Help, help, help! Doug is leveling accusations of anxiety and I am anxious that I am a target! Hey, after all he has already taken me to task for making "wee-wee jokes," and we know that people who make those are anxious about, um, well, I forget (or was that the "transferable phantasm"?).
Just for the serious record: I have criticized Butler for not saying anything new and for using ludicrous academically oriented jargon. I have not criticized her for being obscure, nor have I leveled any general criticism of pomos or pomoism on that or any other grounds. I have read quite a few of them, some extensively, but some not at all. Some of them I have found to be interesting and original. Some I have found to be obscure. Some I have found to be completely off the wall. Some I have found to be all three, e.g. Lacan. I personally don't have time to read all of the pomos as I have to spend a lot of time reading other weird and very irrelevant-in-the-eyes-of-Doug stuff such as Otto Rossler on flame attractors (hot stuff!).
In any case, I am waiting for someone to clearly explain why it would be worth spending much time on reading Butler extensively. So far I have yet to see such an explanation. So she is the "lesbian Foucault", but aren't there plenty of other lesbian theorists out there at least as good? What has she said that is new other then to generate this really godawful acadmic terminology? Frances says that she has a somewhat useful discussion of Hegel. Well, maybe. Is it really all that revealing and wonderful as to take the time to struggle with her jargon?
Personally I don't think the "failure of the left" to connect with the masses has doodley-squat to do with pomo. The masses pay no attention and couldn't care less. Barkley Rosser On Thu, 28 Jan 1999 19:02:30 -0500 Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> Dennis R Redmond wrote:
>
> >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
-- Rosser Jr, John Barkley rosserjb at jmu.edu