>
> 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
>
Ahhh Sokal, Sokal's a putz and Ross made way too many excuses - the whole thing pissed me off. Sokal utterly and completely didn't and doesn't understand what science studies is all about ("I know, I'll take my misapprehension of the worst of those folks, treat it as if it stands for everything and all of them, run with it and refuse any requests by them that I accomodate their standards and concerns about my stupid text.") and many folks of the Social Text ilk spent far too many years engaged in often creative, sometimes interesting but close to useless wanking about cases presented as having little or no applicability to other cases...
Butler's like Spivak for me, sometimes I get it and learn a lot, other times its either too opaque, too embedded in conversations I'm undercommitted to or beyond me. I understand Haraway though, but that's a discussion for another thread sometime.