Lance deHaven Smith's Conspiracy Theory in America

[Lauren Johnson]

Magda, mind saying more about this?

There is a special ring of Dante's hell reserved for the Post Modernists. Right next to the Social Democrats.

Why assigning them [Post-Modernists] such a warm place? Seems a bit much to me.

They could just as well be thrown into a freezing outer ring of Saturn for all I care. Or they can move in a relative direction toward a transformative hermeneutic of quantum gravity. Pretentious obscurantist bourgeois wankers. On a good day.

Oh, I get it. You don't like postmodernists.

Trouble is, "postmodernism" is often a pejorative term similar to "commie pinko," which allows one to throw mud at the enemy -- you know, like what some people you have identified doing in a certain 9/11 thread while another gets a pass. Funny how that works.

A lot of postmodern writing is useless. The worst might be something like a PhD thesis entitled: Lady Gaga and Poker Face: the Deconstruction of the Culturally Inscribed Male/Female Duality ... blah blah. I agree there is lot of it is crap in it.

On the other hand, there have been some major contributions by some accused of being postmoderns. For example, Edward Said in Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism opened my eyes to how colonialism and imperialism is inscribed in Western literature. Foucault's studies in the relation of knowledge and power are brilliant as far as they go. Those themes can be detected at DPF, where we can find many references to the panopticon, which is straight out of Foucault. I have to admit, as obscure as Derrida can be, I enjoyed his systematic dismantling of Francis Fukuyama in his Specters of Marx.

To define terms, I view modernity to be the core of the Enlightenment project, the view that knowledge is universally true and applies to all peoples in all places. Postmodernity deconstructs that project. I'm all for it. But if dismantling totalizing systems is all there is, then indeed it is wankery. In short, in many ways, I would argue that we at DPF are profoundly postmodern