On the American TOP, someone posted that all aesthetics is ideology in disguise. A silly thing to say, but with a grain of truth. Even if it's a grain of salty truth, and a really small one. One of the dangers of reading Eagleton too briskly, I think.

OH MY; thank you t_i_n; I was at home yesterday, and I come in today to discover a sparkly new thread set up here doing JUST what I want it to do.  Well then.

Firstly, responding to something from the M.P. thread which might as well go here:


Yes, but as you might have noticed such observations (which are, I assume, illustrable by many example)have, in the past proved to be part of a rather profoundly unproductive back-and-forth.  Something about specifics might be far more productive, and, I think, much more likely to end in an understanding than what's currently going on.

Now.  Eagleton.  Let me see if I can find it (it seems to be a lot shorter than I had recalled):

I agree that the Eagleton article has, as t_i_n said, some rather epically unsubstantiated generalizations (last paragraph of the first page, for instance, seems almost meaningless to me except insofar as it is rhetorical).  Now on page four...the deductions it make are not absurd by any means, but it is not something I think could be in "no doubt" predicted by any amount of evidence!  Oh wait, page five:

 "Is anything to be gained by this tiresome rhetorical ploy?"

NOT FROM ME!

I curse aloud in your general direction Mr Eagleton.  (My issues with his "predictive" register still stand in spite of this 'admission').

"Its raising of issues of gender and ethnicity have no doubt permanently breached the ideological enclosure of the white male Western left" I believe you'll find the ideological enclosures were first breached by, not postmodernists, but by women(believe it or not!), and people of various ethnicities   Generally, I think his claims for the successes of this movement are quite gigantic, and I'm not seeing much of the important particulars in it.

"But bourgeois Enlightenment is like social class: in order to get rid of it, you must first work your way through it."
Any idea on what this means?  And how one justifies such a claim?

OH I have been listening to some lectures on and by Derrida got off the net, and downloaded a documentary on him and watched it last night.  I don't think he's a man without any substance whatsoever anymore.  And have made it a task to track down and read Plotnitsky's explanation (in the collection "Lacan in America") of Lacan's infamouns comment about i ( "Thus the erectile organ comes to symbolize the place of enjoyment, not in itself, or even in the form of an image, but as a part lacking in the desired image ... That is why it is equivalent to the square root of minus one of the signification produced above, of the enjoyment that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of the lack of signifier -1."). 

I've read another paper by Plotnitsky, and listened to a recording of some seminar he gave about some aspects of mathematics and physics insofar as theorists in/of the arts and humanities might use them, and his language was certainly evocative, if I find it difficult to assess it's value, but can appreciate its aesthetic appeal (in much the same way I can enjoy a story by Borges or a painting by Fomenko).

Oh this is, to my knowledge, intended as a general "postmodernism" thread I think.  Post what you will postmodern.

Well, I certainly recognize quite a bit of what he's talking about, including a form of romantic non-conformism (I wouldn't call it 'ultra-leftism' as he does, though) as in the following:

Eagleton:
The problem with that sort of postmodernist attitude is that paradoxically it is otherwise quite value free, and assumes anything that somehow lies outside of the status quo of the current system must be a positive thing. But that would include religious cults, misogynistic gang rap, aristocracies whose power has declined, the far right, and so on.

Eagleton certainly knows that, and makes that point in his Literary Theory: An Introduction, seeing the growth of such a movement (without calling it postmodernist at that earlier time) as in large measure a response to the growth of feminist, anti-racist, and other movements when combined with post-1968 disillusionment.

That isn't put very clearly, but he's stating a reasonably orthodox Marxist position, that progress can only be achieved by a recognition of the achievements of bourgeois revolution, the Enlightenment, and so on, and through a critical engagement with what they have bequeathed in social terms, rather than simply through disengaged utopian or archaic visions. To a Marxist (like Eagleton), socialism ultimately is a product of capitalism, and its own unsustainability because of its internal contradictions; you can't have the former until one has been through the latter, with all it entails concerning industrialisation (which is what creates the proletariat, who to a Marxist are the revolutionary agent) and so on.

Certainly - could you give some links to the lectures you found?

Derrida's famous essay on apartheid, 'Racism's Last Word', can be viewed here if you have access to that part of Jstor (alas I don't from this computer; it might be in one of the Derrida readers I have, in case quotes are wanted, otherwise if someone can access that, could they send it to me?).

The first two sentences of the above passage are more interesting (in a maybe rather facile way) that I thought (though the first one I think doesn't make grammatical/logical sense).  Does one characterize an oppressive system as one that has opposition or one that hasn't?  It's not clear to me that the only genuine criticism of a political system could come from outside of it either.  Maybe this is simply a historical fact? (for instance, it was ultimately, I think, true (so long as one interprets "outside of the system" as "outside of the power-structures of the system" as opposed to "outside of the influences of the system") of women's suffrage, and of these movements for racial-equality.  It's not, however, true of say the end of slave labour from what I know).


While these things might be socially undesirable and personally offensive, they are still, I think, legitimate subjects of interest in and of themselves as opposed to as an end to their eradication.  This is what, to a broad extent, the term postmodernism means to me.


Okay.  But then it's not clear how he manages to term such movements postmodernist unless one characterizes postmodernism in terms of this "criticism from the outside".  But, as claims go, it's in need of substantiation, right?


So this is speaking of socialism as being a direct development of capitalism.  And that makes a little sense, from what little I know.

What I can't go along with is the facile use of the word system itself. If I am by definition part of a democratic political system, does that mean I am unable to mount an opposition to it? Or can I only mount an opposition insofar as the system is imperfect, i.e., insofar as my own political beliefs are not perfectly represented proportionally? I think it all falls apart when we stare at the word system long enough and realize it comes to mean more than one thing in the course of the argument. But that's just speculation. Tell me I'm on to something or...

You want the viewpoint of a cynic? Although there was considerable and eloquent moral opposition to slave labor in the United States, I think the final push toward abolition came from the purely economic realization that keeping slaves was no longer of sufficient economic advantage to offset the cost and risk of maintaining slave labor conditions, i.e., subjugation. Does that seem depressing? It does rather. I could be wrong, but I have done at least a little reading on the subject, and don't think I'm the first to reach this conclusion, tho it's tentative on my part...