Enitharmon wrote:sg249 wrote:There's a lot wrong with postmodernism - its mostly drivel written by <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=people&v=56">people</a> who needed an excuse to abandon marxism and retain their academic salaries (in my opinion alone of course).
Ah yes, I do like <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=people&v=56">people</a> who dismiss arguments that they don't understand by insulting them! Can you offer us a critical appraisal of Barthes and Derrida so we can see where you disagree with them?
And you're a teacher - tut tut! What do you teach, by the way?
History. However, I don't think to trace the political heritage of most postmodernists to provide answers for why they developed the thought system is that unfair. I don't think anyone wants to read a treatise on Derrida's 'Specters of Marx', for example, and I don't want to write - so I won't! Derrida's work is, generally understandable, exceedingly complex -as were his lectures! (I'm not entirely sure how much of that was an affectation - should all ideas be able to be explained simply??)
However, and vitally, it is entirely possible to make criticisms of the broad movement of postmodernism - a movement developed, certainly in the UK (where I am) by <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=people&v=56">people</a> seeking to rapidly distance themselves from their Communist past. Which may be fine, but to claim it is a radical doctrine (which they do, again, moreso in the UK than in, for example, France) is to replace genuine desire for social change with a radical individualism not too far from Thatcherism. I'm not a Communist, but I see far more honour in Marxism, even of the 1970s CPGB kind, than in a retreat to middle class intellectualism actively designed to be inaccessible to the broad mass of the <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=people&v=56">people</a>. (Not that all <a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=writing&v=56">writing</a> should be simplistic, but that in the work of *some* postmodernists this complexity is almost the only aim).
<a href="http://www.ntsearch.com/search.php?q=Writing&v=56">Writing</a> too much, will stop - last point, I'm not sure I was actively insulting them...certainly not compared to what they have said in polemics against remaining Marxist academics. (Rivers of blood etc..)
s
Edit - much of the above reads back as irrelevant ramblings, apologies!