>All you folks saying "postmodernist!" and "no I'm not!" at each
other: what's a postmodernist? Aren't we all in part "postmodernists"
just by drawing breath in 1999?<
there's a difference between saying that one is a postmodernist, in the sense of one's position being *post* modern, as if those terms are a choice between competing political factions, and saying that there has been an historically significant shift from modernity to postmodernity within capitalism. from only a year on the lists, the former tends to be advanced most often, as if it's a choice between postmodern*ist*, communist, liberal, etc, a mere choice between which theories to adopt and flags to wave. in this sense, it really doesn't exist, and invariably, this kind of definitional slippage becomes a police action designed to halt any analysis, let alone exploration, of the latter. as if the stakes are simply a matter of a voluntarist decision about which faction to support, which consciousness -- true or false.
but 'postmodernity/modernity' bears an unfortunate designation, since it already makes any shift seem like it happens in the realm of ideology, even though there are many who don't use it that way, as christian noted by referring to the book on the geography of money. but i still think it's unfortunate, though perhaps not as unwieldy as talking about it in terms of a shift from formal to real subsumption, which is when anything interesting really begins to get said, and where the very idea of a revolution within capitalism comes from, from marx's _capital_ no less. and then, the question would be quite specifically, what are the implications for something we might call theory are, let alone an entire series of things like the place assigned to theory, consciousness, ideology, the state (as a kind of knowledgable edifice), etc in any political position we might already hold. for instance, what are the implications of granting intellectuals a priveliged place in the schema of political strategy when the relation between intellectual and manual labour has been traversed and/or reshaped by this shift from formal to real subsumption? what does science mean if it's no longer an adjunct to but a branch of production? that marx talks about this shift quite specifically as the dissolution of the relative (or formal) autonomy of the so-called 'superstructures', suggests in a strong sense that it is the assumed autonomy of intellectual labour (and science, the state, let alone notions such as 'the public intellectual', etc) which is being brought into question through that shift.
Angela _________