Date: Wed, 4 May 1994 18:57:30 -0700
Sender: pen-l@ecst.csuchico.edu
From: Nathan Newman <newman@garnet.berkeley.edu>
Subject: Re: Politics and Postmodernism
 
 
On Wed, May 4  1994, Steve Cullenberg wrote:
 
> With all due respect to Anders Schneiderman, students on campuses did not
> understand the complexities and crises of the financial system long before
> postmodernism and Derrida found their way onto the scene.
 
The point is that one would hope that the emergence of a stronger left in
the academy would have led to less ignorance on that point.  Instead,
most postmodernist students became less interested in such questions,
seeing them as secondary to the "more important" epistemological questions.
 
> Politics takes place at many sites and has various effectivities.  The
> academy, the street, and the Congress are all worthy, different, and
> important places to  struggle.
 
Yes, this is the point of disagreement.  The academy unto itself is not a
co-equal point of struggle.  To argue that it is is to create an
equivalence between the struggles of farmworkers with brutal contractor
and the relatively comfortable tenure struggles in the academy.
 
It is an excuse for the privileged in the academic grove to ignore those
harder struggles in the streets in the name of fighting "their own
struggle" at the University.
 
In the words of Liberation Theology, I do believe in a "preferential
option for the poor" and those in more privileged positions have an
option not to just struggle among the elite, but must leverage those
elite resources for those desperate for the prestige and resources the
academy or any other elite position can contribute to their struggle.
 
  The influence of the Left in so-called
> popular or electoral struggles in this country is not noted for its great
> success, and I think it would be folly to lay the blame of this lack of
> success at the feet of Derrida.
 
That is a contestable issue.  The rise of the CIO had strong left
influence just as the Great Society had strong progressive activity
behind it.
 
To use the lesser success of the US left to justify even less activity by
academics in popular movements seems like pure rationalization to me.
 
> In the academy, however, something as seemingly esoteric as Derrida's
> attack on logocentrism years ago has provided theoretical space (and
> subsequently, institutional space) for many of the multicultural and
> feminist theories of recent years (and it is not only French feminists -
> before you sneer too much you might want to look at the collection in Linda
> Nicholson's book _Feminism/Postmodernism_ and many of the essays in Ferber
> and Nelson's _Beyond Economic Man_, especially by Diana Strassmann and
> Rhonda Williams).  George Will knows the political import of these
> developments.  I guess he must figure it out from reading Business Week.
 
And I generally think that only the hard-right and the postmodern left
recognize the import of these developments.  Most left activists "in the
streets" generally find the whole postmodern obsesssion to be an elitist
and usually irrelevant factor in their lives and work.
 
Civil rights has not been fought for based on deconstruction but on mass
struggle, just as feminist and gay rights were won in the streets and in
mass mobilization.  Yes, theory and academics contributed to those
struggles, but only to the extent that they leveraged the prestige of the
academy to intervenee in public discourse.
 
It is the narcisism and almost belligerent unintelligibility of
postmodern theory that I object to.
 
 
--Nathan Newman