I would make some comments, relatively naive, about about pomo that I hope the more informed on the list could respond to. I think there is tremendous "translation" problems surrounding post-modernism arising from a variety of contextual origins. 1) "Pomo" arises out of a discourse in Continental Philosophy. This means to some extent its critiques of other forms of intellectual discourse aren't strictly relevant to and/or are over generalized from discourses that are embedded in an Anglo-American philosophical culture and whose critiques are probably formulated more clearly by other critical traditions. An example: Some people on the list diss Richard Rorty for being to moderate but I think his style of neo-pragmatist\post-modern eschewal of philosophy (or more perhaps precisely metaphysics) is exactly the sort of "secularism" that is necessary to avoid intellectual paralysis. It is this sort of scepticism which is a positivie aspect of post-modernism. In America, we don't have to be on guard against the "will to power" among Hegelians or phenomenologists, rather the chief danger posed by intellectuals here is by those who claim the authority of science to push their ideologies. Because post-modernism (which also includes post-structuralism, mainly for historical reasons) is originally a philosophic movement, there is a particular danger when adopted by "cultural critics". Philosophy can be thought of as have two distinct modes: negative and positive, ie, ideas used to critique other ideas and ideas that claim to contain positive knowledge about the world. Historically, a large part of the positive domain has consists of metaphysics but to some extent arguably includes parts of psychology, language and social theory. Unfortunately, positive philosophy has largely been a failure and the few examples where useful conceptions of the world have come out of philosophy, they have quickly been taken over by scientific disciplines. Continental philosophy, where the most recent unassailable assertion is probably "cogito ergo sum", has historically invested alot of effort into understanding the world through reason alone, ie positive philosophy, also known as rationalism. In my estimation, the fact that post-modernism starts out in continental philosophy, even if as a critique, is, not meaning to pun, a very bad sign. When post-modernism becomes a basis for theory used in a social science context, the assertions that post-modernism contains insight into how culture and power and the mind work have to be taken with more than a grain of salt. In part this scepticism is deserved because pomo theory takes as a given (or sometimes as an object of critique) bodies of theory such as Marxism (of course), Freudanism, structuralism, phenomology and semiotics. Each of these which wrestle their own theorectical and methodological problems. -Paul Meyer
