>That may be true for the
>neoclassical goons who legitimate late capitalism's continuing predations,
>but Butler is someone *questioning* this. But maybe it's precisely this
>resistance to thinking anything new, this virulent attack on even the
>faintest, most tenuous notion of postmodern solidarity, which explains why
>we don't have a Left in this benighted country...
I find it fascinating, and no doubt revealing in ways that I can't yet understand, that people criticize Butler & the posties in general for being both obscure and nothing new. (And not just separate groups of people - the same individuals have made both charges, some of them right here in this list.) In both cases, it seems like an anxiety is defused through a dismissal: either they're incomprehensible (perhaps deliberately so) or irrelevant.
Where does the anxiety come from? I think that a lot of old-style leftists want to blame the depoliticization of the masses and the rather sorry state of Marxism on the evil influence of postmodernism, however loosely defined (if at all) - and the relative success, in intellectual circles, of postmodernism, however loosely defined (if at all) chafes badly. And, content-wise, insofar as the anti-pomoistas have taken on any of the content, the emphasis on instability and uncertainty is also anxiety-provoking; even Marxists can long for the days when verities were verities and classes knew their place. But if, as Jameson argues, "postmodernism" is the cultural logic of our phase of capitalism (calling it late capitalism is too optimistic for me), then you can't blame the theorists for their concerns. As the old guy said, all that's solid melts into air.
Doug