Date: Wed, 4 May 1994 13:32:40 -0700
Sender: pen-l@ecst.csuchico.edu
From: "R. Anders Schneiderman" <anders@garnet.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Postmodernism and Politics (was Derrida)
 
Steve Cullenberg wrote:
 
Postmodernism may or may not be used
politically.  I can only offer some prima facie circumstantial evidence
now.  The journal "Rethinking Marxism", of which I am an editor, could be
fairly described, I think, as generally supporting a postmodern Marxism (I
don't know what my co-editors think).  Unless we are either self-delusional
or entirely non-political, there must on the face of it then be something
Marxists can learn from postmodernism. [ he then cited a book that's
about to come out about the New World Order]
 
This, it seems to me, is the crux of the issue of postmodernism: how do
you define whether it is "politically useful"?  Steve seems to be defining
it in terms of whether it has created more sophisticated theorizing (if
I'm way off base, please say so).  In that sense, I'd say that
postmodernism as a whole has quite been useful in certain areas, such as
epistemology.
 
However, when it comes to its impact on politics, I'd say the record is
pretty clear in the U.S.  In the 1980s, postmodernism swept many campuses,
and most young leftwingers at many colleges got a good dose of it.  Many
young Lefties, such as myself, learned postmodernism first and marxism
later.  What was the political result?  At a time when the U.S. finance
system was becoming wildly postmodern, costing taxpayers billions of
dollars via the S&L bailout, etc., most of my postmodern friends had not a
clue as to what was happening.  Why?  Because most strands of
postmodernism taught on campuses made students very literate on
epistemological issues and almost completely illiterate when it came to
economic issues such as the system of finance.  We could endlessly
deconstruct literary texts or reconstruct hidden "resistences", but when
we talked about the world of economics, we had been given, at best, vulgar
Marxist tools that were pretty much useless.  Frankly, we'd have been
better off reading Business Week than Derrida, Foucault, the French
Femminists, etc.
 
So, when someone can come up with some concrete examples of how
"postmodernism" has produced theorizing/ways of seeing the world that were
more useful in actual political struggles than the theorizing which came
before postmodernism, I'll go back to taking it seriously. So far, the
only practical consequence I've seen of postmodern theory was that it gave
English majors with whom I went to college the right frame of mind to be
good investment brokers (which more than a few of them did).  Until
Postmodern Lefty types can do better than that, they should stop whining
about not being taken seriously.
 
 
Anders Schneiderman
Center for Community Economic Research / U.C Berkeley Sociology
Recovering Postmodernist