PRELUDE:
All of the names of various schools of thought are arbitrary and very
hard to pin down. For example, it's very difficult to argue against
"neoclassical" economics because it keeps on changing, and because the
opinions of individuals within that school differ from those of
others. A standard defense is to say that there is no such animal as a
neoclassical school. In fact, that defense is _correct_. Similarly,
one can validly say that there is no "postmodernism." (Of course, some
say that _nothing_ is valid, but that's another issue.) So I'll
refrain from using the term "postmodernism" below.
However, I wonder: how do we have serious arguments about intellectual
matters without some sort of abstraction? Is it simply a matter of
"just a bunch of individuals and individual cases" with no shared
intellectual visions at all? Also, even a single author can vary her
or his theoretical perspective between books and even between chapters
and paragraphs, so that it is mere _hubris_ to think that she or he
has a unified theory of any sort. Though empirical orientation is
absolutely necessary, empiricism (which I define for argument's sake
as a perspective that reduces everything to an empirical orientation)
is unsatisfying at best.[*] Worse, I doubt that anyone can think
without using some kind of theory. True and pure empiricism does not
exist, at least amongst humans.
For example, people with severe attention deficit disorder or on the
autism spectrum are quite anti-theoretical or empiricist, that is,
extremely concrete and empirical in their orientation toward the
external world. The problem with this is that their brains aren't set
up to easily decide which external stimuli are more important and have
a hard time filtering out what's inessential (as it were). They tend
to be overstimulated, which (at least in the case of those with
classic autism) encourages them to shut off the external world rather
than engaging with it. This makes it very hard for them to function in
the world of "neurotypical" human beings.
(NB: folks with ADD or ASD can be very abstract in their thinking,
however. Some folks with autism are great mathematicians. They have
"splinter skills," like the Rainman.)
FUGUE:
Doug Henwood forwarded my statements below to Rick Wolff for a comment:
me: >>Of course, there are NO standard definitions that aren't subject
to doubt, dispute, and ambiguity. But I
see Resnick & Wolff as "postmodern" because they reject
"essentialism," the idea that some factors in the historical process
may be more important than others.<<
Rick Wolff writes:
I am used to this sort of stuff. The critiques of essentialism (in
philosophy as in various of the social sciences and also, especially
recently, in the natural sciences) are legion and go way back
historically. Given that postmodernism is of much newer vintage and
usually refers to what came after modernism, it is simply wrong
historically and in relation to vast literatures to infer a
postmodernist position from an opposition to essentialism. So first of
all the sentence beginning with "But..." is a reflection of little
grasp of a long theoretical history. <
I don't know how Wolff can comment on a fragment from me (especially
since Doug seems to left out all the other things I've written on the
subject) by saying that I have "little grasp of a long theoretical
history." How does he know that? It's amazing that he can jump to such
a secure and final conclusion. How can one sentence be judged without
_any_ context?
I know it's hard -- if not impossible -- to read emotions correctly in
e-mail, but I sense a world-weary sneer in Wolff's prose. I don't see
how this is justified by a mere fragment of prose. (Maybe my sense
arises from the fact that I use the word "stuff" as a euphemism for
"shit.")
Giving myself the benefit of the doubt, it's possible that my
shorthand description was NOT about summarizing the essence of what
Wolff and Resnick as much as what distinguishes them from similar
thinkers who do not see the critique of essentialism as essential.
In that case, I was not reducing his school[**] to _merely_ an
opposition to essentialism. But Wolff does not seem to be conscious of
this possibility, likely because all he saw was a fragment and then
interpreted it in terms of his other experience.
Next, "essentialism" - like all other basic terms in philosophical or
theoretical discourse - has been variously interpreted and defined. A
serious discussion or debate would require someone to justify
whichever particular definition they were using within the context of
(a) recognizing the existence and circulation of other definitions,
and (b) recognizing the possibility that the "essentialism" one were
about to criticize might be defined in a way different from one's own.
My guess - although without more text I cannot be sure of
this - is that the critic and I don't share the same definitions of
either essentialism or postmodernism (since this often happens in
these sorts of dismissals). <
Again, I don't see how my fragment can be criticized of not presenting
a serious discussion or debate. After all, it was a _fragment_. In
addition, why does Wolff see my fragment as a "dismissal"? That's not
the way I saw it. I am glad that Wolff realizes that "more text" was
needed.
As for the fact that there is more than one definition, I say "well,
duh. Who didn't know that?" Here are at least two definitions of
"essentialism":
1. "idealist essentialism," going back to Plato, who saw the phenomena
of what we so arrogantly think of as the "real world," as being mere
imperfect reflections of ideal noumena (the forms). On the left, this
kind of idealism was seen, for example, in those who took the preface
to Marx's "Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy" as a
full-blown theory and then reified it, i.e., saw it not as an
empirical heuristic ("the guiding principle of my [Marx's] studies")
but as instead a fully-established truth.
2. "materialist or empirical essentialism": this is Marx's method that
I see in much if not most of his CAPITAL. For example, he looked at
the confusing world of extremely heterogeneous commodities in the real
world (starting with an empirical orientation as he wrote in the
methodological introduction to the GRUNDRISSE). He then looked at
(what he saw as) the _shared characteristics_ of those commodities,
which is what he presented
in the early chapters of the book. (One of the shared characteristics
is that commodities are part of a totality, i.e., commodity-producing
society.) These "shared characteristics" may be seen as "essences"
even though they do not exist independent of the objects being
studied. (BTW, Marx -- and especially Engels -- liked analogies from
chemistry here.)
I see the rejection of the first kind of essentialism as essential,
while I think the rejection of the second kind as silly. However, I
don't have the time or energy to defend this assertion at this point.
Let's be more specific. In terms of the debate about "historical
materialism," one could see (at least) three types of
"anti-essentialism."
Start with the Althusserian view (which in many ways reflects Engels'
view) rejects the hypothesis that "All of history can be explained in
terms of the clash between the forces of production and the relations
of production." Concrete history (i.e., specific events, etc.) cannot
be explained simply by reference to such abstractions. It is instead
understood by an overdetermined combination of different factors:
concrete "economic" or "political" events reflect not just economic
forces, but also political, cultural, ideological, etc. forces.
However, the clash between the FofP and the RofP represents a factor
like the slow movement of the tectonic plates under the earth's crust,
biasing the results of concrete results toward attainment of a final
result (what might be called socialism, to dredge up an old word).
This is "determination in the last instance."
Althusser famously stated that "the lonely hour of the last instance
never comes." If this is true (and I don't remember him arguing that
it was true), then there are at least three interpretations.
A. History might be like a railroad track (to change metaphors in
mid-stream), allowing humanity to go toward socialism or away from it.
(The track runs from classical slavery to feudalism to capitalism to
socialism to communism.) The choice of direction at any one time
depends on the concrete details of class struggle. The world might end
-- perhaps due to thermonuclear war, a big concern of Althusser's time
-- before we reach socialism. So the lonely hour of the last instance
may never come.
B. History is always concrete; it's nothing but the concrete. It's
nothing but the result of an overdetermined welter of heterogeneous
forces, which interpenetrate with each other and determine each
others' characters. There is no railroad track and no tectonic bias
toward any kind of final result. There is no lonely hour of the last
instance at all. Instead, we need to do empirical work on the various
different factors and how they all mesh together (or fail to mesh) to
form the concrete situation we see at any one time.
C. There is the idea that even though there is no railroad and no
tectonic bias, there are factors that are more important than others
in determining the nature of the historical process. The class nature
of society suggests that class struggle (of various forms, including
moving capitalist operations to China) plays a major role in
determining what's happening. Sure, gender and ethnic issues are also
extremely crucial. But some sort of rough ranking can be found, so
that the Moose Lodge and the local PTA are not as important as the
AFL-CIO or the Chamber of Commerce (though the AFL-CIO seems to be
moving toward Moose Lodge status). In addition, history is not simply
a matter of the concrete struggle of diffferent groups. The capitalist
system, unlike previous modes of production, has some well-known (and
some less well-known) abstract laws of motion which work independently
of the subjective goals of the various strugglers. These lead to
various kinds of crises, but not automatically to socialism or even
the creation of a socialist movement.
Postmodernism comes in widely different forms and with widely
different political and theoretical associations; in this it parallels
modernism. Thus, there are left postmodernists (including Marxists who
find parts of postmodernism welcome and integratable with their
Marxism) and also rightist postmodernists who hate Marxism (as they
understand it). Likewise there are Marxists who hate postmodernism. <
I said as much in an earlier missive, which Doug did not foward to Wolff.
And then, folks like Resnick and me who find postmodernism a major
intellectual movement with many historical antecedents, hence a
movement Marxism ought to interrogate as to its place in contemporary
intellectual and political history - an interrogation which should
include asking whether postmodernism, qua reaction against modernism
as a hallmark of modern bourgeois thought, might have something in
common with and something to contribute to Marxism as another kind of
reaction against modern bourgeois thought. Resnick and I undertook in
our work to carry through such an interrogation and drew therefrom a
number of valuable insights that we think complement and deepen the
kind of Marxism that is our prime interest. <
I was never aiming to sneer at or "dismiss" Wolff & Resnick's views
(though some on pen-l may want to do so). Maybe my following fragment
was misleading:
the term "Amherst school" of Marxism is not apt, since Bob Pollin
is himself at UMass-Ahmerst. I call the Wolff-Resnick school
"post-modernist Marxism." It's a mixed phenomenon, including both
post-modernism (boo!) and Marxism (yay!). But reasonable observers may
disagree with my value judgments.<<<
I don't see how people could miss the fact that "boo!" and "yay!" are
at least half facetious in this context.
CODA:
It's a mistake to bring someone into an discussion if they don't know
the full context of that discussion. In this case, it was unfair to
Wolff and, to a lesser extent, to me. Luckily, I enjoy intellectual
argumentation.
[*] Not being a Platonist, I see _all_ definitions as really being
"for argument's sake" or rather simply tools for facilitating
discussion with others and thought. I hope this was clear in my
fragment, too. (Definitions aren't totally arbitrary if they have an
empirical referent.)
[**] Is this a school of merely two people? or is it just him, since
he must disagree with Resnick about _something_? should we reject the
concept of "school" altogether?
--
Jim Devine / "Knowledge is good." -- the Motto of Faber College.
