>> Who says this PoMo stuff won't clear your head and revitalize your
>> revolution for you?
>>
>> Not me! Not anymore!
while i don't have the post in question, you went on to make some remark maintaining that pomos maintained that all is a text. please, point to specific *evidence* of this phenom.
>(2) Inheriting sensible ideas, and distorting them out of all
>proportion, turning them into fetishes, is far worse. And this what PoMo
>seems to do with incredible ferocity.
again, evidence? specific texts? passages?
>(3) I don't deny for a minute that oppositional pairs bear scrutiny. I
>just think that PoMo approaches have a strong tendency to be rigid,
>schematic, static, ahistorical and decontextual. Let's see, the
>oppositional pair position would be flexible, fully-realized, dynamic,
>historical and contextual.
clearly you haven't really read a great deal of it have you, for this is precisely NOT the goal of much pomo theorizing. see for example, Steve Seidman's _Contested Knowledge: Social Theory in the Postmodern Era_ Very accessible, very readable, and very much about a pomo project that recognizes the ethical impulse of social theory, that is local, specific, historical. Linda Nicholson's work might also be useful as well.
>(4) For example, PoMo attacks on "reason" don't do very much at all to
>advance our understanding of what reason actually is. On the other
>hand, cognitive science is making a good deal of headway in
>deconstructing the old reason/emotion dichotomy.
what something actually *is* sometimes doesn't matter as much as what we *believe* it is. no one has been able to identify the 'cause' of alcohholism or a gay gene the 'causes' homosexuality. it seems to me that a pomo analysis of the various ideologies and ways of defining/understanding homosexuality sheds light on anumber of things. one is a revelation of the very historical, contextual character of these definitions in western societies.
>(2) I want to understand where Marxism has gone wrong, using its
>profoundest success to help understand its failure, rather than finding
>new, more superficial ways to fail. Hence I find the mere listing of
>similarities you offer as entirely besides the point -- except of course
>as advertising.
some pomo analyses seek to do precisely this: revealing the binarie of science/not-science, man/woman, white/black, western/non-western, developed/underdeveloped in marxist thinking.
as much as i generally despise their work for certain reasons, have look at laclau and mouffe for this sort of critique.
>(3) One way in which Marxism went wrong was by assuming a sort of
>positivist scientism, which was amittedly altogether rampant at the
>time.
very much
>PoMo, with its (non-exclusive) binary obsessions construes itself both
>as positivist and anti-positivist: positivist in its emulation of
>science (the jargon is the evidence of this, not its essence) and
>anti-positivist in its arguments, which totally overlook the posibility
>of construing science on non-positivist grounds.
not all pomo can be characterized as anti-science in the way you've done here. you might want to look at the work of *social scientists* who've had to wrestle with this question in serious ways. Sandra Harding's Whose Science, Who's Knowledge would certainly be a place to start. Richard Harvey Brown's work on the Rhetorical Construction of Sociological Truths as well as Norman Denzin's work which I can't think of off the top of my head.
>(4) As an extra added bouns, William James was already deconstructing
>the reason/emotion dichotomy 100 years ago in his exploration of "The
>Sentiment of Rationality."
so were some of the folks associated with the Scottish Enlightenment. So?
>Needless to say, my problem with this whole gestalt gets down to the
>very way that individualism is conceived, so your attempts at
>clarifications & disavowels here is pretty much beside the point for me.
so how do you think individualism ought to be conceived?
>To repeat : This is emblamatic of my whole problem with PoMo -- it
>DESTROYS the specific in its infatuation with its own holy
>meta-narrative.
not necessarily, but this sort of response certainly paints over all the differences by collapsing everything into one category such that there is no way in which to rescue the baby from the fate of the disposable diaper.