From owner-marxism-international  Mon Apr 14 17:06:33 1997
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 17:05:58 -0400 (EDT)
From: Stephen C Tumino <sctumino@acsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT-9
Message-ID: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970414165430.27282A-100000@lictor.acsu.buffalo.edu>




--------------------------------------------
Revolutionary Marxist Collective Buffalo/SUNY




PANIC LEFT-9



The "conversation" about Althusser and the idea of "epistemological break"
is one more indication of the philosophical insularity of the reformist
left. 

Jon Beasley-Murray, for instance, regards the "epistemological break" to
be the effect of "someone"'s desire: "someone" wills themselves into a new
state of things (from "ideology' to "science")!  Althusser's notion of
"break", needless to say, has nothing to do with "someone"--that would
indeed be a "humanist" fallacy.  "Epistemological break," is a matter of
systemic transformation and has nothing to do with "someone".  Paul
Zarembka, echoes this humanism by saying that yes, we need more "break"
and "break is liberation" and then offers PERSONAL TESTIMONY: he, we
learn, has gone through a personal "break" in thought: "I myself FEEL I
went through a break in thinking".  Which, of course, raises the question
of "experience" (I FEEL) and its place in the "break". Althusser, in a
number of texts has argued that "experience" is not the same as "truth".
On the contrary ,"lived experience" is identical with "ideology" (LENIN
AND PHILOSOPHY, p. 223). The "lived" experience, to repeat, is, according
to Althusser, "not..given by a pure `reality'" but is a construct. To say
that "I FEEL" that I have gone through a "break" then is basically to deny
the historicity of the "experience" and the "instutional" and "discursive" 
conditions that made that "experience" a possibility. Paul Zarembka then,
offers his own "experience" as a panhistorical evidence which is another
way of saying he wants us to take it as the equivalent of a "scientific" 
experiment or at least a rigorous theoretical analysis! 

Levy is more cautious in his discussion of the "break": he steps back from 
embracing unquestioningly the humanism of Zarembka but dodges the theoretical 
questions. He instead provides a "description" : gives an annotation of 
Althusser's notion of break, etc. 

However, no "explanation" (as opposed to "description") of Althusser's
notion of "epistemological break" can be offered on the level of close
reading/annotation.  A theoretical analysis is needed to situate the
concept of "epistemological break" in the general theory of science and
then ask questions about the politics of the concept. Levy himself, in his
thick annotations provides the preliminary "descriptive" frame for such a
theoretical inquiry. He points out that the idea of the "break" comes from
the philosophy of science (G. Bachelard) but, as we have already said,
instead of theorizing the question gives a "description" of it.

Bachelard's notion of "break" is part of the idealist philosphy of science
in which the materialist idea of "truth" (based on an objective world
beyond the "interpretation" of the subject) is erased from the scene of
knowledge. In place of a "materialist" theory, Bachelard puts forth a
"conventionalist" view of truth--a view which is now the core of ludic 
pomo epistemology and is popularized as "cultural" or "social" 
CONSTRUCTIONISM by, among others, Donna Haraway (CYBORG theory of truth, 
etc.) and various forms of neo-marxism (that are regularly published in 
RETHINKING MARXISM, SOCIAL TEXT, NEW FORMATION (London) and in the more recent 
issues of SOCIALIST REVIEW (since Duke University Press took it over...).

It is, however, not only the "conventionalist" theory of truth which is at
stake here. A set of formalist theories of science--which are (as Levy
points out) now best known through Kuhn's idea of "paradigm" are also
necessary to fully understand the idealist nature of Althusserian notion
of "epistemological break". For Kuhn it is not the contradictions between
the forces of production and the social relations of production that makes
the "questions" of science (in science) possible (Marx, CRITIQUE OF
POLITICAL ECONOMY), but the immanent laws of scientific discovery (the
culture of science) themselves. The "normal" sciences, as the result of
such internal changes, are subject to sudden mutations (breaks)....

The notion of "epistemological break" has played a fundamental role in
contemporary theory of social change and theory of history--through the
mediation of texts by Foucault (a student of Althusser). In Foucault the
notion of "epistemological break" works by the concept of "episteme" and
sets up two models of idealist historiography: history-as-archeology (the
role of discouse and discursive formations) and the notion of
history-as-genealogy (the calculus of POWER). These Foucauldean views are
now the founding concepts of NEW HISTORICISM which is deployed to
marginalize Marxist theories of hisory. 

Althusser's idea of break, in short, is part of a larger bourgeois
idealist theory of history and science.  This idealist move, denies the
materialist idea of transformation through continuity (that is social
change as the logic of historical necessity) and in its place puts the
notion of change as "aleatory": change as an "excess" that cannot be
explained by "historical necessity".  History as a series of aleatory
changes is history--as Foucault argues--as series of DISCONTINUITIES. A
series, that is, of "new" beginnings each with its own autonomous logic
free ("liberated" to use Paul Zarembka's word) from the very conditions
that have made it a necessity.  Russell Pearson, in an annotation of
Zarembka's comments indicates that it is specifically the series of
discontinuties between "agency" and "production" (each with its own logic
apart from the other--both working "simultaneously" but not in any
"necessary"  relationship) that drive history forward. 


History as the site of the "alea", a series of discontinuties is an
understanding that is particularly helpful to capitalism which constantly
re-invents and re-writes its own history and in each new re-writing
"liberates" itself from its previous contradictions....(see M. Zavarzadeh,
"post-ality" in TRANSFORMATION # 1:  MARXISM AND POSTMODERNISM). It is by
means of history as genealogy--breaks--that, Stanley Aronowitz and others
for instance argue that we have entered a post-al moment in history: a
moment in which the present of capitalism has nothing to do with its past. 
This "new" capitalism is discontinuous with the capitalism before it (it
has undergone an epistemological break) and unlike before, it is now free
>from "exploitation".  This is so because it is "knowledge" (not labor as
in previous capitalism) that is the source of wealth.  It is such a theory
that also constutiues the foundation of all end-of-the work theories (e.g.
J. Rifkin).  This is also the theory that "informs"  most of recent
analyses of Zaire on this list.... 


Althusser's theory of "epistemological breaks" in Marx reduces the
historical complexities of Marx's work by re-inventing Marx over and over
again. The results is "several" Marxes.  There is, of course, only one
Marx whose work is not so much a subject of mutations, the alea or
epistemological breaks but historical continuity ("necessity"): the
changes in Marx's work are most effectively explained by dialectical
transformations. 











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