and we have yet to know precisely in what that consists-it does this not primarily by virtue of special internal capacities. There is already not only an epistemological frame within which the face appears, but an operation of power as well, since only by virtue of certain kinds of anthropocentric dispositions and cultural frames will a given face seem to be a human face to any one of us. When we ask, by virtue of what exteriority is recognition conferred?, we find that it cannot be the particular endowment of the Other who is able to know and to recognize me, since that Other will also have to rely upon a certain criterion to establish what will and will not be recognizable, a frame for seeing and judging. In this sense, if the Other confers recognition-and we have yet to know precisely in what that consists-it does this not primarily by virtue of special internal capacities. There is already not only an epistemological frame within which the face appears, but an operation of power as well, since only by virtue of certain kinds of anthropocentric dispositions and cultural frames will a given face seem to be a human face to any one of us. After all, under what conditions do some individuals acquire aface, a legible and visible face, and others do not? There is a language that frames the encounter, and embedded in that language a set of norms concerning what will and will not constitute recognizability.
“This is Foucault’s point and, in a way, his supplement to Hegel, when he asks, as he does, ‘What can I become, given the contemporary order of being?’ He understands that this ‘order’ conditions the possibility of his becoming, and that a regime of truth, in his words, constrains what will and will not constitute the truth of his self, the truth that he offers about himself, the truth by which he might be known and become recognizably human, the account he might give of himself.” pp. 23-4
This necessarily implies "solipsism of the present moment." Any claim (such as these claims themselves) that goes beyond this is self- contradictory, so the idea that there are post-foundationalist foundations on which to base rationally "rejecting certain beliefs and accepting others" is mistaken. The "post-foundationalist epistemologies" claiming to do this are necessarily self- contradictory. If Voyou knows of one that isn't he should indicate it.
The one common since Hume, "practice" as pragmatism (which is also a common misinterpretation of Marx's idea of "praxis"), requires assumptions inconsistent with "solipsism of the present moment."
The other unquestioned interpretive claim made here is Foucault's, namely, that all "epistemological frames," all "knowledge" claims in the sense of claims that rational "foundations" exist for belief, must be “aspects of the will to knowledge,” of a “rancourous”, “malicious”, “murderous” “instinct for knowledge” that Foucault identifies with “violence” and “the inquisitor’s devotion, cruel subtlety, and malice"?
These two unquestioned interpretive claims are also implicit in the following:
“It may at first seem that I am simply calling for a more concrete and internally diverse ‘universality,’ a more synthetic and inclusive notion of the universal, and in that way committed to the very foundational notion that I seek to undermine. But my task is, I think, significantly different from that which would articulate a comprehensive universality. In the first place, such a totalizing notion could only be achieved at the cost of producing new and further exclusions. The term ‘universality’ would have to be left permanently open, permanently contested, permanently contingent, in order not to foreclose in advance future claims for inclusion. Indeed, from my position and from any historically constrained perspective, any totalizing concept of the universal will shut down rather than authorize the unanticipated and unanticipatable claims that will be made under the sign of ‘the universal.’ In this sense, I am not doing away with the category, but trying to relieve the category of its foundationalist weight in order to render it as a site of permanent political contest.”
So here Butler is doing what Robert Wood claimed is being done by anyone, e.g. Marx and Husserl, who claims to have phenomenologically interrogated the object of self-consciousness, i.e. claims to have uncovered rational foundations for belief through the radical doubting involved in "bracketing" all interpretive frameworks. She is one of those "producing knowledge from a conceptual framework that one either does not recognize or has somehow obfuscated from oneself."
Ted