> One of the canards about "pomos" is that they somehow lead people
> astray, which I generally take to mean they somehow keep people from
> reading Marx. I think it's just as or more likely that people
> discover Marx, Hegel, et. al. by way of, say, Judith Butler.
That's true. The only time I've ever been exposed to a large concentration of "pomos" was when I was up at grad school - I'm in history but the center of pomo gravity is the English dept (which actually seems to be a department of continental philosophy with a slight literary bent). Unlike the historians, those kids would talk about Marx and Marxist ideas. But they seemed totally ignorant of the context. I won't make any claims that these people were representative of anything. But they would try to talk knowingly about, say, Althusser - always in that gossipy, name-dropping English-dept style of pretension - but they seemed to know nothing about, say, the political implications, for a French communist in the 1960's, of trying to distinguish between the young Marx and the mature Marx. Or they would refer to Badiou's Maoism or Foucault's flirtation with Maoism, but they had no idea what Maoism meant to people in the West during the Sino-Soviet split, the Prague Spring, the Cultural Revolution, etc. The ideas seemed to consist for them of half-grasped philosophical fragments, devoid of historical meaning. And I won't even get into the shallowness, posing, lifestyle-intellectualism, etc. It almost made me want to hang out with my fellow historians, most of whom had the social profile of what I think the British call swots.
SA