Post Ax3L093hwFrVAGoiBs by sy@mastodon.nz
(DIR) More posts by sy@mastodon.nz
(DIR) Post #Ax3H7M4ZYH0FjlP6NE by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-11T06:32:33Z
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"... looking at the roots of our wealth broadly, globally, and looking at the ways that we relate, especially in the field of global aid ... who's making decisions in that space and what are they for? We can think about philanthro-capitalism ... leveraging philanthropy to perpetuate a lot of the harm in our society."#JohnOkhiulu, Decolonizing Wealth Projecthttps://www.solarpunkpresents.com/season-one/decolonizing-wealth-project#podcasts #SolarpunkPresents #SolarPunk #decolonisation #philanthropy #DecolonizingWealth@solarpunkpresents
(DIR) Post #Ax3HNakWkgJJtCloR6 by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-11T06:35:31Z
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@solarpunkpresents are there any Decolonizing Wealth Project folks active in the fediverse? Are there any ways we can help them use fediverse tools to support their work?
(DIR) Post #Ax3JgMm18dCpxDXziy by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-11T07:01:20Z
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"Decolonisation is sometimes presented, not as an attempt to resurrect the dispassionate search for knowledge, but as a rejection of the idea of objectivity, which is seen as a sort of heritage of colonial thinking."#AlexBroadbent, University of Johannesburg, 2017https://theconversation.com/it-will-take-critical-thorough-scrutiny-to-truly-decolonise-knowledge-78477 #academia #knowledge #decolonisation
(DIR) Post #Ax3L093hwFrVAGoiBs by sy@mastodon.nz
2025-08-11T07:16:04Z
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@strypey 'If curricula and ideas and knowledge are colonised, that means they have been shaped in part by considerations that are political, economic, social, cultural or otherwise tangential to the ideals of academic inquiry. 'WTAF is this rubbish?Politics, economics, sociology and cultural studies are all areas of academic inquiry, not things that are tangential to its idealsGiven that most things that aren't covered by the above areas are affected by them - arts, science, literature, technology, history, etc - by virtue of the fact that they exist with societies that are shaped by political, economic and cultural forces, I'm left struggling to grasp what this moron is trying to say.
(DIR) Post #Ax3OFYPmFQ4Y0kB9ii by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-11T07:51:57Z
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@sy > I'm left struggling to grasp what this moron is trying to sayI'm guessing you're feeling really challenged by this article, and inclined to defend whatever you think is being attacked. I suspect that defensive impulse is worth unpacking a bit, to see what might be in there driving it. I'll leave you to it.
(DIR) Post #Ax4V0YpfJ4mRnd2swS by worik@mastodon.social
2025-08-11T20:42:46Z
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@strypey @sy to be fair it was a dreadful article for some one who has not "drunk the koolaid"> Decolonisation is sometimes presented.... as a rejection of the idea of objectivity, which is seen as a sort of heritage of colonial thinking.The article does nothing to dispel that. "Objectivity" is central to the identity of western intellectual traditions (I only really know that tradition) and is mostly misunderstood
(DIR) Post #Ax4ikLCfbrxaFrxwfI by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-11T23:16:50Z
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(1/2)@worik > The article does nothing to dispel thatOh it absolutely does.> "Objectivity" is central to the identity of western intellectual traditionsThat in itself is a colonial idea. Every culture is capable of discovering and utilising knowledge frameworks like "objectivity". As the article says, about half way down, decolonising knowledge has nothing to do with the absolute relativism of the postmodernists.@sy
(DIR) Post #Ax4jwpeKL01A6wQEue by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-11T23:30:21Z
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(2/2)Postmodernism is a " Western" reaction to the failures of universalism and eternalism;https://meaningness.com/eternalist-systemsIt's useful in that it can be used to get you out of failed approaches to meaningness (to borrow Chapman's term), but it doesn't get you to one that works any better. It's an exit, not a destination.
(DIR) Post #Ax4kcSsPOfrne1rQh6 by worik@mastodon.social
2025-08-11T20:43:56Z
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@strypey @sy Decolonising abstract mathematics is not about not being objective, it is about being willing g to shift where you stand to be objective from
(DIR) Post #Ax4kcTkIAKy6L94SgK by worik@mastodon.social
2025-08-11T20:45:11Z
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@strypey @sy ...and abstract mathematics needs decolinising too
(DIR) Post #Ax4kcUNHpMA0I5JbSi by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-11T23:37:51Z
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@worik> abstract mathematics needs decolonising tooIntriguing, can you expand on that? AFAICT abstract maths is one of the few knowledge quests that doesn't. Because other than it's fundamental assumptions (eg 0=0, 0+1=1), it's pure logic. Logic, like objectivity, can be discovered by any culture and has been (most foundational maths is not from the "West").Applied sciences and other academic disciplines tend to assume they're as culturally neutral as maths, but they're generally not.@sy
(DIR) Post #Ax4kcYpnFJL87egQS0 by worik@mastodon.social
2025-08-11T20:46:47Z
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@strypey @sy A good example you are familiar with from computing is "archiving". As westerners we want to archive everything. That is a very culturally specific POV
(DIR) Post #Ax4kff5iRK9wOdbqvQ by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-11T23:38:26Z
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@worik > hiving". As westerners we want to archive everything. That is a very culturally specific POVHow so?@sy
(DIR) Post #Ax4q1l9B6X99JtaLvk by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T00:38:27Z
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@solarpunkpresents > Wish we could be more helpful that way...You could reach out to all your interviewees, ask them if they have a fediverse presence yet, and encourage them to make it part of their long term social media strategy?
(DIR) Post #Ax4svYd329OMcWI6a0 by sy@mastodon.nz
2025-08-12T01:10:57Z
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@strypey This looks alarmingly close to a Jordan Peterson Youtube video - which is largely where the whole Marxism and Postmodernism are all about absolute relativism rubbish that's in the article you linked to comes from.I'm not going to bother explaining why 'scientific socialism' doesn't fit there...Postmodernism is often misunderstood by people who either haven't read the foundational (often French) philosophical texts associated with the term and rely on Peterson or other secondary sources to summarise what it means for them.The three most influential texts were probably Jean-Francois Lyotard's 'The Postmodern Condition', Jean Baudrillard's 'Simulacra and Simulation' and Fredric Jameson's 'Postmodernism: or the cultural logic of late capitalism'. The first of those is a report of how the logic of calculative efficiency associated with computerization was likely to alter societies (this where the rejection of metanarratives comes from, but it's not anywhere near being the main focus of the book). The second is a fairly complex text about how mediation and simulation are leading away from a shared sense of reality. The third discusses how the fragmented aesthetics of then-contemporary cultural forms reflect elements of globalised capitalism. While these 40+ year old texts are dated and problematic in a variety of ways now, they're also all remarkably prescient in numerous ways.But understanding either of those things requires people to have actually read them.
(DIR) Post #Ax4tTfZHjw4tzJnSqm by sy@mastodon.nz
2025-08-12T01:17:07Z
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@strypey @worik The notion that every culture can discover and use 'objectivity' as it's been employed by Western intellectual traditions fails to grasp that many cultures do not recognise the ontological dualism that is necessary to distinguish between subject/object mind/body nature/culture etc. As such, this is a deeply colonial position that wrongly positions a specific, Western way of knowing the world as a universal.It's also a position that has been and continues to be enormously damaging socially and environmentally. Please stop propagating it.
(DIR) Post #Ax500oWI4tx924aG4e by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T02:30:20Z
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(1/?)@sy > But understanding either of those things requires people to have actually read themWhich most PoMos haven't. Which is why postmodernism as a system of meaningness has little or nothing to do with its foundational texts, just as other fundamentalisms have nothing to do with theirs. Fundamentalist Christianity ignores the New Testament, Fundamentalist ignores the sutras about the preeminence of universal compassion, etc.
(DIR) Post #Ax50M7nfablmuVsI40 by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T02:34:12Z
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(2/2)Also the founding authors you cite were regurgitating (and arguably recuperating) arguments made much more powerfully by the writers of the Situationist International. So not only do contemporary PoMos usually not read their own founding texts, they'd understand the ideas mangled by those texts better if they read books like Society of the Spectacle or pamphlet texts like Revolutionary Self-Theory. Which are much easier to grok.But they don't read those either.
(DIR) Post #Ax511l4EV3bUZITSiG by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T02:41:42Z
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(1/?)Firstly, the framing of ...@sy > 'objectivity' as it's been employed by Western intellectual traditions fails to grasp that ...... is bunk. There never was a "West". The classical ideas we associate with "Western intellectual traditions" were actually Mediterranean, which makes them Middle Eastern or North African as much as European;https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-there-never-was-a-westSecondly, many of those ideas came from Persian, Indian, and Chinese intellectual traditions. So not "Western".@worik
(DIR) Post #Ax51M4MWTHJGCbiLVw by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T02:45:22Z
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(2/?)Secondly,@sy > many cultures do not recognise the ontological dualism that is necessary to distinguish between subject/object mind/body nature/culture etcThat may be true, although there's probably a lot of making post-dualism for pre-dualism, meaning the burden of proof for such of claims lies with the person/culture making it. Also even where this is true, it doesn't change the fact that every culture *can* discover and use 'objectivity', even if it hasn't *yet* done so.@worik
(DIR) Post #Ax51ueFZXzg3Lux4LI by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T02:51:38Z
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(3/3)So the idea that "Western" culture "invented" objectivity, and the only way for people from other cultures to learn about it is to apprentice themselves to "Western" institutions, fails on all counts.Even if "The West" was a thing. Even if it had invented objectivity, instead of learning about it from preexisting civilisations. Even then, that wouldn't prevent other cultures inventing it for themselves, from the same conceptual raw materials, in ways appropriate *to those cultures*.
(DIR) Post #Ax6fJsHkaoVnUXwyeW by sy@mastodon.nz
2025-08-12T21:47:48Z
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@strypey Thanks for brightening up my morning.I cannot wait to see the teeming hordes of fundamentalist postmodernists take to streets demanding:1. give the public free access to the data banks (literally what Lyotard says in the final paragraph of that book)2. attentiveness to social issues caused by simulacra undermining a stable sense of reality (predominantly AI slop, but also other forms of digital mis/disinformation)3. a practice of cognitive mapping to better comprehend the spatial forms of exploitation, imperialism and environmental degradation associated with globalized capitalismIf those people actually existed, rather than being figments of Jordan Peterson's imagination, the world would be a much better place.
(DIR) Post #Ax6mtMFjriMoFUsNii by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T23:12:19Z
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@sy I was hoping to have a serious conversation about these ideas. But the best you can see to come up with is a bunch of snark that ignores most of what I said, and another attempt at guilt by association;
(DIR) Post #Ax6nkgAkXGk9NNy4vo by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T23:22:10Z
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(1/2)@sy I was hoping to have a serious conversation about ideas. But it seems you're ignored what I actually said, and the best you can come up with is a bunch of snark and another attempt at guilt-by-association;> If those people actually existed, rather than being figments of Jordan Peterson's imaginationChapman gets his ideas from reading the source texts, not from micro-celebrities on YT. As did David Graeber who makes essentially the same criticism of PoMo;https://davidgraeber.org/papers/anthropology-and-the-rise-of-the-professional-managerial-class/
(DIR) Post #Ax6nuzvHxSeXWlelge by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T23:24:16Z
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(2/2)People like Peterson parrot a funhouse mirror version of critiques like these, stripping them of both their nuance and their conclusions. But for some reason you seem determined to reverse this causation. As of Marx's writing was caused by Vulgar Marxists, not the other way around.
(DIR) Post #Ax6pUx0wLmdysw0X8i by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-12T23:41:53Z
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(2/2)Neither is Graeber's critique of PoMo an outlier on the left. It was made in 2017 by Helen Pluckrose;https://archive.is/DDkgaGoing back further, Mark Fisher made it in 2009 in Capitalist Realism.People like Peterson parrot a funhouse mirror version of critiques like these, stripping them of both their nuance and their anticapitalist conclusions. But you seem determined to reverse this causation. As if Marx's writing was caused by Vulgar Marxists, not the other way around. Curious.
(DIR) Post #Ax6qOrgbLZPCZq9kHI by sy@mastodon.nz
2025-08-12T23:51:58Z
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@strypey Apologies, I didn't think you wanted a serious discussion because you've failed to engage with the ideas or theorists I've mentioned and I found your comment about PoMo fundamentalists genuinely fucking hilarious.So which of the arguments associated with Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson do you disagree with? And why?The Graeber article you link to doesn't mention any of the foundational theorists associated with Postmodernism. It does critique 'vulgar Foucaldianism', but Foucault's work is mainly focused on questions surrounding how specific institutions - schools, hospitals, prisons, families etc. - operate according to a disciplinary logic that compels subjects to adopt particular subject positions. While his work straddles the boundaries between structuralism and poststructuralism, it largely examines how power operates in places that were often thought of to be neutral and apolitcal,. For Foucalut, a central task of academia was to uncover how power operates and comes to dominate how common conceptions of truth and human nature coalesce.Foucault's work primarily looks at 19th and mid-twentieth exemplars. Unlike Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson whose work in the early/mid 80s was very much focused on the range of then contemporary transitions associated with computerizarion, globalization and the media.
(DIR) Post #Ax8wipTKHDGPXillzM by sy@mastodon.nz
2025-08-14T00:12:17Z
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@strypey I'm usually very happy to revisit Mark Fisher's work. Although in this instance it would seem that the grad student I lent that book to years ago never returned it... So I'm less happy.One import caveat to note here is that while the theorists I've discussed were writing in the early 1980s, Fisher is writing in the late-2000s. There's a huge difference historically between those periods in terms of the existence of the USSR as an actually existing alternative to capitalism, the strength of the socialist left and the unions (and their influence on the Labour party in the UK), and the difference between an emergent and hegemonic set of practices around neoliberalism and globalisation. Consequently, in that earlier period there were very clear alternatives to the capitalist realism Fisher outlines. Fisher also has a pretty detailed engagement with Jameson:'Jameson famously claimed that postmodemism is the' cultural logic of late capitalism'. He argued thatthe failure of the future was constitutive of a postmodern cultural scene which, as he correctly prophesied, would becomedominated by pastiche and revivalism. Given that Jameson has made a convincing case for the relationship between postmodern culture and certain tendencies in consumer (or post-Fordist)capitalism, it could appear that there is no need for the concept of capitalist realism at all. In some ways, this is true. What I'mcalling capitalist realism can be subsumed under the rubric of postmodernism as theorized by Jameson. Yet, despite Jameson'sheroic work of clarification, postmodernism remains a hugelycontested term' (p7)He goes on to outline why he prefers capitalist realism as a term, beginning with a discussion of key social changes from 1980-2007. The book has a thoughtful, detailed and insightful engagement with and critique of postmodernism that I would argue is a long way from the kind of wholesale dismissal present in the initial link you posted.
(DIR) Post #Ax954oYNAiTIhL7m2C by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-14T01:45:57Z
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(1/?)@sy I think we're being derailed by semantic confusion here. Like when people try to debate economics, and one of them uses the older socialist definition of "capitalism", and one uses the conservative definition where "capitalism" is any system with private property, money and markets, and a liberal democracy (so the more common fascist forms of "capitalism" don't count).Unsurprisingly, they can't make head nor tail or each other's arguments once the word "capitalism" is involved.
(DIR) Post #Ax95YypNXLCDFbSlA8 by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-14T01:51:24Z
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(2/?)You seem to be using "postmodernism" to mean 'what Foucault, Baudrillard et al believed'.I'm newly aware anyone still uses it that way. All the writers I linked are working with a very different definition. One in which Foucault et al are not "postmodernists", any more than Marx was a marxist. Chapman describes the origins of this "Vulgar Foucauldianism" (to borrow Graeber's term) here;https://metarationality.com/stem-fluidity-bridge
(DIR) Post #Ax95nKbfMP38qntNLs by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-14T01:53:59Z
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(3/3)I suspect any attempt to explore any of the topics we've wandered through in this threads so far will founder on the reef of this semantic confusion. Unless we either agree to use "postmodernism" in only one of these ways, and pick another term for the other. Or even better better, use more specific terms for both, and avoid using the term "postmodernism" any further in our discussions.
(DIR) Post #Ax9GqbF14Ixoo53iDo by sy@mastodon.nz
2025-08-14T03:57:48Z
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@strypey Maybe... But I'd also argue that Marx's definition of capitalism as a mode of production geared around M-C-M' is coherent and insightful, productively identifying what is unique about capitalism, whereas the second definition you give is fundamentally incoherent... 😜Capitalism isn't just private property, money and markets (which have all been around in some form for thousands of years), nor does is require liberal democracy - for example while Pinochet's Chile and Suharto's Indonesia were testing grounds for neoliberalism, both were authoritarian dictatorships
(DIR) Post #Ax9JWrl0FjNq6JIoBk by sy@mastodon.nz
2025-08-14T04:27:50Z
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@strypey Not really, but sort of?Lyotard and Jameson both explicitly write about postmodernism, and I'm generally sympathetic to their arguments about it. Baudrillard is less explicit, but I think his analysis around simulations usefully augments those other works, it came out a similar time and speaks to related issues.Given that they're three of the most cited sources who deal with postmodernism, when I use the term, that's what I'm signalling towards.Foucault's work is not focused (like the other three) on a set of emerging social, cultural, and economic practices in the late 70s/early 80s where computation plays a really important role. He mainly looks at much older institutional structures to try and understand relationships between knowledge and power. The Mark Fisher book you mention specifically references Jameson's work in very positive terms, while carefully delineating where and why he differs, and how that was informed by 25 years of social and cultural change, whereby emerging and contested practices had become hegemonic. I'm totally happy to use his definition of postmodernism.I wouldn't call Fisher a postmodernist, because he's writing at a different time about related but different concerns, but would say he clearly fits into the left/marxist tradition of social and cultural theory alongside those earlier authors.The Chapman article you link to explicitly distinguishes between a first generation of postmodern theories and 'psuedo-postmodernism'. I'm a bit wary of his discussion as it centres Foucault and deconstruction (which is a concept primarily associated with Derrida) - as postmodernism I'd argue they are better understood as poststructuralists, and even then a lot of Foucault's early work around the archaeology of knowledge straddles the boundary between structuralism/poststructuralism.
(DIR) Post #AxBgDwQlL4jaM5hSO8 by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-15T07:51:36Z
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(1/2)@sy > I'd also argue that Marx's definition of capitalism as a mode of production geared around M-C-M' is coherent and insightful, productively identifying what is unique about capitalism, whereas the second definition you give is fundamentally incoherentI agree. But then I would, because I'm an anticapitalist. I thought the wording of my post would have communicated that bias. But the point is that using the same word to mean opposite things prevents fruitful conversation.
(DIR) Post #AxBghJDFiMvxPWNseG by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-15T07:56:55Z
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(2/?)Defining "Marxism" as 'what Marx said', despite the fact that the vast majority of historical Marxists have believed wildly different things from Marx, also creates confusion. Because there are 2 different things there (what Marx wrote, what Marxists think), which is why "Marx was not a Marxist" has become axiomatic.
(DIR) Post #AxBgtwg2oSD3HYsQjY by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-15T07:59:12Z
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(3/3)Defining "postmodernism" as 'what people describing and critiquing the postmodern condition said' seems similarly ... confused. But whatever. If you insist of defining it that way for the purposes of this conversation, I can live with that. What term would you prefer to use for the confused mess of mostly pre-rational thinking that Chapman, Graeber and others are pointing to when they say "postmodernism"? Is "pseudo-PoMo" acceptable?
(DIR) Post #AxBhDfOGnHg1Say0K8 by sy@mastodon.nz
2025-08-15T08:02:43Z
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@strypey Apologies if the silly emoji didn't communicate that I know that and wasn't being entirely serious... But I do think that being able to explain how and why you're using terms and concepts is an important part of being able to have a dialogue with people (even on social media, where many of the social cues are missing and people get angry and the wrong end of the stick a lot of the time).Maybe the fact that I'm wedded to quite specific definitions of so many terms associated with social and cultural theory makes me a really shit postmodernist (this is also a bad joke).
(DIR) Post #AxBhWWvgTa0KikahCi by strypey@mastodon.nzoss.nz
2025-08-15T08:06:11Z
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Side note, while I wait for your reply to settle our use of terminology ...@sy > a lot of Foucault's early work around the archaeology of knowledge straddles the boundary between structuralism/poststructuralismThis is key. As Chapman points out, Foucault et al understood the instrumentalised rationality they were criticising. While many (most?) of their intellectual descendants do not. So they mistake the first halting attempts at a meta-rational analysis for rejections of rationality.