----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com>
> Undoubtedly, there is a pall. Usually I would more or less agree on
> general principles that a material balance of forces is the most
> revealing approach. But curiously, in this case, I don't agree,
> because the motivations of the terrorist attacks on the US, and the
US
> attacks on Afghanistan are not principally driven by material
> conditions. This isn't to say that ultimately, poverty, cultural
> marginality, and suppressed material development are not found
> somewhere down the list. However, these conditions seem more like
> context and background, breeding grounds so to speak but not the
> primary, frontal figuration of events.
>
> Essentially this is a cultural war and is reducible to a conflict
> between differing reactionary religious fundamentalisms---in the US
> and west, against numerous traditional but equally reactionary and
> religious based fundamentalisms.
===========
I'm not sure reductionism will get us very far on this one.
>I don't think it is a mere coincidence
> that bin Laden or whoever planned and timed the attacks, just
happened
> to pick the first year of the Bush administration by accident. That
is
> to say, I don't think that material constraints determined the
> timing. I suspect the Bush administration was picked in particular
> because Bush represents the reactionary Christians as the political
> power of the US state. Perhaps more to the point for many Middle
> Eastern Moslems, Bush and US also represents through its
> fundamentalist turn, a linkage to Jewish fundamentalism and its
> melding of religious law with definitions of state. By rhetorical
> elaboration, the representation becomes a political diatribe on US
> military, economic, and political support for Israel.
>
> In my mind the universal enemy of all these reactionary religious
and
> traditionalist movements is the secular European Enlightenment,
which has
> through material and historical development become what we mean by
> modernity and postmodernity. That is they are mutual representations
> and expressions of each other.
>
> Nevertheless, postmodernity in its cultural expressions is a secular
> form of a related reaction to the enlightenment---an enlightenment
> turned in upon itself, the hermeneutic and apocalyptic turn--the
deep
> and otherworldly concentration on the interpenetrating spheres of
> linguistic analysis and transcendental subjectivity. These mirror in
a
> secular universe, the fevered textual concentration of religious
> fundamentalism and its assurances of spiritual transcendence.
=======
What's otherworldly about pomo? It just takes pluralism and the lack of certitude and finality on the *big* questions and displaces and attenuates the anxieties associated with the quest for the latter two terms by using irony and even comedy to show that the pen should never morph into a sword.
>
> Both the hermeneutic turn in postmodernity and religious
> fundamentalism share a kind of reading process, in which in the
> unfolding of thought, an ideality or transcendent meaning is
achieved
> between the interpreter and the text.
========= Pomo, like the enlightenment, rejects transcendent meaning[s]. "Reflexivity will exhaust us long before we exhaust it."
>However, while these critically
> self-conscious processes seem to erode the apparent absolute nature
of
> the rational agent in a postmodern cultural context, in the
religious
> and traditional cultural context, a similar process seems to lead to
> an further refinement of absolutism, manifested as profoundly held
> moral convictions.
===========
Which from the enlightenment and pomo perspective is precisely the problem... The deeply held conviction that one should not hold one's convictions too tightly is at issue; the 'revenge' of form and content and the possibilities of their fusion.
>It is as if a complete relativity of values and
> meaning were the mirror equivalent to a thorough going absolutism of
> all value and meaning.
========== Metaphor alert! :-)
>
> What seems to unite both these impulses is the complete rejection of
> plain old, dumb material reality---that is the utter indifference
with
> which the material world seems to hold all human ideal and
> transcendent concerns.
=========
Well one--pomo--accepts PODMR with an equal indifference. In a Heraclitean world what's a few thousand species when space-time-history can be framed in galactic terms. "Everything is inconsequential" [Sartre]. Hence the revulsion of many to the 'so what' forms of quietism that some pomo'ers wallow in.
> While I certainly don't expect such a cultural view to become
> headlines hitting the news stands anytime soon, it seems to me, it
is
> very important to understand these processes and where and how they
> position an intellectual life---both here in the west and in the
other
> broadly non-western parts of the world. Part of the reason for that
> importance is its potential to create forms of solidarity between
> intellectual classes. After all, I see George Bush and Trent Lott,
in
> relation to my world view, in something that could not be too
> dissimilar to the appalled regard that a de-classed Egyptian
> intellectual must see Mohammad Omar and Osama Bin Laden. They are
all
> dinosaurs.
=========
And the dinosaurs lived a long time and it took some asteroids to displace them from their eco-throne.
> In political economic terms the problem becomes separating
neoliberal,
> capitalist, and imperialist ideologies from their embedding in the
> broad histo-cultural context of western enlightenment---a process
that
> obviously involves a developing marxist view. That is to say, there
> are western systems of thought and action in the world that are of
> extreme value to development and do lead toward a generally more
> equalitarian world---and these should be adaptable to other
> cultures---without at the same time erasing their cultural
identities
> and history.
===========
Well this will take an enormous amount of *emotional* intelligence. This is about one hell of a lot more than an equitable distribution of goods and services.
>
> While this much at least is not news, I think the spectacle and
drama
> of the WTC/Pentagon attacks along with the glittering crusade-like
US
> military reactions have simply obscured the view. The underlying
> cultural confrontations and conflicts have been around for a very
long
> time.
>
> So, reframing the debate along these lines becomes a very difficult
> task. This is why, I think the western Left has simply fallen back
on
> some vague anti-war rhetoric and then gone into a pall of silence.
But
> I suspect it isn't just the western Left that has been brought down
to
> silence. The same difficulties must be struggled through in
> progressive non-US/EU circles. In a sense the burden to develop
> intellectual responses (the ground of mass resistance) to these
events
> also has to fall on progressive circles in the non-US/EU world. Its
> with them that I want to evoke the terms of debate, and not with the
> bellicose hate mantras of George Bush or the quietly vicious
> subversions of Osama Bin Laden.
>
> Chuck Grimes
>
============
Why us, we didn't create the problem. What are we to do, step up our criticisms of the Bible, Koran, Bhagavad-Gita etc. and reassert a secularism that provides no comfort to those who need something beyond the cosmos itself to have meaningful lives. What's that old Arabic heretical saying that Dostoevsky was fond of stating "if god does not exist everything is permitted"? That's where we are now and have been for a long time, which helps explain the Hobbesian paradigm in international relations along with a bunch of other behaviors some find ghastly but others find appropriate.
It's the dominator/dominated binary that must go, but some folks like that binary and will do whatever it takes to perpetuate it's institutionalization.
Ian