Rhetorical Gestures (was Re: Spivak sez...)

Charles Brown CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us
Fri Oct 15 08:44:45 PDT 1999



>>> Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> 10/14/99 09:31PM >>>
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:


>Might be interesting, but you say you
>haven't read Kant.... If you had, you wouldn't think of postmodernism as
>such a novelty.

I'm ignorant of many things, but thinking "postmodernism" - whatever exactly that is - a novelty isn't one of them. I figured that out the first time I laid eyes on Of Grammatology in 1978.

((((((((((((((

Charles: Part of the problem here is people only have so much time to read. If there is a proliferation of terminologies but a redundancy of content, fewer and fewer people will be on the same page. This problem aggravates the general problem of uniting predominantly mental and predominantly physical laborers, workers of the head with workers of the hand.

If there are new ideas , fine. But, to the extent there isn't novel content, seeking agreement to work in the "original formulations" is not dogmatism , but pragmatism in raising mass class consciousness. Why not stick to Kant's terminology, Hegel's terminology, Marx's terminology ?

Doesn't the rule of "publish (original material) or perish" contribute to this proliferation of vocabularies ?

Charles Brown



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