Miker in quotes:
"'Everybody who is somebody thinks he is wonderful, so it
must be so."
And that is a straw man argument. I didn't say that
Foucault is wonderful or that anyone else thinks he is
wonderful. I am just arguing that whether or not you agree
with everything he wrote, Foucault was an intellectual, not a
pseudo-intellectual. When every single important academic
scholar agrees to the importance of work, it doesn't make the
work
"wonderful," but it does make it pretty obviously academic.
Likewise, I don't agree with everything you, Mike, say about
postmodernism, but I recognize that you are an intellectual,
i.e. "a person who places a high value on or pursues things
of interest to the intellect or the more complex forms and
fields of knowledge, as aesthetic or philosophical matters,
esp. on an abstract and general level" (Webster's). We can
disagree with scholarly work without flippantly deriding it
as "pseudo-intellectual horseshit." Some of your criticism in
your negative summary of postmodernism, for example, is valid
and worth discussing.
"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.'
Is there some part of this quote that you disagree with? Of
course power is thoroughly discursive. To take just one of a
billion examples: the state apparatus in the US that
established slavery was supported by "scientific" theories of
racial inferiority. Foucault argues correctly that power does
not exist separately from knowledge. This is a low stakes
claim that is hardly controversial, but does not encompass
the range of his arguments about power. You wrote that
"[Foucault] noted that
[discourses of power] empower particular groups of people
while isolating others in a marginalized state." The reason I
argue that this is not a thorough version of Foucault's work
on power is that Foucault did not argue that discourses of
power are merely isolating, and it is this very argument of
his about the complexitiy, dispersal, flexibility,
variability and microstructures of power that is most
interesting. In your discussion of Foucault, you changed the
subject in midsentence to an alleged postmodern
"deconstruction" of western democracy as an
"expansionist tyranny." Foucault, as far as I know, never
argued that democracy was tyranny. My point is that in your
effort to dismiss "postmodernism" as a bad thing, your
argument tends to seek out the simplistic rather than the
complex, and conflate a bunch of widely different thinkers
into a single imaginary school that they themselves for the
most part didn't consider themselves a member of.
"Postmodernism is very closely associated with
leftist thought."
Regardless of what associations have been made, the earnest
theory that the world is naturally progressing toward a
golden age is one of the central notions of Marxism, and is
one of the aspects of modernist thought most resisted by
postmodernists. It is reductive to consider radical, ethical
skepticism of rationalism "leftist" in the same way that it
is reductive to consider libertarianism the lone province of
the right. The whole left/right dichotomy is simplistic and
not very useful in trying to understand complex discourses. I
am so bored of the left/right thing. I agree with you that it
is hardly worth discussing.
"Oh yeah. The Enlightenment is the reason for the
Holocaust. What a classic piece of postmodern
thought."
Talk about logical fallacy. Again, instead of
addressing what I actually say, you unfairly summarize it
into a convenient man of straw and then knock him down.
First, I don't think it is classically postmodern to think
the enlightenment caused the holocaust. I think it is
classically reductionist and unfair to misrepresent a lot of
really interesting academic work, though. Second, It is
because of the miracle of my great grandmother's not being
killed in the holocaust that I exist. I knew her quite well
and learned from her about the extermination of her 9
siblings, and i take what happened there quite seriously. i
never said that "the enlightenment is the reason for the
holocaust." That is a very trite and unfair summary of what I
said. I said that some of the origin of the "questioning of
modernism [has a] relation to the rationalism of systematic
genocides in the 20th century." In other words, because there
are aspects of
rationalism/classification/reason/systematization that in
extreme forms have been perverted into the service of
systematic, rationalized mass murders, some philosophers who
have been labeled "postmodern" have been a little suspicious,
or perhaps nervous about grand theories, structures of power,
unwavering certainty, political solutions, systems of
power--not just dictatorships of the left but also of the
right, not just "them" but also "us"--whover "us" happen to
be.
"Equating anti-postmodern with anti-intellectual is logical
fallacy number two, equivocation. Didn't they teach you that
in school?"
I was not equating your rejection of postmodern critical
strategies with anti-intellectualism. I was referring to the
labeling of all so-called postmodern work as
"pseudo-intellectual horseshit"--it wasn't your phrase but
you agreed with it. To disagree with thinkers like Derrida,
Foucault, Butler, et al. is one thing, but to tritely dismiss
work of such depth and intellect, in my opinion, is
anti-intellectual. If you really would read the best of the
work that is generally considered postmodern, you would
surely find that it meets the highest rigors of academic
scholarship. Just take Derrida's work on Austin's Speech
Theory, for one example, or Foucault's History of Sexuality,
for another. I myself am not in agreement with some of the
arguments about postmodernism by Baudrillard the
postmodernist, Bloom the conservative or Eagleton the
Marxist, but I don't label their work horseshit. Maybe
pseudo-intellectual horseshit is what guys who identify with
hard-boiled protagonists a little too much call the stuff
they don't want to have to read.
Those who care about this stuff might check out Lyotard's
"The Postmodern Condition" as one interesting starting place,
particularly for his discussion of cybernetics and
communication.
As for what constitutes postmodern fiction, I am not sure. So
much has been given the label and it's all so different. From
Borges to Amy Tan, it seems like nearly every post 1950s
fiction writer has ended up on someone's list of
postmodernists. Some of what's most often considered
postmodern can be good, some not. Bartheleme, for one, wrote
some stories i like and some that i don't. The one with the
gerbil at the end was pretty fucking funny.
David
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