Date: Sun, 15 Dec 1996 13:06:12 +0000
Subject: Re: BHA: RM conference


I'm off to a conference tomorrow, so I won't be able to pick up some of the
many threads on this issue. But some quick thoughts, which I haven't had
time to check through so this post will be full of errors.


>academic marxists are subject to the same pressures as academics generally. 

Yes this would be part of the materialist explanation. To live one needs
work. To get work one needs to play the game. The game today is
predonimantly postism. To get a job be a postist.


>
>I think Howie rightly complains about Bhaskar's impenetrability, which I'd
>say does CR (and consequently, Left theory in general) a disservice.  The
>fact that I (and others) have managed to cull something of use from
>*Dialectic* does not encourage me to inflict it on others!  Bad writing seems
>to have become mandatory in progressive theory since Althusser, and probably
>is due, in part, to many of the same forces that gave us post-ism. 

I've a lot to say on this, but not the time. Quickly though, I agree that
RB's prose is horrendous in places, but still one grappled with it yields
insights. Most philosophical work (as opposed to commentaries on
philosophical work) is like this. Who has read Heiddeger and got it first
time? What about Derrida? Bourdieu? Try Kristeva. Try Kant's critique of
pure reason and Hegel. But yes, on a general point, I agree RB gives me more
headaches.


 (This is separate from a possible
>attack by poststructuralists that, insofar as it like positivism accepts the
>existence of extramental realities, it is *already* reactionary. 

But one of the major insights I get from RB, and this is confirmed if one
studies the works of the positivists themselves, is their anti-realism.
basically positivism is based on an idealist metaphysics. Any dictionary of
modern thought always sets positivism in opposition to realism. So when
postism in its more extrem variants pushes its linguistic idealism it
mirrors positivism. Remember, the logical positivist took early
Wittgensteinian linguisticism to mystical extremes. This relates to Hans's
point:

>but second the post-structualists are *the* New-Left.
>Third, post-structualism emerges in protest, and as an alternative to both 
>positivism and structuralism.

Are the post-structuralists really the new left? Does anyone really believe
this? Certainly many of them claim it, but does this claim stand up to
scrutiny? What about Habermas's charge that it's essentilly a form of
neo-conservativism? More important, given the similarities between postism
and positivism (the commitment to actualism, the metaphysical denial that
only leads to the secretion of bad metaphysics (idealism in both cases), the
attack on the subject (positivsim did a much beter job in attacking the
subject than any post position), the fixation on what can be observed or
spoken (leading to the reduction of the real to the empirical in positivism
and the reduction of everything to discourse in postism), the
anthropocentrism common to both, ontological monovalence. Need I go on. Put
this way postism emerges as a rampant form of positivism. Any doubts about
this can be dispelled by reading Avenarius alongside Baudraillard.  

 Of course,
>post-ists often want to conflate CR and P in any case.) 

In which case we can now turn the tables upon them.

 Anyway we should be
>cautious of thinking a philosophy can do our political work for us (a notion
>some post-ists seem to have embraced, like perhaps the presenter who cared
>nothing about solidarity).

Or the postist feminists who undercut their normative ground in declaring
that there is no such thing as woman. In which case the practical effect is
either incoherence. there is no such thing as woman, but we will go on
talking as if there were, or no normative ground from which to critique
existing structures of domination that effect women. Please don't tell me
this is the new left, I just cannot accept this. If postism is really the
new left then the right have won, in a manner that brings to mind Lukes's
third level of power. 

Thanks,


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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Aberystwyth
SY23 3DA

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