[PEN-L:9449] Re: RE: My Ideologies

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Rob Schaap <rws@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 07/21/99 04:12PM
Blokes like Giddens write whole (unreadable) books about 'structuration'
(we author our structures, which author us etc etc), but wassit mean?  I
mean it sounds right, but how do you use it?

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Charles: Yea Rob, we need some way to get practical-critical activity out of our philosophy. It's like long waves. They may be a fact, but how does our knowledge of that help us to change the world ? I don't mean that as a rhetorical question. I'm willing to believe it can guide our actions. Just give me a hint.  Even in economics and psychology we have to turn things-in-themselves into things-for-us. Economics is politicaleconomy and as for psychology, the personal is political.

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Some poor kid gets into trouble with drugs and shooters and we say it's the
system / Some rich kid flies his brand new bus into the briny and it's his
fault.  Lenin had to let the peasants starve / Stalin was a mass murderer.
Capitalism will bring about its own demise / We will destroy it.  History,
the present, and the future (three biggish categories in the order of
things) all confuse and bemuse if we allow ourselves to be trapped by 'the
subject', I reckon.

So how to get rid of the subject?  Pomos decentre everything to the point
there's no agency anywhere (or so do I read Foucault's *Order Of Things*,
Derrida's *Of Grammatology* and Doug's account of Judy Butler's *PLOP*).
My response to that is: 'No centre = no reason to do anything and nothing
to do that nothing with'.

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Charles: This is pretty good , Rob.

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Habermas reckons 'intersubjectivity' is the go.  It's got a nice feel to
it.  Does it get us away from our antinomy?

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Charles: The "I", the subject,  is a unity and struggle of opposites, including the individual and social. Contradiction is universal and it is the motor of change even in the subject.


Charles Brown




Time to push the 'help' button ...

Cheers,
Rob.