>You call postmodernists unhappy modernists as if that is derisory. But you
>could equally say that Marx was an unhappy modernist precisely because he
>saw the dynamic element of society as also its most negative and restrictive
>feature. Capital giveth with one hand and taketh away with the other.
Marx, however, thought that capitalism created a material possibility for "an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all." Within much of today's unhappy modernists' theory, in contrast, such an association doesn't figure as a practical future. They are not uninfluenced by Marx, but they probably owe more to Heidegger, etc. than Marx.
>By employing the basic
>culutralist empiricism of notions of identity, the individual/ society,
>they are begging to be deconstructed.
Marx's "Theses on Feuerbach" is instructive on the inadequacy of philosophy based upon the categories of abstract individual and civil society.
>But your orignal statement "no postmodernists = no postmodernism" seems to
>denegrate the actuality of postmodern ideas and relegate them to just bad
>theory.
By that statement, I was just commenting upon an intellectual fashion & school of thought. The postmodern structure of feeling, however, will probably remain as long as we remain politically stuck with TINA (= "There Is No Alternative" to capitalism).
>The specific political problem that creates the need called the postmodern
>is the failure of the left and the incapacity of the generation of
>intellectuals from 60s 70s , now in positions of socal responsiblity, to
>honestly account for it.
In other words, the Third Way.
Yoshie