Reply to Keat and Dews on Dialectic

DIALICTIC: A RIPLY TO KIAT A.ND DBWS RoyEdgley In an article in Radical Philosophy 15, ‘Science, Social Science, and Socialist Science: Reason as Dialectic’, I argued that one of the central doctrines of dialectical materialism, that there are contradictions in reality, and with it the claim that science can be critical of its real object, […]

How to Defend Society Against Science

and of universal hUmanism, but by shortsighted against incompr~hensible neglect of the workers’ education, against authoritarian relatonships particular interests of the ruling apparatus of within the League of Communists, against the intropower. It is very characteristic that parallel duction of censorship and bureaucratic pressures with the development of the campa~gn against us for self-censorship, against […]

Technology and Liberation

Technology’ aDd LlbeJlaIIOD Robert Eccleshall critics of capitalism have traditionally considered technological development as subject to the control of dominant interests and thus as one aspect, albeit crucial, of a broader strategy aimed at reproducing existing social relations. In opposition to technological determinists (who hold material progress to be dependent on the number of individuals […]

The Theory of Ideology: Some Comments on Mepham

whether they are considered as individuals or subgroups, spontaneously create ahierarc~ic structure. All primate communities are hierarchic structures, otherwise they would not be communities. For this reason I believe that a hierarchy of responsible leadership, ~adres and teachers will continue to function in the develoPment and stabilizing of a grass-roots democratic communism in China (providing […]

Reductionism and the ‘Uniqueness of Man’

ing-class Clbove one’s own as an individual. Not only is it a form of moral philistinism to construct a theory in which they must be excluded, but it can only devalue an important (though subsidiary) weapon in the working-class armoury for use in the class struggle. The Valu~ of Morality Morals, or rather moral principles […]

Rancière and Althusser

Hegelian Marxism than to the relations that exist in Althusser’s thought. He attacks the latter as ‘philosophy’s police mentality’ but no more. The difference is that between a clear and rigorous analytic distinction between the concepts that combine into a theory – a distinction that Al thus.ser tries to maintain – and a relationship of […]

Truth and Practice

TRUTH AnD PRA[TI[E Andrew [allier of scientific enquiry and experiment, this is common ground not only of all Marxist theories, but of intelligent bourgeois theories as well. Peter Binns’ paper ‘The Marxist Theory of Truth’ in Radical Philosophy 4 exemplifies what seems to have become a new orthodoxy among Marxists, as well as many bourgeois […]

The Marxist Theory of Truth

THE mARHI5T THEORY OF TRUTH Peter Binns One of the main problems facing marxist theory is that of its own status. On the one hand the theory of the formation of ideology seems to suggest that all beliefs are relative to the believer’s society; while on the other hand there is the assumption that marxism […]

Science-envy: Sokal, science and the police

Commentary Science-envy Sokal, science and the police Bruce robbins When Social Text entitled its Spring 1996 issue ʻScience Warsʼ, it fulfilled its own prophecy. Thanks to Alan Sokalʼs now famous parody article, which was published there undetected, a discursive war immediately erupted. (See ʻFriendly Fire: The Hoaxing of Social Textʼ, RP 81, pp. 54–6.) As […]

The new Bergsonism: Discipline, subjectivity and freedom

This article is intended to raise a number of connected issues. It concludes by suggesting that certain theories of self-organization, in particular the theory of autopoiesis developed by Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and, latterly, Fritjof Capra, might help us to reassess how we view the relationship between discipline, subjectivity and freedom. However, the first half […]

On Bergson’s metaphysics of time

The last two decades have seen a revival of interest in the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941), in large part because of its role in the writings of Gilles Deleuze. However, it has been a noteworthy characteristic of the new Bergsonism (or Deleuze-Bergsonism) that it has proceeded more or less as if earlier criticisms of […]

Late Merleau-Ponty, revived

Late Merleau-Ponty, revived Eric matthews * Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled and with notes by Dominique Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier, Northwestern University Press, Evanston IL, 2003. xx + 296 pp., £69.95 hb., £14.95 pb., 0 8101 1445 3 hb., 0 8101 1446 1 pb.; Mauro Carbone, The Thinking of […]

Science: The invisible transdisciplinarity of French culture

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

Let me start with an apology: this conference obviously is concerned mainly with philosophy, literature, the social and human sciences, much more than with those sciences that are known as exact, natural or whatever – but which could probably, more to the point, be called ‘inhuman’ and ‘asocial’. It is thus for me, as a […]

Structure: method or subversion of the social sciences?

Dossier: From structure to rhizome: transdisciplinarity in French thought (1)

It seems there’s no longer any real doubt as to the answer to this question, and that it is doubly negative. ‘Structuralism’, or what was designated as such mainly in France in the 1960s and 1970s (setting aside the question of other uses), is no longer regarded as a truly fertile method in the domains […]