Carrol
-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of Shag Carpet Bomb Sent: Monday, January 19, 2015 11:49 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Deconstructionism in contemporary leftish discourse
Although, from my dealings with them - Amanda, Jessica Valenti, etc. - they don't have a clue what deconstruction is. In fact, they generally attacked anything related to theory -- where theory is *explanation* about why women are oppressed and how women's oppression relates to other forms of oppression. As an example, they consistently chalked up differences among feminists to personality differences (personal foibles, desire for personal aggrandizement or fame, jealousy) rather than trying to understand it as differences in their understandings of how the world works, what the enemy is, and how to fight it.
And while they disavow theory, they do have one: Liberal feminism. Perhaps the best example of which is described at this site: http://everydayfeminism.com/about-ef/our-vision/
I'd say this has very little to do with deconstruction. Deconstruction is a method of looking at a text to reveal how that text is produced by a set of binary oppositions - contradictions, paradoxes. The idea is to show how the text fails by it's _own_ criteria.
If these folks really believed in this approach, then _all_ texts - including their own - are subject to this operation. Deconstructionists are not surprised at contradiction, hypocrisy, a difference between stated ends and the means by which those ends are actually achieved. There is no outrage at contradiction. It is expected.
The stuff you see on the internet really isn't new. It's always been there. It's not more vicious or hurtful. Who cared in 2004 when a handful of feminist bloggers were trying to get others fired? Who cared when an attack on one blogger -- for her post about deconstructionism and feminism -- was so vicious - such a personal attack -- that she had a nervous breakdown?
The crazy blog wars of 10 years ago were the result of people sitting around in the secrecy of a private, invite-only email list and actually conspiring as to how to attack, at first, male bloggers and, later, how to attack other bloggers who criticized their work. It's a phenom that's just exacerbated by the tools of social media - amplified and faster where social media uses mechanisms of social control - the psychology of persuasion -- to get people to feel frenzied, addicted, depressed and lonely in the absence of tweets and status updates, waiting on the edge for the next notification.
Their real problem is that they all operate within a neoliberlist, individualist understanding of social change. In order to change the world, individuals must first have their minds changed and they must then change their behavior so that their behavior corresponds to the ideal they wish to achieve.
I had to laugh: a couple of weeks ago I stumbled over a forum where a handful of women of color bloggers were complaining about Tim Wise as a hustler, a man who hustles anti-racist sentiment to make his reputation scolding white people for their racism to an audience of other white people who "get off on" the action: watching someone else be disciplined for their racism.
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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>
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