[PEN-L:3837] Re: Re: Postmodernist Marxism

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Doug Henwood wrote:

> Louis Proyect wrote:
>
> >Two of
> >the better-known post-Marxists are Laclau and Mouffe, who I've never taken
> >the trouble to read[...]

[For lbo readers: I have quoted Doug's post in its entirety. No snipping.]

Two points.

1. Lou has got to back off from pulling the Butler trick of argument
through the invention (or echoing others' inventions) of utterly empty
categories. I probably would agree with the substance of most of
what Lou has to say about the world, but his weird insistence on
arguing not against identifiable and substantive positions but against
will-o-the-wisps such as "postmodernism" will destroy him politically
if he can't break the habit. His use of "pomo" is as incontinent as is
Paul Rosenberg's current use of it on lbo to attack anyone who dares
suggest that Buffy, like any other element of u.s. culture, may have
its weaknesses or oddities.

2. That said, the position Doug is implicitly and explicitly advancing in
these exchanges would, if really accepted, make any kind of human
intercourse, political or intellectual, utterly impossible and reduce us
all to the mystic silence at the end of the Tractatus: Whereof we cannot
speak, thereof we must be silent. And of course the "whereof" includes
everything that ever has been said or ever will be said. Following
Doug's advice we would have no alternative but to retire to a Trappist
monastery to attempt to read everything that had ever been scribbled
on a wall. For Doug, Swift and Pope lived and wrote in vain.

            Thy hand, great Anarch!  lets the curtain fall,
            And universal Darkness buries all.

Lou's incontinent use of the label "pomo," as stupid as it is, is far
less intellectually damaging than Doug's implicit position that we
can't say anything until we have read everything, and his apparent
refusal to work out in any detail the principles by means of which
we can decide what we won't read.

Carrol