Re: Geras vs Laclau

["Justin Schwartz" <jkschw@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> You're right this will go nowhere unless we explain their respective
> positions. I was afraid to be locked-in elaborating the little I know. If
> I recall Laclau's point is that there are different, even conflicting
> ways to 'see' a soccer ball, no one view being all-inclusive or
> capable of telling you what the ball is really like - a common
> argument which is consistent with the realist claim that the ball
> exists outside the interpreter.

OK, but this is an old point, due to Kant, and while true, it is not
informative about the question of realism. After all, no one pretends his
account of whatever, given by fallible humans in real time, is complete. But
that does not mean that there is not a complete account that could in
principle be given; it does not mean that an adequate account is not a
fragment of that complete account; it does not mean that accounts that are
inconsistent with that complete account (or with each other) are acceptable,
in fact, it tells us zippo, except to be modest and careful. Which is
important, but not news. I don't know why it is supposed to be newsto
historical materialists, who have always emphasized the partiality of
knowledge claims nad the interestedness of inquiry.

I refreshed my recollection of LaClau and Mouffe last night, saw that they
say that they don't deny that there are earthquakes and trees that are
independent of our "discourses," but they insist that our discourses about
earthquakes are trees are discursive. This is an obvious platitude. They
deny that we can know earthquakes and trees as they are. Thsi does not
follow from the discursive nature of our discourses. Our discourses might be
true and correct, and therefore represent earthquakes and trees as they are.
To put it in the terms I did in the last paragraph, our discourses might be
fragments of the total true story that we, in out limited way, can aspire to
but never attain.

If L&M's point is that we cannot get outside our discourses to compare them
with their earthquakes and trees, no duh, but this claim does not have the
skeptical consequences some have claimed--and which L&M certianly toy with.
Knowledge is a property of discourse: it is the sentences we believe tahe
are true or false. If the point is that we cannot know for sure whether they
are, well, historical materialists say, grow up, live with it. No one ever
promised you certainty. So what is the point of harping on the discursive
nature of discourse? It is without interesting epistemological or
metaphysical consequences.


> The complaint that L&M offer a simplistic, straw man version of
> historical materialism is one that no marxist will ever fail to make.
> Marxists  have outdone Ptolemy in their deployment of epycycles,
> eccentrics, and equants, in all sorts of contradictory combinations,
> to reconcile their theories with observed phenomena. But this
> accusation is a red herring. *Hegemony* is exactly an examination
> of the many, yes, creative strategies marxist have employed to
> overcome monocausal explanations. L&M's conclusion, after
> detailing many such strategies - by Plekhanov, Kautsky, Lenin,
> Luxemburg, Althusser, Gramsci, and others - is the correct one
> that, "whatever the level of complexity in the system of mediations"
> achieved, everyone retained the metaphysical idea that there was a
> "single underlying principle fixing - and hence constituting - the
> whole field of differences".

In other words, you admit that Geras is right in hsi criticism, that L&M
insist that the "essence" of Marxism is class reductionism, and that anyone
who insiste on the importance of class but amplifies it with other
considerations is inconsistent in abandoning the "essence."  I reread L&M's
discussion, and thought that Geras has them dead to rights. They have a
straw man that no serious historical materialist has ever maintained. L&M
reject _any_ attempt to give explanatory primacy to some causal factor,
insisting as a matter of _principle_ that all explanatory factors are of
equal or indeterminate weight, and  they say, quite clearly, that class is
not one that should be given serious weight at all--not because they think
it lacks serious weight, but because it would be politically foolish to
collapse back into Marxsim with with bad essentialism. L&M, in rejecting
explanatory primacy as  matter of principle, thereby reject explanation in
social theory, except in a local sense in microcontext, and they urge us to
avoud cloass as a factor even in those microexplanations. This is
intellectual nihilism.

--jks
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