Re: Lest we forget was Re: On toilets

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Gary:

>I agree that a proper balanced judgement on the pomos has yet to be
>reached.  We are still to close to them.  My own opinion is that
>here in Australia at least they have served to disorient and
>depoliticse a whole generation of students.  I keep repeating that
>when the CIA begin assassinating pomos then I will be impressed.
>
>Now I readily grant that they have looked at a range of phenomena
>that Marxists have neglected.  However as their premises and
>conclusions were largely as you say incorrect I am not too inclined
>to say that they have contributed that much of value.

I agree with you on all of the above (I've made perhaps _more_ than
my share of polemical criticisms of post-modernism, especially on
lists such as LBO -- to take just one example, among post-modernists,
Zizek's remarks on Serbia have been the most horrific), but one thing
that I stick to in my activist & e-list efforts (such as they are) is
to separate ideology from holders of ideology.  An erring world view
can lead people to a correct position; likewise, an apparently
correct philosophy can lead people to a tragically misguided position
(Hegelian, no?).  For us veterans of Marxist lists, especially given
sharply contradictory responses to attacks on Yugoslavia for
instance, it should be clear that there is no guarantee that Marxism
can lead Marxists to a correct position, especially at this point in
history....  It is ironic but not at all surprising that many
Marxists (especially quite a few of people who hail from Trotskyist
or Third Camp backgrounds) have made errors as grave as -- if not
graver than -- Zizek's.  On Yugoslavia, some post-modernists such as
Alain Badiou have made somewhat better -- though still inadequate --
responses than, say, Solidarity, etc.

So, my advice to people here is that we should criticize
post-modernism (as philosophy) as clearly as possible so as to
illuminate why its premises & conclusions are incorrect, while at the
same time treating those who happen to espouse post-modernism at this
moment in the same fashion as you would treat religious leftists,
young anarchists, etc.  I might employ a religious metaphor of hating
sins while holding out a promise of redemption for sinners, but for a
demonstrated fact that Marxists are no gods, hence in no position to
forgive, and ourselves in error as well.

>As for Foucault I cannot abide him at all.  His work on the
>positivity of power for instance has underpinned the sell outs that
>Tony Bennett and his followers led.

I agree, except that Foucault (and some of his followers) has brought
a much better understanding of the _history_ of sexuality.  While
Marxists have been somewhat more adept at historicizing gender than
scholars trapped in commodity fetishism, their treatment of sexuality
has been sometimes ahistorical (in the Freudian and/or Hegelian
fashion).

>BTW I trust you understood that the point about Bakhtin was that his
>theory of the historical role of the lower bodily strata was very
>much a masculinist if not a misogynist one.

Carnivals have often involved gender inversions as well, temporary as
they necessarily have been.  The problem is that with regard to
gender, what we need is not inversion of roles but abolition of
oppression.

Yoshie