Re: [Marxism] RE: Science and Society [was: Challenge...]

[Joonas Laine <jjonas@xxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2006-08-31 at 12:00 -0400, Mike Friedman wrote: 
> But, the problem is deeper than this. Lying at the heart of the scientific
> method is bourgeois (western -- Cartesian) rationalism:
> 
> âA rationality was transformed into Rationality; a way of knowing was
> transformed into Science, a procedure for knowing became the Scientific
> Method. The vast enterprise of dominating the world in a few centuries was
> sufficient argument to demonstrate the imposition of European reason as a
> universal and necessary developmentâ (Gutierrez, 1974, cited in Levins and
> Lewontin, 1985, Pp. 227).
> 
> Itâs not that there is no âobjective reality,â but that the âtoolsâ
> (senses and higher-order processing) we use to perceive and analyze it are
> socially conditioned. Even what constitutes a âdatumâ is socially
> conditioned.

I want to thank Mike Friedman for this mail. Like many others, I haven't
had the time to look into all (or most) approaches that Marxists take on
things like this. I'm not sure what stuff I've been conditioned with,
but in any case it was that kind of stuff that made me look more
favourably on Foucault's work on history of knowledge and of science
than what I thought was the Marxist equivalent; what I thought was the
Marxist way seemed somehow crass to me, ahistorical in its emphasis on
"ok, people used to think like this, but that was illusion, and now we
KNOW", and seemed to reflect what Lewontin-Levins criticise above.
Probably there is a strand like that in Marxism too, but I wasn't sure
there is a fleshed out alternative.

I think it's been extremely valuable having read many of Foucault's
essential work (not in a "know your postmodernist enemy" kind of way) on
history and science, but naturally I've always been put of by his
postmodernism, such as this:

"Nothing is fundamental. That is what is interesting in the analysis of
society. That is why nothing irritates me as much as these inquiries -
which are by definition metaphysical - on the foundations of power in a
society or the self-institution of a society, and so on. These are not
fundamental phenomena. There are only reciprocal relations, and the
perpetual gaps between intentions in relation to one
another." (Essential works III, p. 356. An interview from 1982.)

Or his conclusions like this:

"The conclusion would be that the political, ethical, social,
philosophical problem of our days is not to try to liberate the
individual from the state, and from the state's institutions, but to
liberate us both from the state and from the type of individualization
linked to the state. We have to promote new forms of subjectivity
through the refusal of this kind of individuality that has been imposed
on us for a few centuries." (Essential Works III, p. 336, a text from
1982.)

I've also found Mark Poster's book 'Foucault, Marxism, and History'
interesting in its dealing with the historical aspect of knowledge that
Poster finds in Foucault, but not in Western Marxism:

"The tendency in Hegel-Marx tradition [was that] the historical
dialectic moved through the class struggle; the class that represented
the negation of the present was the privileged agent of history; the
perspective of this class was therefore the true perspective, the
perspective the theorist could adopt to grasp the totality. The theorist
was then in a position to formulate the Truth. Such was the reasoning
made possible by the Hegel-Marx thesis and such was the position taken
by LukÃcs in 'History and Class Consciousness', a founding work of
Western Marxism." (p. 11)

Poster goes on to say that

"Marx accomplished the task of critical social theory perhaps to a
degree never equaled before or since by demonstrating the historicity
and specifying the mechanisms of domination inherent in industrial
capitalism. However, the fell back to the ideological mode of liberal
political economy by framing the advances of his position in terms of
liberal norms, i.e., universal emancipation." (p. 159)

While I'm not sure of all of Poster's conclusions, I think his argument
is sound when he says that Foucault is "more Marxist" than Marx insofar
as he points out the historicality, and thus changeability, of any form
of rationality, which (some) Marxists expect to arrive on the scene
after class antagonism has been swept away. It will be a different kind
of rationality than the prevailing liberal bourgeois one (and of course
a better one :), but it will be socially conditioned just as much, and
thus just as much an ideology.

-- 
jjonas @ nic.fi


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