Radical Engagements: Cutrone and Turley Tussle on Lukacs's Importance
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 6 ก.ย. 2024
- Cutrone and Torley debate James Turley's "The Antinomies of Georg Lukács," and both score some points on each other.
Sources:
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Note: Lukacs's "Tailing and the Dialectic" was from 1925 and was a defense of History and Class Consciousness so shared its core arguments - it was not yet expressing Lukacs's choice to turn away from his own work and reconcile with Stalinism, which began in 1926.
Thanks, Derick!
Returning to this letter exchange, I realize it is ultra-inside baseball and not helpfully systematic - not pedagogical enough, and indeed too polemical.
The short version of this exchange from my perspective would be: Turley upholds Marxism as ordinary science in empirical testing through trial and error of theories; while I think that is insufficient for understanding both Marxism and how science actually works.
I look forward to your reading of my culminating essay in this exchange I had with the CPGB, "Why still read Lukacs?"
If I may ask a question, as someone who is only just now reading Kant, is it that when we look at Marx’s work he would’ve known the decencies of empiricism that Kant points out? Or, in other words, is vulgar materialism similar to empiricism?
Yes.
What I love is the back and forth between two thinkers I believe actually did the work to have their opinions
It's funny, the letters started talking about theoretical physics as something to look up to. I mean, they are still on the same problems they had like 100 years ago.
Your point about needless shorthand with the ideo-genealogical claims stand, but yes, the pre-Socratic charge has to do with Althusser’s opting for an ancient (contra modern) materialism in his later aleatory materialist theory. I know this from hearing Cutrone discuss it late in a recording of a talk he gave called “The Idea of Communism: Badiou, Lacan, Althusser” which is on youtube. Poor audio but worth a listen for those interested
From what I’ve been able to glean about Chris’s claims, he is asserting that Althusser draws on Heidegger’s metaphysics to make a transhistorical claim as the basis of structural Marxism. There is substance to the claim that Heidegger draws heavily from the presocratics as a way of breaking with currents in bourgeois thought, but I don't know if it's fair to reduce Althusser's project to the presocratics as well.
~30:00 Re:Recontextualizing: Sure is some historian stuff going on here. Important as well but I mainly worry about people tying themselves up in their own read of "the orthodoxy" that everyone else now must follow or whatever. It plainly doesn't work. But if your inquiry is undamaged by lazy wielding of names of history then it's still not a great thing to do but it is not a major worry of mine. As much as historians matter, too.
"it plainly doesn't work" in the sense of your own understanding. If it's a kluge in society then it might make you money but you might also keep running into situations where you want to call people sophists (edit: or evil).
Good morning from Katoomba
Good morning from Lismore
Is it possible to connect these ideas broadly to ‘sociology of knowledge’? According to Wikipedia Karl Mannheim could be a connection to Lukacs, as well as the later Foucault who you already mentioned.
Mannheim is very different from Marxism on “ideology”: for Marxism it is characterized by the self-contradictions of “commodity fetishism” and Lukacs’s “reification”; for Mannheim it is expression of functional interest of one’s position in society.
@@ccutronedoes Marx ever deal with knowledge specifically in one text? I’ve read bits of the German Ideology but that seems more focused on historical materialism.
Theses on Feuerbach.
8:45 "something [people/academics] get away with" They do so at their own peril I think. E.g. being able to reliably reproduce the skeleton of an argument may make one think about what are the premises as to what one speaks of so competently. Or open oneself up for another to ask those questions.
There's the part where people are in soft science territory (edit: reminder economics is a social science) but they want the veneer of something greater than and they probably don't even notice what they're doing so everyone asking questions is a "sophist". lol edit: Not saying this is true for the related people here but I keep seeing it happen.
Having read the Torley piece, the interaction seemed to be a lot of talking past the argument put forth in it. Not saying that argument was altogether convincing, but looking forward to whatever clarification comes of it. And, as I read him there, Torley's hat tip to Althusser was to a pretty soft Althusser, that seemed to be a gesture that weakened theory itself in an odd way.
Apologies, Turley. Autocorrect isn't my buddy.