Postmodernism

[jbor]

Kurt-Werner:
> Okay, you are right in the case of Derrida. But he is an exception, and you
> cannot compare him with other postmodern philosophers.

Say what?
I doubt that the rebels in Zimbabwe or Sierra Leone or elsewhere that you
mention have copies of *The Postmodern Condition* or *Gravity's Rainbow*
packed in with their AK47s either. And even if the latter then they have
certainly misread, or selectively-read as some here are also wont to do, the
sections of that novel which deal with colonialism and genocide, if indeed
they are using that archetypally postmodern text by one of the seminal
postmodernist thinkers of our time to justify and bolster their cause. The
new state which the revolutionary factions in these places is seeking to
impose is simply a mirror image of the colonial state which oppresses them:
one set of absolutist values and moral certitudes and socio-economic
hierarchies in place of another (Jameson).

Postmodernism is a descriptive term, not a prescriptive value or system.
Deconstruction is a tool of textual analysis, and post-structuralism is a
(loose) critical school. Opponents of postmodernism need to construct it as
something it is not in order to tear it down, tar and feather it by
association with the Unabomber Manifesto, the Protocols, or Mein Kampf. In
fact, the word itself is an oxymoron and the -ism is, if anything, an ironic
affix, playfully self-deflating (Barthes, Derrida). As a philosophy espoused
by an individual it calls for and embraces its own obsolescence and
renovation (Derrida, Lyotard). And, as Kevin also points out, it is not a
"thing" or "period", but something which is timeless (Eco), and which
"delimits the edges of previous thoughts, [and] tears down structures that
were not really foundational after all" (Baudrillard). In fact, it is often
portrayed as an agglomeration of disparate and apparently mutually
contradictory styles and ways of perceiving the world (Jencks), and it most
certainly endorses critical pluralism, a "both/and" approach (Hutcheon) to
meaning and significance rather than the elitist and oppressive "either/or"
of rationalist binarism which is the mainstay of traditional aesthetic and
political philosophy.

What strikes me is the fact that, for whatever reasons, Rorty dumped the
nomenclature in order to (re-?)assert his nationalism. Personally, I don't
believe that there are answers to be found in modes of thought and practice
which seek to defend and perpetuate global inequality.

best


----------
>From: KXX4493553 at aol.com
>To: EAbla at nazarene.org, hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: Postmodernism
>Date: Sat, May 20, 2000, 2:04 AM
>