Re: Future of Europe (Tausch vs Derrida-Habermas)

On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, Andre Gunder Frank wrote:

|be overcome. you got any suggestios on how to do it?
|personalizing and paulo says i always do,  is there amny point in my
|stuff under the circumstances, sinc competing with the pomos i am beaten
|before ii start.  i of course notice the overlap wiuth them in the
|critical part of what we/I do, and i often make special note of it. if
|the materialist addition of an alternative to the received wisdom is
|falling on death ears because its not pomo, then why bathere with
|it. and then i/we would do better in reaching our audience by  pomoizing
|the critical part where we agree,
|
|so what is to be doone?

the primacy of material forces was asserted *in the final instance*, not in
every low-abstraction instance of social situations, by the greatest
materialists I know. pretty much none of the sociology and the related
disciplines do touch what Marx referred to as "the final instance". that is
the realm of philosophical reflections, i.e., meta-level abstraction from the
analytical content provided by the disciplines (recall that it is Marx's
philosophy what is called historical and dialectical materialism).

insitutional actors of material exploitation always use political means to
achieve discursive (ideational, cultural) legitimacy to support their power.
counterveiling forces to such exploitative practices will also always use
discursive and political means to achieve material change. hence i think a
dismissal of "culture" from economic - political (political-economic, etc.)
analysis is as much a fallacy as the hiding behind words many of us feel the
postmodern analysis practices.

so, in my opinion, what is to be done is a concrete analysis of concrete
historical conjunctures, one that takes material as well as ideational forces
into account and aims to understand change (in a ruthlessly
non-self-deceptively dialectical fashion, i.e., without teleology or
self-justification).

József Böröcz
_______________________________________________________________________

Associate Professor of Sociology    http://borocz.net
Rutgers University                  email: jozsef@borocz.net
54 Joyce Kilmer Ave                 fax: 1(732)445-0974
Piscataway, NJ 08854-8045 U.S.A.    phone: 1(732)445-2435
_______________________________________________________________________

[ Empire's New Clothes: Unveiling EU-Enlargement                         ]
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