File spoon-archives/marxism2.archive/marxism2_1996/96-06-08.010, message 118


Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 17:06:00 -0500
From: rahul-AT-peaches.ph.utexas.edu (Rahul Mahajan)
Subject: Re: SERIOUS SOKAL/Ross, Aronowitz, and postmarxism...


Keith, first of all, the quote you attributed to me was actually made by
Ralph Dumain. Second, it is of course true that
postmodernism/postmarxism/modern academic "interdisciplinarism" are complex
and multifarious phenomena. However, that does not mean there is not a
possibility of moving beyond the sterile individual-by-individual critique
and isolating broad general logical or methodological flaws. The most
obvious one is the writing style, which I do not consider to be trivial at
all; in fact, people who spend their academic careers pulling out political
meanings through such convoluted mechanisms as "interrogating the absences"
should hardly squawk at questioning the political implications of the
unnecessarily bloated, turgid, incomprehensible, and usually incoherent
prose of nearly all of this stuff. This is just the starting point. There
is much more that can be said, even though these trends try to resist any
possibility of critique by refusing to define themselves.

Rahul




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