[PEN-L:3674] Re: Race as a "construct"

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote: >>or is it simply a matter of ideology, i.e., what's in people's
heads,
something that can be solved if we simply reveal that it's wrong and if we
use correct forms of speech and discourage others from using incorrect
speech?<<

angela writes: >jim, many whom you might call pomos are idealists, but not
all by any accurate account.  <

That's why I used the phrase "some of the PoMos lean toward the latter"
(the idealist interpretation). Since I have never read all of, or even a
lion's share of, the PoMo literature (not to mention all of the
Post-Structuralist, Post-Marxist, Post-Colonial, or Post Toasties
literatures), I can't talk about "PoMo in general."  So I don't. As Doug
notes, "PoMo" covers a multitude of sins and virtues.

(I don't plan to do a survey of the PoMo lit, BTW, because I usually find
its prose to be obscure if not obscurantist, often reflecting the mandarin
mentality of professional academics who write using insider langage. The
benefits of the reading it seems to be swamped by the cost, so I'd rather
spend my time read ing a FOREIGN AFFAIRS essay by Paul Krugman (e.g.) or
even grading problem sets. I have found Wolff and Resnick to be coherent,
though I disagree with them.)

>anyway, neither marx nor freud not zizek nor foucault thought of ideology
in the vernacular sense as ideas which can shown to be false.  ie., none of
them are rationalists or empiricists.<

My understanding of Marx's theory of ideology (I'll skip freud, zizek, and
foucault, since I don't feel I have enough knowledge about them to anything
near to intelligent concerning their ideas) is that he saw the most
important kind of ideology for him as based in the structure of the
capitalist mode of production. Commodity production, an essential part of
capitalism, promotes the view that we're not dealing with social relations
of production but instead with the simple exchange of commodity for
commodity (a.k.a., commodity fetishism). And following Edward Bellamy's
later analogy about how people who sit in different places in the careening
coach that is capitalism, people in different classes have different
visions of the totality. I agree with Marx that people of the working class
have the potential of having a deeper and more complete (less ideological)
of the system. However, as Marx would note, this vision develops in
historical time through a long process of self-organization and
self-education (sometimes with help from the outside) and there are lots of
obstacles to its development, including the existence of racist and sexist
institutions inherited from the past.

(More generally, an individual's world-view depends on his or her biography
within the societal structure encountered as part of life. Ideology is not
simply "in our heads.")

I'm not exactly sure why Angela brings up the issue of whether or not
ideology is "false consciousness." That's not what I was talking about.
Ideology, as I sketched it above, can easily be "true consciousness" from
the perspective of an individual looking at the totality of the system from
the inside. It "works" for her or him, allowing survival, the attainment of
loftier goals, etc. It might not be contradicted at all by the social facts
that the individual faces, while being a paragon of logical sense. But that
person's consciousness can be radically incomplete.

Marx wasn't a rationalist or an empiricist since he tried to transcend the
partial visions of each of these and synthesize their valid aspects. But he
was a critical realist. In this perspective, even though we don't know
exactly what the truth is, there actually is an objective reality "out
there" (i.e., independent of our perceptions of it). So we can talk about
some propositions being "false," either because they do not correspond to
empirical reality, because they are illogical, or because they represent
incomplete, partial, visions of the totality.

BTW, my general verdict on the whole Post- phenomenon is that, like many
other visions, its practioners are better at criticizing others' weaknesses
than at proposing new and valid theories that help us understand and change
the world. Like most of us, they are much better at asking questions than
at posing answers that stand up under criticism. And too many of them do so
using mandarin language.

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html