From jpb8@acpub.duke.edu  Tue Apr 15 02:23:24 1997
From: jpb8@acpub.duke.edu (Jon Beasley-Murray)
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 1997 21:23:24 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: M-TH: More Althusser
In-Reply-To: <Pine.GSO.3.95.970414165430.27282A-100000@lictor.acsu.buffalo.edu>
Message-ID: <Pine.SOL.3.91.970414211235.7497D-100000@godzilla2.acpub.duke.edu>

On Mon, 14 Apr 1997, Stephen C Tumino wrote:

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

No.  And in any case, filling a message with references does not move you 
on to some new continent of philosophical enquiry.

> 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")!  

No.  But it certainly is a question of agency--socially constituted, of 
course.  I was making this point in contrast to Andrew Austin's reading 
of Althusser's agentless anti-humanism.

> 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".  

So what constitutes a systemic transformation?  Not that there is an easy 
answer, but you seem to think that pointing (again) to the question of 
systemic transformation provides some kind of answer--"needless to say."  
Too easy, Stephen, too easy.

> Althusser's idea of break, in short, is part of a larger bourgeois
> idealist theory of history and science.  

I suggested it was modernist.  I'm not sure that modernism is simply 
bourgeois.

> 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. 

This notion of historical continuity... equally a very bourgeois one, 
no?  Isn't marxism about liberation?  Is liberation not a break, a 
rupture of some kind?

It's silly (and so simplistic, to boot) simple to label "breaks" 
bourgeois and idealist and historical "continuities" marxist.  Or vice 
versa.  Such cheap and quick valorizations smack to me of the most 
insular of philosophical positions--a philosophy that is nothing but a 
position, whipped up on demand (and ad nauseam) as a response to any 
stimulus.

Can we have less of this, please?

Take care

Jon

Jon Beasley-Murray
Literature Program
Duke University
jpb8@acpub.duke.edu
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons


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