[lbo-talk] anti-pro contradictions

[Alan Rudy]

1a) You're right, no more use of the words post-modern or postmodernism from
me (assuming my memory holds).
1b) You're right, I often pack to much into my sentences.
2) Self-aggrandizing - self-absorbed, self-important and loudly so.
3) Ideology - deluded (let's leave that one in its everyday meaning)
hyper-relativism (in this case).  At this point, are there are any
non-problematic terms?
4) In the end, I meant to say that Reagan combined economic and cultural
visions the public understood - even if they are ahistorically nostalgic and
incommensurable in practice - and there's no similarly understandable
alternative, coherent and synthetic vision, agenda or plan on the left.
This is in part because large pockets of the public no longer trusts most
20th century economic, political, and scientific institutions to move the
world forward whether their vision is romantically nostalgic or
futuristically technophilic (not that these are the only options).
5) On the one hand, I wonder what ever happened to democratize production
and reproduction, democratize politics and the state, democratize science
and technology.  On the other hand, advocating for democratizing public
natures, public health and public space might represent a set of places to
start en route back to the previous set since you pretty much can't do the
latter three successfully without starting down the path to the former
triumverate (or is it a double triumverate, sexverate?).  (And I know that
all these terms need unpacking but that's part of the process, no?  Its what
I do with my students all the time.)
A

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


>
>
> Alan Rudy wrote:
> >
> > As always, different folks mean different things by post-modern.  I
> didn't
> > mean the world of desituated deconstruction or free-floating signifiers,
> > less postmodernism - which I always read as self-aggrandizing ideology
>
> Two points.
>
> First, I don't knmow what you are talking about here (you are trying to
> put too much into a single sentence). Whose "self-aggrandizing
> ideology? What do you mean by ideology?
>
> Secondly, we are now discussing the term post-modernism and its hundred
> variations  instead of whatever it was you wanted to discuss in the
> first place. IAnd this deflection from the subject matter ALWAYS follows
> introductin of the term "post-modernism," unless a particular
> conceptionof it is THE topic under discussion.
>
> Carrol
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>

-- 
*********************************************************
Alan P. Rudy
Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work
Central Michigan University
124 Anspach Hall
Mt Pleasant, MI 48858
517-881-6319