[lbo-talk] internally riven

[shag carpet bomb]

At 05:03 PM 4/12/2009, Miles Jackson wrote:
>Chris Doss wrote:
>>I don't think it's really so much paranoid as solipsistic. You've got
>>this system operating everywhere, determining everything, and
>>operating independently of anything according to its internal rules.
>>Sure there's differance and power and all that (in
>>post-structuralism), but really they serve the function of a
>>noumenon. Like I said this may be true on some deep metaphysical
>>level, but I don't think it works all that well for societies --
>>which are not actually structured like languages.
>
>This is an apt illustration of the disciplinary silos in academe.  The 
>notion that there are social structures that operate independently of any 
>individual is a fundamental idea covered in any Soc 101 class.  In this 
>respect, Foucault's work is almost banal sociology.  It fascinates me that 
>a fundamental principle in one academic discipline is construed by someone 
>trained in another discipline as outrageous solipsism.
>
>Miles

here's an online text that outlines "paranoid structuralism" -- the work of 
a law prof from whom Halley got the term. The 'enlightenment' bit in the 
quote below is what interested me. Halley uses the term to describe the 
structuralists Foucault is criticizing.

http://duncankennedy.net/documents/A%20Semiotics%20of%20Critique.pdf
A Semiotics of Critique, Duncan Kennedy

"Paranoid structuralism teaches us that it is part of our modern
social and individual psychological condition that we are
playthings of forces whose existence and true relationships the
"normal" discourse of our world denies, thereby helping to
reproduce the denied condition. The forces have a "logic" we can
master, to some extent, but only if we overcome the denial.
Reproduction theory53 is just as important here as in organicism,
but it has taken a perverse turn. The paranoid structuralist asks
how unwanted things get reproduced, rather than how the
organism sustains itself through time. The answer is paranoid
because it emphasizes that "out there" forces or people or
structures operate behind our backs, insinuating themselves into
our very being to make us feel that we are freely choosing what is
bad for us. The result is that we can't trust ourselves or anyone
else, unless and until we have . . . undergone enlightenment."

"let's be civil and nice, but not to the point of obeying the rules of 
debate as defined by liberal blackmail (in which, discomfort caused by a 
challenge is seen as some vague form of harassment)."

                                    -- Dwayne Monroe, 11/19/08

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