File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 39


Date: Thu, 08 Jul 1999 14:39:45 -0700
From: hugh bone <hughbone-AT-worldnet.att.net>
Subject: Re: Defending culture


colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net wrote:
> 
> Hugh,
>      You said "Cultural homogenization is a lesser evil than
> dispossesion and removal of populations from their ancestral homes". For
> me, the word 'ancestral' here is a recepticle containing exactly the
> cultural stakes I was referring to. Capitalism increasingly demands a
> radical mobility of its labour force, a luiquidity the better to
> redistribute it on an ad hoc basis. My point is that exactly this rapid
> mobilization of resources of labour wrenches peoples, communities,
> traditions from their situatedness in specific locales, and further,
> that this tendency is, insidiously, redefining the perameters of what
> constitutes being human. In raising this objection, one opens oneself to
> accusations (and under Capitalism it becomes a serious one) of
> nostalgia.
>       By contrast, postmodernism in its emphasis on difference
> represents an ethico-political opportunity to recognise culture and
> tradition and pre-modern belief systems in general while respecting them
> in their alterity. Capitalism disavows the very possibility of alterity,
> since, as with all Imperialisms, otherness is an affront to its very
> self-understanding.
> Col.

-AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT--AT-

I'm not above taking "Yes" for an answer.

Maybe this will answer Lois' question.

"Postmodernism" isn't really a player; suffers obsolesence daily;
globalizing capitalism kills it.  No contest.

In WWII, Stalin was supposed to have said:  "How many Divisions does the
Pope have?" 

I think of postmodernism as a tree without roots or branches.

Hugh


   

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