Date: Wed, 10 Dec 1997 22:31:35 -0800
Subject: Re: Reason & Metanarratives


MATTHEW FRANCIS WETTLAUFER wrote:

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Thanks for your definition of metanarrative.  It sounds, if you'll
excuse my indebtedness to the Enlightenment, "reasonable".

I expect each of the named living persons you've cited lately would
give a slightly, sometimes significantly different definition,
but yours is good enough for now.

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> On Tue, 9 Dec 1997, hugh bone wrote:
> > Matt, Jon et.al.
> >
> > I find the above comparison very interesting.  Never encountered it
> > before.  On Marx's concept of the role of the State, I thought he
> > envisioned its disappearance into communal bliss at some point after
> > the workers escaped their chains and united to win the Revolution.
> >
> 
> Hugh,
> 
> I think that Communism is the ideal end to Marxist dialectics, to the
> movement of history towards a classless State.  But in practise, Lenin
> found it necessary to place in power, in the interim between Russian
> feudalism and the ideal of Communism, a dictatorship on behalf of the
> proletariat.  --I wonder what Derrida would say of this
> substitution!--Some orthodox Marxists still view the interim period of
> the Socialist State as a temporary stepping stone towards Communism.  But
> people from the Frankfurt School and from the French post-structuralists
> view it not as an aberration to an otherwise straightforward process but
> as part and fundamental to that process.  And they would add that Stalin
> is the full realization of that process rather than an abitrary
> "accident".  One could argue about that of course.
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REPLY:
I don't think many people would argue that it was "the" metanarrative
for several generations of people all over the globe since Marx
wrote it down.
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 > Maybe we can discuss in depth the problem of the
 metanarrative, for I > > am not sure I understand it.
> >
> > I think of systems of thought, of specific religions, and specific
> > systems of philosophy, and systems of politics, as metanarratives.
> >
> > Before learning the word, I called such systems ideologies.
> > I believe Foucault, at one point, described his work as writing
> > histories
> > of systems of thought.
> >
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> 
> I think Foucault is offering possible ways of reading the production of
> mechanisms of power and discourse--in other words, he offers genealogy
> over history.  
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 REPLY: I believe History became a God-substitute for Hegel, Marx, and
their disciples; a metanarrative force that explains forever, as you
say.  
Genealogy, as Foucault used it, was a different take, exploring the
genesis of different ideas about institutions and how they form social
beings.
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> I understand metanarrative to mean any theory that attempts to explain
> something forever, at all times, in all cultures--a universalism (like
> the statement that all people are good, or there is a human nature, or
> reason is the highest form of thought, etc).  Lyotard (and others) are
> wary of these announcements because it is precisely due to universalisms
> that the world experienced colonialism, slavery, ethnic massacres, and
> ultimately the Holocaust--such things could only be thinkable, and
> realizable, out of a perspective that could totalize that which is
> particular.
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REPLY: Hope omission of Gulag was accidental.

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> Lyotard looked at language in a fresh and different way, and found that
> > the rationality of the sapient animal, the basis of social agreement,
> > disagreement, rights and wrongs, grew out of phrases which are a
> > heritage imposed on newborns.  Some of them grow up to be theologians,
> > philosophers, scientists.
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REPLY:  Although I'm not above presuming, I thought I was replaying your 
words from your prior post.  Sorry.

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> Don't you think that a great deal is presumed by the suggestion of a
> "rationality of a sapient animal, the basis of social agreement"?  This
> reminds me of Gadamer's debate with Derrida where Gadamer said that
> basically we all have good will towards one another, we all wish to be
> understood, and Derrida responded by asking how can one even
> begin by presuming this existence of "good will"?
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REPLY:  Although I'm not above presuming, I thought I was replaying your 
words from your prior post.  Sorry.
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The one thing I got from Gadamer was the thought that we can unknowingly
make assertions which are the answer to some question.  

And have the good will toward Derrida to presume he may have written
something which I could read and profit from; but scanning his books and
hearing him quoted offers no encouragement. 

I presume your good will and that of others on the list.

We presume goodwill to live, and so did our parents or we never would
have survived.

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> > Scientists of the Enlightenment and today's physicists, astronomers,
> > biologists employ similar techniques of reasoning, consensus, belief.
> >
> > Both religions and Marxism have known successes and failures.  Science
> > survives by constantly re-writing its narratives.
> 
> The problem though isn't in rewrites but in the insistence that science
> alone holds "the truth"--that its findings--its way of describing the
> world--is more "factual" or better than other ways of explaining the
> world.  Science insists on this by way of its methodology--the prejudice
> that accords greater value to a method which seems to be rigorous--the
> prejudice that associates rigour with greater truth value.  This is what > Alan Sokel is forgetting when he launches into his attacks on the
> French--especially on Deleuze.  He forgets that science, like any other
> discourse, uses language and is no "better" or worse than poetry (what
> afterall is a quark if not poetry and fiction?)

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You get some of that in Feyerabend.

Also I keep writing about languages other than words, and so did
Lyotard.  Science is knowledge and knowledge is power, and science has
remade "reality", as we know it, just as political and financial power
have in only a couple of centuries, turned people into product, to be
exploited like any other domestic animal.
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> > > How can there be a
> "self" without experience? How can
> there be a > "society" of rational animals unless there are narratives, as
> > Cashinahua,
> > French Republic, etc. which serve as a basis for their description of
> > past and present, their vision of the future, and thus create
> > the unity of theologians, philosophers, scientists, or the nation-state
> > itself?
> 
> Could explain where those examples are that you cite--about Cashinahua,
> etc, so that I can read about them?
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REPLY:  See references below. 

 What do you mean by a "self"?  You realize that most
post-structuralists
> would reject language which retains the idea of a self or subjectivity?
> Foucault talks about the body in his later writings but he's not talking
> about subjectivity in the Cartesian sense (anymore than Nietzsche is).
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REPLY:
The self is what one experiences when awake and capable of remembering
thinking, imagining etc.

Post-structuralists can reject language but they can't make it go
away, they can reject their own "selves" but it will make little
difference in their actions.
 
There are 259 definitions of "self" in the on-line Merriam-Webster, so
others asked your question and got 259 answers. You're the only one who
can answer it for your "self". 
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Cashinahua Notice is page 152 of "Le Differend", Univ. of Minn. Press
Declaration of 1789 is page 145.
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Best,

Hugh