Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2002 23:57:22 +0000
From: "steve.devos" <steve.devos-AT-krokodile.co.uk>
Subject: Re: postmodernists and politics - a nice brick and associated notes


Shawn

A question was asked and in a base shorthand I simply laid out some of 
the elements that have been raised repeatedly, hardly original or even 
mine. You can do it next time the question is asked....

steve



shawn wilbur wrote:

>What if, despite the practical difficulties posed by the "interminable
>analyses" of what probably amounts to the Nietzchean wing of the
>enlightenment, and the fear and loathing they quite naturally inspire in
>us, there, finally, is no "univeral subject" and (to put it one familiar
>way) "truth is a woman." What if "fundamentalism" is primarily based on
>belief in a "right" to a "truth" which does not exist? And what if this
>"fundamentalism" is not, as we are sometimes told, a matter of religious
>fanaticism, but one of secularization, globalization and, perhaps most
>importantly, the fatigue that accompanies those other forces - not
>conservatism in any real form, but its simulation?
>
>Perhaps Jameson's analysis of "postmodernism" is the most consistent and
>coherent approach. The "logics of late capitalism" seem to involve both
>a "waning of affect" and a scattershot range of responses, from right
>and left, that want to be "historical," but generally stop short of the
>hard work involved. Ben Agger's _Fast Capitalism_, with its concern with
>various theoretical "fetishes" seems to push this potentially complex
>critique of "postmodernism" as embodied in "cultural theory" forward as
>clearly as anything i've read in the last decade or so.
>
>The "anti-globalization" movement in the US, as represented at "Seattle"
>on "N30" (or "Eugene" on "J18," etc - these labels have become as
>recognizable as corporate logos, sometimes little more than competing
>brands with "Starbucks" or "McDonalds," sometimes as radical road trips
>on the model of "Burning Man" and music/art fests) emerged in part
>*instead* of the more difficult, materially and locally grounded
>"encuentro" network proposed and initially nursed along by the EZLN.
>I've watched the same folks who travelled to protest injustice abroad,
>at considerable expense, turn a wilfully blind eye to the workings of
>neo-liberalism in their own communities. The "encuentros" might yet be a
>model for a new International, and perhaps one less susceptible to the
>manipulations of a new Marx. (It is quite simply the historical case
>that the first great defeat for socialism in the US came at the hands of
>Marx, Sorge and company. The continued failures of socialist solidarity
>in the times between that break and the Haymarket affair destroyed the
>common language of the left in the US, so that important libertarian
>elements here, pushed outside the envelope of "socialism," have
>pinballed rather ungracefully across the political landscape through
>most of the 20th century.) The organizational emphasis on the local,
>taken together with a radical consciousness of linkage between problems
>and, potentially, between struggles, is a refreshingly
>non-fundamentalist approach to resistance. The EZLN approach to
>something like a "universal subject" is likewise refreshing - "we are
>all Zapatistas" (if "we" want to be, if we acknowledge the kinship,
>linkage, need for solidarity, if we will take the time to learn, in
>standard materialism fashion, our "real conditions," and then to
>struggle to be free, etc...) The curious Zapatista "universal subject"
>has an assumed name and a mask, marks of the difficulties of simplying
>being a subject in the way that any claim of "rights" simply takes for
>granted. It is a problem and a possibility, though perhaps one which,
>ultimately, we would like to surpass.
>
>Ultimately, i suppose that the question is whether we expect the
>"universal subject" to be a problem or a guarantee (/alibi). The
>question is more or less the same where "truth" is concerned. For both
>good and ill, the effect of "postmodernism" (Jameson's variety
>primarily, but Lyotard's as well, i think, and some others) is not that
>"all that is solid melts into air," but that all that seemed solid shows
>itself to be, perhaps, of a very different character indeed. And so we
>are on past easy oppositions between the spectacle and the real, towards
>the realms of simulation and "hauntology."
>
>We also take on some damn hard work, which probably explains why so much
>ineffectual, incoherent crap has been produced in an attempt to deal
>with the problem of the postmodern.
>
>I'm personally convinced that neither the concern with "truth" nor with
>the problem of the "universal subject" can be abandoned without serious
>consequences. But, in that, i'm just echoing an old line, alongside many
>of the writers who are considered "postmodern" (again, not all, perhaps
>not even most.). I'm *personally* inclined to think that some of the
>possibly "postmodern" approaches to these questions - some of those by,
>for example, Lyotard, Derrida, Haraway, even Baudrillard - are better
>hedges against fundamentalism than those of most of their critics. At
>the same time, all of those writers - often quite explicitly - show how
>the critical stakes are raised by allowing these problems to appear *as
>problems*.
>
>As to the specific critique Steve has advanced, i have to be honest - i
>find it somewhat unbelievable to lay responsibility, even a significant
>share thereof, for the rise of the new right at the feet of Tel Quel,
>Lyotard, and/or Lipovetski. After 9/11, we saw serious condemnations of
>"postmodernism" as responsible for national weakness, "moral and
>cultural relativism" responsible for dissent against the fundamentally
>unjust attack on Afghanistan. Now, with everyone's attention focused on
>the next WWII analogy for the war against terrorism, we're hearing about
>"postmodernists" as "appeasers." A recent Atlantic story links
>"postmodernists and mullahs" as the new Hitler-Stalin pact. GW Bush is
>notoriously big on "moral clarity" and not too concerned about the
>factual and logical corners he has to cut to keep it "all about good vs.
>evil," but apparently the appeal of this sort of stuff has a much
>broader appeal.
>
>-shawn
>