Re: Re: Hardt: "Spinoza was a communist thinker long before Marx"

["Ian Murray" <seamus2001@xxxxxxxx>]

> You compare the importance of Foucault's theory to that of Darwin's.
> Biologists are capable of describing theory they use to explain
> phenomena they analyze; in fact, they make it their business to
teach
> it to others.  Those who find Foucault's theory useful & urge others
> to take it up should be able to do the same.  Otherwise, you can't
> hope to persuade others to come to your view.  So, try again -- what
> is Foucault's brand-new view of causal explanation that should
> relegate Marxists' to the status of pre-Darwinian "theistic
> explanations of causality"?
>
> Yoshie
=========
Actually, I was merely pointing out that, like Darwin, Foucault was
trying to think "outside" the received categories of social theory and
linguistic theory. Hence my quote from "The Use of Pleasure". It does
not follow that he thought in terms of displacing those modes of
thought. He was attempting to shift various disciplines from causal
and representational modes of discourse to constitutive modes of
discourse and making use of reflexivity, genealogy-nominalism to look
not only at those modes of discourse but the very behavior of those
agents and institutions that other social theorist were analyzing.

Constitutive and causal theorizing are not a methodological zero-sum
game. Nor are they necessarily orthogonal to one another in terms of
what they hope to accomplish. However, if one starts with different
categories, metaphors and analogies as constitutive/designative of how
one will attempt to create a model of causation at various
organizational/institutional sites/scales one may end up with
different analyses and explanations from those which start from
different categories, metaphors, analogies. Intertheoretic assessment
can then proceed on the basis of adversarial, winner take all
discourse or on the basis of mutuality and learning or both or
neither. Obviously, if participants in the discussion favor one of
these modes of intertheoretic assessment over another less will be
accomplished than if another form of assessment is used. All I have
ever asserted in this discussion is that the adversarial stance some
Marxists have taken to Foucault seems to have reached a point of
diminishing returns and the work of Marsden, as well as, say, Donald
Lowe's "The Body in Late Capitalist USA" represent an acknowledgement
of this shift.

Ian