'Yoshie' wrote:
Derrida probably wouldn't be annoyed by the negative reference to postmodern/poststructuralist discourse, in that he doesn't claim to be a postmodernist/poststructuralist. In fact, most pomo celebrities profess they are *not* pomo, probably because it's uncool to be pomo. Postmodernism/poststructuralism may die as an intellectual fashion & school of thought (if not as a structure of feeling in late capitalism) due to the dearth of people who unabashedly say they believe in postmodernism/poststructuralism. No postmodernist = no postmodernism. :-)
Yoshie
hmmm...Jameson, Baudrillard, Bauman, Lyotard?
And even if most analysists are careful to state their attitude to the postmodern is a critical one, like the left in general they have popularised the term whether as a designation of a social state, a method, a characterisation of knowledge, as a political disposition, as the crisis of representation, as a cultural impasse or whatever.
The extent of the diverse and contradictory explantions of the postmodern is something that could be charcaterised as...er..positively postmodern. (and it is understandable that this looks like it might decompose under its own dynamic) But whilst this ambiguity seems to be the essential import of the postmodern, it is first and foremost a reaction to the equally ambiguous, contadictory (and ideological)designation of our societies and knowledge of them as 'modernity' or 'modernism' salient in the academy. Postmodern rubbish might disappear when the self-satisfied crap of 'modernity' does. Because any attempt to affect an ideological closure on the here and now (even when concieved as a development) easily lends itself to the argument that it has allready past.
Indeed Yoshie is aguing that postmodenity has allready deceased happily implying that it once existed - does this make him a post-post-modernist?
Erik Empson