the linguistic left

[Steve Perry]

huh? it's a little early in the day for such a big
slug of cough syrup, carrol. what i wrote had nothing 
to do with prose style. it was about 
philosophical/epistemological underpinnings.

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
[mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Carrol Cox
Sent: Monday, November 01, 1999 12:14 PM
To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
Subject: Re: the linguistic left

Steve Perry wrote:


>  the relentless tendency down unto the present day to view
> the world as a text, and politics as a pretext for
> turgid, interminable proto-literary theorizing.

I object to this on very similar grounds to my objections to
using "dogmatism" as a charge: it is essentially unprincipled.
The question is the validity of the substance of an argument,
not the personal morals or verbal felicity of the person
making the argument..

It is also extremely bad tactics. As a friend of mine used to say,
Opportunism is seldom opportune, and this constant whine
about style is opportunist.. Most (not all) of those who
are called pomo operate from utterly unconvincing premises
and arrive at utterly unconvincing conclusions (which, in
addition, usually turn out to have reactionary political
implications). This is true, for example, of Derrida's *Spectres
of Marxism*. So why the fuck quibble about their
prose style like a freshman complaining about too tough a
reading assignment in World History?

Carrol