On Tue, 11 Feb 1997, malgosia askanas wrote:
> The statement: "It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities
> to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was
> always that power could be undermined by truth" implies a view of power in
> which power is something separate from and opposed to "minorities", who
> (as a reward for their powerlessless) have access to "truth" -- which,
> as we're all supposedly know, is either coextensive with Goodness (which, in
> turn, is coextensive with meekness and not mucking with power) or Goodness'
> reward. But this "minority truth", if it is worth anything, is just as much
> tied to power, the will to power, as any "official" truth. Ryan's (or Sokal's)
> view is the one that F himself summarizes in LCP: "Popular movements, on the
> other hand, are said to arise from famines, taxes, or unemployment; and
> they never appear as the result of a struggle for power, as if the masses
> could dream of a full stomach but never of exercising power." In this view,
> truth appears as something to consume, an apple offered by the goodness of
> Nature for the thirsty tourist, uncultivated by the human hand and having
> no part in any human struggles, except to occasionally embarrass those who
> are Evil because they wield power. These views, as "serious" social ideas,
> are laughable, in a manner that owes nothing to the existence of Foucault,
> let alone Derrida. I think they would be just as laughable to, say, Marx.
>
>
>
> -m
>
May I second the response above provided by Malagosia? Sokal, by the way,
calls himself a "Marxist and a feminist," but clearly one does not have to
read the postmoderns to confront a problematization of truth. We can think
here of Marx's comment in _Wage, Labour, and Capital_ that a spinning
jenny spins cotton, but only becomes capital in the context of determinate
social relations.
--John
> The statement: "It is, for instance, pretty suicidal for embattled minorities
> to embrace Michel Foucault, let alone Jacques Derrida. The minority view was
> always that power could be undermined by truth" implies a view of power in
> which power is something separate from and opposed to "minorities", who
> (as a reward for their powerlessless) have access to "truth" -- which,
> as we're all supposedly know, is either coextensive with Goodness (which, in
> turn, is coextensive with meekness and not mucking with power) or Goodness'
> reward. But this "minority truth", if it is worth anything, is just as much
> tied to power, the will to power, as any "official" truth. Ryan's (or Sokal's)
> view is the one that F himself summarizes in LCP: "Popular movements, on the
> other hand, are said to arise from famines, taxes, or unemployment; and
> they never appear as the result of a struggle for power, as if the masses
> could dream of a full stomach but never of exercising power." In this view,
> truth appears as something to consume, an apple offered by the goodness of
> Nature for the thirsty tourist, uncultivated by the human hand and having
> no part in any human struggles, except to occasionally embarrass those who
> are Evil because they wield power. These views, as "serious" social ideas,
> are laughable, in a manner that owes nothing to the existence of Foucault,
> let alone Derrida. I think they would be just as laughable to, say, Marx.
>
>
>
> -m
>
May I second the response above provided by Malagosia? Sokal, by the way,
calls himself a "Marxist and a feminist," but clearly one does not have to
read the postmoderns to confront a problematization of truth. We can think
here of Marx's comment in _Wage, Labour, and Capital_ that a spinning
jenny spins cotton, but only becomes capital in the context of determinate
social relations.
--John