I agree entirely with the Butler quote (it certainly never pissed me off), agree entirely with your hopes for this list, agree entirely with you about Seattle, and agree decisively with the likes of the young Habermas (who called pomo 'new conservatism'), Alex Callinicos (who suggested pomo was effectively a 'lie back and enjoy capitalism' project), Terry Eagleton (who reckons to deny essence and history is to lose your politics) and Perry Anderson (who follows Berman in defining modernism as the project of men and women consciously to take a hand in changing the world that is changing them and asks us not to lose sight of this progressive metanarrative) on what the postmodernist social theory enterprise actually entails. Can this be, d'ya think?
Cheers, Rob.
You'd written:
>No kidding. As Judy B said in her Rethinking Marxism talk which
>pissed off so many people:
>
>>What the resurgent orthodoxy may resent about new social movements
>>is precisely the vitality that such movements are enjoying.
>>Paradoxically, the very movements this continue to keep the Left
>>alive are credited with its paralysis. Although I would agree that a
>>narrowly identitarian construal of such movements leads to a
>>narrowing of the political field, *there is no reason to assume that
>>such social movements are reducible to their identitarian
>>formations.* The problem of unity, or more modestly, of solidarity,
>>cannot be resolved through the transcendence or obliteration of this
>>field, and certainly not through the vain promise of retrieving a
>>unity wrought through exclusions, one that reinstitutes
>>subordination as the condition of its own possibility. The only
>>possible unity will not be the synthesis of a set of conflicts, but
>>will be *a mode of sustaining conflict in politically productive
>>ways,* a practice of contesation that demands that these movements
>>articulate their goals under the pressure of each other without
>>therefore exactly becoming each other....
>
>Or, as Angela said:
>
>>i, for one, welcome the tactical and political diversity. without that,
>>movement becomes ossified.
>
>One of the reasons I started this list was to try to do something
>about all these awful splits - cultural/real politics,
>Marxists/postmodernists, class/identity, etc. - to which we can now
>add anarchist/Marxist. Do the masses of Seattle protesters, whether
>middle-aged Steelworkers or young anarchists, have what I see as a
>satisfying analysis of capitalism? No, they don't. But then I
>couldn't have organized anything like that action, or actions (since
>they were very plural). We all need each other.
>
>Doug