Pomo can be seen as the latest version of what philosophers generally refer to as "skepticism." It is a troublesome doctrine, but contending with it has in the long run been productive (e.g., no Descartes, no Hume; no Hume, no Kant; ... Hegel, ... Marx, ...).
The problem that Andy is describing, however, is more that pomo provides nasty ammunition to those who want to score discursive points as a means of defeating opponents without having to debate the real issues. But that didn't start with pomo and I'm pretty sure won't end with it.
On Fri, Jan 16, 2015 at 11:52 AM, Andy <andy274 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Doug in the past has wondered why anybody would care about the tendencies
> in the late 80's and early 90's that rightly or wrongly go under the name
> postmodernism if it is in fact a dead fad. I've related my own experiences
> of political alienation as a physics major in a world of social
> constructivist science studies, and have been tempted to point out examples
> of how that lives on in ways I think I could convince most here to be
> destructive.
>
> What I find more salient now is the rise of similar tendencies in the past
> couple years in what we usually call the left, as outlined in part in the
> essay "Exiting the Vampire Castle", which discusses the moralistic
> enforcement of language codes particularly by the educated. The elevation
> of testimony and subjective experience over objective analysis is another
> aspect, and the combination of these was ably skewered back in the day:
>
> http://www.sidewalkbubblegum.com/images/150.gif
>
> One difference I see is that the newer form is far more nasty and
> moralistic.
>
> Deconstruction, as I understand it, involved analyzing works for hidden
> meaning arising out of a larger cultural context, with bonus points for
> completely inverting the explicit meaning. I don't mean to dismiss any of
> the above approaches without qualification, but this particular technique
> can devolve into what people normally call "putting words in your mouth".
>
> Call-out culture on the net is rife with tendency. Amanda Marcotte has a
> genius for it. Jacobinghazi was built out of it -- and Kendzior, as Doug
> has pointed out, studied anthropology. It showed up in recent FB posts of
> Doug's around racist imagery in Charlie Hebdo, the possible nadir of which
> was Amber Frost's tolerance of old Trotskyists calling her "hon" getting
> morphed into her being ok with the scenario of Doug groping her ass. Fred
> deBoer drives himself to distraction repeating "That's not what he said."
>
> What do you think?
>
>
>
> --
> Andy
> "It's a testament to ketchup that there can be no confusion."
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