[lbo-talk] Is this the new left?

B. docile_body at yahoo.com
Fri Jul 21 15:43:37 PDT 2006


The signal-to-noise ratio of so much PoMo stuff favors the noise. Or at least that's my experience.

That doesn't mean I don't find some PoMo stuff personally useful, but I've found I enjoy it more aesthetically (like poetry or a novel) than as a tool for social analysis, if that makes sense. Like Chomsky said about Foucault (who was apparently the PoMo dude Chomsky respected most) "you have to dig." Some authors you have to dig more than others. There's some funny, amusing, ironic stuff, here and there, like Baudrillard pointing out that laid off French steelworkers were re-hired at EuroDisney to play Snow White's Seven Dwarves, etc. Har har. But reading a lot of PoMo is just a slog.

-B.

C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> True, because it's so over. But Berube was once a
devotee. (Some years ago I listened to his ardent defense of Pomo in a debate with Alan Sokal.) Its political stance was a cloudy mix of Democratic party left-liberalism and I.P., the source of the most choleric attacks on Chomsky's anarchism since Vietnam days. --CGE



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