Eric quotes Radical Chains quoting Soper:
>Yet, with postmodernism, conceived not just as a form of social
>consciousness but as a philosophical project, these legitimate
>concerns are subjected to a kind of 'theoretical overdrive'. In
>the end it invites us to 'disown the very aspiration to truth as
>something unobtainable in principle' (p.45). Thus it degenerates
>into a total relativism and a form of libertarianism or anarchism
>'of distinctly New Rightist overtones' (p.46).
Which brings to mind another of Anatole France's beaut aphorisms: "When a thing has been said, and said well, have no scruple. Take it and copy it."
Good on you, Eric!
As for Radical Chains' own conclusion, I reckon "the social processes necessary to the breakdown of the current condition of disorientation," aren't that hard to find. The SU collapsed because the centre was rotten and could no longer hold (I think that was ol' Yeats's line , but it's certainly but a pale paraphrase). Centres eventually do go rotten, I reckon, whatever their avowed hue. Anyway, down they went, and then we copped a decade of one-eyed triumphalism. The disillusionment that produced the aggressive scepticism of late sixties' French pomo seemed just the ticket to what was left of the Anglo-Saxon academic left, and they went for it with gusto, taking care first to brand their own variety of 'if ya can't beat 'em; join 'em' with a little opacity and appropriate reinterpretation of their erstwhile canon. Voila! Careerist system-players dressed up as street-cred rebels:
The workers get told they no longer exist (eg Hindess et al); political organisations get told they're imposing and othering whenever they seek solidarity (Lyotard); political economists get told they're actually playing the same little game as the marginalists and neo-classicists they thought they were constructively critiquing (Foucault and his bloody epistemes); art-as-consciously-invoked-social-affect/cognition becomes pastiche-with-irony (goodbye Ernst Fischer, hello Ken Done); politics becomes play; Habermas's 'emancipatory interest' becomes Foucault's borrowed 'will to power'; and reality itself disappears up Baudrillard's self-reflecting arsehole.
And 'the old base/superstructure thing' does need critical engagement, Catherine (it's a crappy simplifying heuristic at the best of times, for mine - allowing, as it does, the exclusion of dialectics). You're right, we don't want any of that Stalinist naturalist-economism coming back (while that remains a leftie's reference point, we are indeed 'disoriented'). But to talk about social forms (like culturally-parasitic, history-effacing media, meaningless spectacles blah blah) as if they have nothing to do with their underpinning substance (like the commodification of culture, as a desperate capital seeks new sites of accumulation and opportunists seek new valourisation troughs) is, to my mind at least, to tie your own blindfold on your way to the wall.
Ahh ... sweet release ...
Cheers, Rob.