From rws@comserver.canberra.edu.au  Sat Apr 19 10:48:52 1997
From: rws@comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Date: Sat, 19 Apr 1997 19:48:52 +1000
Subject: M-TH: How to spend lunch (aka sad bastard).
Message-ID: <199704190847.SAA27498@comserver.canberra.edu.au>

G'day Thaxists,

Russell's response to the Buffalo challenge was compelling, but he had to
stop (the forces of production confronting relations yet again) just as I
thought I was about to get an answer to something that has long worried me.
 I'll try to organise my own tangential take on this to contextualise the
question that bugs me.

Aristotle's point:  humans are definitively, essentially social beings;

Hegel' point:  human identities are definitively, essentially constructed
in social interaction, ie relationally;

Marx's point:  these relations are conditioned by the dominant mode of
production and themselves are logically capable of 'naturalising' that mode
(tending to reproduce it) or delegitimising that mode (tending to transform
it);

Adorno's point:  communication is problematic because you can't cram the
object of apprehension neatly into its concept (tension between 'text' and
'real'?) - there will always be bits left out, creating unspoken (thus
neglected and/or violated) 'others' - 'respectful agonism' should be the
goal, not the unattainable 'harmony'.  Industrial culture leaves much that
is 'true' or 'human' out in its mode of discourse.

Gramsci's (and Williams's) point:  hegemony is never complete.  Residual
and emerging meanings are always interacting (chaotically and
unpredictably) within the superstructure and with the base.

Habermas's point (at least through my less 'reconstructed' eyes):  given
the industrial system's colonisation of 'the lifeworld', and given that
communication is how delegitimising, the fundamental precondition for
transformation, must come about - how, and in what circumstances, does the
proletariat's objective (if Adorno would allow me the term) growth and
commonality of material grievance translate into the historically necessary
'class for itself'?  

My question (among the many I have no doubt just engendered):  How do you
get from 'respectful agonism', through the 'system's' imposed 'harmony', to
fundamental concepts like class self-recognition and co-ordinated action?

Any criticism or speculation gratefully accepted.

Yours hopefully,
Rob.



>Looking through some earlier mails I chanced upon this pearler from the
>Buffers:
>
>"I challenge these critics to explain how they conceive of the historicity
>and materiality of language and discourse, and of semiosis and
>communication."
>
>Language's historicity is undermined by de Saussure's designation of
>meaning into the binary of the sign. The laws that structure this process
>become ahistorical and the structuralist tragedy is that change can only be
>explained through a theory of radical breaks. 
>By splitting the sign into signifier and signified de Saussure is able to
>remove and bracket the referent, thus  rendering any recourse to
>materiality a dead dog before and after the event (apriori/post fido as
>Hugh might put it). As such, semiotics, re-rehearses the marginal utility
>theory of value (which not incidentally, de Saussure likens his linguistics
>to), in which all meanings, values, expressions become merely relational.
>As Derrida points out this creates an endless _play_ of meaning, which
>therefore endlessly questions any material relationship between the 'text'
>and the 'real' 
>
>Discourse theory attempts, but ultimately fails, to restore some sort of
>connection between the two. In its Foucauldian form it presents a
>hyper-materialism with power centred on the body and the discursive
>practices that control the body. But this is tempered by a hyper-idealism:
>the knowledge practices that 'coquette' with this power are mere
>conventions. Thus, as with Foucault's teacher, old Louis, we end up with a
>Marx turned upside down but one that that fails to become Hegel.
>
>Now I can't be arsed to go onto communication. It's the end of my lunch
>break and I have to earn a crust. 
>
>
>Best Wishes,
>
>
>Russell Pearson.
>
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