>Erik Empson writes:
> >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.
That about sums up my problem with postmodernism. The question, though, is the _future_, not simply the here and now. While by definition of the concept, one cannot obtain _absolute_ conceptual closure on the future, by the very same definition one cannot simply argue it away as "past". That would be an absurdity.
But we _can_ probabilistically infer something about the future from the present. For example, the present is capitalist, and, everything else being held constant (meaning no intervention by workers and socialist consciousness, for one example), the probability is high that the future will also be capitalist.
However, it is plain that many people would like to imagine a variety of post-capitalist futures. This is an objective fact of the present situation, produced by (well known) facts concerning capitalism. The problem with things like postmodern thought is that it has been lees than an optimal means for imagining the possibilities for alternative futures, let alone calculate the probabilities, for which purpose it has been useless and even harmful.
The future has been forgotten.
-Brad Mayer