I forwarded Jim Devine's comment:
Of course, there are NO standard definitions that aren't subject to
doubt, dispute, and ambiguity. But I see Resnick & Wolff as
"postmodern" because they reject "essentialism," the idea that some
factors in the historical process may be more important than others.
to Rick Wolff for a comment. He writes:
I am used to this sort of stuff. The critiques of essentialism (in
philosophy as in various of the social sciences and also, especially
recently, in the natural sciences) are legion and go way back
historically.
Given that postmodernism is of much newer vintage and usually refers
to what
came after modernism, it is simply wrong historically and in relation to
vast literatures to infer a postmodernist position from an opposition to
essentialism. So first of all the sentence beginning with "But..." is a
reflection of little grasp of a long theoretical history.
Next, "essentialism" - like all other basic terms in philosophical
or theoretical discourse - has been variously interpreted and defined. A
serious discussion or debate would require someone to justify whichever
particular definition they were using within the context of (a)
recognizing
the existence and circulation of other definitions, and (b)
recognizing the
possibility that the "essentialism" one were about to criticize might be
defined in a way different from one's own. My guess - although
without more
text I cannot be sure of this - is that the critic and I don't share the
same definitions of either essentialism or postmodernism (since this
often
happens in these sorts of dismissals).
Postmodernism comes in widely different forms and with widely
different political and theoretical associations; in this it parallels
modernism. Thus, there are left postmodernists (including Marxists
who find
parts of postmodernism welcome and integratable with their Marxism)
and also
rightist postmodernists who hate Marxism (as they understand it).
Likewise
there are Marxists who hate postmodernism.
And then, folks like Resnick and me who find postmodernism a major
intellectual movement with many historical antecedents, hence a movement
Marxism ought to interrogate as to its place in contemporary
intellectual
and political history - an interrogation which should include asking
whether
postmodernism, qua reaction against modernism as a hallmark of modern
bourgeois thought, might have something in common with and something to
contribute to Marxism as another kind of reaction against modern
bourgeois
thought. Resnick and I undertook in our work to carry through such an
interrogation and drew therefrom a number of valuable insights that
we think
complement and deepen the kind of Marxism that is our prime interest.
