Date: Thu, 5 May 1994 18:29:01 -0700
Sender: pen-l@ecst.csuchico.edu
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From: "Anthony D'Costa" <dcosta@u.washington.edu>
Subject: Re: PoMo in the 90'ies (Long!)
 
This discussion has been quite enlightening.  I have been a part of a
year-long colloquium at the University of Washington that is titled
"Reassessing the Project of Modernity."  Speakers from a variety of
schools, mainly political scientists, and lately
anthropologists, attempted to provide a basis for this discourse.  I am
torn between different strands of the pomo position, just like many card
carrying members of pen-l.
 
If we take pomo as a tool for deconstruction (which most marxists employ
for analyzing the bourgeois economy or entrpreneurial as per Paul) then
certainly it is a useful tool.  As someone recently mentioned (pardon my
hastiness in using the "d" button) that pomo is extremely important for
the so-called Third World, feminist movements, etc.  The voluminous
literature on subaltern studies (especially from India) is an indication
that the "oppressed" need a voice that can mount an attack on the
structures of status quo.  While pomo at the academic level is often
abstract, jargon-laden, and difficult, at a more tangible level, praxis if
you will, it has its place.  Pomo essentially is against any totalizing
ideology.
 
But this is where (my) problems begin.  Pomo is against modernity because
the latter conveyed a totalizing ideology (industrialization, the state,
violence against fellow beings, nature)--in short it was a "secular theory
of salvation" to use one Indian scholar's perspective on "modernity."
Modernization, like Marx's view on British India, promised redemption from
hunger, malnutrition, and oppression... We all know how that turned out
to be.  Yet, according to Bruce Cumings this totalizing ideology of
modernity has been replaced by another totalizing ideology, namely, that
of the market.  So as some have been referring to bankers, etc. must be
referring to it.
 
There are two issues here: one we can begin to describe new institutions,
processes, etc. on the basis of pomo (which are different from mod), the
other we can say pomo (however described) is better (for whatever reason)
than mod.  The problem, IMHO, is that many on pen-l have correctly
identified the lack of any "reconstructive" politics in pomo.  But these
comrades assume, for lack of a better term, that modernity is preferable,
which incidentally includes all the elements enshrined in "the secular
theory of salvation."  What that means is that political praxis should
encourage "deconstruction" but only to the extent that reconstruction
is possible.  But the idea of reconstruction as used by some is embedded in
the idea of egalitarianism, relativism if you will.  And increasingly
pomo begins to look like mod (and vice versa) because of this singular
vision of
society, although in a more nuanced way.  Since pomo takes on, not
always, a form of crass relativism, many on the left are critical of it.
But what about oppressed groups who deconstruct a world that is not
theirs?  Pomo in a praxis sense certainly helps.  On the other hand,
without a hierarchy of goals, practicing pomo could very well be
destructive.  The point is that the left also roots its
liberating ideas on the principles of egalitarianism (a flattening of
hierarchies that binds a society together) and hence
shares the basic  foundation of pomo.  This I believe is an erroneous social
organizing principle.  Without hierarchies, without priorities, without
"imagined communities" societies simply become dysfunctional.
 
Anthony D'Costa