Re: anti-Pomo babble

[Colin Danby <danbyc@xxxxxxx>]

I tried to avoid getting reimmersed in these
recurrent pen-lpomo discussions, which are a sort
of chronic cyberdisease.  But this latest by "jks"
was a little much.

> 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.

Then he should know that there are very large differences
among them.

> 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;

I assume "relativism" is meant.  Who is the naive relativist
in the list above?  "Relativism" is the key term in the
standard, ignorant, conflationst attack on the mythical
unity of "pomo".  Relativism is
in fact a highly modernist position.  See for example Haraway's
blistering attack on relativism in her "Situated Knowledges" essay.

>
> 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);

These 2 apply only in
the sense that learning how to critique these things helped a
lot of different people see deeper problems.  But this is just
a first babystep.  Indeed this kind of critique, by itself, is
not even terribly new.

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

Wrong, if this phrase means anything at all.  Here we can
see the kind of confusion that conflating pomo and
post-structralism produces.

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

Right only to the extent that 2-3 above compel attention
to exclusions and omissions, and call into question
(which is not the same thing as deny) simple unities
like "the working class."

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

Howlingly wrong.  Post-structuralists like Said and
Spivak are sharply critical of identity politics.
Postmodernism is *nothing* if not a
critique of the whole notion of identity, and has thus
always been sharply at odds with identity politics and
standpoint theories.

> Not every pomo recapitulates all of these themes,

Wiggle room.

> but most of them recapitulate
> most of them, in their own way,

More wiggling, as was the phrase "family resemblance"
earlier.  The author wants to make a set of sweeping claims
and yet escape responsibility for them.

The first logical problem here is that the set of theorists named
is so broad and diverse that if you try to find a set of propositions
that they all share, you either get a very reduced
set of banal propositions (e.g. 2 and 3 above) or
if you try to find broader agreement, you get mush.
People who want to debate "pomo" construed in these
broad terms want to debate mush.  There is no there
there.

As a general rule, folks, anyone who conflates
post-structuralism and postmodernism doesn't know what
they're talking about.  Pomo, when used in these
conflationist terms, is
a bogeyman, a term for everything that makes the
person who is using it nervous.

> an their epiones in the American academy ampliy
> and vulgarize them to a ludirous extent.

THis is another illogical move, widely represented
on pen-l.  You assail the silliest postmodernist
you can find.  When it's pointed out that this is
mere strawmanbashing, you claim that there is
nonetheless some essential link -- that the serious theorists
are responsible for the silly ones, as in the
metaphor "amplify" above.

As a result of these two forms of conflationism,
the silliness of the silliest pomo
becomes a justification for not reading, or not
reading carefully, several genres of theory.

>... explain
> why their favorite pomo does not advocate a relevantly large
> subset of these positions, I would be enlightened.

Yet more illogic. You cannot prove a negative. It is
up to the author to pick a particular theorist
and make a critique, with textual evidence.

 * * *

About a year and a half ago, when I was
a more regular participant on this list, this topic
came up and I pointed to

> examples in recent ethnography (e.g. Clark,
> _Onions are My Husband_, Tsing, _In the Realm of the
> Diamond Queen_, Steedly, _Hanging Without a Rope_.)
> for evidence that work informed by post-structuralism
> can produce insights about the social organization of
> material life.

I might also have pointed to work in history like the
subaltern studies school, and a lot of important
work on gender.

Part of our trouble is the backwardness of econ
as a discipline, orthodox and heterodox -- it has
remained essentially out of
the debates over social theory of the last century
that have produced structuralism, post-structuralism,
and so forth.  The kind of work I mention above
shows social science that has digested these
successive schools of thought, learned from the
debates between them, and moved on.  We should too.

Best, Colin