File spoon-archives/postanarchism.archive/postanarchism_2004/postanarchism.0402, message 29


Date: Mon, 9 Feb 2004 23:56:51 -0800 (PST)
From: "J.M. Adams" <ringfingers-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [postanarchism] Ghandchi: "Postmodernism Shaping Islamism"


In regard to your statement referring to Tadzio
Mueller's essay: 

"I think the essay is badly compromised in a number of
ways, some of which may reflect the "activistism" our
marxist comrades speak about in another essay you
forwarded. The latter issue is one we could debate. 
The issue of misrepresenting sources is a little more
straightforward. I know you don't claim to have even
read all the way through these texts, but that still
leaves the question open: why send them - particularly

when they can be shown to be misleading in a variety
of ways"

I can only gather from this question that you are
suggesting that because you personally felt that
Mueller misrepresented Barbara Epstein's article that
I should somehow have not posted it for that reason
alone? Despite the fact that this was published in
Anarchist Studies, the only academic anarchist journal
that I am aware of, and certainly the one that has
published the majority of the essays in print looking
at the intersection between anarchism and contemporary
critical theory, it is a rather interesting article
aside from all of that, and there are many things in
your own writings that I could point to as
'misrepresentations' yet you don't see me not posting
your stuff do you?

When you say "why send them" in reference to articles
such as Mueller's, you leave me without any kind of
possible response - *of course* I am going to post
articles like Mueller's to a listserv like this, that
is why it exists, his is a valid and important
contribution to the discussion, it may not be one you
agree with, but that is beside the point. Now whether
it exists for essays like Ghandchi's is another
question I suppose, but then we can move on to that
too:

You ask in regard to the Ghandchi essay:

"What, then, is the value of giving it further
circulation? Information glut is a real enough problem
that unfiltered forwarding seems like a 
questionable critical practice."

I guess I feel like it is important to hear all the
voices that are discussing this from whatever angle,
even if we do not agree with the perspective being
offered. I don't want to feel like there is only one
discussion that we are having here, it seems like most
people on the list want it to be as open-ended as
possible, which is what my perspective is as well.

In regard to the question of postmodernism and Islam,
one of the most interesting in this regard is Akbar
Ahmed's book at
http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0415062934 or Ziauddin
Sardar at http://styluspub.com/books/book6163.html -
the latter has written some very interesting works on
postcolonial critique of 'Western' science. Hardt and
Negri state on p. 147 of Empire that 

"fundamentalism, however, is a poor and confused
category that groups together widely disparate
phenomena. In general, one might say that
fundamentalisms, diverse though they may be, are
linked by their being understood both from within and
outside as anti-modernist movements, resurgences of
primordial identities and values; they are conceived
as a kind of historical backflow, a de-modernization.
It is more accurate and more useful, however, to
understand the various fundamentalisms not as the
recreation of a premodern world, but rather as a
powerful refusal of the contemporary historical
passage in course" (147).  

In addition to this, George Katsiaficas has argued
from a radical mulitculturalist perspective that we
may need to learn to coexist with Islamic
fundamentalism, at least to a greater extent than is
typically accepted by the mainstream Left, though he
is not exactly a postmodernist per se.


The concept of the 'Veil of Resistance' which some
postmodern theorists refer to, such as my former
professor Steve Niva at the Evergreen State College is
explained here:
www.utexas.edu/cola/depts/culturalstudies/
tpp/tpp4/perkins.pdf - what I remember of it is
basically the idea that whereas in the West we often
think that any kind of veil or burka or whatever is
always in all cases and situations proof of the
oppression of women, in fact it is sometimes a form of
resistance by the women themselves against Western
homogenization - witness for instance the recent
attempts to ban headwear by the French governement, in
this case the 'veil of oppression' becomes a 'veil of
resistance'. 

Jason

Jason



===="“It does not matter how many people chose moral duty over the rationality of self-preservation - what does matter is that some did. Evil is not all-powerful. It can be resisted. The testimony of the few who did resist shatters the authority of the logic of self-preservation. It shows it for what it is in the end - a choice." 

- Zygmunt Bauman, 'Modernity and the Holocaust'

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