At 6:56 PM 10/28/96, Ajit Sinha wrote: >At 09:10 AM 10/28/96 -0800, you (Doug Henwood) wrote: > (as if, among other >>things, there weren't critiques of decon from the left for being the >>essentially conservative thing it is). >__________________________ >And why is that? Could you elaborate a bit? Enquiring minds want to know. Well, I'm reading - intermittently - Teresa Ebert's book Ludic Feminism and After (excellent in content, but she writes in that awful English department way), and she goes into these issues in great depth, from a Marxist-feminist viewpoint. I'll just say this: decon/pomo, in its canonical form, tends to ignore social and material reality, training its focus instead on the world of "discourse." Those pomos/decons who still feel some loyalties to the old verities try to have it both ways by making "discourse" into a material force, but it ain't really. This focus on "discourse" is basically old idealism dressed up in fancy new clothes, just as lots of multiculturalism is pluralism decked out in snazzy threads. For some reason, I've just been reading Baudrillard's absurd book, The Transparency of Evil. To B., the political economy of the "sign" has replaced the p.e. of value. In a passage emblematic of a whole strand of pomo thinking, he writes: "But Marx simply did not foresee that it would be possible for capital, in the face of the imminent threat to its existence, to transpoliticize itself, as it were: to launch itself into an orbit beyond the relations of production and political contradictions, to make itself autonomous in a free-floating, ecstatic and haphazard form, and thus to totalize the world in its own image. Capital (if it still may be so called) has barred the way of political economy and the law of value; it is in this sense that it has successfully escaped its own end. Henceforward it can function independently of its own former aims, and absolutely without reference to any aims whatever." Yeah, right. Doug -- Doug Henwood Left Business Observer 250 W 85 St New York NY 10024-3217 USA +1-212-874-4020 voice +1-212-874-3137 fax email: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> web: <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/LBO_home.html>
