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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