wasn't it Perry Anderson who argued that when intellectuals get separated from actual social movements -- especially when the social movements are totally demobilized -- they tend to focus totally cultural stuff (or abstract stuff like the "labor theory of value")? In this view, the PoMo trend could be seen as a symptom of the decline of the New Lefts of the 1960s/1970s. Jim Devine
------------------- Well that is more or less what happened. But there were other factors. I am speaking for myself here. I am not sure it has much theoretical value. Once I got to grad school, it wasn't what I expected. Maybe it was just the particular department. But this scene needed serious reform and overhaul. Once out of a specific set of courses, nobody was teaching anything. Maybe they didn't know how. All my learning was coming from other fields or fellow grad students. Then there was a strange kind of academic problem with art history in particular. I've noted that before. Art history doesn't seem to really say anything about the art itself. Once you have a catalog of periods and their style characteristics, you are mostly done. But the trouble is you're not done, only beginning. So a larger scale or more comprehensive understanding of arts and culture was needed and needed development. But where, how, etc? So there was a great vacuum. While its true there was a big separation between an active movement or movements and radical reworking of an academic field or fields, they were or should have been extensions of each other. Foucault was supposed to be an icon of this, but really when you get down to it, he wasn't. He had one solid point. Most social institutions resemble prisons. And the bourgeois sensibility itself is a mental prison. Okay, so then what? On the other hand a lot of the US cultural critiques were developed after, sometimes long after any social or political movements. This was out of phase and probably was a mark of decline. But decline is something of the wrong word. The problem in some sense was the loss of radical intellectual momentum, like it couldn't develop or move. I mean that is different than decline. In retrospect, I think I can blame a lot of this sluggishness on simple things. For example, you really do need to master a part of a field like art history in order to reconstruct or overhaul its intellectual foundations so that different views come into play. You really need to understand art is a social production and not just a list of famous artists. For that you need a larger view of the arts within a society and how they function. The idea that it's all propaganda of and for the bourgeoisie just isn't enough. Yet such a larger view is consider outside art history, therefore inadmissible. Take Judith Butler for an interesting example. She's in English, yet the book I read was based on Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic which she morphed into a gender politics and struggle. Whether that's cool or not, it is not about English, except in the extremely didactic way that language itself embodies these divisions and subboardinations, i.e. the pronoun issue, etc. Then there were more obvious matters. In US academia, any semblence of Left anything was pretty much suppressed after the 1960s. It wasn't restricted to economics departments and their aversion to anything outside their neoclassical ideology. It was generally speaking, and this is just my impression, a kind of total sort of suppression. I have not idea how this came about. It's an interesting social study in itself. What made the pomo stuff acceptible to some extent was its lack of threat. By being nearly unintelligible it posed no threat at all. In my mind it is a very complicated thing to sort out. CG _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
