POSITIVE SPEECH, PROGRESS and UTOPIA. (Paperback)

Towards the end of the 20th century, it appears to be highly problematic to speak 'positively' about anything; except it seems, about the impossibility of speaking positively. The perhaps only transitionally legitimate, but currently damning charges of, 'positivist', 'master-narrative', or 'reified', lie in wait, primed, rehearsed and ready to do their rhetorical damage. Positive speech is widely and strongly condemned and accused: of failing epistemologically as 'positivism', partly because that epistemology was founded on an ontological failure to notice the fundamental difference between the social and the physical; of failing historically, by not noticing that the Knowledge-Control of Science turned into the Positivism of Societies, and provided for the 'master-narratives' of the Control of history and correct human existence; and of failing to notice that positive speech annihilated 'difference', and smothered or distorted the voice of 'the Other'. These charges are large obstacles for any intention to return to talk of Progress, quite apart from any arguments about the balance-sheet of Good and Evil in the present century, or since the Enlightenment. And yet it seems, so long as care is a constituent of any contribution to social theorising, positive speech is entirely indispensable, and insofar as theorising refuses to be resigned to reflection alone. Theorising which speaks to a purpose, even the purpose of the most 'truly analytical', 'primordial inquiry', or the most 'postmodern' playful celebration of difference, requires the positive speech which is also the ground of their special inner contradiction. Conversely, if care is no longer the principal axiom of the purpose of theorising - a routine contemporary perception - then its absence is itself one of the elements of the widespread reaction to, and imagined solution of, the problem of how to theorize positively at this time, without being, as it is seen, anachronistically 'progressivist'.