If you read the whole chap, posted at the blog, you can see that she's not making some age old point about the need to either do away with foundations or to make them more encompassing. Rather, the point is that we must politicize them, always, as Catherine says, asking questions of our answers. An endless process in which we hold our universalizing feet constantly to the fire.
She also makes some excellent points about the way people lump very different thinkers together under the banner of postmodernism -- people who feud with one another -- and do the same thing with claims about identity politics, usually while never really understanding what the practitioners of identity politics want or say. e.g., feminism. since there are many kinds of feminism and disputes over the "woman question" then which feminist identity politics is anyone talking about, really? no one knows because it's a stuffed full of straw.
At 07:43 PM 12/14/2005, Miles Jackson wrote:
>boddi satva, responding to Kel's JB passage:
>>This is just a stupid inflation of a bogus point. The United States is
>>not at war to inflict any "universal" on Iraq. That's the Bush
>>rhetoric. We're there to protect our interests and that is all we mean
>>to do.
>
>You're missing JB's point. She agrees with you. Her point--as I
>understand it--is that the Iraq travesty is perpetrated in the name of the
>universal: Democracy, Freedom, Triumph over Evil. By positioning the U.
>S. war plan as battle in the ongoing war between Freedom and Tyranny, Bush
>is attempting to justify and extend the war. --It's an almost banal but
>crucial point: Appeals to universals are an effective rhetorical strategy
>to accomplish political goals (see also MLK Jr's constant references to
>Justice, Equality, and Democracy). I agree that JB could make her point
>more clearly, but I think she's highlighting an important practical
>problem with references to universals: they work via exclusion, not
>inclusion. Any political or social relations that do not correspond to
>the Universal Standard of Freedom and Democracy must be stigmatized,
>censured, and/or obliterated to distinguish the universal ideal from the
>aberration.
"Scream-of-consciousness prose stylings, peppered with sociological observations, political ruminations, and in-yore-face colloquial assaults."
-- Dennis Perrin, redstateson.blogspot.com
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org