Tuesday, May 17, 2005
The other Skinner
Just to prove my liberal elitist credentials and, maybe, evoke the ire of former Leftists who now bash people like Lakoff, there is a wonderful review of three new editions by Cambridge professor Quentin Skinner (no relation) in the New York Review of Books this week, though only a sample of it is online.
The article notes quite rightly that the rejection of Marxian materialism has created some new space for political ideas and, by extension, language. Now, I think that the idea that we have to reject Marx to think about political ideas is, well, silly. But I welcome the conversation that Skinner's work provokes and hope that we can think about bit more seriously about the historiography of our own moment. Language has a genealogy of its own, and that genealogy is a roadmap of power relations that need to be understood.
The article notes quite rightly that the rejection of Marxian materialism has created some new space for political ideas and, by extension, language. Now, I think that the idea that we have to reject Marx to think about political ideas is, well, silly. But I welcome the conversation that Skinner's work provokes and hope that we can think about bit more seriously about the historiography of our own moment. Language has a genealogy of its own, and that genealogy is a roadmap of power relations that need to be understood.
# posted by tapscottscopydesk @ 4:32 AM 
