To: bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu
From: cow-AT-aber.ac.uk (Colin Wight)
Subject: Re: BHA: Re: Help
Date: Fri, 24 Oct 1997 15:49:19 +0100


Well,

My little question, where I was being slightly postmodern myself (that is ironic, as good a definition of the postmodern I can come up with for now), has generated many replies. Alan, and Oscar wish to extend the hand of friendship to our postist colleagues, seeing something (at least for Oscar) of a kindred spirit at work between postism and CR. A kind of brotherly/sisterly affection that tolerates our wayward kin - we know that they mean well, they just have a few minor problems. Some on the left (and by this I simply mean anyone still committed to some form of socialism (a word according to many postists we should not use)), however, are deeply suspicious of this movement. Without truth, argues Geras, there can be no injustice.

Now here I reach a major problem. The irony of my question was the impossibility of my postist foe being able to conduct such a decentered understanding. She clams that there are no agents and no structures only practices. But worse than this, she actually sucuumbs to a rampant structrualism arguing, "The subject, agent, is determined not determinative." Oscar, I suspect, wants to view this as attributable to this one renegage postist writer, not part of the postists discourse itself. But how can this be, doesn't this imply a sovereign subject able to free itself from its place in the signifying chain? If I take Doty at her word, it is not _her_ writing the text, she does not exist as such, she is determined to write this rampant structuralism as consequence of the discourse she is embedded within. Ipso facto, the problem is not Doty, but postism.

Moreover, Oscar, the Kantian/Cartesian subject you refer to is a chimera,  created by the postist hordes in order to attack modernity. But as Joan Copec has pointed out, we have for a long time now being living in the graveyard of the subject, and modernity, particularly positivism, was no friend of the subject. Doesn't RB even point out somewhere that Marx put the final nail in the coffin of the subject. The pomo problem comes because wedded to the epistemic fallacy, they fail to see that the subject, which is basically a philosophical construct, is not the same as the self, the individual, nor the human.

The irony in my original question was this. How did Doty write the piece? How is a decentred understanding possible. After all, she must have got herself centered enough to (mis)read the literature, sit at the computer, write the article, stick it in the post, reply and attend to referee's comments and send it back again. Her position, for all the linguistic trappings, boils down to a rampant structuralism where she can but claim she is an effect of discourse. Moreover, she claims that agents and structures are but effects of practices, and of course, there is something to this. But what are the conditions of possibility for practices - agents and structures perhaps?

A further problem occurs when she somehow manages to identify herself as a poststructuralist. How does she know this? What makes one a poststructuralist? I've read my Derrida, do I qualify? I've read my Foucault, does this help? Do I simply have to claim that I am one to be one, much like the muslim woman in Bosnia simply has to claim that she is a Serb to save herself from rape? Is this all identity is?

There is and can be no agency in postism because they deny the "is" of the world. They resemble the ignorant who exercise their agency by walking off the top of a cliff because they know not the "is" of gravity - they can't know it because they either deny it or see it as a linguistic construct (Marx and drowning men springs to mind here). This is a kind of freedom I (speaking tentatively of course) can do without.

Postism is the child of '68. It is the merest surface reflection of a loss of intellectual nerve in the face of an all-embracing captialist machine. For those Star Trek fans on the list, it is the Borg, and it is showing a cinema near you. Remember, as someone once said about war, you may not be interested in it, but it is certainly interested in you.

Thanks,


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Colin Wight
Department of International Politics
University of Wales, Aberystwyth
Tel: (01970) 621769

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