- Against Post-Modernism
A Marxist Critique
Resource Type: Book
Published: 1982
Callinocos argues that the relativism preached by post-modernist leaves us with no objective criteria by which to reject those who would falsify the past.
- An Annotated Bibliography of Nonsense
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1998
Academic critics today not only question the impact of science upon society, but they also question the very idea of scientific rationality.
- Bad Marxism
Capitalism and Cultural Studies
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2004
Cultural Studies commonly claims to be a radical discipline. This book thinks that's a bad assessment. After an introduction critiquing the 'Marxism' of the academy, Hutnyk provides detailed critical analyses of the approaches and theorists of cultural studies.
- Chomsky on Post-Modernism
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1995
What I find in the writings of the post-modernists is extremely pretentious, but on examination, a lot of it is simply illiterate, based on extraordinary misreading of texts that I know well (sometimes, that I have written), argument that is appalling in its casual lack of elementary self-criticism, lots of statements that are trivial (though dressed up in complicated verbiage) or false; and a good deal of plain gibberish.
- Multiculturalism or World Culture?
On a "Left"-Wing Response to Contemporary Social Breakdown
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2000
Post-modernists are profoundly bored by any questions of economics and technology which cannot be connected to cultural differences. The implicit agenda of the multiculturalists is to present the values associated with intensive capitalist accumulation as "white male", so "non-white" peoples such as Japanese or Koreans who currently embody those values with a greater fervour than most "whites" are ignored.
- The Nazis and Deconstruction: Jean-Pierre Faye's Demolition of Derrida
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1993
A review of Jean-Pierre Faye's book 'La raison narrative', which traces the Nazi origins of deconstructionist and post-modernist concepts and terminology. Faye shows, for example, that the concept of 'deconstruction' was introduced in a Nazi journal edited by M.H. Goering, and he shows how theorists who based themselves on Heidegger's writings, such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Lacoue-Labarthe, whitewashed Heidegger's Nazism, treating it as a mere 'detail'.
- Ontological "Difference" and the Neo-Liberal War on the Social
Deconstruction and Deindustrialization
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2001
We have today legions of people with a smattering of knowledge turning out reams of books filled with buzz words that could be (and have been) produced by a computer program, and could be (and are) picked up in peer-group shop talk in a few months at the nearest humanities program or academic conference. Everyone these people don't like is trapped in a "gaze"; everyone "constitutes" their "identity" by "discourse"; to the fuddy-duddy "master narratives" that talk about such indelicate subjects as world accumulation these people counterpose "pastiche" and "bricolage", the very idea of being in any way systematic smacking of "totalitarianism"; it is blithely assumed that everyone except heterosexual white males now and for all time have been "subversives" (one wonders why we are still living under capitalism); a crippling relativism makes it somehow "imperial" to criticize public beheadings in Saudi Arabia or cliterodectomy practiced on five-year old girls in the Sudan.
- Postmodernism: Paralysed by postmodernism
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2008
A great deal of "theory" in the humanities and social sciences -- and not just postmodern theory -- involves the creating of a kind of conceptual landscape filled with curious kinds of abstract objects -- "language", "power", "justice", "state", "culture", "government", "the polity", "the economy" and a host of others, which are viewed "theoretically" from somewhere way "outside" or "above" them. But it is just this way of looking at things -- from "on high" -- that makes it so difficult to see how people in the landscape are able to create and re-create the world in which they live, and are not simply trapped or formed by it. In fashionable postmodernist treatments of identity or subjectivity, language, as the ultimately hollow and imprisoning object, is put together with the notion that anybody who uses words must be committed to the standard definition of those words, to produce the conclusion that "language" determines the meaning of "identity" words such as man, woman, gay, straight, black, white, natural, normal -- and thus "constructs" (as it is said) human identity or subjectivity itself.
- Rationality/Science
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1995
Chomsky writes: "It strikes me as remarkable that the left today should seek to deprive oppressed people not only of the joys of understanding and insight, but also of tools of emancipation, informing us that the "project of the Enlightenment" is dead, that we must abandon the "illusions" of science and rationality--a message that will gladden the hearts of the powerful, delighted to monopolize these instruments for their own use."
- Edward Said's shadowy legacy
Tricky with argument, weak in languages, careless of facts: but, thirty years on, Said still dominates debate
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 2008
So many academics want the arguments presented in Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) to be true. It discourages any kind of critical approach to Islam in Middle Eastern studies.
- Vanguard of Retrogression
"Postmodern" Fictions as Ideology in the Era of Fictitious Capital
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2001
When one probes the terms of the debate, what is truly amazing is that the ostensibly anti-Eurocentric multiculturalists are, without knowing it, purveying a remarkably Eurocentric version of what the Western tradition really is. The ultimate theoretical sources of today's multiculturalism are two very white and very dead European males, Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.
- Where Do Postmodernists Come From?
Resource Type: Article/Report/Letter
Published: 1995
Eagleton argues that left intellectuals have adopted postmodernism out of a sense of having been badly defeated, a belief that the left as a political tendency has little future. Culturalism, he argues, involves an extreme subjectivism combined with a deep pessimism, a sense that it isn't worth the effort to learn about the world, to analyze social systems, for instance, because they can't be changed anyway.
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