On Apr 10, 2009, at 2:52 PM, Alan Rudy wrote:
> Jim tossed off this one liner
> thats stuck with me ever since: "If your first reaction's not an
> over-reaction its likely not genuine or very deep."
>
> Going to grad school in Santa Cruz - one of the three of four main
> hotbeds
> of post-modern deconstruction in the US during the 80s and early 90s
> - I
> despised post-modernism and deconstruction (but loved a good
> materialist and
> historical ideology critique). Over time, though, as grad students
> in the
> History of Consciousness Department moved away from deconstructive
> texts
> about texts about texts (however much "text" referred to lived
> material
> semiotic practice) and "back" towards relational epistemologies -
> often tied
> to feminist or critical racist interactionism/pragmatism - I decided
> it
> might just be that under Harvey's condition of post-modernity and the
> oppressive and reductionist character of both the left and rights high
> modern/Cold War politics, maybe deconstruction was a geniune, and
> sometimes
> fairly deep, over-reaction that - ironically, without enough
> complexity or
> playfulness - could teach us quite a bit about our past, as well as
> what not
> to do in the future.
>
> Did this post lose its thread?
Not at all. Very nicely put. Me, I found the whole postmodern thing exasperating up to and just past the Sokal affair. When I heard Judith Butler at the RM conference in 1996, she drove me bonkers. But I asked her for the paper, which she sent me after a long delay, and I read it, and thought and read and thought...and decided she was onto something.
Doug