> I have all the issues too. Doug admits ignorance in areas in which he
> knows a hell of a lot. It's in the areas he _hasn[t_ studied (because
> too busy mastering the material for Left Business Obserrver, his radio
> show, and his books probably) that he is afraid to admit ignorance. He
> can't admit, for example, that he really knows very little about what
> Lenin has to say on anything: his remarks on Lenin regularly reveal
> thrid or fourth hand acquaintance. And, as I said in the preceding post,
> he probably really does think (out of ignorance) that my ideas are
> original with me, that it is some weird aberration to question whether
> ethics have any transhistorical foundation. Like another famous social
> democrat, Doug is at risk of being viewed as philosophically naive by
> the philsophically naive.
>
> Carrol
somebody said something about testosterone.
yeah. I'm here now. OK?
I don't think that the problem is that Doug is ignorant of the works you mention. Rather, I suspect that, even if he were, he would still ride your ass.
I mean, when you insisted the other day, in a thread on identity politics, that Postone and some other person would help understand the problem, I chuckled thinking that, gee, why not read Gloria Anzaldua? the Combahee River Collective? Barbara Smith? Maria Lugones? Ehrenreich? Judith Butler?Brownfemipower's Blog? Wendy Brown? Janet Halley? Susie Bright?
Ahem.
Halley and Brown have very specifically developed a critique of *moralizing* identity politics. (For Brown, it is inevitable that ethics and moral demands on power replace politics as intrinsic to liberalism)
You know? So why some white male fuckers then?
But anyway, that is the least of my concerns. I'm more goofing off because, yes, I know: you are not criticizing doug for being ignorant, but for not admitting it. :)
At any rate, as for this dispute, I really think it's more that both Doug and Dossbomber are intentionally misreading you. Doug, for instance, has suggested that your problem is that you don't like touchy-feely things like morals and prefer dry, boring science -- along with Punctuated Equilibrium!
but as Voyou pointed out the other day, Doug's got you quite wrong about that. And I agree. You can imagine me sitting there in front of the monitor, fist punching the air saying, "Go! Voyou! You Go!"
But I suspect is is *also* that you aren't doing enough to explain yourself -- and yes, I'm aware of the problem of trying to relate Postone and your eyesight.
nevertheless, Postone does have a very lengthy discussion of critical theory -- negative critique -- in which he speaks precisely to the ethical claims that always animate even the most negative critique. Every criticism of existing society must necessarily draw on some vision of what the "good society" ought to look like. It might not be fleshed out at all. It might be very subtly. And it might be those things *on purpose* -- as strategy, so as to avoid prescribing what the good society ought to look like when that task ought to be up to the people who make that society, together.
Postone speaks to a difference between that kind of ethical claim and what he later calls utopian critique undermined by a moralizing claim, IIRC.
I have been much too exhausted to want to pull out Postone and struggle with transcribing that passage here, but maybe someday.
Also, caveat: all this is from memory and I don't have the books in front of me, so TIFWIW.
shag
(Brown goes about this in a slightly different way and I'm actually working on fleshing that out on the blog at the moment. second part to come this weekend.)