I’m not talking about just about particular thinkers. I don’t care how Baudrillard would perhaps maybe understand this. What importance does that have politically? Why is that interpretation more theoretically enlightening? Why could any actual claims made there, valid or not, not be expressed in Marxism, or simply more clear language, so that we can better examine and test them?
I am talking about postmodern culture in general. I am referring to a cultural ‘logic’, and more specifically to one that has become more and more in common in intellectual culture - both in bourgeois academia and outside. You see it above in certain departments, such as sociology and anthropology which, not coincidentally, are also filled, in proportional terms, with very high amounts of poor scholarship and outright nonsense which people will often still obtain degrees. Especially in anthropology, there are waves of deeply essentializing, fetishistic, and frankly racist works of no logical coherence or empirical validity fusing ‘ocean epistemologies’ of indigeneous people from one location with their deleuzian mysticism and that applying to another indigeneous peoples on the other side of the planet who also happen to live by the sea. I could go on endlessly with these times of examples, but frankly the main point is simply that if these fields were. Also, suffice to say that this level of investment of public economic resources into such bullshit would not have been allowed in the Soviet Union. The post-structural intellectual turn and the postmodern cultural transformations that it accompanied, and of which it is a part, has changed the intellehctual characters of the modern social sciences and humanities. It is not a coincidence that these became dominant in the Neoliberal era and that they drove out Marxism from these domains. There is basic lack of sytematicity, logical validity and empirical support throughout many of these works. Some of these thinkers, such as Deleuze, I think are more philosophically impressive, albeit deeply problematic. But even with the latter case, as with Christ, the problem is the Christians. As I’m talking about a culture, and in particular and intellectual culture, you cannot separate it from the participants in the culture, and it is striking that it seems to have become, at least amongst American or anglo ‘leftists’ (but really what Marx referred to sarcastically as ‘true leftists’ and what Lenin referred to ‘ultraleftists’) more common to refer to and read these thinkers than Marxist thinkers. I don’t care how Baudrillard would perhaps maybe understand this. What importance does that have politically? Why is that interpretation more theoretically enlightening? Why could any actual claims made there, valid or not, not be expressed in Marxism, or simply more clear language, so that we can better examine and test them?
Tbh the baudrillardian point your comment cites is an example of the kind of obfuscation that I’m talking about. ‘Whole modernist reduction of identity’ - what does this mean? What, in concrete, material terms, is a reduction of identity? Are you making a physicalist statement? Is this a metaphysical statement? Is this a statement about ideology, about thought, i.e. that we in the modern world reduce our concepts of identity to one of what one consumes? Baudrillard’s entire theory, to the extent is has coherence, demands an explicit rejection of Marx. In particular, is does so based on the hilariously wrong and reductionist idea that, as you put it, Marx carries out a ‘modern reduction of identity as production’.
Also, you are saying that the correct judgement would be ‘“criticism of astrology is a from of misogyny” is a wholely modernist reduction of identity to consumption’, except that it is not clear why you are not yourself reducing this judgement to a fairly arbitrary interpretation. We can explain it far more simply, easily and clearly by just saying that saying that you think that the belief, that saying that that which is clearly nonsense is wrong, is also misogynist because it is, on average, is more commonly believed by women (I don’t know if this true, but anecdotally is seems to be the case and appears to be the reason for the judgement), is simply nonsensical because what women at any point in time happen to believe on average doesn’t really determine any nature of womenhood (why should it? Why do we need that in the first place? Why is this relevant?). And, in any case, because it is a criticism of a specific belief, not women as women. Otherwise we start doing another classic irrational postmodern move of saying that practically it is misogynist for the former reason. In other words it destroys the distinction between the meaning of what we can say or think and reduces them to a kind of sociological relativism. It makes thought passive and destroys the ability for analysis. I am not saying that this form of irrational thought has not existed plenty in the past. I’m saying that it has become even more common as a sociological product of neoliberal postmodern culture.
I’m not talking about just about particular thinkers. I don’t care how Baudrillard would perhaps maybe understand this. What importance does that have politically? Why is that interpretation more theoretically enlightening? Why could any actual claims made there, valid or not, not be expressed in Marxism, or simply more clear language, so that we can better examine and test them?
I am talking about postmodern culture in general. I am referring to a cultural ‘logic’, and more specifically to one that has become more and more in common in intellectual culture - both in bourgeois academia and outside. You see it above in certain departments, such as sociology and anthropology which, not coincidentally, are also filled, in proportional terms, with very high amounts of poor scholarship and outright nonsense which people will often still obtain degrees. Especially in anthropology, there are waves of deeply essentializing, fetishistic, and frankly racist works of no logical coherence or empirical validity fusing ‘ocean epistemologies’ of indigeneous people from one location with their deleuzian mysticism and that applying to another indigeneous peoples on the other side of the planet who also happen to live by the sea. I could go on endlessly with these times of examples, but frankly the main point is simply that if these fields were. Also, suffice to say that this level of investment of public economic resources into such bullshit would not have been allowed in the Soviet Union. The post-structural intellectual turn and the postmodern cultural transformations that it accompanied, and of which it is a part, has changed the intellehctual characters of the modern social sciences and humanities. It is not a coincidence that these became dominant in the Neoliberal era and that they drove out Marxism from these domains. There is basic lack of sytematicity, logical validity and empirical support throughout many of these works. Some of these thinkers, such as Deleuze, I think are more philosophically impressive, albeit deeply problematic. But even with the latter case, as with Christ, the problem is the Christians. As I’m talking about a culture, and in particular and intellectual culture, you cannot separate it from the participants in the culture, and it is striking that it seems to have become, at least amongst American or anglo ‘leftists’ (but really what Marx referred to sarcastically as ‘true leftists’ and what Lenin referred to ‘ultraleftists’) more common to refer to and read these thinkers than Marxist thinkers. I don’t care how Baudrillard would perhaps maybe understand this. What importance does that have politically? Why is that interpretation more theoretically enlightening? Why could any actual claims made there, valid or not, not be expressed in Marxism, or simply more clear language, so that we can better examine and test them?
Tbh the baudrillardian point your comment cites is an example of the kind of obfuscation that I’m talking about. ‘Whole modernist reduction of identity’ - what does this mean? What, in concrete, material terms, is a reduction of identity? Are you making a physicalist statement? Is this a metaphysical statement? Is this a statement about ideology, about thought, i.e. that we in the modern world reduce our concepts of identity to one of what one consumes? Baudrillard’s entire theory, to the extent is has coherence, demands an explicit rejection of Marx. In particular, is does so based on the hilariously wrong and reductionist idea that, as you put it, Marx carries out a ‘modern reduction of identity as production’. Also, you are saying that the correct judgement would be ‘“criticism of astrology is a from of misogyny” is a wholely modernist reduction of identity to consumption’, except that it is not clear why you are not yourself reducing this judgement to a fairly arbitrary interpretation. We can explain it far more simply, easily and clearly by just saying that saying that you think that the belief, that saying that that which is clearly nonsense is wrong, is also misogynist because it is, on average, is more commonly believed by women (I don’t know if this true, but anecdotally is seems to be the case and appears to be the reason for the judgement), is simply nonsensical because what women at any point in time happen to believe on average doesn’t really determine any nature of womenhood (why should it? Why do we need that in the first place? Why is this relevant?). And, in any case, because it is a criticism of a specific belief, not women as women. Otherwise we start doing another classic irrational postmodern move of saying that practically it is misogynist for the former reason. In other words it destroys the distinction between the meaning of what we can say or think and reduces them to a kind of sociological relativism. It makes thought passive and destroys the ability for analysis. I am not saying that this form of irrational thought has not existed plenty in the past. I’m saying that it has become even more common as a sociological product of neoliberal postmodern culture.