This week I have been mostly reading

As part of my reading of Macey's biography of Foucault, I have also dipped into Belsey's Poststructuralism.  I am too much of a realist and a liberal-democrat to be much of a poststructuralist and I do not ascribe as prominent a role to language as many such theorists would.  But I do enjoy such works as a chance to practice critical thinking on views I don't necessarily agree with.

And to practice my new-found poststructuralist skills on, what better than the following classic by Cheryl Smith:

The way I see it - raising goats can be understood as working on three levels: economic, political and ideological.  Each of these levels has a degree of independence, or "relative autonomy", but each is also the condition of existemnce of the others, though they would not all necessarily move at the same rate.  The motor of change is contradiction in or between the three levels.  Ownership defines social relations (the ownership of goats especially so) The ideology that does most to sustain goat-owning capitalism is humanism - the belief in "man" as the free, autonomous origin of history.

As Hegel said - "the goat of minerva flies only at dusk"