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From:
[log in to unmask] (Robin Neill)
Date:
Fri Mar 31 17:18:25 2006
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Let me start again. 
 
Here is Foucoult on wealth, value, and economics. 
 
`In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only 
one EPISTEME that defines the conditions of possibility of all 
knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a 
practice.  The monetary reform prescribed by the States General of 
1575, mercantilist measures, or Law's experiment and its liquidation, 
all have the same archaeological basis as the theories of Davanzatti, 
Bouteroue, Petty or Cantillon.' 
 
`The mutation that occurred in the entire Western EPISTEME towards the 
end of the eighteenth century by saying that a scientifically strong 
moment was created in just that area where the Classical EPISTEME was 
metaphysically strong ...  In fact, the analysis of production, as the 
new project of the new `political economy', has as its essential role 
the analysis of the relation between value and prices .... .' 
 
`The end of Classical thought - and of the EPISTEME that made general 
grammar, natural history, and the science of wealth possible - will 
coincide with the decline of representation, or rather with the 
emancipation of language, of the living being, and of need, with 
regard to representation.' 
 
******************************** 
 
    Remember, I am an historian of thought, not a theorist or 
politician.  I ask questions to expose intellectual history, not to 
propose anything. 
  
    P.R. Saul has stated, `After twenty two years of policies that 
have governed the persistant relative decline of North America, the 
source of those policies, the University of Chicago, has been awarded 
eight Nobel Prizes.' 
 
   [The words are not exact, but I put them in quotes to indicate that 
the statement is not an assertion of mine, or even, in the first 
instance in this discussion, an assertion of truth.  The statement is 
data for analysis.] 
 
QUESTION.  Can the signs we use, the instruments of discourse, become so 
disassociated from realty that they become disfunctional? 
Alternatively, is there an EPISTEME, corresponding to postmodern 
technical and informational circumstance, that is not expressible in 
traditional economic discourse? 
 

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