Autopilot:
So if there are multiple readings of a text that's bad? And how is having multiple readings of a text not an ancient problem that continues into the contemporary era? What does using the word pomo in a sweeping, pejorative manner add to anything with regard to the problems of language-world dynamics.
I think that pomo in itself is harmless, especially in the arts. The big problem is the postmodernist challenge to Marxism. This takes two forms. One, presenting itself as an alternative like Lyotard did. The other is postmodernist "fixes" to Marxism, like the kind found in Laclau and Mouffe.
What specifically is pomo about Derrida? Surely he's not the first difficult -to- understand writer in the history of humankind.
He is poststructuralist, not postmodernist. In fact, Christopher Norris, while being pro-Derrida, wrote a book titled "The Problem with Postmodernism".
How a term first used in an article on architecture came to be a bogeyman in academic politics and the wider culture after the death of god and all his semantic substitutes escapes me. It looks/reads more and more as just not much more than an esoteric version of machismo one-upmanship about having the final word on various issues.
I used to be much more upset about it 15 years ago or so, but it seems to have disappeared as a cultural/theoretical trend. -- www.marxmail.org
