[lbo-talk] Marc Cooper's flipping out over Churchill

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Feb 7 21:04:07 PST 2005


Miles Jackson wrote:
>
>
> Instead of wasting your time reading hack jobs or trying to "define"
> postmodernism, spend some time with the work. I suggest Foucault,
> History of Sexuality, vol. 1, if you've not read it.
>

I'm as ignorant on the whole of the postmodern thinkers as Jon is -- except that in various discussions with various people after the Sokal affair I _realized_ how ignorant I was, and stopped propounding on it.

A couple years ago Yoshie posted a whole series of discussion of specific "post-modernists," with lengthy quotations and commentary on them.

I would think that anyone with much historical knowledge, in literature, in philosophy, would realize in advance how vaporous such labels as "Modernism," "Neoclassicism," "Baroque," "Renaissance," "Romantic" are -- and hence also be aware that there was bound to be far more variety in "Postmodernism" than any one definition, clear or vague, could conceivably capture. Such terms can usefully gesture toward some fuzzily demarcated domain, but in themselves tell us nothing about anything.

It is just as silly, incidentally, to make sweeping statements about "The Left."

Carrol


> Miles
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