[lbo-talk] Texas school board drops Jefferson, adds Calvin

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Sun Mar 21 15:52:41 PDT 2010


Miles Jackson asked:


> I cannot imagine how someone who has actually read Foucault or Butler and considered their arguments in any detail would attribute this position to them. Could you provide some relevant passages from these authors that demonstrate that they "rule out any possibility of true answers"?

I've done that before, e.g. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2008/2008-June/009861.html>


> Butler ... mistakenly treats 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. After all, under what conditions do some individuals acquire a face, 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.
>
> 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."

As I've also pointed out before, and as the texts Avineri quotes from the early Hegel also demonstrate, this is antithetical, rather than "supplemental," to what Hegel and Marx mean by "mutual recognition," e.g. <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2008/2008-June/010291.html>.


> Judith Butler's idea of "mutual recognition" is "giving an account of oneself."
>
> This contrasts with the Hegel/Marx idea of the communicative content of "mutual recognition" - "the most beautiful music," "the finest play" - as created and appropriated by "educated" individuals who "determine their knowing, willing, and acting in a universal way." (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 187) <http://marx.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/prcivils.htm>
>
> For this reason, the content is self-effacing in the following sense:
>
> “In caprice it is involved that the content is not formed by the nature of my will, but by contingency. I am dependent upon this content. This is the contradiction contained in caprice. Ordinary man believes that he is free, when he is allowed to act capriciously, but precisely in caprice is it inherent that he is not free. When I will the rational, I do not act as a particular individual but according to the conception of ethical life in general. In an ethical act I establish not myself but the thing. A man, who acts perversely, exhibits particularity. The rational is the highway on which every one travels, and no one is specially marked. When a great artist finishes a work we say: ‘It must be so.’ The particularity of the artist has wholly disappeared and the work shows no mannerism. Phidias has no mannerism; the statue itself lives and moves. But the poorer is the artist, the more easily we discern himself, his particularity all caprice. If we adhere to the consideration that in caprice a man can will what he pleases, we have certainly freedom of a kind; but again, if we hold to the view that the content is given, then man must be determined by it, and in this light is no longer free.” (Hegel, Philosophy of Right, Introduction) <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/printrod.htm>



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