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

[Miles Jackson]

Ted Winslow wrote:
> 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."

[most of long quote snipped]


>>  “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 long passage you quote has nothing to do with your argument.  How 
you get from that quote to the para about the "solipsism of the present 
moment" baffles me.  There is nothing self-contradictory about Butler's 
position here, your repeated claims notwithstanding.

Miles