Historical Transformation and Epistemological Discontinuity

Abstract

Starting from recent formulas of EU bureaucracy for subordinating scientific and educational apparatuses to the needs of the capital and to the requests of its political representatives, the article analyses the interconnection between the historical transformation of the ideological state apparatuses (universities, higher education institutions, research institutes etc.) and the epistemological discontinuity provoked by the triumph of technosciences. The hypothesis to be tested is the following: While the crisis of West European-North American capitalism requires an ever tighter submission of ideological state apparatuses, and especially of scientific and academic apparatuses to the needs of the capital, theoretical practices in the humanities and social sciences have come to the point where they entered into an open conflict with the domination of the capital and have, as a consequence, started to subvert their own institutional supports in the ideological apparatuses of the capitalist state. For this purpose, the article reconsiders social sciences as a compromise formation and, eventually, reassesses the historical materialism as a non-Cartesian modern science.