Date: Mon, 5 Dec 1994 23:09:04 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mani Salem-Haghighi <msalemha-AT-uoguelph.ca>
Subject: Re: Deleuze and Postmodernity



The recent posts on this topic have been great, primarily because the 
issue seems more muddled than ever, which is often quite a wonderful 
thing... 

I have two brief things to say:

First, Jon's quote from the Huyssen book notwithstanding, I still
find Huyssen's understanding of the postmodern/post-structuralist 
distinction to be ambivalent. He obviously does make a distinction, 
but he also makes a lot out of the overlaps between them, their 
"middle", which I find just as interesting. 

Frankly, I can't see how Huyssen can say 
that "even in America, poststructuralism offers a theory of 
modernism, not a theory of postmodernism," when he's already said 
that "...the American appropriation of structuralist 
and especially poststructuralist theory from France reflects the extent 
to which postmodernism itself has been academicized since it won its 
battle against modernism..." (pg.170) "...there are definite links 
between the ethos of postmodernism and the American appropriation of 
poststructuralism..." (pg.235n.24) By the way, what does this appropriation 
mean, Jon, In terms of your idea of institutional placement? Doesn't it 
make the theorized postmodernism something which reaches beyond the 
Anglo-American context? And more generally, why the obsession to keep 
PoMo American? 

(But as far as I'm concerned, we don't really have to 
get into any of this because):  

What seems to have become clear is that the distinctions between 
poststructuralism and postmodernism, or the one between postmodernism and 
and modernism, are more or less irrelevant to D+G. Asking these 
questions doesn't seem to take D+G anywhere, do anything to them. Either 
way, they do what they've been doing, (which is not necessarily the same 
as saying that they are neither one nor the other, and it doesn't imply 
that the distinctions are inherently useless: we don't want to call 
someone like Baudrilard a modern, or do we?) I'm beginning to 
wonder if this is an example of what Deleuze calls a False Problem.

What do you think?

love 

mani







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