Andrew Sullivan had a good, if imperfectly phrased, take on Stanley Fish’s idiotic “Bush nostalgia” piece a few days ago:
But for Fish, there is no actual reality, remember, just post-modern illusions. Which is why the pomo-left and the shameless-right were made for each other.
I’m not sure “pomo-left” is the right expression here, since Fish isn’t on the left. But there are deep similarities between a certain kind of post-modern wankery and today’s post-realist rightgeist. This Lee Siegel piece (written only a few months before the 2008 election) is the perfect example:
All the postmodern qualities are present and thriving. There is historical pastiche, as Sen. Obama gives us a shmear of JFK, a sprinkle of LBJ, a smidgen of FDR and dollops of MLK, and as Sen. McCain offers up a little Reagan here, some Nixon there and a bit of Truman everywhere. There is a kind of speeding relativity, as the candidates change long-held positions in a second, and even assimilate each other’s positions. And there are fungible selves, as the two nominees respond almost hysterically to an illusion of majority opinions: a few right-wingers yell and McCain chooses a right-wing running mate to appease them (as if more than a relative handful of evangelicals were going to either vote for Obama or stay home and risk letting Obama win); a few Hillaryites scream and Obama decides not to choose a female running mate so as not to inflame them (as if more than a relative handful of disaffected Hillary supporters were either going to vote for McCain or stay home and risk letting McCain win).
[…..]To put it another way, the jangling twists and turns, contrasts, incongruities and outright contradictions in the team of McCain and Palin make them the perfect duo for our mega-distracted culture. (The P.O.W. factor meets the WOW factor.) Obama and Biden are like the warp and the woof of a traditional stereo system — each one completes the other. Watching and listening to the Arizona senator and the Alaskan governor, side by side, or one after the other, is like listening to an iPod, instant messaging, watching TV and talking on your cellphone all at once.
Why look at things like polling data and fundraising numbers when you can wank about iPods and fungible selves?
I know it’s a cliche to make fun of Lee Siegel, but his career — in particular the fact that he still has one — says a lot about the state of our media.
Update. Apparently, Brendan Nyhan writes about conservative postmodernism fairly regularly (via MY).
Rick Massimo
He was SO obviously SO proud of that. Probably took him half a day.
DougJ
@Rick Massimo:
He should know it’s only worth doing that with titles, not with something buried in the 6th paragraph.
Alex
I went to college with Frank Luntz, and encountered him in a history of science course. At the time, history of science was one of the cutting edges of academic postmodernism, and arguments about the social construction of scientific knowledge, the critical role of language and metaphor as shapers of perception and reality, etc. were Hot Hot Hot.
Of course, the more sophisticated versions of these arguments were very serious and nuanced: they encouraged scholars to look very closely at what scientists really did in the lab, how standards evolved, how aesthetics influenced decision-making, etc.. There was a brief period of “this picture of the brain looks like Queen Victoria, this other picture of the brain looks like Kaiser Wilhelm, so English biologists believed the first and German biologists believed the second,” but by the early 80s (when Luntz and I were in college) it had pretty much passed. However, for undergraduates who were impressionable or cynical, this all collapsed into “there’s no such thing as truth, just power.”
Michael Lewis was horrified to discover college students treating “Liar’s Poker” as career advice rather than caution; likewise, Frank Luntz’s career can be seen as the most successful exercise in the sociology of knowledge EVER. He’s done more than Thomas Kuhn, Feyerabend, Derrida, and Baudrillard put together to convince millions that there’s no such thing as objective truth, that science is just a sham, and that power is truth. I’ve always wondered what our teachers would have made of this.
FlipYrWhig
His book about free speech was leftish, at least for the time–maybe more communitarian than left. But I think he’s on the continuum.
PeakVT
Obama and Biden are like the warp and the woof of a traditional stereo system
He’s comparing Obama and Biden to… grille cloth?
/facepalm
FlipYrWhig
@PeakVT: I can’t tell if he thinks he’s being clever by making an unspoken woof-woofer pun, or if he just blew it.
AhabTRuler
Yeah, I hadz a little LOLWUT?! at that particular train wreck of a metaphor. I don’t think he said what he meant to said.
The Moar You Know
Use of the word “fungible” disqualifies you from being considered a sentient being.
Punchy
Can I get this in english?
Rick Taylor
What does the word “pomo” mean?
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@Rick Taylor:
Postmodern.
aimai
FlipYRWhig: but by definition isn’t everyone, even hitler, “on the continuum? ” from left to right? I don’t really think of Fish as anything but a former middle aged terrible, largely apolitical insofar as politics would require caring about something larger than the self.
aimai
booferama
Only one word matters with Lee Siegel: sprezzatura.
Citizen_X
the warp and the woof of a traditional stereo system
You know, I’d give Siegel a point about Obama and Biden complimenting each other, while McCain-Palin together was modern Republican cacophony. But he’s mangling metaphors, thinking about…woofers? He might have well have said, “Obama and Biden are like the warp and the woof of an exhaust system.” It’s plain lazy writing.
And yeah, I’m in favor of corporal punishment for anyone who uses “fungible” in a non-economic sense.
Paul L.
Good thing Sully is taking the GOP to task over Massa/Foley 2.
Andrew Sullivan doesn’t know Massa is a Democrat?
Progressives/Democrats are showing how civil they are by downplaying the whole Massa scandal.
beltane
@Rick Taylor: Oh, I thought it had something to do with apples. Pomme fruit, pomo, whatever.
QDC
Does that make Sarah Palin the Sokal Hoax of the post-realist right?
Tom Hilton
Ah, Lee Siegel–the Mary Rosch of post-modernism.
cleek
i don’t think the entire right is shameless, as in not caring that they’re lying. though those at the top certainly are. instead, it looks to me like the right has decided that, because the underlying truth of its hallowed tenets (liberals are bad, liberals have the US and want to soshulize it, free markets are ideal, “conservatives” are for small government, etc) are secure that all they need to do is find more and more ways of symbolically expressing those truths.
thus, they say provably untrue things like “death panels!” or “government takeover of medicine!” and merely shrug at people who point out the truth. they can do that because “death panel” is just a way of saying “liberals want the govt to take over health care”; it’s a superficial symbol of a deeper truth. and, to the faithful, you can no more disprove that deeper truth by pointing out that one of its symbols is bogus than you can disprove the existence of God by pointing out that the Bible is full of logical absurdities.
so, they’re free to say whatever they want because they’re not trying to convince anyone of the truth of the symbols. they’re using the symbols as a way to communicate what the symbols are supposed to represent. i don’t see that as “shameless” because we’re not necessarily supposed to believe the symbols; we’re just supposed to see the symbols as examples of the underlying truth. they’re speaking to the country as if the country really is as conservative as they want it to be.
which is to say: conservatism is a religion. and “death panels” and “Saddam had WMD” are koans.
yes, we libs do some of this, too. everybody does. but i think the modern GOP has taken it to an extreme.
or, i could be totally wrong. i should go eat lunch.
Snowwy
You can take prisoners in World of Warcraft? Score!
What?
KG
ok, it’s been a while since I dealt with political philosophy, but if I am remembering right, “pomo-left” is really kind of redundant, just on a different spectrum. You have traditionalists (pre-modernists) on the right, modernists in the middle, and post-modernists on the left. I think that this left/right continuum formed because traditionalists tend to be social conservatives and post-modernists (especially in the early days) tended to be social liberals, if not nihilists (again, in the early days).
That said, I think a portion of the right today, particularly what Sullivan calls the shameless-right is inherently (either consciously or unconsciously) post-modern in its own way. In that regard, perhaps what Sullivan meant is that there is a distinction without a difference between the two sides.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Is there anything left to say about the state of our media other than: just shoot them all and let God sort them out ?
‘Cause I’ve had my fill.
dmsilev
@QDC: No, because Sokal knew that he was joking. I don’t think Palin has figured that out yet.
-dms
neill
Let’s ask if Lee Siegel is living in Stanley Fish’s basement. But of course there are a multitude of Lee Siegels and Stanley Fishes, and so many that I guess it is okay to go ahead and assume a “fungible” Siegel does reside in a “fungible” Fish’s asshole.
David in NY
Say what you will about Andrew Sullivan (and I’ve said or thought some stuff the Times would not print), this is the single best summary of the reign of Bush II that I have read:
FlipYrWhig
@aimai: I meant to say that Fish was somewhere on the left end of the continuum. But I’m drawing that assessment from the enveloping haze of my memory of his book There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech, And It’s A Good Thing, Too, which IIRC defended campus speech codes on the principle that to protect values like tolerance there had always been rules and definitions rather than laissez-faire rule-less-ness.
Sentient Puddle
@Rick Massimo: The sad thing is, for all the strain and effort he put into working that line into prose, it still says basically nothing.
MikeTheZ
Its our media like George W. Bush was my president and Eric Cantor is my representative.
AhabTRuler
@David in NY: Yes, but the real problem is that I could have told Sullivan that before Bush was, and I use the term loosely, elected.
David in NY
@AhabTRuler: You know, I thought Bush II would be not good, but if Sullivan had written a prediction like that sentence, even after Bush v. Gore, I would have thought he was abusing hyperbole. I mean, bad at every turn, even when the badness requires rejection of your alleged principles (e.g., fiscal discipline), is really hard to imagine in advance.
To think his administration would outdo Nixon for abuse of the constitution, corruption, and dishonesty, to think he would outdo Reagan for fiscal irresponsibility — all at once! Amazing.
Quiddity
You dismiss Lee Siegal at your peril.
Zifnab
Wait, Obama picked Biden because of the PUMAs? That’s the saddest stab at false equivalence I’ve seen to date. Am I to understand that he choose an old white man from Delware to appease his female base of supporters? How on god’s green earth does that make any sense at all? Perhaps Seigel can explain whether Obama picked Hillary for Secretary of State to satisfy the ACLU or the NAACP.
Mark S.
I think I’ve read three columns by Stanley Fish, and they have been the three dumbest things I’ve ever read (here is one of them). I realize he was a hot new literary critic 70 or 80 years ago, but what editor would read this drivel now and decide to publish it?
slag
@Zifnab:
That was one PUMA argument back in the day. Hillary or no woman! For feminism! Funny then as it is now because no one with any sense bought into it. And you’d have to be an idiot to believe Obama bought into.
David
Obama and Biden are like the warp and the weft of a traditional weaving perhaps.
maus
And that’s the aggravating thing, the right has been RECREATING REALITY, using total thought-reform, media control, and domination over the school curriculum to do so. I mean, it’s always happened to some extent. But the “synergy” of control has been much more powerful now that the public has lost any pretense of objectivity and now that the general cable/print media have turned into lapdogs.
The study of “pomo” might be in “left”-leaning departments of universities, but the modern-day political applications have absolutely been conservative in nature.
FlipYrWhig
@David: Maybe “Obama and Biden are like the meow and the woof of a traditional pair of pets.”
mr. whipple
WTF is the ‘pomo-left’?
Svensker
@mr. whipple:
Post-Modern Left, altho I’m not sure what that is either when it’s at home. I was thinking it had to do with the “faggy-left” because of the Brit/pomme thing, but ‘parently not.
Curtis
Misread that as porno-left. Gives DFHs a new meaning.
cleek
@mr. whipple:
usually it’s a way of accusing the left of having abandoned the notion of ultimate truth or morality. good/evil, truth/lies: everything, to a po-mo lefty, is subjective. ex. if a terrorist is fighting what he thinks is evil, he can’t be evil himself. we have two opposing definitions of evil! “evil” must be subjective.
this kind of thinking is endlessly amusing to people who believe in absolute evil – which coincidentally, America is incapable of doing.
Redshirt
After reading this thread I feel as if I have had postmodernism forced upon me. I feel abstracted.
slag
@Redshirt:
Heh.
cervantes
A good occasion to check out the Postmodernism Generator:
Sartre uses the term ‘cultural libertarianism’ to denote a self-sufficient whole. Thus, if pretextual dedeconstructivism holds, we have to choose between subdialectic objectivism and semioticist libertarianism.
If one examines Batailleist `powerful communication’, one is faced with a choice: either accept cultural libertarianism or conclude that sexuality may be used to disempower the Other. Porter[1] suggests that the works of Madonna are modernistic. But several discourses concerning the role of the poet as participant may be found.
In the works of Eco, a predominant concept is the distinction between destruction and creation. The subject is interpolated into a subcultural narrative that includes consciousness as a totality. Thus, Foucault suggests the use of subdialectic objectivism to read society.
jeffreyw
Talk talk talk. Meh. Let’s have lunch.
licensed to kill time
@Redshirt:
Some people achieve postmodernism
Others have it thrust upon them
And then there are those who are born postmodern
(anybody remember Holly and the Italians?)
Sarcastro
What’s funny about the Siegel piece is that what he’s describing is not post-modernism, but his description – the piece itself – most certainly is. The dumb motherfucker doesn’t even realize that he’s fully internalized post-modern critical theory.
Comrade Kevin
Moe: It’s po-mo! [blank stares from all]
Post-modern! [more staring]
Yeah, all right — weird for the sake of weird.
Guys: Oooh!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Comrade Kevin:
It’s like Freud predicted. We all have DaDa and MoMA issues.
Busta
No bigger fraud in the American intellectual scene than Stanley Fish.
Equally big, maybe – but none bigger.
Michael
OT, but here’s another dumbshit diary by Ministry of Truth, designed to appeal to the barrel bodied battle bots of the 55-70 demographic. As usual, it is overloaded with the sort of ridiculous Helen Reddy “I am Woman Hear Me Roar” nonsense that was nothing but FAIL in the 70s, 80s and 90s,
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2010/3/12/845485/-Women-ROAR-BACK-against-Stupak-Pitts!-EPIC-WIN!-
And yes, once more you get that mewly, weak-assed “woman’s right to choose” verbiage which so long ago wrote off men from having any stake in the profoundly libertarian opinion that was Roe. Blackmun wrote the country a marvelous gift, and progressive activists and feminists just threw it the hell away by making it just about women.
Dumb asses. Somebody find me a progressive from the 70s so I can go and kick them in the teeth.
Redshirt
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Now that’s witty. Bravo!
DougJ
@Sarcastro:
What’s funny about the Siegel piece is that what he’s describing is not post-modernism, but his description – the piece itself – most certainly is. The dumb motherfucker doesn’t even realize that he’s fully internalized post-modern critical theory.
Yes, I agree.
Michael
cleek
American exceptionalism to the conservative is because we are us, and not related to our shared institutions. Thus you find that exceptionalism to the Southern or Midwest conservative frequently rooted in ethnic and religious exclusion of “the other”.
demimondian
@Michael: OK, then here are my teeth. I’m not a progressive — I’m a liberal — but I was there then.
_Roe_ is, was, and always has been about principally about women and their rights. Go read the fracking decision, if you doubt that.
Ed Drone
@Comrade Kevin:
Fixed for Glaswegians.
Ed
Gus
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Ha!
Ed Drone
@cervantes:
I couldn’t have said it better!
Ed
Svensker
@Ed Drone:
LOL
geg6
@David in NY:
Hmmm. Really? Because I was saying exactly this sort of thing in September, October, November, and December of 1999. Maybe not in so many words nor so specifically (because who knew that they’d go so far as the torture thing), but with the exception of one point there, I argued these very things with all my friends. Who pointed and laughed and referred me to a therapist for my obviously clinical paranoia. I remember telling one friend that, just wait, he’s gonna find a way to take revenge for his dad in Iraq and he screamed with laughter at such silliness.
geg6
@Redshirt:
WIN
Michael
@demimondian
Suck it.
It was actually about the right to be left alone, and was far broader than the idiot feminists of the 70s thought. Instead, they put it into a box and let it be carved at because they simply wrote the interests of men out of the doctrine of privacy that Blackmun was trying to expand.
Had feminists not decided to make it all about themselves (a difficult concept for them, to be sure – see any published work by that fucking retard Catherine MacKinnon for an example), the US population could have made far greater strides toward gay rights and marriage equality far earlier, and maybe even addressed the war on drugs before it got out of hand. Instead, feminist activists have so screwed the pooch that Roe itself is likely to go while conservative states debate criminalizing miscarriages.
Way to go, progressives! All win, as usual.
JGabriel
You know, I’m pretty sure that post-modernism wasn’t originally intended to be synonymous with self-deluding hypocrisy, though I guess it’s understandable why the GOP would prefer the more philosophical term for their self-justifying paranoia.
.
geg6
@Michael:
Hmmm. Well, Michael, until you get a uterus, Roe v. Wade will always be about nothing other than a woman’s right to choose.
And as one of those 70s era liberal women who fought for that right, please go fuck yourself.
geg6
@Michael:
You really are an idiot. Blackmun himself worked hard to make the ruling as narrow as possible, which is why the vast majority of the opinion is taken with spelling out the specific circumstances to which the ruling applies. You know nothing about that case, obviously, nor the law. And to take a tiny part of the majority opinion and somehow assert that women/feminists (let alone Catherine McKinnon) had anything to do with this ruling not being some sort of sweeping libertarian manifesto just proves, once more, that libertarians are literally the stupidest dupes on earth.
Mnemosyne
@Michael:
Because men in the 1970s were desperately eager to extend equal rights to women, which is why the Equal Rights Amendment passed by such a huge margin.
/eyeroll
Though I have to admit, it’s very pomo of you to completely rewrite history so you can manufacture a grievance about how chicks selfishly made Roe v Wade all about them.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Horray for Balloon Juice! Is there any other place like it?
Come for the snark and wit, stay for the knock-down, drag-out internecine brawls. It is like the neighborhood bar where everybody knows your name, and you’re more likely than not to get hit in the back of the head with a barstool and stagger out into the street several hours later missing several teeth and a spare organ (or two).
And then come back the next day for more of that.
JackieBinAZ
@cleek: No, these are exactly the kinds of connections I’ve been making in my comparative religions class. Also telling is how much these people love archetypes – look at the adoration they have for the cowboy, the daddy figure, the military hero, the Masters of the Universe and how they frame their enemies as the next Hitler or Stalin or Jimmy Carter. Everything they believe comes out of some bastardized American mythology of theocratic roots, taming of the west by people like them with hatchets and guns, our military incapable of defeat, a work ethic that scoffs at the notion of “paid vacation” and always, everything being all right when Daddy gets home. If religion is an effort to see the promises of your mythology fulfilled and affirmed, then their frame is entirely religious.
R-Jud
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
And pet pics and recipes. And Cole drunk-posting lots of 80s videos. But yeah, what you said.
Mark S.
Shorter Michael:
Svensker
@Mnemosyne:
Yeah, huh? What was that all about, Michael? Do you have issues with women? Excuse us for thinking the loosening of laws against abortion was about those of us who, like, you know, GOT abortions. Silly us.
Brick Oven Bill
There is no post-reality. The Greeks, Plato in particular, teach us that reality is a four step plan and it never ends:
First, there is certainty.
Second, mathematics give us the power of perception.
Third, as mathematics are thought, they are eternal, and in another realm of existence.
And fourth, as mathematics are thought, they can be known by everybody.
Let us take, for instance, Barack Obama.
Barry tells America that he will only raise the top tax bracket, and then by three point six percent. Enter the Greeks:
The top tax bracket paid $600 billion in the good times.
$600 billion times 0.036 equals $21.6 billion.
Now compare $21.6 billion with the budget deficit of $1.5 trillion.
$21.6 billion divided by $1.5 trillion equals 1.4% (one point four percent).
Thus we learn that the Democratic Party is the Party of the Religious Zealots, as religion is belief in the absence of perception. In contrast, Teabaggers are founded in mathematics. Rock. Solid.
Join us Rachel.
eemom
that has a nice ring to it.
The proposition that Roe v Wade was a “profoundly libertarian opinion” is literally one of the stupidest things I’ve ever heard said about a court opinion. Also too.
geg6
@eemom:
Yeah, seriously. Wish kay was in this thread to see this. She could probably use a laugh. Because that sort of “legal analysis” is certainly laughable.
va
Stanley Fish isn’t a product of postmodernism (he’s too old), or the left (he drove a Mercedes in grad school). Academics agree to use the word postmodernism with the understanding that it has different definitions in different disciplines, but that everyone will nod soberly along as if they know what’s going on.
The laity uses postmodern, I guess, to mean “it’s all a dream” etc., but that’s not unique to this or any zeitgeist.
Anyway, Andrew Sullivan is hardly one to claim the mantle of the less deceived. I suspect he and Fish would get along pretty well.
Ked
Not bad, BOB, I give that about an 8.5
You know, when I saw that post by Sully this morning my first random thought was that MoDo needs to do more pomo.
…but what’s really news here is Sullivan acknowledging the Wingularity.
Joel
“Pomo lefty” is the incorrect term. The term you’re looking for is dushbag.
Brick Oven Bill
Does FOX News read Balloon Juice?
So there I was, having traveled to the town TV to watch the Glenn Beck Show yesterday, and Cavuto was closing out his show. And then I saw it. Cavuto predicted a ‘Jack Nicholson Moment’ for this Administration. This was complete with images from The Shining, including the one with the axe and the bathroom door.
Balloon Juice, of course, has been tracking Nicholas Cage Moments (NCMs), and has been awaiting the Jack Nicholson Moment (JNM) for over a year now (this will most likely come when they start taking pictures of him smoking). Also consider that Beck is getting into the Liberal Arts and equating government expenses to Nimitz-class nuclear powered aircraft carriers.
Balloon Juice, cutting edge, ahead of its time. Accept no substitutes.
Rachel, this can all be yours.
Sentient Puddle
@Brick Oven Bill: Funny thing is, Rachel did actually cite Balloon Juice directly one day.
freelancer
@Brick Oven Bill:
Maynard G Krebs? Is that you? Far out.
cleek
huh. and all this time i thought they were founded in anti-Obama hysteria.
Mike in NC
Ah, Frank “Death Panels” Luntz, one of the GOP’s leading hacks and spinmeisters. He’s getting a lot of assistance in the MSM lately pushing the notion that “everybody hates Obama” as we move closer to the 2010 elections. Republicans are “organized and energized” and will vote in huge numbers, while Democrats are “demoralized and disillusioned” and will stay home. Rinse and repeat.
Allan
Obligatory “fixed.”
kay
@cleek:
They weren’t founded in spelling, that’s for sure.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@cleek:
The famous Tang dynasty tea poem Seven bowls of tea, by Lú Tóng, translates into English something like this:
The first bowl of tea moistens my throat,
The second breaks my loneliness, and
The third bowl racks my brains, bringing to light the texts of 5,000 volumes.
The fourth induces perspiration whereby all ills evaporate through my pores.
The fifth makes my muscles and bones feel light, and
The sixth links me to celestials.
Be careful when drinking the seventh bowl,
as it makes you feel as if a cool breeze were coming from your armpits.
BOB would have been well advised to stop after the 11th bowl.
El Cid
@cleek:
And occupy an imaginary set of irrational numbers.
licensed to kill time
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Though he might be improved by 11 bowls of another kind of tea.
(or at least have some kind of excuse for his inanities…)
Slaney Black
I knew some pomo-left people in grad school. Couple Lacanian Marxists, a Deleuze-Guattari freak and a bombshell 70’s French feminism scholar. They all f***ing hated Stanley Fish’s guts.
Tax Analyst
@cleek:
This.
freelancer
OT- Wow, but wow.
licensed to kill time
@freelancer:
Uh oh. Garn Massage Alert.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@licensed to kill time:
With all this massage action going on, one of these days somebody is going to get hurt.
cleek
@Tax Analyst:
:)
heh.
kay
@geg6:
I’m stuck on “barrel bodied” and the weird specificity of “55 to 70” year old feminists.
Why do they always use “barrel bodied”? I never see it in any other context. Is it a CATO word?
What was the rest about? I lost him somewhere in there.
licensed to kill time
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Heh. Without even going there, Pulp Fiction, no?
geg6
@kay:
I’m still wrapping my head around the idea that he thinks Roe v. Wade (and by extension, Harry Blackmun) was some sort of libertarian’s dream that would bring about the world of gay marriage and legal marijuana back in 1973 if it wasn’t for all those bitchy women and their damn uterii who fucked the whole thing up.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@licensed to kill time:
Two words: foot massage
Batocchio
I wouldn’t tar all of postmodernism with Stanley Fish, who has had some decent ideas in his life but is mostly a dolt who makes poor arguments.
There’s also several key differences between the right-wingers and postmodernists. The right-wingers don’t care what the truth is, but they’re certain they know it. A postmodernist is more likely to say the truth is uncertain (but here’s some different ways we can look at it, and hey, this perspective takes these assumptions for granted, etc.). The main issue is whether someone’s thoughtful or not. Keep in mind, too, that postmodernism mainly relates to the arts and humanities, and not empirical studies and hard science. The media’s eagerness to avoid fact-checking, critical thinking and qualitative judgment isn’t really “postmodern” – it’s lazy and gutless.
Svensker
@kay:
I really think Michael has issues with women. Post-menopausal women are apparently really repulsive to him and have caused all the problems for teh gay, both when we were younger, politically active and very selfish. And now, when we are just repulsive and, presumably, still selfish.
Josh
Isn’t Fish, like, the last guy living who can be styled a postmodern thinker (as opposed to, say, people who get labelled “postmodern artist,” which is a little different)? Rorty and Lyotard and Baudrillard are all gone.
maus
@cleek:
The people who call the left PoMo are the people who exploit a false polarity, they do not *actually* believe in absolute evil.
maus
@freelancer: And he got a standing ovation for “coming foward” about the likely molestation.
JenJen
“Rightgeist.”
Nice, DougJ!
maus
@Michael: Obviously it’s those pesky feminists’ fault that the Religious Right will make it a campaign point to ONLY remove legislation that protects abortion rights if someone explicitly calls attention to that fact. Get a fucking clue and stop blaming feminism for the horrible nature of conservatives. They’re not interested in privacy, which is obvious by everything they do. Stop blaming the aggressor in every case.
maus
Er, stop making excuses for the aggressor.
DougJ
@Alex:
Interesting comment. History of science is very interesting stuff, approached from the right point of view.
tejas_trilobite
@Slaney Black:
Yes! Ha.
And, personally, I miss Derrida.
tejas_trilobite
@DougJ:
Interesting to watch this — the slow death of (this recently passed period of) Theory. It’s probably only the “old guard” now (certainly no one under 30) that has a first-hand experience of “pomo-left”. [Though I’ve been out the area for a while, so correct me if I’m wrong.]
Fergal
Warp and Woof (or, more usually, weft) is a reference to woven cloth. Siegel is confusing it with woofer and tweeter speakers, thus advertising his ignorance of both. I have a rule which keeps me from looking like an idiot more than is necessary: never use a word or phrase unless you actually know, for certain, what it means. Siegel obviously doesn’t share this rule.