>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.
Agreed on all, tho I think the causality runs differently. The crisis in Marxism and the left was, among other things, a crisis of imperialism or postwar capital--ie Northern liberal democracy. If pomo theory is the academic left's attempt to talk about its own failures in this regard, as you said, the first thing it's got to explain is this capitalist crisis, why (according to the theory) it ushers in a world-historical juncture and, more importantly, for whom.
>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.
Agreed. Although I tend to be skeptical of pomo as a descriptive or periodizing name, I do think there's a lot said under this rubric can be useful, even if the larger rubric isn't.
Christian