I am sure this is in part because of the idiom. I was trained to read analytical philosophy. I taught myself some contemporary French philosophy, but I never was exactly trained in the stuff. However, aprt of it is because I think that most pomo is rubbish. I'm not an analytical philosophy bigot: I gave it the old college try, particularly when I was a professor, but apart from liking the middle Foucault, I found little there. Pomists do not for the most part have a clue what an argument is. In some cases, as with Rorty, they do have a clue (in his case, and then some), but reject the practice. But generally they don't know enough about it to reject it.
As to the clarity or lack of it of the passage we were discussing, I find it no more clear after the explanation, maybe less. Angela says
> I thought I was explicity trying not to counterpose 'ideas' to 'reality'.
But orginally she wrote:
>>I mplicit here is the assertion that nothing has _really_ hanged (by
> which 'really' is taken to mean actual practices, the ways in which life is
> produced and reproduced, etc), and hence that 'pomo' comes from the skies,
> someone's head, the world of ideas -- merely (!) ideas.
Maybe she means that antipomists make this false opposition. But I would have thought she was saying that pomo is not merely ideas but in some sense comes from actual practices. So now I have no idea what she is saying. I think she thinks that antipomists fail to appreciate how the world has changed in ways that pomo captures, but there must be more to it than this.
I have no idea what she is doing with Marx's notion of formal and real subsumption, a pair of concepts I associate with the transition in the history of capitalism from the rise of wage labor (formal subsumption) to the imposition of factory discipline (real subsumption). Is Marxism somehow like wage labor and pomo like the factory system? I'm lost.
Then there's this stuff about the 'aesthetic."
> I used the word "aestheticisation", because this is seems to mark out both
the word 'postmodern' itself (as in modernity, postmodernity) AND
responses (from a good many marxists, perhaps litcritter marxists) to it.
Those changes that I refered to would include the collapse of the dichotomy
between aesthetic and economic, for instance.
This strikes me as Jabberwocky.
>
> Perhaps a citation from Montag might help clear matters up, or perhaps
I doubt it. Warren's a friend of mine, but I find his writing utterly opaque.
Angela says that she never said or implied that the changes since the 1930s she is talking about have made Marxism obsolete. OK, I'll accept that, but a lot of pomists disagree. In France, pomo was a reaction against Marxism. Lyotard, for one, is very clear about this, if about little else.
>
> referring to.
>
I had complained:
>
> > [Pomo] reduces otherwise promising young people to chanters of jargon
>
> Kids today!
Quite possibly I am a curmudgeonly old coot. My 10 year old daughter thinks so, I'm hopelessly uncool, I don't like TLC or Black and I listen to Ellington and Dylan. But I was a thinking about a specific instance, a young man from the recently contested ethnic studies progarm at Berkeley who spoke at a panel on prisons with Angela Davis at the Pacific Division APA last spring. I was there giving a paper. The young man was burbling over with subalternity and suchlike; it was clear that he didn't care for American criminal justice, and that he thought it was racist, but otherwise things seemed pretty murky to me. Everyone else was nodding and smiling, so I thought I must have missed something, until it emerged that one main theme of the young man's talk was that the American criminal justice system means taht we live under fascism. At this point I demurred, noting that if we lived under fascism, he wouldn't be giving this talk, and if he did, he'd be dead or in a camp. He found ! ! this objection to be quite a poser. On being pressed, he allowed as he didn't mean fascism by "fascism," but something else nasty. He was a bright enough kid. It was just that far from having been taught to think and use words with some precision, he had been taught to move pomo jargon around in approved ways. I thought it was sad.
Marxist kids in "my" day weren't, and many aren't, any better, for the most part, but there's a logical structure of theory under Marxist jargon and (the dialectoids to the contrary--I don't like them either), it operates with normal rules of argument.
>
> PS. I'd highly recommend Rebecca Comay's article on Rorty. I'll chase up
> refs if you're interested.
No, thanks. I have a fix on Rorty--an old teacher of mine, btw, from Princeton (see, I really am ancient! Why Aristotle once told me . . . .), and I am not interested enough to think more about his defects. Or virtues.
> Angela
> (all the markings of a misspent youth.)
> -----------
> I'd written:
>
> I've argued a number of times that postmodernism is another way -- an
> aestheticised and/or idealistic way -- of talking about changes to the mode
> of production, for which we might look to concepts such as real and formal
> subsumption as a way of indicating and talking about those changes. Those
> who bemoan 'pomos' really enact a similar aestheticisation by rendering it
> as a cultural choice, philosophical brand-name, or job competitor in
> litcrit depts -- ie., whilst some folks complain that 'pomo' is not
> marxism, they can't manage to deliver a marxist analysis of what this might
> be. Implicit here is the assertion that nothing has _really_ hanged (by
> which 'really' is taken to mean actual practices, the ways in which life is
> produced and reproduced, etc), and hence that 'pomo' comes from the skies,
> someone's head, the world of ideas -- merely (!) ideas.
--jks