[lbo-talk] Kenneally, some notes and background

Alan Rudy alan.rudy at gmail.com
Fri Jun 12 21:26:43 PDT 2009


On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 7:40 PM, Michael Smith <mjs at smithbowen.net> wrote:


> On Fri, 12 Jun 2009 16:01:20 -0700
> Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> ... SNIP ...
>
> But at the same time we are physical organisms, with certain
> anatomical and physiological properties, like other critters
> in the world. Is it really un-Marxist to argue that this
> concrete material fact sets some limits on what we can do
> and be? I don't think the Old Man would have claimed that.

I think the issue is not whether or not that the materiality of the human body places limits on what we can do, it does. The issues are whether or not that body and those limits are to be seen as definitive or derivative of human nature and whether or not the body is viewed as a social rather than natural product. As always in these extended debates, there are four or five themes running unevenly across the thread and sometimes they run together and sometimes they splinter apart and sometimes folks normally committed to one theme end up in odd places. I feel as you do, but the other way around: wasn't I the guy who kept on arguing with the post-modernists at UCSC about the limits of "textual" analysis?


>
> (He might have claimed that those limits are less narrow than
> we sometimes think -- and if so, I would agree with him.)
>
> Is it un-Marxist to argue that the same logic might apply
> to the brain? What's the case for demanding an exception
> for that organ among all the others? Isn't this a weird
> kind of idealism smuggled back into the materialist picture
> of the world?

Here, I don't mind suggesting that the brain - socionatural product that it is - has structures more tied to language than others (and much more associated with language than the knees). What I mind is the idea that those structures structure language in some sort of Universal way that has some sort of non-idealist meaning (which is why I raised Geertz).



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