[lbo-talk] do people still read post-structuralism?

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Fri Oct 30 15:59:05 PDT 2009


"Life is about the interaction of forces, and people only matter as indexes to those interactions."

A good demonstration of the meandering rubbish that was post-structuralism. People only matter as the indexes of the interaction of forces? What forces, exactly, if not the forces that people put into train? To be really radical is to get to the root, Marx said, and the root is man. Any theory that dissipate human history to an interplay of - what, parallelograms - of force is merely handmaiden to the alienation of human powers.

Really, do people still do that stuff at colleges? No, honestly, I mean are there still people reading Althusser and Foucault? Why not Lysenko, or Bergson, while you are at it, or Sabbatai Zevi. If ever there were an historical dead end, it would surely be post-structuralism. In all seriousness, what worthwhile idea or text did post-structuralism ever put before us? The best would have to be Orientalism, and it has long since been shown to be historically wrong. Or there is Madness and Civilisation (again, wrong, derivative and unscholarly). But even those are painfully otiose, and not really worth the effort of mastering the neurotic word games that cramp their meaning. Donna Harraway - playful maybe, but not one iota of understanding advanced. Levi Strauss? One good story about apprentices in a workshop, and for the rest, anal meanderings. Vladimir Propp? A funny idea, as a parody of scholarship, but not really worth the effort of tabulating all those fairy stories (and did he even do it, or just make it up?). Does Derrida still have any readers, do we remember the creed a' derrida?



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