[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Several people on PEN-L were at the conference and will undoubtedly offer
>different perspectives, but the bottom line is that a bunch of orthodox
>marxists were upset that suggestions from speakers were not the same as the
>answers offered by orthodox marxists. Because we know that orthodox marxism
>has all the answers. oh well.
Now Blair, I knew you were a partisan, but I thought you were a fair guy.
First of all, the most prominent "orthodox Marxist" dissenters were not
quite the dinosaurs your use of that epithet implies - the most prominent
was a young Indian woman who's a grad student in English at Cornell, who,
among other things, argues that the picutre painted of "orthodox Marxists"
by pomos is highly inaccurate. She cites, for example, vigorous debates
within Indian Marxism about issues like nationality and gender of just the
sort that pomos flatter themselves into thinking they originated.
And second, there was a great deal of discontent about the makeup of the
plenary panels, which were *all* - to replicate this binary that we're all
playing with even though we're all too sophisticated to fall prey to such
devious dyads - partisan pomos. A panel inspired by Alan Sokal consisting
of Vandana Shiva and Sandra Harding isn't likely to offer any real exchange
of views, is it? Especially when you have Harding, who seems from what I've
read and heard of her to be a bit of a fool, flickering her fingers
ceilingward to evoke the "hole in the atmosphere, up there, you know." Or
Judith Butler, who is certainly no fool, denouncing "neoconservative
Marxists" in a mode of pure caricature. Or Roger Burbach slamming me,
without offering any evidence or argument in his support.
There was also a lot of discontent that Etienne Balibar, who was supposed
to be having an exchange on race with Cornel West, gassed on for about 90
minutes with no exchange in sight.
The one-sided makeup of the plenaries was proof, I think, that
postmodernism has hardened into the kind of, dare I say it, hegemonic
orthodoxy that it fancies itself a critique of. Fortunately, there were
enough dissenters in the audience and on the smaller panels to make the
conference an interesting one. Too bad the plenary organizers took any
criticism of their work as personal insults.
Doug
--
Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer
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