[PEN-L:7066] Derrida v. Gingrich (was: anti-intellectualism against and in the

[R. Anders Schneiderman]

In the 80s, when I went to college, I read tons and tons of pomo and got my
degree in "Political Discourse." Since I'd worked in the developmental
disability rights movement,  I was a prime candidate for using pomo, since
much of our work revolved around the cracks and contradictions in the
construction of social reality (eg., what is "intelligence"?  When is
something a "disability"?).  By the end of college, I'd decided that once
you'd agreed that reality is just a social construction, pomo didn't have
much more to offer in analyzing power and taking on the Bad Guys.  It
seemed also to me that ultimately pomo used analyzing discourse as an
excuse for not doing very much.

But after spending the past three years talking to low-level grassroots
Rightwing activists, I think there's a much better, more fundamental
criticism of pomo.

In the 1980s, the pomos argued that discourse and power were inextricably
intertwined and that the key to winning was to fight over discourse,
preferably in fights whose discourse was engineered by academics.  After 16
years, the end result has been a huge number of academic treatices that
almost no one can read, more hip advertising, MTV (?), and, perhaps, a
generation of college educated lefties who are incredibly cynical and who
sometimes aren't sure there are answers to anything (although you could
certainly argue it's unfair to blame that on pomo).

In the 1980s, there was another group of professors, the most important
being Gingrich, who also preached that discourse was tied to power and that
winning the battle over discourse was critical, preferably in fights whose
discourse was engineered by academics (eg., conservative opportunity
society vs liberal welfare state).  After 16 years, the end result was a
number of incredibly powerful nation-wide grassroots organizations;
domination of one of the two major political parties; thousands of extreme,
ideologically motivated, activists in political positions of power from the
school board to the Senate; and amazing success in changing the political
discourse in the U.S. (there are limits to how far changing discourse will
convince people that toxic water is good for them or that Social Security
is "evil government", but even so, Newt's done remarkably well).

Of course, you could argue that it's unfair to compare the discursive
ideologues of the left and right, because there was one very big difference
between Derrida and Gingrich:  money.  In response, I'd say:

1) There are plenty of groups on the far right that have a hell of a lot of
money based on serious grassroots organizing--1 million members each paying
$10-20/yr adds up.  If pomo had helped push us away from dependency on
foundations and towards serious grassroots organizing, money wouldn't have
been a problem.

2)  There's a hell of a lot of money on our side that we don't use well. Z
magazine published a great article on money and progressive groups a few
years back which pointed that out.  There's also a shitload of money in
unions, much of which is wasted (that's why Sweeney is pushing for spending
30% of union dues on organizing).  For ex, my union, the UAW, has an insane
amt of money tied up in buildings they've bought over the years.  If they
sold most of those buildings and rented space instead, someone figured out
they could have $50-100 million dollars a YEAR to spend, just off the
interest on the money they'd saved. Again, if pomo had been remotely
useful, pomos would've gone after this money, and they would have gotten
some of it.

3) Since when did _any_ of the pomos say we needed lots of money to win?  I
sure don't remember hearing that in any course I took or any book I read.
In fact, talking seriously about money was often considered a sign of being
insufficiently pomo--you were just too wrapped up in the old, stale
paradigms (unless, of course, the subject was profs' salaries).


In short, the problem with the pomos isn't that they were wrong about the
connections between discourse and power.  They were just incompetent.

R. Anders Schneiderman, PhD.
Progressive Communications