>BTW, I'm not into preaching. Part of what _leftists_ should do is >to _respect_ the people we are trying to reach. (If Jesse Jackson >were here, he'd say that "preaching prevents reaching." Or is that >too puerile?) This need for _respect_ for people is something that >precedes postmodernism by several years. It is right at the center >of the "socialism from below" perspective, which says (to >paraphrase an unfashionable old German guy) "only the workers can >liberate the workers," an insight that applies for women, racial >minorities, etc. Other groups such as intellectuals) can _help_, >but if we want to avoid having those other groups become new >bosses, it has to be a process of collective and democratic >self-liberation by the oppressed. I'm going to de-lurk again for a moment, because this is a very interesting comment, and I couldn't agree more. So what about those intellectuals? One of the things Bill Mitchell did was to compare the politics of jargon in "neoclassicana" to post-modernism (whatever that is, I'm not so sure that ultimately there's a "there there," except as Tom Walker said, with those obsessed with their own credentials). This is an interesting comparison for three reasons: 1) It strikes me as very valid in that both yield elites and experts, but also that 2) Critics of postmodernism like Sokal (but ironically either on the right or the left) seem to get immediate access to the media in ways in which, say, critics of Gary Becker do not (no matter how absurd the neoliberal pontifications), raising the question of the status of anti-intellectualism in the United States, and 3) "postmodernism" and neo-classical economics have different relationships to political power. Postmodernists (at least most often) _do_ think of themselves as oppositional to the society at large. To make a "postmodern" kind of reading of postmodernism, it could be that the fact they conceive of their political opposition the way they do is really just an effect of political power. But for me, the question then becomes what is the relationship of academia to the public sphere (a question that Ross Perot's folksy chart bearing authoritarian populism should be hitting home to anyone interested in political economy), and of course of theory to practice? What should it be? But if this question was really easy to answer, we'd all be so effective that we'd be talking about something else in a socialist society. Asking for activism is important, but you don't have to be a postmodernist to figure out that the way people talk about action itself already has a lot to say about their politics. What if the ability to communicate in different "registers" - as they say in linguistics - is more important than not speaking academese? (So yeah, a good summation of a lot more of Derrida and Negri would be really helpful, but I'd prefer it in the form of a comic book that I could peruse for a little longer - surely more than 15 minutes. Derrida could make it. :) ) But a careful reading of Derrida would probably help the left to avoid many of sectarianisms to which it succumbs regularly almost as a matter of habit. (Just getting 15 different "authentic" Marxist rags waved in your face at someplace like a socialist scholars conference can make you question the political expediency of essentialism.) _But_ in the end, I'm not exactly a Derridean. I also think that Foucault has many insights into power that are very relevant to new shop floor changes, among other places. In the end, I think that Foucault's analysis of power leaves out a whole hell of a lot, and may even make any kind of legitimacy whatsoever impossible. The signal to noise ratio _varies_ greatly across "postmodernism", but Foucault and Derrida don't come from nowhere historically, they don't write about nothing, and they could help others who may not even stay on the post-structuralist terrain to expand their analyses. Verne [EMAIL PROTECTED]
