> If you're talking about someone like Foucault, his concern was to
> subvert dogma. He got sick of people asking him about Marx, as if
> his work was defined by whether he was for or against Marx.
>
> One of the most dedicated upholders of Marxism as a grand utopian
> narrative is "postmodernist" Frederic Jameson. In his big book on
> postmodernism he sums up his project as a retrieval of the sixties
> call to "name the system" in order to change it.
>
> I really don't know what people are on about with the idea social
> constructionists/pomos/etc. are "subverting Marxism."
Foucault's concern wasn't "to subvert dogma"; it was to impose it.
One dogma he was concerned to impose (his own "dogmas" necessarily being, since he claims this is true of "all knowledge" claims, nothing but instinctive violence expressed as "the violence" of a "cruel," "rancorous," "murderous," "malicious" "instinct for knowledge") was the dogma that "all knowledge" claims are nothing but this "violence."
This doesn't "subvert" the ideas of Marx and the "humanist" tradition in thought to which they belong. It substitutes for them "anti- humanism."
The foundational ontological and anthropological ideas constitutive of this anti-humanism are the ideas that "being" is nothing but "violence" and "human being" nothing but "violence-doing."
These are the mystical intuitions of Heidegger. They are set out by him in the absurd misinterpretation of a passage from Sophocles's Antigone to which I pointed in an earlier discussion. He there explicitly contrasts them with the ontological and anthropological ideas of Marx and of the "humanist" tradition in thought that Marx sublates.
"Poststructuralists" who can't see that the claim that "all knowledge" is "the violence" of a "cruel," "rancourous," "murderous," "malicious" "instinct for knowledge" must (a) apply to itself and (b) be, as they also claim is true of "all knowledge," a socially constructed projective interpretive claim about reality (and not, as they themselves treat it, a knowably true claim about reality) make an interesting subject for study.
Ted