post, er, what?

Well no, your post was highly ambigious but i'm sure someone soo knowlegdable (whatever that can mean in a world of free floating sings) of postmodernism would be well aware of such communicative gaps being inescapable.

Maybe you wish to bulk out your point too, I mean what type of postmodernism, which theorists, what do you take from it?

By the way your post's telling us to free our minds are as far from postmodernism as you can get.

PS it's all pretty much relative.

because postmodernism implicitly denies that concrete social relations exist, at least in a form that they can be meaningfully described.

if social relations don't exist/can't be described, then how can we go about changing them?

As john has already pointed out, all post-modernism offers (at best) is an extreme form of subjectivity. There is no "reality" simply "interpretation".

It either openly rejects the objective world or separates human experience so far from it as to make it irrelevant. It's simply solipsism for bored literary critics.

For those of us who actually have to work for a living, reality is a bit more prosaic. When we stop working little things like houses, food and children get taken away from us. The "reality" of the factory or the office, of poor diet, poor housing, etc. seems horrifyingly "objective" to us.

Workers thus have an urgent need to understand this objective horror in order to inform their struggle to free ourselves from it. I can't see that post-modernism offers anything at all to the working class in that regard.

More could be said about post-modernism perfectly expresses the ideological despair of the bourgeoisie at it retreats further and further from reality in the face of a crumbling social order. It is the "intellectual" complement to religious fundamentalism in that regard - the complete abandonment of rational, coherent thought.

it is rational and coherent, in its own way, but it is an extreme opposite of modernism, and so is so horrendously 'out there' that ironically it becomes completely alienated from any grasp of actual lived reality, despite how much it claims to represent that lived reality 'better' than other epistemologies.

you make this sound like a voluntary decision - but post-modernism can't accept the existence of something so homogenous as a "society", so by its own logic it also can't locate explanations for itself (which it also can't accept to exist as a meanignful entity) within a society that it is unable to acknowledge exists.

post modernism is 'scepticism toward meta-narratives'.

I assume this means that pomos will be disinclined to believe very big stories, or theories - for example, about history, or about what meaning, or truth, or good are. Presumably small stories are fine about these things, but when you try and string them together and draw any sort of universal conclusions - here the pomo has a problem.

As far as I can work out, there is also a love for 'rhizomatic' as opposed to 'arboreal' structures. I don't really get what the connection is.

Ah, ok. But I guess that anarchists don't like post modernism because, like all proponents of sysematising 'isms, they have to disagree that all systems of thought are false - which is what pomo maintains.

which all be fair enough in a "look at those nutters" way, except they do proclaim their "truth". When Lyotard locates Stalinism and the Holocaust in the "grand narrative" he himself is affirming a grand narrative ie that of the dangers of "grand narrative". Infact post modernism is the ultimate grand narrative, as it seeks to step outside all of them in order to offer condemnation. I mean it's not hard to see the parralel with capitalism and it's denouncement of "totalitarianism", whilst being unable to see how capital is the "totalitarian" regime that framed "totalitarinism". The belief that it is beyond ideology is what makes it an ideology par excellance.

Just as extreme subjectivity and relativism actually requires the destruction of subjectivity, as it stretches perspectives out into infinity eg a liberal who refuses to every make a stance because it is always partial,, it becomes a kind of negative objectivism. Like the psychologist who refuses to offer an opinion in order not to judge or undermine the subjectivity of the patient, in fact ends up totally dominating this subjectivity through the very absence of another subjectivty, hence the patient ends up talking to a kind of "objective", an denial of subjectivity that is all the more controlling and dominating. I think we can all relate to ths feeling, when your perspective is "respected" to death.

i agree - the point i was trying to make was that postmodernists couldn't make this critique, because there is no foundation to anything they say

you can, because there is (or at least you don't reject the possibility that there might be)

i thought that was even in Kant, mr modern, with his inescapable antinomies? any philosophically versed comrades care to *ahem* enlighten us?

i can see the deconstruction-Marx analogy in the sense that the critique of the "free exchange" is rooted in the social relations outside of the immediate act (or text if you like). A few beers, that sounds like a plan ... 8)

except Marx is talking about actual human practices/relations, whereas deconstructivism is talking about the words we use to describe those relations - aren't they?

:? :? :?

Jesus, how much academic cock did you have to swallow to write something like that? 2 feet, 3 feet?

RP

In a nutshell.

Post-structuralism is a response to the central flaw of structuralism, i.e. that it tends to make the "structures" look timeless & ahistoric. Thus, where a structuralist might look at how (for instance) gender acts as an organising principle in a given form of social organisation, the post-structuralist will investigate how "gender" is constructed, and the conditions under which gender could come to be "taken as read".