Date: Thu, 5 May 1994 08:03:33 -0700 Sender: pen-l@ecst.csuchico.edu From: Trond Andresen Subject: Re: PoMo in the 90'ies My experience is that you acquire your values, outlook, political affiliation, ideology during the first half of the twenties. Then your mind is volatile. After that the mind stiffens, and you just go on keeping what you acquired during the twenties. The radical wave of the 70'ies took off around 1970 (not 68, as in France) in Scandinavia. I was 23 in 1970, therefore I am a 47 year-old brain-washed with revolutionary marxism for life. This has a bearing on PoMo. In parallell with the 80'ies Reagan/Thatcher wave in politics and economics, which was also manifest in Norway, we had a wave of PoMo ideology and philosophy in academia: Nothing and everything is true, enlightenment and rationalism is unfeasible, the concept of progress is naive, humans are inherently irrational, etc. I am no specialist in philosophy, but I found a lot of the 80-ies PoMo proponents reactionary and/or comical, sitting around in Cafes , dropping names and words (Derrida, Lyotard, deconstruction, etc. ) for everyone to hear. I suspect many of them didn't even understand what they themselves were saying/writing, but then again, that should be in the best PoMo tradition, or what?? They had only contempt for such trivia as working people, poverty, solidarity, political action. To me, as yours truly brain-washed dogmatic marxist, this was just another case of the emperor's new clothes again, not qualitatively different from earlier narcissistic intellectual exercises in history. IMO PoMo was extremely useful for the rulers as a fashionable academic pastime in those times. Today I call those poseurs for 86-ers, in analogy with the revolutionaries of the 70'ies which in Norway (misleadingly after the Paris riots) are called 68'ers. The 86'ers are more or less, but irrevocably, stamped with Thatherism in economics and PoMO'ism ideologically. They will have an increasing influence in some ways, even if the Thatcherism/PoMo wave has passed, since they are rising to gradually more important posts in media and academia. Sigh. still 68 after all those years, ;-) Trond Andresen (Trond.Andresen@itk.unit.no)