``...good way to insist that there is no real antimony between post modernism and Marxism per se as long as we are dealing with a particular kind of Marxism and a particular kind of post modern thinking...'' tfast
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Thanks for the compliment. But I was trying to outline something much less theoretical and much less elevated. I was trying to descripe what effect the period surrounding 1968 had on just about anybody who was alive and thinking and felt they were part of it. It was a fundamental fracture of some sort. Suddenly the walls of state came tumbling down, and there was an unimaginable void in its place. There were no conceptual and no concrete foundations. This void was covered over in the US media as a credibility gap. What an absurd characterization. Credibility had vanished. It wasn't a gap. It was an unfamthable chasm of disbelief. Calling it a credibility gap was like calling the Grand Canyon a ravine. The whole enlightenment conceptual framework so elaborately constructed for generations since the French Revolution and the American War of Independence simply vanished. The concept of government was a mere conceit of the criminal syndicates in power. Their calls for law and order were ludicious in the extreme. They were the criminals.
But the real point was that I have discovered since then that of course there have been quite a few fractures and these have often led to various expressions or representational changes in the history of ideas---which I consider something like art movements. Obviously the French Revolution and its aftermath was such a fracture or rather a whole series of them. 68 wasn't on that scale of course---but it was just enough to teach me something about history.
In any event, this fracture in the public mind had a profound impact on the whole spectrum of society, and the critical writers of the period were all effected by it. For example, the fractured discontinuities of thought and interminable returns to the same phrase to extract some modicum of meaning out of once traditional but now empty texts--deconstruction as it were--are all characteristic style motifs for what later became known as postmodernism.
What I wanted to do, now, after the fact, a retracing, point out that ideas, schools of thought, stylistic turns, subject matter are all subsummed in their historical moment of conception. And that moment completes the meaning so to speak. It is impossible to understand the writers who compose postmodernity without understanding their period and its own material history, its own symbolic moment. It was The Fall, pure and simple. The fall of what? The entire sweep of the modernist, rational project, which every state in Europe and most of the Americas felt simultaneously.
Probably the best book I ever read on these few years was Octavio Paz, Children of the Mire. I've mentioned this book many times. It is a collection of essays Paz delivered at Harvard (I think) called the Elliot Norton lectures in 1972. Paz was in his middle career, had been the Mexican Ambassador to India, was well known as a Mexican surrealist poet, and was a class A thinker, when he found himself in the middle of a student protest in Mexico City during the Olympic Games---where the famous Black Power salut was given by the winners of some track event. Go here:
http://www.sportsposterwarehouse.com/warehouse/mexicocity68ii.htm
Their salud was performed to the Star Spangled Banner, i.e. screw you America. The point was these guys didn't represent the State, they represented the people. They didn't perform their sport for the State, their achievements were not to be counted for the State. There was the fracture and it was understood by millions. At least some of the audience in Mexico City, got on the bus or on the plane and went to Chicago. Jean Genet and William Burroughs for example---and some far lesser lights that I knew from around here got back to tell their stories of Mexico City only to get ready to go to Chicago in a couple of weeks. It was a movable feast. I was stuck surviving on a construction job.
The depth of the reaction to these and other events has had a profound effect on US history, but few seem to see it. For example most of the intellegencia (using the term loosely) of the Bush administration formed their political concepts under various reactionary academics who revolted as the opposition like Leo Strauss or Allan Bloom (Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, the necons, and their distant spawn like David Brooks and I forget who else).
A couple of years ago I started digging into Strauss just to figure these guys out---where did this bullshit they spout come from? Well, I found out they derive from the reactionary wing of postmodernity, which in the history of 20thC ideas can be traced back to Weimar---another pivol fracture.
Ravi wrote a great passage very much in the spirit of those times:
``we cannot know beforehand what actions will lead to positive change because actions do not have linear and continuous development. One big difference that I have noticed between Western leftists and the ones I know from my own past in the East (India) is that the Western variety seem enamoured with determinism (I would call it a form of 'scientism', without resort of parentheses, if I were not worried about a segue). The truth, IMHO, is that, as per the second law of thermodynamics, progress is an extremely unlikely outcome. You cannot "compute" your way to a better world, especially by calculating probabilities.
Actions work in all sorts of ways: creating communities, acting as catalysts for more powerful actions, and so on. Again IMHO, the only way to make progress against the intractable is by continuously attempting the improbable.
The problem, therefore, with modern (20th century and later) leftism is not too much "meaningless" activism, but too little...''
Pure contingency. We thought our actions were inspiring a fundamental revolt, and we had no idea we were fomenting a forty year long reaction---a reaction we are all still submerged in at this immediate moment. The revolts, the enormous intellectual creativity of Weimar, the dissolving of rationalism....led Germany into the rise of a really god aweful reaction, where any order was seen as better than no public order at all.
Meanwhile the great religious revivals of the book, the Jews, Christians and Muslims all promise a return to a tradition that never existed. The US and the Middle East are caught in this cultural convolution which is somekind of insane reaction against the very modernist project they require to exist---and where their bitterest enemies are the reconstructed left as some form of postmodernist project, founded in the fracture all these movements are trying desparately to repair.
This is another of those unintended consequences. When the rational bounds and bonds of a modern state threatent to dissolve, rationalism itself comes into question and with it, its ancient foes, the relgious systems of thought seem to rise to prominence. For many it seems they prefer just about any order of thought and action over the contingent and disorder of a breach. Any tradition will do, even a fabricated one in place of no tradition at all.
I actually watched a related reaction in my younger sister who was going to UCSB, arriving the fall they burned the Bank of America down. She sure wasn't ready for anything like that. When she got out of school she joined a Christian co-op of some sort and soon moved to Oregon where she, her husband and friends founded a small fundamentalist church in a small town and lived there for many yeasrs. I think they were hiding from the world.
(I am going to send this without much re-reading or spell checking. I hope makes sense. Gotta go to work---fucking work of all places...)
CG