Howard rocks!
Posted on 04/20/2006 2:21:49 PM PDT by naturalman1975
Howard rocks!
Most yes, but not all - and the idealogues who've basically been most responsible for our English courses in Australia over the last few years (like Alan Luke for example) are both post-modernists and Marxists. I can't say for certain if he's a feminist.
Well you can be a Marxist and a Structuralist as well that doesn't imply causation. Postmodernism is a cultural logic and is apolitical.
Postermodernism is unlearning. To the extent that it is learning at all, it is learned confusion and insanity.
I wouldn't say postmodernism is apoltical exactly. It can infect the thinking of all ideologies to a point; but for the most part, a consistent conservative can't really be a postmodernist. The theories of conservatism are too based on absolute truth. Conservatives are by nature traditionalists. Liberals can be modernists or post-modernists. You might find someone who calls himself a conservative and a postmodernist, but the rest of us would call him a RINO or a CINO.
That isn't exactly the broadest spectrum - it's sort of lumped up over there on the left. Post-structuralists and post-modernists aren't the same breed of cat these days but the amount of intellectual sludge you have to wade through to recognize that there is a significant difference is astonishing (and sort of futile since to both schools "significance" is a heavily negotiable term).
The real problem with this sort of thing with respect to Shakespeare is that the latter's universalist treatment of human emotions is antithetical to the idea that they must be interpreted through the filters of queer or feminist theory in order to extract the proper subtextual meaning. ("Proper" turns out to be negotiable too.) The result is a terrible hash and it's no wonder the kiddies are confused by it.
PoMo taken consistently is anarchy. It's a set of glasses through which to see the world in novel ways. But at some point you have to take the glasses off or replace them with another pair.
bump for publicity
And the goal is not to really see anything in any rational sense, but only to find confusion where none really exists. It's an activity of imagination. That's what I meant by learned confusion and insanity. People who dwell in that mental realm larely lose touch with reality.
Most of the PoMos I have encountered used to be dogmatic Marxists until the Soviet Union collapsed, and rather than confess that capitalism won they found refuge in PoMo.
That's my point. Many of the PoMos I have studied were former Marxists who gave up on a dogmatic view of the world after the USSR fell. This is particularly true of the French PoMos.
Most who consider themselves postmodernists are inconsistent or partial postmodernists using the strict definition of postmodernism. A consistent PoMo will say there is no cultural basis to be judged, which means Nazism, Kipling/Joseph Chamberlain-kind "civilizational mission" imperialism, Leopold II type exploitative imperialism, American muscular patriotism, French-Euro Gallic nationalism, communism, free market libertarianism, Euro social market democracy, "Third Way-ism", classical Metternich Ancien regime authoritarism, Third World Marxo-nationalism, Mussolini Fascism, you-name-it-ism are all equally valid. "Who are we to judge?", in other words, is the motto.
But evidences from our self-avowed postmodernists suggest they don't believe in this way. Most are quite classical absolutist in stance when it comes to judging American patriotism or classical European absolute monarchy (not saying that they are equivalent, but most typical Western academics treat these two with equal contempt). And they are the first to denounce Western patriotism, but tolerate to a great length Third World nationalism.
What a bit of comedy that is. Anyone who is aware of the intellectual scene is aware of what has happened. Vulgar Marxism is out. Deconstructing Nietzsche and Heidegger and enlisting them in the cause of egalitarian socialism is in.
Now instead of individual consciousness being necessarily conditioned by the economic realities of vulgar Marxism, they are conditioned by the cultural realities of gender and race.
That is the reality. To say that feminists and Marxists hate postmodernism is simply goofy.
Good job, PM Howard
Allan Bloom once wrote that deconstruction does for literary criticism what Huey Long did for politics: Every man a critic.
He was right. Deconstruction is a "tool," all right. It's a tool for self-satisfied nihilists who inhabit our universities. It makes the study of literature an impossibility.
Which, come to think of it, may be the point.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.