Archive for the 'If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention' Category

What does one equalize power relationships with, anyway? A bulldozer?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on March 11, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention and Philosophy
. 5 Comments

You know you’re a token when…you leave school and the Internet for a few days and discover that your friends have taken the opportunity to straw-man you in absentia.

Actually, I’m thrilled that thanks to the (post)modern age I can leave the room without leaving the conversation. But I do feel that, as the only self-identified representative of the “pomo Left” I know, I should provide a correction to Helen on McCarthy on Russello on Kirk:

I feel like power is one of the biggest differences between the pomo Left and the pomo Right: they think power relationships have to be neutralized, we think they only have to be sanctified (i.e. love is a power relationship, but that’s fine because introducing love into a power relationship makes it okay, etc.)

Only an idiot would earnestly believe that “power relationships have to be neutralized,” because only an idiot could believe that they can be neutralized. There are so many types of power bound up in any given relationship, and they don’t always flow the same way or to the same degree. The postmodern Left, more so than the postmodern Right, recognizes this, and we encourage (and, when possible, pursue) the expression of less-obvious forms of power by those who lack power by standard metrics. To call an action “purely symbolic” isn’t to make a statement about its effectiveness — its power — but to describe the form that power could take.

This is the difference between “transgressive” and “subversive”: do you look at the rulebender as a brilliant and visible outlier expressing herself without troublesome ramifications, ultimately reinforcing the norm/ative outside which she stands? Or do you recognize that she herself is exercising power, of a type qualitatively different that which seeks to bind her — moving sideways so as to avoid getting pushed down?

I’m perfectly willing to admit the latter attitude may not encompass anyone who considers himself both a postmodernist and a liberal/leftist. (I don’t think a postmodernist could use the word “progressive” with a straight face, but what do I know?) My strain of pomo leftism comes not from Foucault so much as Michel de Certeau, who doesn’t get his due inside academia, let alone outside it.

Jean Valjean and the Warm Fuzzies. (Not a music post.)

Published
by
Dara Lind
on March 7, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Politics and Yale
. 5 Comments

I’m sure Nicola or Kate will wax more eloquent regarding last night’s debate about welfare, but thanks to the fact that they are done with midterms and I am not, I’m waking up earlier, and I have questions that went unresolved.

  1. Is it really possible to believe that coercion is exclusively synonymous with violence — that is, that no one is ever coerced to action by circumstances (economic, social/cultural, etc.)? It seems obvious to me that the scope of options a man has is circumscribed by circumstance — sometimes so tightly that only one option remains. The normative question aside, is it even coherent to say that Jean Valjean could and should have chosen to let his sister’s child starve?
  2. It’s widely agreed upon that intermediate institutions are usually more efficient (and sometimes even more effective) than the state, and that they allow people to connect to others in a more direct way than through taxation. But their effect on civil society as a whole seems to be a bit more ambiguous, because the people to whom one feels connected through a non-state institution are only a subset of the community in which one lives. Is there hope for communitas in postmodernity? And if so, what mediates it if not the polity (and therefore, by extension, the state)? (I suspect localism might be the answer, but cities have governments too.)

While fishing for links for this post I discovered an impressive number of charitable organizations called “Communitas,” or some variation thereof. I approve of the branding but hasten to point out that the fact that so many different organizations have such a name moots any persuasive value the name would have. And the link I eventually found, while AWESOME (Wikipedia does virtual sociology, goes meta), doesn’t quite cover it either — unless we’re trying for communitas through vanguardism.

Quick Hits

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on March 5, 2008
in Extemporanea, If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Inexplicably Burke, Politics and Yale
. 1 Comment

I currently reside at the bottom of a deep pit of paper writing and internship applying, emerging only briefly to bring you a collection of links that make me wave my arms in the air for various reasons.

The Traditionalist Counterculture at First Principles:

A jeremiad against the materialism and consumerism of the modern Right, Dreher’s book is a manifesto for—to quote its original subtitle—“Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives.”

The Pomo Mind at Reason:

In his final chapter, Russello deals most explicitly with the relationship of conservatism to postmodernism, particularly to Lyotard’s “crisis of narratives”—the splintering of metanarratives into discrete, incommensurable stories. It is here that Russello insists that Kirkian conservatism and postmodernism do not simply have the same enemies but have common interests as well. Cultural decentralization and localism are two of the overlapping concerns Russello finds, and he notes parallel themes in several traditionalist and postmodern thinkers. In 1926 Bernard Iddings Bell, an Episcopal clergyman and friend of Kirk’s, was “among the first ever to use the term postmodernism as a description of an age emerging from the collapse of Enlightenment rationality,” Russello notes. Meanwhile, the postmodern theorist Hans Georg Gadamer came to a rather Kirkian understanding of, and respect for, tradition, arguing that it could not be understood by an objective, outside observer. “To stand within a tradition,” Gadamer wrote, “does not limit the freedom of knowledge but makes it possible.”

Peter Johnston in the YDN:

The problem is that, in a society increasingly conceptualized as one of rights-bearing individuals — one moving away from common law and toward the philosophical framework of the Declaration of Independence — marriage is understood as little more than a visible contract, a public declaration of mutual love. Proponents of gay marriage who lament that the absence of gay marriage “prevents gay couples from a public expression of their love for each other” thereby confirm the fears of their opponents, for the foundational character of marriage is entirely absent.

Under common law, in addition to having a foundation, marriage is a foundation. It is the liminal ritual by which a new social unit, the family, comes into existence. Those who oppose gay marriage are not motivated by the desire to prevent the public expression of mutual love. They simply maintain that marriage cannot be divorced from the family. This is not to say that family arising out of gay marriage is impossible. But gay family is less familiar, less obvious. So the opponents of gay marriage will only change their mind if gay marriage is understood as the foundation of a family.

Jake McGuire on the erosion of the purpose of the university:

Dean Salovey finished the panel response by referencing the Woodward Report, the defining document about how Yale treats conflicts between speech and tolerance at an institutional level. He put the most emphasis on how the Woodward Report says that when mutual respect and friendship have to be weighed against freedom of speech, mutual respect and friendship ought to be sacrificed. He only went as far as calling it “provocative” and “interesting,” but made an explicit point of stating that he was not defending the Woodward Report’s argument. (Indeed, it was quite telling that he called it an “argument” at all.)

Conclusions:

  1. I need to finish my work so I have enough free time to read.
  2. Peter Johnston is right, but seems to have missed things like this.
  3. Dean Salovey is responsible for further ebbing of my dwindling faith in humanity.

Enter, sputtering in disbelief.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on February 27, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Navel Gazing and Philosophy
. 2 Comments

This probably isn’t the best way to introduce myself (EDIT: okay, maybe it is) but I differ with 2/3 of Nicola’s characterization of modernism, postmodernism and “post-postmodernism”:

1. Postmodernism isn’t the denial of meaning; it’s the denial of Meaning. Any postmodernist (and most reflexive conservatives, whether they consider themselves postmodern or not) will admit that the arbitrariness of meaning doesn’t make it any less important to the individuals who have created or inherited that meaning for themselves.

2. “Post-postmodernism” is only a good term insofar as it’s reminiscent of “postapocalyptic” — and even that’s more an asset of style (”postapocalyptic” is an AWESOME word) than of sense. Because there’s no inherent contradiction between meaning (properly understood as arbitrary but still valued), the recreation of meaning isn’t something we have to move beyond postmodernism to accomplish — it’s just another take on the postmodern agenda. This is why I prefer the term “creative postmodernism” to “post-postmodernism.”

I’d also add that conservatism isn’t the only type of creative postmodernism, though it’s unusually well-developed. While the postmodern liberals who think that in pointing out the arbitrariness of oppression they are promoting autonomy have it all wrong, in my opinion, some non-conservative ideologies — such as feminist theory, perhaps — could be construed as creatively postmodern without being conservative by most standards.

Man will become better when you show him what he is like.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on February 25, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Inexplicably Burke, Navel Gazing and Philosophy
. 6 Comments
  1. “Most allegedly postmodern thought emphasizes the arbitrary character of all human authority, the freedom of each human being from all standards but his own will or creativity, and the death not only of God but of nature. These allegedly postmodern characteristics are really hypermodern; they aim to ‘deconstruct’ as incoherent and so incredible any residual modern faith in reason or nature. They shout that everything modern — in fact, everything human — is nothing but a construction.” (Peter Lawler, Conservative Postmodernism, Postmodern Conservatism.)
  2. “Traditionalism is unreflective and an immediate experience of a way of life. It has no need for intellectual formulation. It just is. Conseratism is…a reflection of the fact that the meaning of tradition is no longer self-evident. Conservatism is the political recreation of the meaning of tradition and in doing so puts tradition to work in the struggle of political ideas. …’if tradition is integral to conservative politics, it is because it represents, not history as such, but history made present and perceivable.’ It is an interpretation, a reconstruction, a ‘practical’ past…” (Aughey, Jones, and Riches, The Conservative Political Tradition in Britain and the United States.)
  3. “…the deliberate following of prescription which Burke advocated was something different, because it was the result of choice, from the uncalculated loyalty of the past. Those who have eaten from the fruit of knowledge cannot forget.” (Graham Wallas, quoted in The Conservative Mind.)
  4. “All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover the defects of our own, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded…” (Burke, Reflections.)

Modernism is the search for meaning; postmodernism is the denial of meaning; post-postmodernism is the creation of meaning.

Conclusion: Conservatism is post-postmodern.

Conclusion 2: Conservatism is post-postmodernism.