Paul Treanor writes:
feminists, postcolonialists, queer theorists, and Marxists in the western
academy reproduce the liberal ideology that surrounds them.
A break with that ideology requires that they abandon beliefs, which they have
been brought up to regard as sacred.
As a *minimum* a critical geography should reject democracy, human rights,
political rights, free speech, political freedom, and academic freedom. These
are not sacred truths...
I think what Paul misses is that he has a very narrow idea of 'critical',
which concurs very nicely with that of the arch RIGHT-WINGER Stanley Fish,
who's view, as Terry Eagleton nicely summarizes it, is that:
either my critical observations on the current power-system are
intelligible to that system, in which case they are simply one more move
within it, and thus not radical at all; or they are not [intelligible to
that system], in which case they are so much irrelevant noise.
Effectively, what Paul and Stanley are searching for is a way that they can
stand outside contemporary space and time altogether, perform what Haraway
has called the 'God-trick' of disembodied, omnipotent vision and therefore
remain 'untainted' by ideological formations. Well, sorry Paul, haven't you
caught up? There is no transcendent truth we can find 'behind' ideology.
There is truth of a kind, in the journalistic sense of deliberate lies and
misunderstandings. But if you want to be truly 'radical' epistemologically
speaking, you have to go with Foucault, who argues that ways of
understanding something can only be replaced by other ways of understanding
something. No truth outside space and time. In this case, you are faced
(broadly) with the following options:
Laughing, as Foucault does at the beginning of 'The Order of Things' at the
thought of 'shattering the thought of our age and the stamp of our
geography', or going with concepts and ideas that actually mean something
to people - not accepting them uncritically, modifying and rejecting where
appropriate, and making space for 'deeper' readings of institutions like
the state (excuse my phallagocentrism).
This is the choice we make if we accept - as you seem to - the essential
inessentiality of beliefs and ideas. So I ask Paul again, Who appointed you
God that you should have the right to decide for us?
Graham
>Paul Treanor
>
>
Graham Gardner
Institute of Geography & Earth Sciences
University of Wales
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 3DB
Wales
UK
Tel: 0044 (0)1970 622606
Fax: 0044 (0)1970 622659
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
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