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

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

Ian:

>  > 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".

One favors thinking outside received categories *when* they are
either false or inadequate.  But why ditch categories that make for
effective explanations, as categories used by Marx are?  That doesn't
make sense to me.  (If you think of some categories used by Marx as
either false & inadequate, which should be replaced by Foucault's,
you might _explain what they are & why_.)

Moreover, in the case of Foucault, he first of all misunderstood how
Marx used such categories as commodity, thus his criticism of Marx
was unfortunately based upon his (willful?) misunderstanding of Marx
(Cf. Doug's remark upon the anxiety of influence).  On this point,
see for instance Abdul Janmohamed, "Refiguring Values, Power,
Knowledge: or Foucault's Disavowal of Marx," _Whither Marxism?:
Global Crises in International Perspective (edited and with an
introduction by Bernd Magnus and Stephen Cullenberg, NY: Routledge,
1995).

> 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.

There is no need for going outside Marxism to make use of
reflexivity.  Nominalism is a dead end, for instance leading to an
understanding of mental illnesses that leaves out biology altogether
& degenerates into a labeling theory of deviance.

> 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.

Remember that adversarial stance is toward not each and everything
that Foucault ever wrote -- it is taken toward his theoretical
premises & conclusions that are not compatible with Marxism as theory
& political project -- incompatibility that post-Marxist
post-modernists themselves trumpet.

If you want us to take a look at works by Marsden & Lowe, you might
explain why we should in more concrete terms.

Yoshie

P.S.  Your posts, except for forwards, are increasingly content-less,
and it's not clear to me what you are arguing _for_ at all, except
that you disagree with me.  Especially your latest:

At 12:23 PM -0700 6/15/01, Ian Murray wrote:
>  > That's what
> >  is implicit in Marx's works, made clearer by Lenin's criticism of
> >  Economism (which also serves as criticism of narrowly focused social
> >  movements):
> >
> >  *****   Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers
> >  only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle,
> >  from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers.
> >  The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge
>  > is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state
> >  and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all
> >  classes.  For that reason, the reply to the question as to what must
> >  be done to bring political knowledge to the workers cannot be merely
>  > the answer with which, in the majority of cases, the practical
> >  workers, especially those inclined towards Economism, mostly content
> >  themselves, namely: "To go among the workers."  To bring political
> >  knowledge to the workers the Social Democrats must go among all
> >  classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their army in
> >  all directions.
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/what-itd/ch03.htm#03
> _A>
> >  *****
> =========
> Hence the social scientist's quest for the archimedian point/olympian
> epistemology and know-it-all vanguardism are to be repeated? Lot's of
> metaphor to decontruct in 'ol Vlady's rhetoric....
>
> Ian

Here, you are just repeating post-it buzzwords.  So much for
"thinking 'outside' received categories," moving beyond adversarial
stance, arguing against "a methodological zero-sum game," etc.
Thanks for your post-modern dogma.  The end of discussion.