The Case of J. Greenfield v L Prodeo (2008): An Examination of Multicultural Management and Conflict Techniques in the Context of Differenct Ontolo-political regimes of Sub-hegemony.

Catchy title ‘ey? Should do great at the airports.

But what I am sensing more and more is a Trotskyist really pissed off that the working class didn’t choose socialism after WW2, that 1968 failed, and the socio-political response to 1970s stagflation was not revolution but neoliberalism.

I can’t say I’m surprised that you think that, since there appears to be some evidence both from a shared IP address and writing style that you are in fact John Greenfield’s sock puppet.

It’s probably redundant to point out that sockpuppetry for the purpose of evading LP moderation decisions is against the comments policy.

OK, I’ve read a bit more including a bit of Thousand Plateaus and the whole of chapter 14 – “The Smooth and the Striated.” Deleuze is most certainly not using maths as mere metaphor. His discussion of Riemann Sums seems to fold in with his whole rejection of what he sees as the discrete – indeed binary – nature of the dialectic, and by extension his fanciful delusions of the innate fascism of western metaphysics from Plato onwards. I am persuaded he does understand the maths very well, and that Sokal is a bit off in his critique. Having said that, I also detect Delezue has decidedly and strategically refused to explicate his use of maths a bit more. He is assuming a great deal of understanding for a readership he well knows will probably not be so on top a lot of what he assumes.

I’m not sure I understand your distinguishing between maths and philosophy so vigorously. In fact, such a distinction is precisely what postmodernist – especially Foucault and Deleuze try so hard to show are artificial. Also, most of history’s great philosophers were mathematicians.

As I said, I only started reading him last week, and have been surprised a few times already, so no doubt I will change my perspective over the next week and onwards. But what I am sensing more and more is a Trotskyist really pissed off that the working class didn’t choose socialism after WW2, that 1968 failed, and the socio-political response to 1970s stagflation was not revolution but neoliberalism. He seems to see no alternative than a thorough cognitive rewiring of western political thinking, which must start at the very base of western metaphysics – geometry. I am getting the hint this is where all his “deterritorialisation” is coming from, but I haven’t got into that yet.

I think that quote above is very powerful in tying Foucault and Deleuze to postmodernism, but as I said, there are many, may more.

Anyway, I’m on to rhizomes now, so I’d better go.

For how history is taught, The History Teacher could be a good journal to start with.

If you are interested in an excellent marxist historian’s response to postmodernist historiography you can’t go past Alex Callinicos’ Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the philosophy of history. I am nothing like an expert, or even very clued in to a lot of this stuff, but I found Callinicos very accessible. What I particularly like about the book is it is filled with real life historical events and debates ranging from Herodotus right up to Hobsbawm, Hayden White, Foucault, Derrida, etc. It was written in 1995, so I imagine it is quite up to date.

I HAD thought that the dogma of postmodernism was dead and that its odour had disappeared. Regrettably, this has not happened in the atavistic world of ABC radio management, a vacuum of intellectual and moral relativism where no form of knowledge appears to have any perceived value over another.

This is not a bit of intellectual discussion ’round the faculty coffee table Mark. You know this but do you really know this? This is another salvo. What conservatives do much better than the Left is generate and disseminate propaganda. The spin-doctors spin, and spin well. And the apparatchniks just repeat it over and over again.
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This gives the Left an impression of fighting dogmatically driven robots and, by contrast, they’re impression of themselves as independently minded thinking people is reinforced. But that’s an illusion. Consider this first comment:

John old boy I think you should be aware that postmodernism as you call it was a term coined with reference to architecture. I think you need to get out your Jameson and do a bit of revision, I doubt you could pass a 3rd year high school English exam if you submitted the dross above.

This reminds me of some of the comments I’ve received. There’s the (incorrect) assertion of postmodernism’s true original meaning, the patronizing putdown of Carmody’s faculties and the required reading, in this case Frederic Jameson.
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First off a word’s meaning can change. Next the meaning of words and their metamorphosis over time is something that happens out there not within the hallways of some institution: parole alters langue.
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It may disappoint you, distress you or infuriate you but ‘postmodernism’ is associated with with extreme cultural relativism where no text is better than another, where no values are better than others, where truth is what you would have it be and the rest. This is being challenged by those who wish to maintain and reassert notions of reason, objectivity, empirical truth and ‘traditional’ values.
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In lambasting the ABC for removing a program on religion, in characterizing this as the result of adherence to ‘postmodern dogma’ Carmody is not trying to make some intellectual point about French poststructuralism or anything remotely similar. He is reasserting ‘tradition’. Call it what you will: sovereignty, hegemony, the centre.
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I have quioted bulk writers above. I could (but won’t) quote many more both those associated with and opposed to ‘postmodernism’ in which the phenomena is described as the advocacy of a plurality of value-systems and a challenge to the dominance of any one value-system. The theory, discourse, what have you imagines the culture to be dominated by a kind of ‘fascism’ rooted in the ideological masquerade of ‘objective truth’ and seeks to usurp it.
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I’m sure you feel the impulse to tell me that it’s more complicated than that or that this is an over-simplification or over-generalization, please don’t. It’s been done and moreover I know. I’m doing it on purpose. The dichotomy I’ve described exists and has real force in the real world. This Carmody fellow is pissed off because the ABC is not ‘representing him’ that is not showing stuff he thinks should be. He’s not alone.
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Above I cite Chris Hitchens’ take American historical education. Again there’s a dichotomy and it resembles this one. Postmodernism, for want of a better word, means what Carmody says it means. Sorry but it doesn’t matter what you say, or if you agree, that’s how the word is used in society. Hence that’s its meaning.
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Carmody’s overly critical, he caricatures the notions, but he does this on purpose too. He’s mustering support to either transform (take back) or eradicate the ABC? Why? Because he objects to ‘postmodern dogma’ with its sidelining of tradition. The response here, like that first commentor on Carmody’s thread is to ge hi’ falutin’: you haven’t read the books enough mate, you don;t know what postmodernism is mate, you’re a bad speller etc.
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None of this matter. What matters is the war and the words fired in anger. Postmodernism is such a word and the cannon is aimed directly at you. You on th other hand, do, well how should I describe it? Thing is whether you like it or not this conflict will be around for the time being. And losing it will cost you. And if you can’t do better than fuss and feud about categorical labels and the rest, you’ll lose. Simple as that.

I do think that your ideas on all this are somewhat unfocused. I think we’d need to define concepts and terms with greater precision to have a fruitful discussion.

The difference between therapy and enhancement has been attacked on the grounds that there is no way to distinguish between the two in theory, and therefore no way of discriminating in practice. There is a long tradition, argued most forcefully in recent years by the French postmodernist thinker Michel Foucault, that maintains that what society considers to be pathology or disease is actually a socially constructed phenomena in which deviation from some presumed norm is stigmatized. Homosexuality, to take on example, was long taken to be unnatural and was classified as a psychiatric disorder until the latter part of the twentieth century, when it was depatholigized as part of the growing acceptance of gayness in developed societies

Our Post-Human Future
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Of course he has it wrong. He thinks Foucault is a postmodernist and he writes for the Weekly Standard or some such.
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The above is an application of, and also an implicit indication of, the limits of Foucault’s analysis of norms. Homosexuality to be sure was classified as a pathology for social reasons. Is schizophrenia a ‘real’ pathology or a ‘constructed’ one? Perhaps the faults of Science lays not in its striving to be objective and impersonal but in the fact that it fails to do so.
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But anyway, what are we dealing with here?
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In American Fascists the left-liberal (and Christian) Chris Hedges describes the malaise which causes persons to adopt the rigid theo-ideology of fundamentalism:

Isolation, the plague of the modern industrial society, has torn apart networks of extended families and communities. It has empowered this new movement of dreamers who bombard the airwaves with an idealistic and religious utopianism that promises, through apocalyptic purification, to eradicate the old sinful world and fill the resulting emptiness with a new world where time stops and all problems are solved. The movement promises to followers what many never had: a stable home and family, a loving community, fixed moral standards, financial and personal success and an abolition of uncertainty and doubt. It offers a religious vision that will make fragmented, lost individuals whole

How does this malaise square with Foucault’s admonition to diversity? It seems to me that these are different reactions to the same circumstances seen by different people. In the fundamentalists’ case modernity is confused, immoral, chaotic and hateful. In the estimates of Foucauldian anarchists modernity is hard, rigid, fascistic and hateful. At least they agree they’re not happy.
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This is what lays behind the Culture Wars. This is why removing a religious program will bring about accusations of postmodernism. Postmodernism, like other collective categorical nouns has a limited utility because it can never be adequately and finally defined. But that doesn’t make it meaningless. The gist is readily apparent. There is a conflict between the forces for and against some shifting ideas about the Absolute and the Universal.
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Chris Hitchens calls it the ‘dialogue of the deaf’.
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In discussing American history, or lack thereof, he writes that:

Ever since the tussle between Cheney and the forces P.C. history classes and textbooks have been oscillating between demands for a patriotic and intelligible narrative and cries for a story that is more ‘usefriendly’ to minorities and new arrivals. School bureaucracies everywhere have responded by looking for safe and tepid waters and educational publishers have been keen to abet the process in order to sell their bland and uncontroversial series. Combine this with lobbying from disparate confessional, regional and ethnic groups and tributary blends imperceptably to produce a uniform flow of drool

In other words the modes of history, the vigourous contesting of interpretation of fact is being sidebarred by competition between two ideologically motivated forces. The response has been to placate and compromise with inevitable mediocre results.
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Hitchens, whose sympathies are naturally with the multiculturalists, in spirit if not in fact, has an interesting suggestion:

False and emptily moralistic trails such as ‘Are we too Eurocentric?’ or ‘Was Columbus Ecologically friendly’ can be abandoned in favour of the real thing. Why did Basil Davidson have to refute Hegel in order to show that Africa had a history? Was Bertrand Russell right in saying that the disappearance of North American Indians was no tragedy? And why was he banned from teaching in the United States? Had Russell read Bartolomé de Las Casas first historian of the Americas, who doubted that the ‘discovery’ had been a good thing? Why did the first historian of the Americas have a Spanish name?

Interesting questions. Perhaps a bit too far above the high school level especially if the poor little shits don’t even know when the Civil War took place. But those questions do two things: 1. they admit of a plurality of answers, all legitimate; 2. they require an excellence in analytical and expressive skill not to mention the capacity to see things from different points of view and to appreciate the complexity and contradictions of reality.
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But clarity is something, I think, a little outré these days. There is a war on doncha know? No, not the actual war. The Cultural War. In the blue corner (or is that red) the forces of Moral Certainty relying on a kitsch propogandic view of the past and a highly selective yet literal interpretation of scripture. In the blue corner (or is that red) the forces of [insert anything except postmodernism here] who believe in multiple truths, multiple perspectives and diversity and disengaging from the basis of the modern state that enables you to do this in the first place.
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Fight!
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Funnily enough, and finally, this dichotomy is a pre-postmodern thing, the Christian, socialist historian WA Williams once wrote that the choice Americans faced was either hedonistic, ultimately dehumanizing hedonism or to “accept the demands of living with other human beings in a truly responsible humane fashion” (New Politics, Spring ‘62). Something probably applauded by fundamentalists on the ground while they’re busily bolstering the corporate apparatus of unchecked power their manipulators are busy building. And on the other side we have a War about Words. Well what of words:

Spirit, the human soul, our self-awareness our ability to generalize and think in concepts, to perceive the world as our world (and not just as our locality) and lastly, our capacity for knowing that we will die – and living in spite of that knowledge: surely these are all mediated, or actually created by words.

Vaclev Havel
Acceptance Speech
German Booksellers Awards
25/07/89
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Or is it:

Words are useless, especially sentences. They don’t stand for anything. How can they explain how I feel?

Björk Guðmundsdóttir
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Or both?

1. Write off assertions on the basis that the words used do not mean what they’re generally understood to mean. References, citations, dictionary definitons are not relevant.
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2. Sidebar into category disputes. This is not a category, so and so doesn’t fit into a category etc.
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3. Contradiction is fine for everyone who isn’t uptight with oppressive hegemonic forms of fascism like facts. If someone says ‘universal’ and you don’t like ‘em then they’re erecting strawmen. If someone you worship uses it then we swallow it whole:
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Does Deleuze’s idea that “The concept is therefore both absolute and relative: it is relative to its own components, to other concepts, to the plane on which it is defined, and to the problems it is supposed to resolve; but it is absolute through the condensation it carries out, the site it occupies on the plane, and the conditions it assigns to the problem.” – have bearing here?
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4. Directing your opponent’s attention to the sheet quantity of words consumed by yourself is an intimidating and authoritative way of promoting flow and diversity too. After all quantity of words is what counts. That’s why The Thorn Birds is a much better book than The Bell Jar. It’s also good if they fall for it. It might keep them out of your hair while you dream up the next subterfuge.
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5. And, when all else fails, disconnect on the grounds of ennui

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This all contributes to ensure that we remain nice and cozy in our cliques and can categorically exclude anything or anyone that may make us think about stuff from any other perspective. As, y’see it’s important in advocating diversity, flows, and casual arrangements to remain as rigidly tunnel-visioned and contemptuous of people who haven’t read the Entire Works of Derrida. After all the capacity to deflect criticism without ever once considering its merits is the mark of a true intellectual.
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But meantime back in the real world students are going to university and what do they learn there? How to read and write proper. In America most kids have no idea what century the Civil,War was in. Is that a problem? No.

The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualise” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals but a constant generator of de-individualization

What is this de-individualization? How is the individual created by the power? That is political or cultural power? After all individual organisms pre-exist not only politics and culture but the human species itself.
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Multiplication, diverse combination, appear to me to be the result of freedom of association. The irony here is that Foucault is condemning a political philosophy applied in the name of those things that philosophy made possible in the first place! What will he replace it with?
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In 1976 he said:

The Juridico-Political theory of sovereignty – the theory we have to get away from if we want to analyze power – dates from the Middle Ages. It dates to the reactivation of Roman law and is constituted around the problem of the monarch and the monarchy

Foucault’s genealogy of this theory goes as follows: the theory originally corresponded to actual political practice in the feudal era, it was an instrument to justify and constitute the institutions of monarchical practice.
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Here Foucault displays a fuzziness about pre-modern history typical of postmodernists (or whatever), Monarchism grew out of feudalism. Feudalism was a polymorphous power relationship in which the King of France was in constant competition with powerful lords like the Duc d’Orlean or Burgundy. Monarchism, as in the absolute monarchy of Louis XIV, was a utilization of this theory of sovereignty to consolidate State power against such competition.
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Foucault does understand this somewhat. His geneology of the theory proceeds thru its use by monarchical/Catholic and anti-monarchical/protestant forces during the wars of religion and its role in the development of alternative theories of state power in the 18th century leading to the emergence of the modern democratic state.
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Concurrent with this process is what Foucault calls an ‘invention a new mechanism of power’ which he believes was ‘absolutely incompatible with relations of sovereignty’ concerned with ‘bodies and what they do’. Here’s there’s a shift from power incarnate in the person of the Sovereign to a ‘grid of material coercions’, a system of continuous surveillance and, against the homogenus hierarchy of the monarchy a radical heterogeny in which power is calculated for maximum efficiency and minimum expenditure – that is Capitalism.
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However this opposition is false. The State under the monarchy consolidates its power. But finally the monarch gets removed. The apparatus of political power evidenced by its monopoly on violence, for example, however proceeds. What Richelieu created, Napoleon built on.
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What actually happens is that a new, unprecedentedly powerful state, capable, yes, of ‘constant surveillance’ of reaching everyone, everywhere in its territory arrives. But at the same time these ’sacred negative categories’ are also instituted to place limits on State power: rights. The right to free speech, for example, is a negative right. You can speak freely because no-one can stop you. You can associate freely because no-one can stop you etc.
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There’s a paradox then at the heart of the matter. On the one hand a unitary, monolithic power structure which renders everyone subject to the same laws, the same obligations the same standards of measurement, behaviour, obligation and the rest. On the other hand the design of the liberal state enables unprecedented diversity. The strict hierarchies and social conventions created by and underpinning feudal Christendom become unraveled.
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One may be required to acquire a social security number, tax file number or the like. One may be required to produce a birth certificate as proof of identity. One may have a credit history, a criminal record, an obligation to military service, but… belief in God, allegiance to Lord (or employer), behaviour and dress in accordance with one’s station – these things are not required. They cannot be required in a liberal society.
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The sovereign state that moves from being personified in the person of the monarch – l’etat ce moi – becomes an entity which embodies the will of the population. It draws its legitimacy, not from God, but from consent. This is, of course tricky, if one is born French one has the obligations of a French citizen. One does not have a choice except insofar as one is able to become citizen of another State. At base there’s compulsion. However the limits on that compulsion produce liberty.
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It’s not an opposition as Foucault maintains but a paradox.
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His call for us to prefer “difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements instead of systems” articulates the difficulties. Does difference over uniformity mean that there should be ‘more experiments in living’ as Hayek once wrote? Okay. Does this extend to law? Should the law be different for person a than for person b? What would be the consequences of that? Liberty or hierarchy?
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It sounds good but when I read it I’m reminded that, contrary to what Foucault maintains, the theory of sovereignty did not underpin feudal institutions. Feudal ‘institutions’ such as they were were a model of flows and mobile arrangements.
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And such fun they were.