Showing papers in "Thesis Eleven in 1989"

The State Of The Subject Today

Abstract: us once again. All this talk about the death of man and the end of the subject has never been anything other than a pseudotheoretical cover for an evasion of responsibility--on the part of the psychoanalyst, the thinker, the citizen. Similarly, today’s boisterous proclamations about the return of the subject, like the alleged &dquo;individualism&dquo; that accompanies it, mask the drift of decomposition under another of its forms. The subject has not just returned, for it never left. It was al-

Sociological Responses to Postmodernity

Abstract: nomena. In some cases, they focus narrowly on arts. In some other, they spill over to include a wider spectrum of cultural forms and precepts. In a few cases they reach deeper, into the fundamental preconceptions of contemporary consciousness. Rarely, if at all, they step beyond the boundary of the spiritual, into the changing social figuration which the artistic, cultural and cognitive developments, bracketed as postmodern, may reflect. Such a self-limitation of the postmodernity discourse, and its legitimacy, is of crucial importance for the future of sociology. Indeed, if postmodernity means what the current concepts imply:

Narrativity And Interpretation: On Hermeneutical And Structuralist Approaches To Culture

Abstract: The dominance of the problematic of culture, variously interpreted, preoccupies the contemporary social sciences. This concern has two dimensions. Firstly, it leads towards attempts to thematize social life in a radically non-functionalist manner. In this context its most serious rival is the problematic of power. Secondly, it leads to a parallel and complementary reinterpretation of the history of the social sciences. Thinkers that we previously thought we knew are being re-read in the context of this renewed concern with culture. Thinkers such as Marx, Durkheim and Weber are being read not only for the analyses of the cultural presuppositions of modernity that can be discerned in their works, but for the non-functionalist theoretical framework that can be reconstructed from their works. What I want to do in this paper is to examine the pre-history of this culturalist shift in the contemporary social sciences by examining two of its most potent sources: French anthropology and German hermeneutical philosophy.

From The Shores Of Reason To The Horizon Of Meaning: Some Remarks On Habermas' And Castoriadis' Theories Of Culture

Abstract: It has been extensively argued that Marx came up against the problem of the patterns of interpretative self-understanding when addressing the nature and dynamics of both class contestation and social change. He was in each case confronted by the internal limits of his theory construction-the paradigm of production-which circumscribed the way in which worldviews or &dquo;cultural interpretative systems&dquo; 1 were constituted and analyzed by him. This is a limitation that has now once again pre-occupied social theory in a systematic way, notwithstanding systematic treatment of this problem-&dquo;what is culture?&dquo;-by some of sociology’s other founding figures, in particular Durkheim and Weber. The problem of the role of culture can be presented by wccy of the following thesis: society is constituted as a series of objectivations that

Jürgen Habermas and the Discourse of Postmodernity

Abstract: guishes his personal evolution and the form that Critical Theory should take today from the positions of its founders, Adorno and Horkheimer.1 This &dquo;revision&dquo; has been undertaken under the double pressure of the new tasks imposed by a profoundly changed socio-economic environrr’ent2 and by &dquo;postmodern&dquo; philosophical and sociological theories, whose ideological impact threatens to supplant the influence of Critical Theory, which was practically uncontested fifteen or twenty years ago, not only in France and the USA but also in the Federal Republic of Germany itself. At the very least they represent a challenge to Critical Theory. 3 Given the combative vigour of his not always nuanced polemical statements and the tenacity with which in his successive works4 he seeks to reformulate the grounding of modern reason in order to reaffirm its &dquo;normative content&dquo; and binding nature (Verbindlichkeit), it is not an exaggeration to say that Jurgen Habermas has taken up this challenge. He does not want to be the continuer of Critical Theory because that has become impossible, but neither does he want to be its liquidator (NU209), for what is involved, as he sees it, is the fate of enlightenment, the express theme of the two programmatic texts of 1937 of Marcuse and Horkheimer. At issue, however, is the question how far his &dquo;engagement for reason&dquo;, in the form it has taken in the Theory of Communicative Action, can confront the new stage of the dialectic of enlightenment which is the postmodern condition.

The Techno-Structures of Society

Abstract: According to this famous quotation from Hegel, philosophy arrives late on the scene. I ask myself whether sociology does not come even later, perhaps too late. If the desideratum of a sociology of technology was first voiced in 1982’ and sociological research on technology has only recently been established, then sociology really is too late. Of course, in a certain respect there has been a sociology of technology for a long time, at least since Marx in the traditional sense of &dquo;Technology and Social Change&dquo;. Traditionally, technology has been viewed as a cause or

Martin Walker, The Waking Giant: The Soviet Union Under Gorbachev (Abacus, 1988):

Abstract: Author of numerous books on Gramsci and Eurocommunism, Carl Boggs now attempts to follow radicalism into a similar terrain to that charted by Laclau and Mouffe, this time with a special emphasis on American populism and the German Greens. Boggs argues that ’social democratization’ is a general, Michelslike process which takes in all tendencies-including American populism-except the Greens. The Greens represent the only obvious hope, but for their &dquo;romanticism&dquo;; Boggs identifies the problem here as a need for strategic intervention around the specific theme of &dquo;social conversion&dquo; programs in the manner of Lucas Aerospace. He attempts, in short, to wed Marxism and post-Marxism; the canons of judgment seem to shift from one to the next, depending on the strength of Boggs’ commitment to class analysis, so, for example, that social movements are continually criticized on the grounds that they do not frontally address the question of (state) political power. It is not impossible that Boggs here is both too negative about political parties and too positive about social movements. It is, of course, for us to argue whether these are false promises or false premises. Boggs’ book is an important attempt to connect across the Atlantic and across radical cultures, and its author’s is an important voice in these debates. But we end, finally, where in a sense we started: with the problem of democracy itself, with the unresolved problems of the legacy of 1789, rather than 1917. Hopefully this might be the next intellectual challenge for Boggs to take up.

Hermeneutic As Europe's Mainstream Political Tradition

Abstract: The nunc stans of today’s Europeans is the feeling that the &dquo;European project&dquo; or tradition has increasingly become problematic. At the same time, it is gradually dawning upon us that hermeneutic, which for a long time transpired as an innocent Romantic innovation within the sanctuary of the Academia, has been an inherent and permanent constituent of the European project. We now begin to see that it has not just been

Reviews : David Boucher, Texts in Context: Revisionist Methods for Studying the History of Ideas (Martinus Nijhoff, Dordrecht, 1985):

Abstract: A final point about Politics in the Communist World is that its breadth almost defeats it, and in the hands of a lesser writer probably would have. While most examples in the book are drawn from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and China it does attempt to cover the entire communist world. This comprises not just many extraordinarily divergent nations, but also nations at very different stages of development. The structure of the book makes little allowance for perceiving the features described within a dynamic, historically developing, context. Despite this Politics remains a very good textbook, and its range reflects merit on its author. Indeed it would make an excellent companion to Westoby’s superb study Communism Since World War Two which, because of its historical approach, to some extent avoids the problems in Holmes’ study, yet doesn’t explore as deeply most of the themes taken up in his book.

The Soul and Forms of Georg Lukács

Abstract: The critic is one who glimpses destiny in forms: whose most profound experience is the soul-content which forms indi rectly and unconsciously conceal within themselves.1Georg Lukacs, 1910.