Re: anti-Pomo babble

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I appreciate and am edified by Justin's summary below.

Seems to me also behind much of the work of this school of thought is the project of getting more support for women's and gay liberation on the Left, and reputedly for liberations of peoples of color ( socalled new social movements). However, this project is formulated mainly as a philosophical (especially epistemological), not explicity political , critique of the classical Left; and as a misrepresentation and arrogation of a lot of the peoples of color part. The critique of the Left goal is good, but the project is undermined by the indirection through philosophy, and  by the poor philosophy. Also, the project ends up as a form of petit bourgeois liberalism in its anti-Marxism.

CB



>>> JKSCHW@xxxxxxx 09/08/00 10:33AM >>>
I have read and indeed taught the major pomos & poststructuralists--Derrida, DeMan, Foucault, DeLeuze & Guttari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Rorty, and made an effort to get a grip on Irigaray, Kristev, Butler, and Spivak. I am pretty confident that they share a family resemblance in advocating:

1) antifoundationalism, by which they seem to mean a sort of naive realtivism, a denial of objective truth, in favor of social constructiism;

2) antiessentialism,a  denial that humans as such or specific groups of humans have an objective nature, social or biological; this is associated with a sort of individualistic nominalism, an insistence on "difference";

3) anti-grand-narrativism, specifically a rejection of the idea that history has any directionality of thes ort espoused by historical materialism (in particular);

4) Linguistic idealism; the idea that reality is constituted by local linguistic conventions;

5) "marginalism," an affection for groups at the margins of society (not the working class) which is also connected with

6) An identity politics that focuses on respect and recognition rather than a class politics taht focuses on interests and power.

Not every pomo recapitulates all of these themes, but most of them recapitulate most of them, in their own way, an their epiones in the American academy ampliy and vulgarize them to a ludirous extent. I am not any more embarassed about attributing these views to pomo than I am about attriuting class politics, etc. to Marxism, without necessarily getting real specific about which marxists have class politics. Besides, we have here an advocate of (1) and (2), Nicole, who clearly does hold these positions and has put them up for discussions. And finally, I think that if Temps or any other pomo fan, such as Doug, can explain why their favorite pomo does not advocate a relevantly large subset of these positions, I would be enlightened.

--jks