 Good evening again, or good day, good morning. It's Professor Resnick again. Today I want to talk about two interesting things. One is the connection to what we have been doing here before and a concept called modernism. And also its connection to another concept, which you probably have run into, post-modernism. Modernism is a way of thinking that asserts that particular ideas or particular kinds of tools can be used by human beings to enable those human beings, those knowers, to understand what is really going on in the world or what is really going on in nature. Now these tools may be mathematics, say geometry and economics or algebra and economics. There may be particular kinds of painting in art. There may be particular kinds of grammar in language. There may be rationalism and empiricism in philosophy. So whatever they are, these particular tools are asserted to be necessary for a knower to conquer time and space by revealing to the knower what is universally true, that conquist space, and what is eternally true, that conquist time. So modernism is a way of thinking that searches for and finds the absolute truth. Some philosophers have linked modernism to despotism and tyranny. And again, that person I mentioned to you the last couple of times, Foucault is one who has argued that what occurs in modernism is that the few have been able to transform their particular set of tools and the knowledges produced with those tools into the theorizations or discourses or what he calls the formations of the day that order everybody else's behavior. That's why he's such a controversial and interesting thinker across the 20th century. Their ideas, their tools, order our behavior because these other individuals assert that their tools and their ideas are the true discourses, the true theories of the day. So if it's the truth, if one accepts that assertion, then those true theories and tools dominate and can eliminate all other in different ways of thinking and different ways of using tools that are determined not to be true or not to be reasonable when compared to the true discourse of the day. Note the implications here for Marxian theories since that's been deemed not to be true and the tools of Marxian theory, its value theory not to be correct and hence he gets demoted, gets demoted because other ways of thinking are asserted to be the truth. That is the lesson of Foucault. So rather than having a reason and experience liberate human beings from ignorance which was the hope of the Renaissance in which modernism grew up, they are used to force individuals that is reason, experience are used to force individuals into accepting the declared true discourse of the day. So the Foucault used their power in one way or the other to make the majority's thinking conform to the ideas of the Foucault. So they're despots in that sense, the Foucault. Instead, we should acknowledge the different discourses that human beings produce with their different relative truths yielding their different determinations on our lives, the lesson of Mr. Rody. And that's all we ever have. We have all these different truths and these different consequences. And that's what we need to be aware of and conscious of so that we can choose amongst them based upon their different consequences on our lives. Not based upon that one is true and is not true because there's no way as we just have shown the last two presentations to go about ascertaining that. Rather, we have these different truth claims, these different consequences and that's what we choose amongst. That's what we have to recognize and that's what we have to evaluate, but we always have to recognize and evaluate that these different consequences are always occurring within a particular theory because there's no way to step out of that. So the way we evaluate the different consequences is always relative to a particular theory. I wanna now move and discuss more this notion of overdetermination, this notion of dialectics and Marx's own presentation of his method, which I've asked you to look at. The notion of overdetermination, which we've talked about refers to how something exists. I'm gonna use a different word, how something is constituted. And it exists or it is constituted as a site of different determinations that literally combine together to produce it. So I wanna put on the whiteboard, again a diagram which I put on a couple of presentations ago and explain this notion of overdetermination. So let me turn to this. The idea is that in the world there's an infinity of different, I'm gonna call them processes after Marx. And I'm gonna divide them again into these four categories. This is arbitrary, you can divide them any way you want. I'm gonna use this particular kind of taxonomy. So economics again to remind you has got to do with the production and dissemination of wealth. Politics has got to do with the production and dissemination of ordering of human behavior. Culture has got to do with the production and dissemination of all the different meanings that we produce about life. And of course nature has got to do with all the biological, chemical and so forth changes that occur in life. So the argument is that the society or the world, the term that was used in Marx's day, materiality, reality, these are all synonyms, is a result of the coming together of these different political, economic, cultural and natural determinations. So we have the economic. We have the political. Economic processes, production, dissemination of wealth, political processes, the ordering of human behavior, the laws and the rules that we establish in society. All the cultural processes, how we think in the different forms of our thinking. And of course, I don't wanna leave it out, all the natural processes, sun up in the sky, rainfall, blah, blah, blah, blah. All those come together and literally create in here society. That dot is the site of all these different causes, these different determinations. Okay, that's the notion of over-determination. There's an infinity of them. So as I told you before, the prefix over is a poetic way of trying to say there's an infinity of these determinations. So what's true for society is also true for anything in society, any person, any institution. Anything we can think of using this notion of causation is a site, a locus of these different causes that come together and literally create it. Let's use another term. We can say that the political, economic and cultural and natural processes are the conditions of existence of a particular site, in this case, society. So we can say that in the United States today, what are its conditions of existence? Well, they would be the political, the natural, the economic and of course the cultural processes that come together literally create the society, the United States. What's true for the site society, in terms of this notion of over-determination, is again true for all of these processes. So if we just look at, let's take economic, if we ask how this thing is constituted, how it exists, well it exists of course as the result of the impact of society on it, but also as politics and culture and nature. And we can do the same for any one of these. So if we ask how politics exists, it would be economics, of course, natural and of course society and of course culture. Well, you can see that this is a mess. So from the perspective of over-determination, if I continue to do this, I'm gonna have an infinity of these different crossing lines and that's what the over-determination asserts that this society is a mess of, it's a chaotic entity of these interacting determinations and then you ask well, what do you do as a human being when you're confronted with this mess? What we do then is we choose one, at best, set of processes to begin to understand the mess. Some people choose economics, other people choose politics, other people choose nature, physicists, other people choose culture, music. These are the different entry points that theorists deploy to begin to bring order and understanding to theorize to explain the mess.