Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 14:11:56 -0500 From: Kenneth MacKendrick <kenneth.mackendrick-AT-utoronto.ca> Subject: Re: M-TH: Zen and the Art of Postmodern Self Maintenance? (was ethics and intentions. Footnote.) On Thu, 12 Feb 1998 21:09:45 -0500 Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: > Ken wrote: > >And I doubt very much that Utah is equating aesthetics and > >politics. Geez - it's a story. > > I happen to like his music, and my comments on "Zen and the Art of Postmodern Self Maintenance" is mainly about the postmodern context in which you sought to incorporate his words. This is a guilt by association charge. I didn't put Utah is a postmodern context. Poststructuralism is not postmodernism. Deconstruction is not postmodernism. > >You might also want to note though that the absolute > >distinction between aesthetics and politics means, logically, that they cannot speak to one another - an idea that swallows wholesale the bourgeious mentality of the always already free, independent, and autonomy self - something which covers up, ideologically, the sadistic entwinement of the > >individual and society. In other words the entire dialectic of enlightenment is wiped out in such a rigid distinction - siding with the liquidation of subjectivity altogether - something far more insidious than a simple story about resisting the urge to act on violent impulses. > I don't make a "rigid distinction" between politics and aesthetics. I only object to the postmodern moves to substitute ethics and aesthetics for politics. A big difference. Then we are not in disagreement about this. I object to the same bait and switch - which is actually a highly modern thing to do anyway. This charge, in any event, is problematic because it itself presupposes that the distinctions between the spheres in modernity are valid. To charge this one already has to believe they are radically separate. The aesthetic-political critique of postmodernism is incoherent from where I stand. In other words the critique itself is based upon some pretty totalitarian assumptions - which slide into the same fate as those who deliberately blur the distinctions via assimilation. Both the critique and the object of the critique end up in the same junk pile. > >The postmodern self doesn't make any sense and I don't think there is anything in my post that warrants this kind of red herring critique. > I happen to think that postmodernism is not much of a threat to good old bourgeois individualism. By saying this, I don't meant to imply that anything and everything that has been said by those who are said to be postmodernists are worthless. I merely question the idea that postmodernism as a school of thought subverts "the bourgeious mentality of the always already free, independent, and autonomy self"; as you say, "Hell - if that's the case then I guess the Titanic > eliminated class struggle eh?" Do you have a class list of the postmodern school? I would be interested in seeing the reading list (wink). And, get ready for the irrelevant association, when did the postmodern turn occur? I was dizzy after the linguistic turn, the interpretive turn, and the hermeneutic turn... I'm tired of spinning. ken --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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