I've only just crawled, battered but unbowed (coz, bugger it, I still think I
was in the right of it), from an LBO-Talk skirmish on this sort of question,
and I do not propose to repeat the dose here, but do think (as I'm sure Lou
does) that Hardt makes too little of the problems Marxian thinking and postie
thinking have with each other. Nietzchean total-critique-of-truth is a
*fundamental* problem, for mine, yet marks quite a lot of postie thinking..
And that neo-Weberian tendency to look to the rationality of modernity as the
point of departure, rather than class, takes us away from history on a
hopelessly idealist plane.
I'll say no more on that (sighs of relief all 'round, I'm sure), but Yoshie is
giving us something of a good example of where postism can take us in this
latter respect. H&N's refusal to engage with the class relationships causes
them not to notice the slip they make (the category error of equating the
feudalism -> capitalism transition with the development towards whatever
'globalism' might mean to them. And this sort of unsubstantiated info-global
exceptionalism has been all over the academy for yonks - from Bell to
Negroponte to Castells - saliently getting nobody anywhere ... )
Anyway, back to a droopy Japan and a wheezing Wall St ...
Cheers,
Rob.
