From djones@uclink.berkeley.edu  Sun Apr 20 03:33:40 1997
From: djones@uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 18:33:40 -0800
Subject: M-TH: PANIC LEFTIST: FRAME THIRTEEN
Message-ID: <v02130500af7f26375b51@[136.152.76.151]>

I agree with Brian's argument here (reproduced below). For two attempts to
work out a methodology of social science broadly consistent with what Brian
has suggested here, see Pierre Bourdieu, The Craft of Sociology:
Epistemological Preliminaries (who emphasizes the need to break with the
spontaneous sociology of common sense) and Derek Sayer: Marx's Method:
Science, Ideology and Critique. I cannot recommend highly enough the latter
book.

(One criticism: D Sayer, like II Rubin before him, *seems* to understand
the law of value as an equilibriating mechanism, a mistake exposed in
Mattick's *Marxism: the last refuge of the bourgeoisie*; on the other hand,
Sayer provides a tremendously illuminating analysis of Marx's *social*
theory of value and the peculiarities of the value form, in particular why
it is, strangely enough,  that the value of a commodity can *only* be
re-presented in so many physical units of another commodity, therefore
putting our social relations at the whim of relations between things.)

Sayer's book was celebrated in the early 80s, and it would be terrible if
this work were unknown to those of us beginning the study of Marx. I would
have been spared much confusion if I had read this book earlier. Not only
is it best read before the works of Patrick Murray and Moishe Postone,
Sayer sets the stage for more general debates in social science
methodology.

Rakesh

 No common-sensical language can offer a
>sustained analysis: it may give us a broad DESCRIPTION. . . but
>EXPLANATION always requires a language which is alien to common sense
>because KNOWING rigorously is to negate the common sense, to seek the
>abstract STRUCTURES that allow the representation of the common sense to
>take the shape it takes.
>
>This is also the frame of our critique of EXPERIENCE: experience is a
>marker of the "common sense."  One experiences oppression as a woman, a
>lesbian, a gay man, an African American. . . but one cannot EXPLAIN that
>oppression in terms of EXPERIENCE.  One has to know the conditions of
>possibility of that EXPERIENCE--which are always historical and material.
>It is therefore not a question of negating BUT attempting to know
>EXPERIENCE.  An affect is not knowledge and all analyses require
>knowledge. . . and knowledge is historical. . . not personal




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