Postmodernism: Materialist? [re-posting]

[rdumain@igc.org]

I fear this discussion is too easily going astray.  I'm not sure if the situation is repairable.

For my part, I apologize for the sloppiness of my definitions, but I've been wirting in a rush, and definitions are not my strong point anyway.  So forgive me if I fudge the issue of causality.  However, causality is of relevance to our discussion in one important respect: it's a shorthand way of dealing with the issue of the social origins (hence causes) of ideas.  Since historical materialism, and other sociological positions outside of Marxism proper with similar concerns, purport to give some account of the social origins of ideas beyond the disinterested production of ideas sui generis, one could loosely assert that one takes a historical materialist position regarding the production of ideas.  So when you ask if a theory is materialist, do you mean in this sociological sense or in the traditional philosophical sense of ontologically materialist or even (if this makes terminological sense) epistemologically materialist (i.e. that the world is knowable by means of a combin!
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ation of rational and empirical methods becuase the world and our cognitive apparatus which it is a product are rooted in matter)?

Now idealists in practice can be very slippery about their commitments.  Some people will talk about the real world "out there" (Out where?  how far away from where you're at?) as if that's some distant impenetrable fantasy concept.  Others will try to appear less ridiculous by saying, well of course no one questions the objective existence of a world independent of our subjective thoughts, but .... This is the latter tack taken by the defenders of the SOCIAL TEXT charlatans in THE NEW YORK TIMES after Sokal's hoax embarrassed them. Yet if you examine their arguments, any question of an objective world or verifiability of any truths about it has been banished from their world view.  There is no rational accountability, and therein one is idealist to the core, no matter what escape clauses one may wish to invoke.

There is yet another sense (not yet discussed here) of the traditional Marxist use of "materialism" and "idealism", which has a long history but is still not recognized within western academe.  That is, the materialism or idealism of a theory does not lie solely in whether it declares matter as the fundmental ontological reality, but the entire structure of the theory determines whether it is concretely materialist or an idealist construction.  We could take something like Nazi race theory, or for that matter, racist IQ theory, as an example. It purports to have a biological explanation for social behavior: biology is something physical and material, right?--yet it is clear that the entire structure of the racialist ideology is not supported by real knowledge of the material world, but is a distorted metaphysical fabrication, and hence idealist in Marxist terms.  So here is yet one more decisive criterion to apply.  Hence, if we are going to evaluate Deleuze, to take Jukka's e!
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xample, we have to scrutinize his "materialism" to see if that's really what it is, or whether it's just another idealist construction no matter what it claims.

I'm not going to delve into "postmodernism" further now; I'll leave that to others to straighten out.  But I am troubled by some of the directions the discussion has taken.  Ben Day defends some of the pomos on political grounds because of the political positions they have taken or radical politics engaged in in the past.  Jim J. attacks any theory that does not explicitly posit the possibility of a post-capitalist society and make the classless society part of the philosophy itself.  But what gets lost in this fruitless debate is the actual objectivity of thought itself, as well as the effects of ways of thought on the human mind.  If there is demoralization involved in contemporary theory--and there surely is--here is where you will find it.  Obscurantism is harmful because of the way it functions cognitively, just as enlightening thought is beneficial becuase of its power to orient and clarify.  A philosophical approach always embodies a certain morality concerning the purs!
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uit of truth, and you will always find, always and always, that when somebody fucks with your mind, there's some other skullduggery afoot as well, even if that person is up to his eyeballs in radical politics.  It is already bad faith to hold the human mind so cheap that one thinks one has the right to degrade it in pursuit of external pragmatic ends.  Taking such shortcuts never works in the end.  Social movements based on lies (and that includes liberation theology as one important example about which the guilt-ridden left is so pious) reveal much about the immaturity of human development--about the mystification of human relations as well as of cognition.  But the development of human beings--which means their minds above all--is an absolute value; socialism can have no other meaning than that.  While we have no choice but to work with the human ignorance that history imposes upon us, the inability to overcome it is a real, non-arbitrary measure of how far we have to go.  T!
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he malfunctioning political conditioning that leads to the way both Ben and Jim express their valuation of ideas is one of the main reasons I have parted company with both the academic and activist left.