> paul wrote:
>
> >AND why PoMo is so quietist at heart, so deeply complicitous in the
> >continued reign of the positivism it overtly rails against.
>
> did you get a chance to take a look at the derrida citation i
> mentioned, paul? i think you will find that this is not so easy a
> thing to conclude of derrida or foucault, for instance.
No I did not look at Derrida. I haven't looked at Derrida in years. The objection I'm raising is not the sort of thing you answer by pointing toward a particular text. It's something you answer by pointing towards the world. Ooops! I forgot! "The world" does not exist! Only texts! Sorry....
> beoming a repetition of that one ostensibly seeks to oppose is not a
> condition of postmodernism, which at least has the virtue of
> recognising this possibility when it works from a dialectical
> understanding, but a condition of those wpolitics which declare
> themselves to be autonomously consitituted, self-sufficient.
And speaking of texts, that's a pretty mean little one it's own self! It's indirection neatly illustrates the habitual disengagement that PoMo dresses up as resistence.
Now, you may disagree with the statement I've just made, but compare it to the pseudo-science-speak of Angela's paragraph, and ask yourself about how these forms of expression relate to the very possibilities of taking action which they implicitly express. (BTW, I don't think PoMo's do a very good job with this, for example -- Understanding the spirit of texts.)
But, trying to come down to brass tacks again, here's the context of the snippet Angela was responding to:
> > Or, as Horkheimer said, cynicism is the worst kind of conformity. You
> > pretend to know better, but play along.
>
> Which is precisely why "The X-Files" is the "Father Knows Best" of
> the 90s.
>
> AND why PoMo is so quietist at heart, so deeply complicitous
> in the continued reign of the positivism it overtly rails against.
Implicit here is the parallel construction:
Era Of Belief Conformist Cynical Psuedo-Hip Rejoinder
"Father Knows Best" "The X-Files"
Positivism PoMo
What's interesting about The X-Files is how it's composed almost entirely of authoritarian pronouncements, much as the classical 1950s father was supposed to be. In "The X-Files" EVERYONE knows best -- regardless of how ignorant they are. You can't EVER ask Mulder a straight question and get a straight answer. It's amazing that after all these years Skinner and Scully still keep trying. Not that they're any better, tho. Well, maybe just a tad.
What it completely missess (assuming, counterfactually for a moment here that it was ever looking in the first place) is that the true opposition to that authoritarianism is dialogue -- actual conversation in which depths are explored (as in the conversations among friends in "Buffy, The Vampire Slayer"), in which ideas are revealed in their own specificity, integrity and self-contradiction (as in the debates in the prosecutors office in "Law & Order").
The same is true of PoMo -- it apes the imperious manner of the positivism it ostensibly opposses.
But reflecting the old order in a shattered glass is NOT the same as shattering the old order, not by a long shot. It's a psuedo-hip way of perpetuating the old order. It looks really cool on the screen, in an aching-to-be-Hitchcock-but-thinking-you-can-be-moreso kinda way.
Marx started it all, but he had an excuse. He swam in the positivist seas of the 19th Century. He saw more of the oceans he swam in than any fish in history, perhaps. But this one he failed to really come to terms with.
But the PoMos have no such excuse. They have another model -- the James/Dewey model of pragmatism, pluralism, and the primacy of dialog (without denying the reality OR fetishizing the authority of facts). This model is just not hip enough to satisfy, tho. It's like "Meet John Doe" compared to "Strangers on a Train". Or "Law & Order" compared to "The X-Files".
Doug's Horkheimer reference simply provided an opportune moment to remind folks how full of shit such posing really is. Even if it does produce some rilly rilly great B-Movie art.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"