curtiss_leung at ibi.com wrote:
> Marx was trying to show that the commodity was not as it appeared,
> true, but is that a license for the overwrought prose of some posties?
licence? no. but me thinks often that prose becomes overwrought when there is a real difficulty in articulating something. i know mine does. the more certain i am, the more concise i can be. and this is then more than simply saying if these folks were so sure of stuff, they would say it more clearly; or perhaps it is saying that, but not as a negative judgement. there are moments for instance in derrida that the hesitancy, nuance, constant turning and overturning of concepts is crucial to what it is he is arguing - that is: no chasm is presumed to exist between the 'style' of expression and the 'content'. other times i find derrida doing this a sheer style, and it bores the hell out of me.
and yes, there are some pomos who place a great emphasis on literary prose, but i think you can say 'this or that particular way doesn't work for me', without at the same time thinking there is another chasm that separates philosophy or politics from literature and rhetoric. that one of the precepts of pomo stuff is a rejection of this separation, i can see why it becomes important for them. i think this assault on the separation of 'truth' from the mechanisms which establish it as 'true for us' is not - in itself - inimical to marxism or oppositional politics generally.
so: i'm really not particularly bothered by what some see as the aestheticisation of knowledge or politics, since there are those who raise more than important discussions about the relation between aesthetics and politics (like jean-luc nancy) who i do take the time to read seriously, and those who i think are pretty awful (like baudrillard, or lyotard). not an homogeneous group by any measure, especially a marxist one i would have thought.
which is why i continue to think much of the complaints about 'the pomos' that comes from marxists has more to do with a rather pathological belief that pomo is responsible for taking away the glam of marxism in the academy, for making it hard to get a job as a marxist in the academy, etc. was it ever any different? and, i think we can't simply write off the academy as an ivory-tower in the way that would have actually meant something in the times of a not-so-mass education system. if the universities are increasingly a site of production (as i think they are) and if the majority of students are destined to be working class (which i think is now more than ever true) and if there is now the not-so-clean symmetry between productive labour and manual labour as there was before (true for me), then the academy as a site of class struggle is more than just a banal statement, and one that marxists can't take seriously if they think it is all ivory-tower stuff. aesthetics no less than the philosophy of science or economics is our terrain - especially when what was usually regarded as epiphenomenal to the 'base' is i reckon now more or less another branch of prodn. (now, there's a provocation to end off on....
cheers, angela