> > left is reduced to post modernist "deconstruction" of
> ideas - a largely
> > meaningless babble whose appeal is limited to narrow
> literati circles.
> >
> > [APR] I'm broadly in agreement with this, though I
> think the last sentence
> close-minded.
to me deconstruction has a simple version, such as 'don't believe the hype' (public enemy). its a generalized version of understanding propoganda, misrepresentation, rhetoric, etc. Of course, I guess James joyce, heidegger, wittgenstein, and so on (godel) took it to its philosophical extremes (in which all certainty in empirical, scientific reality is questioned, along with logical certainty (eg paraconsistant logic, which excludes the law of the excluded middle, so 1=/1). I think Berkely's idealism, and relativity and quantum theory also were part of the same cause, or skeptical inquiry. (btw Sokal has a cute paper on the arxiv revently on computing how raindrops fall, with a power law mechanism.)
to me its like economics----alot of very simple things are and can be said using the most abstruse formalism. (or think of russel and whitehead's principia math----2 large volumes proving arithmatic that is learned in elementary school.)
and looking at leftist economics, its gone the same rout of 'rigor mortis' so you have these endless debates about what constitutes class (eg are workers microsoft employees who get only a salary, benefits, and stock, or walmart employees?) and dialectics (which to me is a nearly useless concept, though one apparently you can make a living off as a leftist at such bastions of anti-capitist sentiment as columbia, NYU, the new school, etc----all down with the hood) which are innacessible to most people. and they don;t have a hook, like 'dont believe the hype'.
deconstruction and alot of critical theory does seem essentially to preserve leftism as a medieval preserve amidst the fox news barbarians. (and its hard to blame people---who wants to live next to a militia?)
the small progressive and left wing mags (or pacifica ) try to give the simpler 'scientific american' style versions of these ideas, but like SciAm, these are niche markets, and many NGO's essentially try to hold on to their niche so they don't get swept away, but as a result are self-limiting. (why don't the masses have a fox news or NYt's? i gues they have john stewart, which i have never seen.)
i do think the sectarianism (which seems mostly branding because often there are no good reasons, unlike in empirical sciences, to select amognst one version apart from religion or ideology) drives people off. (but its the same in music, or pop culture in general---people need identity.) but its also the economy, what with the service economy, which actually does provide some space even if meager (your bar, seat at mcdonald's, TV, etc.) and that benefits 'the system'. 'you can get with this, or you can get with that' (black sheep).
the whole system is based on complicity, and its and addiction essentially, and that effectively trumps and concerted resistance or movement to something different. there's always new drugs in the pipeline; the invisible hand of entrepeneurship. ('I can see for miles and miles and miles"---the who).
i pretty much agree with the rest of the comment in that there are many issues and its hard to prioritize----except i actually don't think it is. The 'hardness' (think NP-complete in computer science) here is somewhat illusory. Most of these issues really overlap; the problem to me is people choose single issues and then try to ride them into history. I think 'ecological thinking' is better---all the problems are connected, and actually often constructed by each other. Also, 'mathematical'----often times two seemingly different math problems can actually be reduced to the same one in many ways. (one can look up the 'graph partitioning problem' which is NP-complete, but which can be efficiently (or effectively) solved by simulated annealing (to throw in my deconstructionist rigor mortis terminology) to get a rough picture of what i'm talking about. and that, if i recall is essentially a kind of complement to a kind of traveling salesman
problem which is easy to understand---shortest route to N cities without visiting any twice.) a simple example is that social justice and environmentalism really overlap alot since often wealth translates into either excess consumption, or investment into garbage. (of course it also sometimes leads to philanthropy---paulson gave 1 billion$ to save peregrine falcons, i read---which presumably came from sucking the blood out of somebody.)
out.
http://www.axiomsandchoices.blogspot.com
---------------------
Part of the post-modern condition is
> the disintegration of
> the more-or-less singular and deproblematized modern
> identities upon which
> earlier solidarities were built. A major part of the
> problem with the
> modern left, today, is that it continues to appeal to
> modern identities.
> I'm not saying that terms like "the working class" are
> useless but I am say
> that a great deal of the ethnic, racial, religious,
> occupational,
> patriarchal, progressive, spatial, nationalistic and
> heteronormative ground
> upon which earlier forms of working class organizing were
> based have been
> blown apart - and, in many ways, for good reason.
>
> It seems to me and, from discussions on this list, it
> appears to a number of
> others here, that the historical and material semiotic
> elements of what so
> many derisively refer to as deconstruction look an awful
> lot like what folks
> on the left used to call ideology critique. The
> problem with even that
> stance, today, is that - painting in broad strokes - both
> the left and the
> right largely base their appeals on modern (or premodern)
> categories and
> relationships as they engage in ideology critique in world
> of fractured and
> unstable identities and partial and situated knowledges.
>
> Hell, look at the debate here on Iran, go back and read the
> modes of
> production debate, take some time to review the arguments
> about feminist
> standpoint epistemologies, look at Marxist and
> post-structuralist science
> studies in re: the production of nature, the construction
> of science and the
> contradictions of technology... part of the problem the
> left has is that the
> categories we've traditionally used are largely in flux,
> are deeply
> contested and are no longer as easy to rank. Given
> global climate change,
> what do we prioritize and which we are we talking
> about? Given
> environmental injustice, ought we to be more concerned with
> wilderness,
> resources, parks, health, pollution, production, outdoor
> activities, or
> (urban, suburban, rural or Southern) aesthetics.
>
> I think the left - whatever that actually means, today -
> largely imploded as
> a result of a lack of internal democracy and a surfeit of
> internal
> differentiation - at exactly the same time that its
> ever-so-partial-victories within social/liberal democracy
> can under virulent
> neoliberal political, fiscal and ideological attack AND at
> exactly the same
> time that the taken-for-granted economic, environmental and
> spatial
> conditions of the left became increasingly transformed by
> globalization.
> Pulling this all apart in order to produce a useful
> political narrative may
> in fact require deconstruction, even if it ought to
> completely avoid the
> kinds of texts-about-texts-about-texts-about-me navel
> gazing of
> late-80s/early-90s postmodernism.
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