>Jesus Doug, I'm stunned, this is really insulting. How am I anywhere
>near an "old-style leftist"? How am I concerned about the "sorry
>state of Marxism"? I really could care less about the "relative
>success, in intellectual circles, of postmodernism". Do you really
>think I have a problem with "instability and uncertainty"?
I certainly don't mean to insult you, Bill, not in the least, and I'm sorry if it looked that way. You do seem to think that it's easier to tell the real from the unreal and the true from the untrue than I do, and you're inclined to rank stylistic clarity higher on the list of virtues than I would. But I wasn't addressing you when I made those comments. I was thinking mostly of the folks around Monthly Review - people I have a lot of sympathy with on many issues - and even The Nation, for whom obscurantist posties are like serpents in the garden.
And as for the claim of obscurity as a symptom of anxiety, I was first thinking of Keynes's claim that he found Marx incomprehensible - a claim that I find incomprehensible. Marx made him nervous in class terms, and in dismissing him as obscure, "out-of-date controversialising," he was doing something similar to what a lot of more traditional leftists are doing with the various postalisms.
Stop the
>psychoanalyzing and decode her for us if you think she has something
>new to say --- or would doing so provoke anxiety of a different sort
>in you?
I thought I've made that pretty clear. As for newness, few things in life are truly new.
Many things make me anxious, but it would excite my anxiety to list them right now.
>Because Noam Chomsky's imprimatur appears on the back of Sokal and
>Bricmont's book, and because he is (largely) dismissive of
>postmodernism, does that make him a victim of anxiety too? When I
>dismiss creationism, am I suffering from anxiety?
I admire Chomsky a lot, and for many reasons, but this is one place where we have to part company. He has a bit more faith in the liberating powers of truth & reason than I do.
Doug