Describing a ‘post-modern’ sensibility

Describing a ‘post-modern’ sensibility

(Extracts from ‘A semiotic interrogation of law & economics’ by Dr James Moylan)

Notes on the very recent arrival of the concept of ideology

The ‘concept of ideology’ is a commonplace archetype of ordering. The adequately encultured citizenry all share a host of common suppositions and assumptions relating to politics and ideology that are generally perceived to be so familiar and ordinary that they are rarely highlighted or provided consideration. Yet the way that we commonly and jointly suppose that societies are constituted and ordered (i.e., the ‘concept of ideology’) is unique to our age.

The concept of ideology enlivens a range of readily identifiable assumptions and presumptions of definition and ordering, including;

• Ideologies can describe society.
• Ideologies do describe society.
• Ideologies are ways of rationalising about self and society.
• Ideologies are syllogistically discrete, internally coherent and are entertained (subjectively and corporately) in a largely uniform fashion.
• Citizens enliven and animate ‘an ideology’ intellectually and empathetically.
• Ideologies provide the rationale for political thinking.
• Ideology is the motivating agency of politics.
• Political motivations arise from ideological propositions.
• Political ideas and motivations are articulated by and reflect particular ideological rationalities.
• Political ideation is ideologically predicated.
• Political action without ideological justification is invalid.
• Legal action coupled with ideological justification is invalid.
• ‘The law’ is supposed to be ideologically naïve and apolitically enacted, &,
• ‘Politics’ is supposed to be ideologically informed, articulated, validated and justified.

(etc.).

All of these propositions, as well as the host of commonplace perceptions regarding the content and rationale of the many commonly recognised political ideologies, are entirely recent inventions. Prior to 1910, very few citizens outside of the realm of academia believed that a society (any society) might be ordered in accord with (or even be described by recourse to) ‘ideological’ precepts. Nor did the citizenry believe that the political class ordered their rationalities in accord with ideological precepts. Nor did the citizenry propose that they might best order their cognisance of social events, actions or their social ambitions or inclinations in accord with ‘ideological’ precepts.

If they had so believed these things then it is a reasonable supposition that they would have said so in writing. Yet a frequency analysis of the use of the word ‘ideology’ in the English literature of the 20th century indicates that this is not the case. Also, the newspapers and private writings of the 19th century entirely fail to display any cognisance of the concept. They just occasionally employ the word to refer to the ideation that might be stereotypically attributed to a common class or a particular group.

Above: A case sensitive search for the frequency of use of the terms ‘ideology’ and ‘Ideology’ in English language literature from 1900 to 2008.[1]

It is therefore evident that the citizenry of the 1800s did not expect society to be rationally explicable by recourse to propositions of ideology. This is simply because such an intellectual conceit was not available. Yet in our contemporary experience the term ‘ideology’ means so much. The ‘concept of ideology’ now instantly evokes for all the citizenry a common range of competing conceptions regarding ‘politics’ that did not exist a century ago.

In our current age, any signifier that is perceived to be at all ideologically redolent is at once assimilated to a familiar (both commonly and subjectively entertained) landscape of ‘political contention’. This is a knee-jerk cognitive reflex that serves to largely preclude even the possibility of noticing that a common paradigm of ordering has been evoked, or that this manner of thinking about society is itself an artefact. These various realisations are at once cognitively belied by the seeming appropriateness and validity of a host of particular ideological perspectives and propositions as well as a seeming superfluity of apparent argumentative potential.

Describing Society

The way that the many commonplace descriptions of society that are current within our social discourse are generally employed in conversation and text often masks the reality that these many descriptions are not just distinctive but are also remarkably similar. Liberalism, libertarianism, socialism, neo-liberalism, communism, neo-classicism, Marxism and all the other congresses of Ideology that are commonly recognised and employed, certainly do describe dissimilar structural/functional propositions regarding what a ‘society’ might be and how it might function. Yet these descriptions nonetheless serve to fuse and articulate a range of remarkably congruent ontological (i.e., who am ‘I’ and why am ‘I’ here) and epistemic (i.e., what is knowledge and what is valid knowledge) suppositions and presuppositions.

A collective reflexively engaged cognitive focus on the likely discordance between these various explanations of society (i.e., ideologies) is one of the contemporary imperatives of signification. Every adequately encultured citizen entertains and employs a variety of competing and seemingly discordant explanations of society in contextualising and sorting information and all the populace anticipates that this will be the case.

That the citizenry immediately perceive of these dominant ideological social descriptions as being distinctly differentiated and in contradistinctive tension means that whenever any one of them is invoked (such as liberalism, socialism, capitalism, communism, etc.) the focus is invariably upon contrast and dissimilarity. Yet this serves to obscure the many suppositions and assumptions that these various conjoined propositions of ordering enliven.

For example, an individual who might describe themselves as a small ‘l’ liberal, negotiates a personal contradistinctive understanding in accord with a supposition of common (hegemonically normative) definitions and understandings relating to ‘liberalism’ (as well as any other seemingly implicated codes and meta-codes). The same applies to those who entertain a self-conception as a ‘socialist’ or a ‘conservative’. So, while the individually realised conceptions that are contradistinctively negotiated by a citizen might be uniquely constituted, the code and meta-code discriminations that are being employed in generating these perceptions are nonetheless relatively uniformly entertained and employed.

This primary dynamic of signification (i.e., meta-code cognisance) will later be provided close attention. However, for the purposes of initially distinguishing a semiotic perspective regarding ‘ideology’, all that need be noted is that these many ‘ideologically’ cognisant descriptions of society (and their various associated analytical narratives), whilst they are generally conceived of as being vastly dissimilar, actually share many common features both with each other and also with the many other congresses of explanatory facility that are inscribed in the social discourse and public imagination (i.e., in archetypes, tropes, mythologies and social narratives).

From the perspective of the semiotician, these commonalities are appreciated as having been forged in the furnace of the common functional language utilities that a cognisance of the ‘concept of ideology’ obliges. The many dominant and commonly employed Ideologies (and their allied explanations) have all been generated and thence constantly re-defined and refined in contradistinctive fusion, with all these various doctrinal propositions being perceived, in signification, as being necessarily conjoined.

So it is that ‘communism’ (for example) is always amenable to specific description and critique as a proposition of ordering, however the evocation of ‘communism’ is more commonly resolved in the public and private imagination as a cognisance of a range of potential narrative implications relating to other propositions of social ordering. ‘Democracy’ is not communism. Nor is ‘socialism’. Or ‘capitalism’. Moreover, it is not ‘liberalism’, ‘fascism’ or ‘republicanism’ or any other appreciable ‘ideology’. Each distinction is appreciated as particularly illuminating and serves to enhance a potential meaning utility. Thus, a series of ‘meta-code’ relativities serve to enliven (in this instance) the ‘concept of ideology’.

Yet it is also important to understand ‘the concept of ideology’ is a heuristic and not a ‘natural’ category. Meta-code cognisance is narratively promiscuous and extends to all seemingly (contextually) implicated narrative propositions. Which is to say that ‘communism’ (or any other ‘ideological’ proposition) is necessarily understood in a holistic and relativistic manner, in serial realisations of contradistinctive tension relative to all of the other forms of ordering that might seem to be narratively implicated in any given discrimination. Not just commonly recognised aspects of the ‘concept of ideology’. Thus, a particular text might seemingly implicate conceptions relating to Marxism; in contrast to socialism; relative to feminism; taking into account communism, fascism, capitalism, etc. As well as nudism, bee-keeping, the sewage system, modern political protocols and several recent movies. With all these anticipations and dynamics of ordering not necessarily being inscribed in any given ‘text’ or even enunciation.

So, while the many Ideologies that are commonly recognised are appreciated as being distinctly differentiated, this is simply because the functional utility of the ‘concept of ideology’ in signification (as with all commonplace archetypes of ordering) is to facilitate just such an appreciation of ordered differentiation and distinction. Nevertheless, when these many (propositionally) distinct and seemingly differentiated descriptions of society are considered as constituting an assemblage of conjoined facilities of definition and description, then it instantly becomes apparent that they jointly serve to validate and promote a range of very similar, purposively entertained, conceptions regarding self, normality and society.

The evolution of the current social discourse of liberal indeterminacy

‘Dialectics’ might be defined as being a series of traditionally formulated modalities for describing the resolution of disagreement through argumentation. In the 21st century the best known of these formally defined dialectical abstractions is the one that bears the name of the German philosopher, Georg Hegel. Therefore, it is interesting to note that Hegel never employed the precise ‘thesis – antithesis – synthesis’ formulation that is now commonly referred to as the ‘Hegelian dialectic’.[2] Rather, this model of signification was formulated by critics of Hegel many years after his passing.

Nevertheless, it is instructive to observe that when the Hegelian dialectic model is generally evoked in the modern classroom, it is usually employed as a straw man starting point in discussions relating to the evolution of our ‘modern’ comprehensions relating to cognition and society and as being illustrative of the relative crudeness of prior conceptions. With students being introduced to the ‘Hegelian dialectic’ as a series if naïve conceptions regarding human cognition, where the individual is conceived of as being a tabla rasa upon which culture simply inscribes theses which are then modified by further inscriptions (antitheses). With ‘consciousness’ being perceived as advertising a synthesis of these inscriptions.

In this manner, in the modern age, most students are exposed to the thesis – antithesis – synthesis dialectical model at least once during the course of their education as being illustrative of a flawed and insufficient model of signification. However, despite its name, the model that is commonly celebrated actually serves to sidestep most of Hegel’s central concerns which chiefly revolved around the relationship of social ideas with political and institutional dynamics.

Understanding the nature of Hegel’s primary concerns, then Marx’s critique of these propositions, assists in clarifying the origins of many of the primary, purposively formulated, ‘ideological’ terms and propositions that are still commonly employed, in ever mutating form, in our social and academic discourse.

In his theorising, Hegel perceived a link between the evolution of social ideas and social structures. He believed that:

‘…better social and political ideas emerged when deficient understandings (theses) encountered their opposite understandings (antitheses) and were resolved by better understandings (syntheses). The dialectical process of ever improving would, according to Hegel, result in a post-historical stage – an “end of history”- where all deficient ideas would have been overcome and humans would be governed by absolutely correct ideas, by pure rationality’.[3]

Thus, Hegel was actually proposing a dialectical formulation that would explain ‘the conflict of opposites’[4] within and between societies as a whole, not just on a personal and interpersonal level.

Proposing:

‘… that historical progress occurred as societies acquired ever better understandings of such values as freedom and equality through the conflict of old ideas (called theses) with their opposites (antitheses)’.[5] And that ‘…the development of ideas did not follow a closed circuit, but rose from lower to higher forms, that quantitative changes turned into qualitative ones in this process and that contradictions were the source of development’.[6]

Significantly, Karl Marx largely agreed with Hegel’s model, just not his approach. Marx believed that because ‘[t]he first historical act is… the production of material life itself’, [7] that a ‘dialectical materialism’ was instead preferable. An analytical perspective that would instead focus on ‘…the social production which men carry on as they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will’.[8] With these factors being envisioned as being ‘the real foundation, on which legal and political superstructures arise and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond’.[9].

‘My dialectic method is [therefore] not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain… is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.[10]

It is significant that Marx believed that Hegel’s dialectical model needed to be inverted, not abandoned. His aspiration was that the social sciences would one day adopt a ‘material dialecticism’, with this observation being tendered in underlining his refutation of the table rasa concept of human signification (which he noted was being employed as a straw-man for Hegel’s theorising).

Thus, Marx was not refuting Hegel nor his model when he coined the term ‘the material dialectic’. Rather, he was annoyed that his theorising, which self-consciously employed a lot of Hegel’s terminology and in which Marx had proposed a reformulation of many of Hegel’s propositions, had been misinterpreted as constituting a general critique.[11] These matters are of interest for two reasons.

First and most obviously, these academic arguments are significant because Hegel and Marx’s theorising came to be at the heart of the political and philosophical arguments across Europe for several decades during the middle of the 1900s. With these debates generally focussing on the degree to which the work of Hegel and Marx, serially and incrementally, represented a shift away from the philosophical traditions of the ancients. Thus, forging many of the ‘ideologically’ implicated terms and phrases that are commonly recognized and employed right up until the present day

As Jean Hyppolite has wryly noted; ‘[t]o a certain degree, every generation, every tendency has found in Hegel what it sought: a “phenomenological” Hegel, an “existential” Hegel, a “Marxist” Hegel’.[12] Much the same might also be said regarding the work of Marx.

Moreover, in concert, these debates over decades have served to forge many of the foundations that support our contemporary concept of an ‘ideologically’ explicable society. Yet it is also notable that the contemporary ‘post-modern’ sensibility is not only entirely different to that entertained by these theorists, it is also appreciably different to any that they anticipated.

Hegel and Marx both proposed relatively sophisticated analyses, employing a range of competing and variously authorised ‘social order’ propositions and precepts that were assessed as being either more or less adequately explanatory and predictive. With each theorist being so confident that their hypothesising would lead to the end of traditional notions regarding ‘the social sciences’ that they were happy to declare that an end of ‘history’ was immanent.[13]

So, when we step back from these debates regarding the work of Hegel and Marx and place these propositions (and the underlying congress of assumptions and suppositions they articulate) in a broader historical context, while it at once becomes apparent that the theorising engaged by both of these individuals represents a sharp movement away from a range of earlier Cartesian sensibilities,[14] it is also apparent that the world has changed a great deal since. Therefore, even though the social discourse is still enlivened by many of the same terms and concepts that were coined during this period, these propositions of ordering are now appreciated as arbitrating entirely different arguments about different things.

From aspirations of modernism to a post-modern liberal indeterminacy

The idea of a ‘post-modern’ form of appreciation of culture is generally described in complex terms and colourful language. Well illustrating this tendency, in 1995, in an essay entitled ‘Critique in the Name of What? Postmodernism and Critical Approaches to Organization’,[15] Martin Parker cobbled together the following wonderfully evocative descriptions of the ‘post-modern epistemic’ from the work of a range of respected social scientists:

‘The twentieth century post-Wittgensteinian linguistic turn has established that naive positivism or empiricism has clear limits for the social sciences. We can never know all there is to know, we cannot predict with any accuracy and we have no special claims to knowledge over and above that of the participants themselves….[16]

As Rorty puts it, the mind is not the mirror of nature, there are no privileged representations and what we call truth is no more than a name for a historically located practice of justification … .[17]

Any student of interpretive social science from the 1960s onwards learnt the critique of naive empiricism and the game of exposing the hidden ideological position, semiotic code or hermeneutic closure. The contemporary version of this relativist social constructionism is postmodernism, a position that is premised on continually exposing the contradictions at the heart of any grand narrative claims to foundations for truth.[18]

Parker then immediately presents a quote which he proposes as acidly parodying the ‘crippling performative contradictions’ of postmodernism’.’[19]

‘Today, to assign class an explanatory status is to invite the charge of “classism”; to posit a social totality (never mind a global system) with organising principles, that of “essentialism” (“economism”, should – ultimate sin – one of them be economic); to assign causal priority (misconstrued as exclusivity) to anything, that of “reductionism”; to invoke history, that of “historicism”; to mention science – without scare quotes – that of “scientism”; and as far as objective knowledge, well, it is known to be passé (undesirable, even were it attainable)’.[20]

The first few extracts provide a series of working definitions regarding what is generally meant by most social theorists when they employ the term ‘post-modernism’. Then the closing quote (which is otherwise remarkable only for its being very close to word soup) serves well to illustrate the many discursive and political facilities that are commonly mediated in our modern social discourse by the ‘concept of the post-modern’.

However, while Hegel proposed that man was alienated from God by immoral beliefs and Marx that man was alienated from society by false conceptions, it is apparent that in our modern epoch the ‘concept of alienation’ no longer facilitates the same social dreams. ‘Alienation’ is now anticipated as an unavoidable facet of existence. It is no longer conceived of as a ‘problem’. Nietzschean conceptions relating to ontological and epistemic relativism are no longer thought to be propositional but rather aptly descriptive.

Marx and Hegel, as with all their contemporaries, entertained a distinctly dissimilar view of what a society might be and how it might function to that entertained and promoted in the social discourse of the 2020s. Moreover, their dreams of what a ‘society’ might be entirely fail to encompass or anticipate the ‘post-modern’. Yet strangely, the semiological and linguistic homilies of our society still continue to substantiate many of the propositions and perspectives that were forged by Hegel and Marx and their various supporters and critics. But in an oddly contorted form.

Therefore, paradoxically, the citizenry seems to entertain and functionally employ many arcane descriptions of society in an age where the social discourse promotes and facilitates very different assumptions regarding society and self. Unlike those who were forging the majority of these terms (and their associated anticipations of social ordering), the current citizenry of the west knowingly accommodate and anticipate personal and interpersonal cognitive dissonance and relativism. The citizenry commonly anticipate and accept that every individual will entertain and believe in a range of differing conceptions regarding the nature and functioning of society (and most other matters as well).

These post-modern sensibilities of appreciation are commonly, vaguely, contrasted with propositions relating to earlier ‘modern’ forms of epistemic. Which are themselves often contrasted with the metaphysical dialectics entertained by the ‘ancients’. Consequently, it is appreciable that our contemporary concept of the post-modern is not at all equivalent to Marx’s dreams about ‘a material dialectic’. Marx was developing and employing structural/functional conceptions of society that were formulated in contradistinction to the modes of social description that were commonly employed during his lifetime. As a result, his theorising is as nakedly positivistic as is that of all of his contemporaries. So, when Marx was dreaming of a ‘material dialectic’ he was dreaming a positivistic dream regarding modes of analysis that, in the future, would serve to better explain our society and more accurately predict social outcomes. Whereas our commonplace post-modern angst now urges all the encultured citizenry to view such propositions warily.

So, it is apparent that in the contemporary societies of the west the transition to a post-modern sensibility has occasioned a movement from a theologically ordered anticipation of a society to a largely secular and inchoately ordered anticipation of potential disorder and disaster. Rather than a religiously inspired apocalypticism, the populace now entertains a fractured and largely inchoate secular apocalypticism. One enlivened and animated by a host of variously authorised and informed narratives of impending catastrophe.

Thus, all commonplace and academically formulated descriptions of our post-modern epistemic invariably incorporate an acknowledgement that in our contemporary social discourse, positivistic explanatory descriptions (such as ‘ideological’ propositions) are regarded as being at one and the same time significant and merely propositional. Culture is perceived as being both important and arbitrary. Our descriptions as both significant and illusory – that like mist in a glade, our many corporate propositions of definition and ordering serve no meaning function outside of human cognition.

However, all of these propositions of ordering are not perceived by the contemporary citizenry as being contradictory. In many ways the great fear of the theologians, that the populace would eventually abandon them and their ‘explanations’, has come to pass.

The post-modern sensibility exhibits a passé acceptance that ‘ideas’ are necessarily only of import for particular people in a particular context. The concept of a universal ‘truth’ is so last century. Consequently, the post-modern epistemic might be described as incorporating a schizophrenically entertained acknowledgement that ‘society’ is both vitally important (as it is the cradle and birthplace of all ‘meaning’ in the universe) yet it is also, outside of the realm of human conception, meaningless and pointless.

Thus, the contemporary citizenry of the west no longer anticipates that the world will be explicable. ‘God’ is an option, but only one of many. This is not to say that the populace has evolved beyond the habit of reflexively invoking a range of mythically articulated alibis of explanation and definition, but rather to observe that the population now commonly anticipates that the ‘concept of economy’ and the ‘concept of ideology’ will jointly serve much the same meaning and linguistic functions that were once obliged by the ‘concept of alienation’ from God and/or society.

References

[1] A case sensitive search for the frequency of use of the term ‘ideology’ and ‘Ideology’ from 1900 to 2008. Google Books, ‘ideology’ and ‘Ideology’ Google Books Ngram Viewer (web page, 15/12/18) <https://books.google.com/ngrams>.

[2] For example, see MariaLaura Di Domenico, Paul Tracey and Helen Haugh, ‘The dialectic of social exchange: Theorizing corporate – social enterprise collaboration’ (2009) 30(8) Organization studies 887-907, or, Gustav E. Mueller, ‘The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis’(1958) 19(3) Journal of the History of Ideas 411-414.

[3] Paul Schumaker, From Ideologies to Public Philosophy: An Introduction to Political Theory (Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 114, quoted in Uchendu Patrick Chukwudi and Port Harcourt ‘Dialectics and Social Transformation: A Comparative Study of Hegel and Marx’, www.academia.edu (MS Word document, 13/08/16) 5 <www.academia.edu/download/34054290/Dialectics_and_Social_Transformation.docx>.

[4] Described by Lenin as being a ‘struggle of opposites’. See Vladimir Lenin, ‘Lenin’s Collected Works (4th ed. Moscow, Progress Publishers , Volume 38, 1976)’ www.marxists.org (web page, 13/08/16) 357-361 <https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/misc/x02.htm >.

[5] Paul Schumaker, From Ideologies to Public Philosophy: An Introduction to Political Theory (Blackwell Publishing, 2008), 28, quoted in Uchendu Patrick Chukwudi and Port Harcourt ‘Dialectics and Social Transformation: A Comparative Study of Hegel and Marx’, www.academia.edu (MS Word document, 13/08/16) 4 <www.academia.edu/download/34054290/Dialectics_and_Social_Transformation.docx>.

[6] Viktor Grigorevich Afanasev, Marxist philosophy (Progress Publishers, 4th ed, 1965) 28, quoted in Chukwudi and Harcourt (n 463) 4.

[7] Karl Marx, Capital (Vol. 1, 1873) (Penguin, 1990) 60.

[8] Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Selected Works (2 Vols. Foreign Language Publishing House, 1962), 488.

[9] Ibid.

[10] Marx (n 6) 14 (underlining added).

[11] ‘The mystifying side of Hegelian dialectic I criticised nearly thirty years ago, at a time when it was still the fashion. But just as I was working at the first volume of ‘Das Kapital’, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing’s time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a ‘dead dog’. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’. Ibid.

[12] Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and structure of Hegel’s’ ‘Phenomenology of spirit’ (Northwestern University Press, 1979) xvi.

[13] It is interesting to note that Hegel published his Phenomenology of Spirit as the ‘first part’ of a proposed ‘System of Science’. Ibid. Although there is no space for extended consideration of this point, it is important to note that the ‘concept of science’ that is evidently being entertained by both Marx and Hegel is sharply divergent to that which is in common currency at the time of writing.

[14] In the following quote, Hegel evaluates the theorising of his academic peers regarding society in terms that would not be out of place if uttered by a Marxist during the 1900s; ‘The more that conventional opinion’, Hegel complains, ‘holds that the opposition between the true and the false is itself fixed and set, the more that it customarily expects to find itself in either agreement or in contradiction with any given philosophical system, and, if so, then in any explanation of such a system, the more it will merely see the one or the other. It does not comprehend the diversity of philosophical systems as the progressive development of truth as much as it sees merely contradiction within that diversity’. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (W. Ross MacDonald School Resource Services Library, 2008), ‘Preface’ [2].

[15] Martin Parker, ‘Critique in the name of what? Postmodernism and critical approaches to organization’ (1995) 16(4) Organization Studies 553-565.

[16] The author cites Peter Winch, The idea of a social science: And its relation to philosophy (Routledge, 2002); Paul Feyerabend, ‘Against Method: Outline of an Anarchistic Theory of Knowledge’ (1970) Analyses of Theories 17-130; Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, Rationality and relativism (1982). Ibid 555.

[17] The author cites Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2009). Ibid.

[18] The author cites Jean-Francois Lyotard, ‘The postmodern condition’ (1999) 4 Modernity: Critical Concepts 161-177. Ibid.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Quoting Gregory Elliott, ‘The cards of confusion’. (1993) 64 Radical Philosophy 3-12, ibid 555-6.