Re: [xmca] Anthony Wilden: A thought

[Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>]

I love the Marx quote too Mike.
It answers many questions about his views in this short passage,
which certainly had an impact on LSV.
BTW it is from his 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and can be
found at:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm

 It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism,
spiritualism and materialism, activity and passivity, cease to be
antinomies and thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution of
the theoretical contradictions is possible only through practical means,
only through the practical energy of man. Their resolution is not by any
means, therefore, only a problem of knowledge, but is a real problem of
life which philosophy was unable to solve precisely because it saw there a
purely theoretical problem


Robert

On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 1:18 PM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> AT the bottom of the following passage, from Anthony Wilden's *System and
> Structure*, is a quotation
> from Marx that we have been thinking about here recently. The passage is
> from an Essay on Montaigne on the paradoxes of individualism. I find a lot
> of the ideas in the book and the essay interesting. But in what is below I
> found myself reading the
> paragraph that precedes the Marx and was caught by his observation, which I
> encountered at just the right time, about the digital
> being viewed as a means of exploitation, not in the service of social
> relations.
>
> Today, of course, we see the digital in relationship to the social quite
> differently, but still, here we are concerned with the
> issue of reduction to the digital and the liquidity of modern capitalism.
>
> The Marx has special resonance with us because we feel just exactly the
> melting of binaries in our community learning
> activities. The going back and forth is mind expanding.
>
> mike
> -----------------------
>
> The only avenue of metacommunication that can escape the oscillations
> of the individualistic ethic on which the paradoxical injunction depends in
> our present pathological context, is that of the collective praxis of human
> kind: the reduction of the digital to its natural function as an instrument
> of
> relationship, where now it is an exploitative device. For whereas there is
> no
> possibility - and no necessity - of overcoming our relation to Otherness,
> and no need for a metalanguage which will disprove Godel, there will
> eventually have to be devised a way of overcoming our present enslavement
> to the Imaginary Other. This enslavement depends on a value-system
> based on the maintenance of exploitative oppositions and identities. If our
> species is to survive, humankind must find a way of reintroducing the
> mediating function of difference and similarity into the social ecosystem.
> As the young Marx put it (1844: 162):
>
>
>
> It is only in a social context that subjectivism and objectivism,
> spiritual-
> ism and materialism, activity and passivity cease to be antinomies, and
> thus cease to exist as such antinomies. The resolution of the THEORETICAL
> contradictions is possible ONLY through practical means, only through the
> PRACTICAL energy of man.
>
>
> (Caps in original wilden, do not know about original marx.)
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-- 
*Robert Lake  Ed.D.
*Assistant Professor
Social Foundations of Education
Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
Georgia Southern University
P. O. Box 8144
Phone: (912) 478-5125
Fax: (912) 478-5382
Statesboro, GA  30460

 *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
midwife.*
*-*John Dewey.
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