Oh, knock it off, guys. I have read too much pomo and postructuralism. I have worked through several books of Lyotard, tried (unsuccessfully) to struggle with Derrida and Lacan, read quite a lot of Foucault and even taught him, ditto Deleuze & Guatteri. I've read a couple books of de Man's. I have worked through LaClau & Mouffe quite carefully. I tried Spivak, Irigaray, Kristeva, really tried 'em, decided that there was nothing there. I tried Butler, less strenuously, found it uninteresting and opaque.
I have worked through Rorty's recent work, taught HIS stuff, read West, also Nancy Fraser, Iris Young, Martha Minow. these last three writers I think are quite good. I have read a lot of Jameson on pomo, as well as a few books by critics--Callinicos, Christopher Norris.
The long and short of it is that I think I've read enough to say without being ignorant about it that there's not much there there.
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The problem is that you might be looking for something that isn't there, rather than seeing what is there--if that makes any sense.
In any event, if you are at all interested, try this meta-narrative, which is more or less the path I've taken. Go backward, through the intellectual history and trace, not the subject matter, but the form of the critiques themselves. Much of this work is phenomenological rather than analytical, despite the claims. So, if you were looking for analytical validity and insight, then of course there is none there.
Instead, consider that the work represents an intellectual reaction to the failure of a post-WWII social, political and cultural revolt against mass industrial society--its tyrannies and the domination of its institutions over every aspect of life from thought to production. Now consider the nature of this failed revolt--a revolt which was essentially romantic, cultural and to a limited extent political (at least in the US). Then put this together with the foundations of the institutions, the bastions of power this revolt batter against. When you follow this theme back into history you arrive at the origins of modern industrial society, which is the French Revolution and its long and protracted reactions and counter-reactions.
Now focus on the failures of that revolution as well as its successes. You will find astonishing analogues in the forms taken by various reactions to both the failures and successes of the French revolution at the dawn of modernism, and our own period which might as well be called the intellectual eclipse of that modernist project. I qualify it as an intellectual eclipse, because obviously mega-corp-governments are certainly not disappearing and neither are their socio-political organizational methods to swage us all to the equally vast machinations of capital and production.
You have indicated in other posts a distaste for Hegel. Consider that this distaste is reflected in your reaction to the post-modernists. It is more than interesting, isn't it? Well, I can only take Hegel or the latter day theory crowd in tiny doses myself. No matter. Their profound similitude is not accidental, arbitrary, nor fortuitous. It is also not just a question of influence and historical precedence. Hegel's quest to bring metaphysics back from almost certain eclipse by the empiricist and positivists of the post-revolutionary period is precisely the kind or genre of the reaction that we are witnessing in the post-modern revivals, resuscitations, and re-furbishing projects of cultural philosophy.
I forget who said that WW2 could be seen as the battle between the right hegelians and the left hegelians. Presumably this referred to Hegel's Theory of the Right. But looking at Hegel in these terms isn't as productive as considering a little of his personal background, which I've been doing. Consider who his friends in college were: Holderlin and Schelling--romantic poets, composing in classical forms on classical themes and mythologies. It takes a little background in art history to see what is going on this strange and little mentioned fact. You have to consider just what the neo-classical movement meant and how it differed in England, France, and Germany, and the linkage between this aesthetic movement and its relation to Romanticism and to a broader bourgeois sensibility--and given all that, its relation to the changing modes of production--that is the birth of mass industrial economies. The enlightenment and revolutionary revival of classicism was essentially what we might call an identity movement that re-invented greco-roman antiquity in a protracted historical moment of crisis. Within that loosely defined movement, we find a philosophical re-examination of Aristotle and Plato. But, it is Plato who most exercises the minds of Hegel and his poet-philosopher friends when they were theology students together at Tubingen. The residue and echo of these friendships and the central position of a romanticized classicism is found in virtually all of Hegel. Hegel when confronted with the rising mechanistic bastions of the English empiricists and French postivists, tried to re-vitalize and return to what he conceived to be the primary font of all subsequent philosophical impulses, and give that resuscitation a uniquely germanic cast. In other words he represents an intellectual tradition of identity in crisis.
Now the linkage to the present reactions in cultural philosophies. The best place to see the above intellectual history reflected in the most striking terms is in Heidegger. But it is also reflected in much less direct form in Derrida. That Hegel's Theory of the Right, gave him the odious title of philosopher of the Prussian State, should go a long way toward making the connection between him and Heidegger, who after all will forever be considered in similar terms in relation to the rise of the National Socialist movement in the Germany of the 1930s.
Consider this cartoon. The cold reaction of current Marxist schools to post-modern philosophies of culture has a great deal of similitude to Marx's own reaction to Hegel. And, yet both then as now, what would one be with out the other?
Chuck Grimes