ABSTRACTThis article integrates into critical discourse analysis concepts developed by the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson. These concepts include Jameson's theories of contradiction, mode of production, and social formation. By taking up Jameson's ideas, it is argued, researchers can strengthen CDA's underdeveloped theories of contradiction and historical change. Furthermore, this article shows how Jameson's theories can sharpen CDA's methods of studying texts. By taking a Jamesonian tack and viewing each text as offering ‘an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction', researchers (...) can track how antagonisms in the social order shape and are shaped by processes of textual production. Additionally, by foregrounding contradictions and resolutions, researchers can see how texts participate in processes of historical change. To demonstrate a Jamesonian version of CDA, this article concludes with an analysis of a text that charts a course through neoliberal capitalism. (shrink)

The field of information technology is broadened up to the domain of ‘learning’ systems and cybernetics. In covering this extension of the field due recourse is made to the epistemological basis of theory construction. When so comprehended, information technology becomes a philosophical inquiry on a variety of social, scientific and technological issues. A new idea that we refer to as neuro-cybernetics is born. The term neuro-cybernetics is used to delineate the epistemological field of system and cybernetic study. The above-mentioned phenomenological (...) or the epistemic model of a cybernetic and system type is applied to flood control problem in Bangladesh. This example presents an application of the cybernetic model to a physico-human problem. This is the nature of socio-scientific system. In it, organically unifying relations occur between the environment and the human world, with the objective of controlling the perennial problem of floods by using interactive factors. (shrink)

The scientific methodology underlying model-building is critically investigated. The modeling views of Popper and Samuelson and their prototypes are critically examined in the light of the theme of the moral law of unity of knowledge and unity of the world-system configured by the meta-epistemology of organic unity of knowledge. Upon such critical examination of received methodology of model-building in economics, the extended perspective?namely of integrating the moral law derived from the divine roots as the meta-epistemology?is rigorously studied. The example of (...) the Islamic prerogative in interpreting the holistic world-system through model-building in economics is highlighted. A religio-philosophical approach is adopted to exemplify some approaches in Islamic model-building. An especial focus is placed here on grassroots types of financing and activities. The critique of these models within the existing Islamic scholarship is carried out. The result is new dimensions of macroeconomic analysis that emanate in a logical way from the meta-epistemological approach, and oppose the mainstream ideas, both in received and Islamic economic thinking as of now. (shrink)

This paper revisits Derrida’s and Deleuze’s early discussions of “Platonism” in order to challenge the common claim that there is a fundamental divergence in their thought and to challenge one standard narrative about the history of deconstruction. According to that narrative, deconstruction should be understood as the successor to phenomenology. To complicate this story, I read Derrida’s “Plato’s Pharmacy” alongside Deleuze’s discussion of Platonism and simulacra at the end of Logic of Sense. Both discussions present Platonism as the effort to (...) establish a representative order (of original ideas and authorized reproductions of them) with no excess or outside (simulacra, or ideas that cannot be tied to an eidos). Since such pure representation is impossible, Platonism functions by means of the violent suppression of the simulacra and pharamakoi that exceed its eidetic structures. To overcome Platonism is thus not to reverse it, but to establish something like a practice of counter-memorials: detecting, exhuming, and writing back textual traces of what Platonism excludes. I then briefly apply this practice to narratives about the history of deconstruction, and suggest that they tend to occlude precisely the materialist elements of that history, as (for example) the importance of Spinoza as an interlocutor. In other words, the emerging canonical narrative about deconstruction runs the risk of repeating the Platonic gesture that Derrida spent his career writing against. (shrink)

Although oppressive social practices like capitalism are often portrayed as static, totalizing social 'structures' with 'logics' and 'imperatives' that must be accommodated politically and economically, such portrayals are problematic both theoretically and politically. They rest on determinist and essentialist conceptions of social practices, and they curtail the scope of politics, government regulation, and human action and creativity. Fortunately, social practices can instead be conceptualized as thoroughly social, historical, and contingent, and thus susceptible to political intervention and reworking, as many feminist, (...) post-structuralist, and anti-economistic Marxian theorists do. Attempting to build on such alternative conceptualizations, I argue that Judith Butler's concept of reiteration provides a particularly useful, in-depth theorization of power, the mechanisms enabling social practices to endure and change, and the role of the individual and collectivities in perpetuating and challenging social practices such as capitalism. In so doing, the concept of reiteration offers a compelling and detailed non-voluntaristic account of human agency. Butler's work is thus helpful in theorizing and empirically investigating both the obstacles to and the possibilities for resisting exploitation and altering unjust social practices. (shrink)

Nancy Fraser has elaborated a framework for analyzing different forms of oppression using the categories of redistribution and recognition. This framework has come under criticism from Iris Marion Young and Judith Butler, despite the fact that all three theorists similarly insist that justice is not reducible solely to economic justice and that struggles against ‘cultural’ forms of oppression are equally important. Drawing on the debate between these theorists, in this article I examine the ways in which their respective theoretical frameworks (...) are potentially problematic or do not go far enough in theorizing the complex interconnections among economics, politics and culture. For example, Fraser’s binary economy/culture and Young’s distinction between culture and structure are overly broad and potentially misleading. Butler and Fraser also appear to adopt undertheorized and economistic conceptualizations of ‘the economy’ and capitalism. In the course of my critique, I propose a somewhat different approach to analyzing the causes of various forms of oppression and the relation between different emancipatory struggles. Among other things, I argue that social relationships need to be disaggregated further, into more than just two categories, and that the economic and the cultural (as well as the political) should be analyzed as always complexly overdetermining each other. (shrink)

Although oppressive social practices like capitalism are often portrayed as static, totalizing social 'structures' with 'logics' and 'imperatives' that must be accommodated politically and economically, such portrayals are problematic both theoretically and politically. They rest on determinist and essentialist conceptions of social practices, and they curtail the scope of politics, government regulation, and human action and creativity. Fortunately, social practices can instead be conceptualized as thoroughly social, historical, and contingent, and thus susceptible to political intervention and reworking, as many feminist, (...) post-structuralist, and anti-economistic Marxian theorists do. Attempting to build on such alternative conceptualizations, I argue that Judith Butler's concept of reiteration provides a particularly useful, in-depth theorization of power, the mechanisms enabling social practices to endure and change, and the role of the individual and collectivities in perpetuating and challenging social practices such as capitalism. In so doing, the concept of reiteration offers a compelling and detailed non-voluntaristic account of human agency. Butler's work is thus helpful in theorizing and empirically investigating both the obstacles to and the possibilities for resisting exploitation and altering unjust social practices. (shrink)

In this review, I argue that Erik Olin Wright’s Envisioning Real Utopias is necessary reading for anyone interested in thinking through the possibilities of creating noncapitalist ways of organising economic and social life in the world today. However, I also raise questions about Wright’s deterministic interpretation of Marx’s critique of political economy, his relative neglect of class-analysis, and his non-Gramscian conception of the relationship between the state, economy, and civil society.

The literature in economic methodology has witnessed an increase in the number of studies which, drawing upon the postmodern turn in social sciences, pay serious attention to the non-epistemological-discursive elements of economic theorizing. This recent work on the "economic discourse" has thus added a new dimension to economic methodology by analyzing various discursive aspects of the construction of scientific meanings in economics. Taking a similar stance, this paper explores Michel Foucault's archaeological analysis of scientific discourses. It aims to show that (...) his archaeological reading of the history of economic thought provides an articulate non-epistemological framework for the analysis of the discursive elements in the history of economics and contemporary economic theorizing. (shrink)

Foucault distanced himself from Marxism even though he worked in an environment—left French theory of the 1960s and 1970s—where Marxism was the dominant frame of reference. By viewing Foucault in the context of French Marxist theoretical debates of his day, we can connect his criticisms of Marxism to his discussions of the status of intellectuals. Foucault viewed standard Marxist approaches to the role of intellectuals as a problem of power and knowledge applicable to the Communist party. Marxist party intellectuals, in (...) his view, had developed rigid and universal theories and had used them to prescribe action, which prevented work on the sorts of problems that he uncovered—even though these problems were central to the development of capitalism. (shrink)