[lbo-talk] Texas school board drops Jefferson, adds Calvin

[C. G. Estabrook]

I agree, it's entirely five minutes ago.  And I also think some interesting
people were included in its quite elastic boundaries - Lacan, for instance (whom
Chomsky seems to have liked but thinks became "a quite conscious charlatan").

But we were talking about what questions were within the limits of allowable
debate in history graduate departments ca. 1975-2000.  Crudely put (and it was
pretty crude), the collapse of the academic left in those days and its
replacement by identity politics meant that pomo became a collecting vessel for
"radicals" who didn't want to risk their careers. One could be intellectually
radical ("all is indeterminate"), foursquare on racism, feminism, etc. (THAT'S
not indeterminate), and thus risk no confrontation with power, academic or
political.  The result was the comfortably quiescent intellectual institutions
that we've enjoyed for a generation.  --CGE

Doug Henwood wrote:
> 
> On Mar 21, 2010, at 11:01 AM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> And I wouldn't exculpate postmodernism - among other things a non-innocent
>> way of avoiding dangerous questions.
> 
> Given the horrified reactions of so many to "postmodernism" - which I thought
> had been getting obsolete, but evidently not - I don't get this claim. It
> seems to make lots of people, mainstream and Marxist, very uncomfortable. And
> I'm not really sure to whom this vague word is supposed to apply - Foucault?
> He certainly didn't avoid dangerous questions about madness, incarceration,
> sex. Butler? Ditto. Etc.
> 
> Doug ___________________________________ 
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