>What is the "actuality of postmodern ideas"? For whom are they actual?
They are actual like all ideas - i.e. they arise out of particular social configurations. I suggested that the particular form of intellectual currents of postmodernism are sustained by crisies in the left and Marxism. Accepting their actuality is arguably the best way to take them up, because we can show why they emerge out of actual contradictions between the way the world is understood, intervened in and the way it might exist behind surface appearances.
>So those who can't understand the recent history of capitalist metropoles
invent pomo theory? It makes the whole enterprise >sound a bit
narcissistic--like a great theoretical ediface has been invented to salve
some psychic wound. In those conditions, why would anyone expect such theory
to be good or useful?
The enterprise is narcissistic but so is, perhaps the continuing bashing of those ideas by the side of the left that believes it can comfortably use the postmodern as a negative reference point for elaborating some other nuanced version of the truth. It is this practice in the left which I have seen too on this list, that also authenticates the postmodern dimension.
Erik