David in quotes. Me without.
"Well, if no others here are going to play devil's advocate,
I guess I will."
Go for it! It's well worth discussing. Postmodern thought
permeates the air we breathe. More on topic, it's had a
profound impact on the hardboiled and noir books we read.
I've already mentioned a few in an earlier post. I could add
John Barth to that list. I interpret his The Road as a
slightly tongue-in-cheek play between an existentialist
doctor, a pomo protagonist, and an Enlightenment modern. It
actually prefigures the birth of postmodernism by a year or
few. Stewart astutely mentions Sallis. I've heard that
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 19 and some of Robee-Grillet show
pomo influence, but I haven't had the pleasure.
"Some of the work is definitely pseudo-intellectual
horseshit, but not all of it. Even academic critics of
Foucault, for example, acknowledge the depth, scope, and
importance of his work."
Shame on you. That's an ad populum argument.
'Everybody who is somebody thinks he is wonderful, so it must
be so.' Logical fallacy number one.
"Foucault did not have as shallow a theory of power as
Miker's summary might have you believe."
If you are saying that several books cannot be adequately
summarized in a few short paragraphs, I have no problem with
that. Nevertheless, just for the record, here's Foucault: 'No
power is exercised without the extraction appropriation,
distribution or retension of knowledge. At this level, we do
not have knowledge on the on hand and society on the other,
or science and state; we have the basic forms of
power/knowledge.'
"Second, postmodern philosophers have been equally attacked
by the Right and Left, so to consider them all leftists is
ironic when the likes of Derrida have been critiqued as Nazis
by some on the Left."
The Nazi accusation is sloppy reasoning. It is based on the
postmodern deconstruction of Enlightenment ideals of freedom,
equality, and justice. The Lefties who are doing the Nazi
name-calling are making the faulty assumption that just
because the pomos are not opposed to fascism, they must be in
favor of it. Postmodernism is very closely associated with
leftist thought. We could easily pursue this, but it hardly
seems worth it.
"I could say a lot more about the origins of the questioning
of modernism and its relation to the rationalism of
systematic genocides in the 20th century..."
Oh yeah. The Enlightenment is the reason for the Holocaust.
What a classic piece of postmodern thought.
"I got so tired of defending popular fiction from academic
snobbery in grad school that it is a little disheartening to
have to defend important academic work from anti-intellectual
snobbery here at RARA AVIS..."
My stance is anti-postmodern. Equating anti-postmodern with
anti-intellectual is logical fallacy number two,
equivocation. Didn't they teach you that in school? Anyway,
seems like there's a lot of that going around these days. Jim
did a wonderful job of it when he turned my declaration that
"Art has no moral obligation" into "Artists have no moral
obligation." Art. Artist. What's the difference? But I
diverge.
miker
____________________________________________________________________________________
It's here! Your new message! Get new email alerts with the
free Yahoo! Toolbar. http://tools.search.yahoo.com/toolbar/features/mail/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 21 Mar 2007 EDT