From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Jan 05 2006 - 12:36:31 EST
Hi Jerry, Thanks for your comment and I don't obviously want this discussion to degenerate into some kind of trivial pursuit, and I have noticed that kinship appelations can convey different sort of meanings (e.g. in Irish or Maori culture). I don't have a lot of personal experience of American culture. My cousin might be my cousin, but also not my cousin, and so on. In English idiom, you say "sugar daddy" for example, and in Dutch you say "suiker oompje" (sugar-uncle). Nevertheless I believe anthropologists, statisticians and demographers do have some standard conventions to describe kinship relations objectively and universally. I worked on an official statistical classification of household and family arrangements once (without fully resolving the issue), the argument being that the standard classification was biased, because e.g. it did not make explicit same-sex relationships and assimilated these relationships to other categories. You might think this is all relatively straightforward stuff, but goodness when you try to measure that, there's a lot of issues to consider; the good old nuclear family just isn't so prevalent as you might think, and there are all sorts of curious permutations out there. Nevertheless, you have this task of quantifying these kinship structures in households. Question then is, to what extent is my postulated "structure" objectively real, and to what extent is it an artifact of survey design or of a theoretical presupposition? But practically you cannot easily solve that with a theoretical generality, you have to get quite specific, and figure out what you can validly measure. In that sense, I am always a bit suspicious of Althusser's "theoretical practice", and through many mistakes and some successes, I acquired a different idea about how theory is, or ought to be, formed, if that is the task. Althusserianism is good, I think, if it gets us to "think structure" and to the way issues are specifically problematised, but if it is just theory theorising itself, I'm afraid nothing much will get solved. Isaac Deutscher suggested once in an essay, that Marxism was about coming to grips with large, specific issues affecting humanity, and in his book on Stalin, that Marx provided a convenient "toolkit" for radical thinkers to frame the "big(ger) picture" about society. But actually that implies a lot of research work beyond theorising, since if the issue is not only specific but also large, there's lots to find out. The categories we use, have to interact with the empirical material to see how they specifically apply. And so I am always a bit hesitant about talking about these epistemological or ontological questions, because I tend to think they do not really permit of a "general" answer, you have to look at a specific problem, the abstraction has to be an abstraction from something tangible. It seems that after Marx formed his materialist interpretation of history, he had little interest anymore in general questions of epistemology and ontology, regarding them as mainly scholastic; problems of knowledge were to be resolved through practical inquiry - whether or not we could know something, became a practical question, it could not be resolved simply by theorising in general. As we discussed before, this does not however rule out philosophy, because creative philosophy can provide useful insight and correctives with regard to the processes of abstraction and specification that we use. Engels commented though that "Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker. Consciously, it is true, but with a false awareness. The real motivating forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process at all. Hence, he imagines false or ostensible motivating forces." The suggestion here is that ideological thought lacks objectivity, precisely because it works over only "thought-material", without tracing the origin of ideas in practical life and showing the real connection between what exists, and how this is perceived. It is thought in some sense profoundly disconnected from the real context to which it refers. In that case, "theoretical practice" could just as easily become an 'intellectual ideology" and perhaps - as Althusser sometimes suggests, it partly always is (calling into question any easy demarcation of science from ideology). In reply to Howard, I don't think Marx argued for a unified science in general, he argued for a unified science of human history, but in any case I wonder to what extent this is meaningful, since it would assume some kind of grandiose, shared scientific consensus... we can see what happens if everybody has to swear by "dialectical materialism"... Jurriaan
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