Dear All

I am increasingly impressed with the level of debate going on amongst our
company. Helpful moments of clarification have doubtless been occurring for
many of us (as Mark's latest email suggests) as well as moments of
increasing confusion for many of us (probably with significant overlap
between the people in those two categories).

If Grant's clarification regarding Mark's point reassures Mark to some
extent and, furthermore, if Chomsky agrees with Baudrillard, then that may
make some of us a little less suspicious of accounts appearing under the
heading of "postmodern".

Postmodernism still has a case to answer, however. Certainly in a clinical
setting I have experienced its influences as: drawing greater attention to
meaning rather than material circumstances as factors in people's lives; as
acting as a fertilizer to increasingly inaccessible accounts of the world we
live in; as promoting an idealist version of reality and challenging the
notion of an external reality (and yes I do know that we are stuck with the
inaccessibility of an objective reality but what I worry about is that
definitions of reality tend to be made by those in positions of power).

I have tried to say this as briefly and straightforwardly as possible,
largely because I would like to see these ideas subjected to our joint
scrutiny. 

I recognise that I have, in this communication, drawn us towards a clinical
perspective and away from a more global one. I am afraid that, given the
material circumstances within which I earn my living, it is likely that I
will do so. I hope though, that this debate is one which can span the micro
and macro and draw connections between them and the intervening levels of
analysis.

Yours in wage slavery

Carl


-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Burton [mailto:[log in to unmask]] 
Sent: 07 December 2005 13:40
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] Escaping the Critique

Grant,
Thanks for the clarification.  Good to know that it is't as bad as I'd
believed!

A good link to Dussel's work can be found at
http://www.clacso.org/wwwclacso/espanol/html/libros/dussel/dussel.html
Much of it is in (a remarkably clear) Spanish, but there are some English
references there too.
A useful introduction is Alcoff, Linda Martin-Mendieta, Eduardo,
Thinking form the Underside of History. Enrique Dussel's Philosophy of
Liberation, Rowman and
Littlefield, Maryland, 2000, 300 p.
The key text is Ética de la liberación en la epoca de la
globalización y la exclusión, 1998 Madrid, Trotta - soon to appear in
translation from Duke University Press.
Mark

>
> Thanks very much for this Mark, I have not read Dussel, but it sounds as
> if I should, looking forward to finding out more about him.
>
> You are probably thinking of Jean Baudrillard with regard to the "the
> gulf war did not take place"?  It is really just three short essays,
> most of which were originally published in Liberation.  It's an
> entertaining read (although, I agree, a confection), but not really
> sinister, he shows how the media was the main weapon in a 'war' in which
> the outcome was never in doubt and which turned into a risk free (for
> Western powers) 'turkey shoot' with American and British forces
> massacring Iraqis.  Chomsky said much the same "As I understand the
> concept of 'war', it involves two sides in combat, say shooting each
> other.  That did not happen in the gulf." (The Media and the War).
>
> Our project is the same - we can find ways to 'escape the dialectic' and
> resist what Baudrillard calls 'monstrous and unprincipled capital', I
> hope.
>
> Thanks again, Grant
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The UK Community Psychology Discussion List
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Mark Burton
> Sent: 06 December 2005 13:44
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [COMMUNITYPSYCHUK] Escaping the Critique
>
> Thanks Grant for that interesting posting.
> In relation to the 'postmodern' I suppose I'd have to say 2 things.
> 1)  I have used it in what was a brief piece as a kind of shorthand
> (that risked losing all nuances) for the tendencies towards extreme
> relativism and idealism (in the sense of denying that there is a social
> reality - however hard to apprehend), and of a denial of the possibility
> of what is usually called 'grand narratives' - i.e. general theory of
> the world.  So I apologise to anyone who self defines as postmodernist
> that also rejects those extremes, most notoriously expressed in a text
> (I forget by whom) called something like "The Gulf War Didn't Happen".
> 2) I also want to question that there is something that can be sensibly
> called a 'postmodern condition' - i.e. as a theory of the state of the
> world or of modern culture, it just seems inadequate to me, posing a
> break with the modern, whereas what I see in imperialist globalisation,
> in the extension of capital into all areas of life, including culture
> (and Habermas is good on this - colonisatin of the lifeworld) is an
> extension of the worst aspects of modernism - modernism without
> enlightnment.  This idea seems to have a lot in common with the 'end of
> history' ideologists of triumphant capitalism at the start of the 90s.
>
> For some time I bought the Habermasian line that tries to recapture an
> emancipatory tradition in modernism, contrasting it with the repressive,
> rationalising, mechanical modernism of the capitalist machine.  However,
> reading Enrique Dussel on philosophy of liberation, I came to the view
> that this notion is very Eurocentric, and the modernist project is
> beeply bound up in the economics of capitalist expansion, the politics
> of
> colonisation and empire, and the social psychology of exclusion.
> Instead
> Dussel proposes a paradigm of transmodernity, that (and I don't have the
> texts to hand to check exactly) tries to synthesise a liberatory praxis
> and world view from the modernist ouvre together with other world views
> - especially those excluded within and excluded outside the totality of
> the system.
> Again these are difficult ideas to grasp, (and I'm in great danger of
> oversimplifying and caricaturing them), but this seems to me to suggest
> a way out of the impasse of a stalled and flawed enlightenment project.
> Dussel uses the term 'analectics' to capture this synthetic praxis - the
> idea being to go beyond the dialectic model of
> thesis-antithesis-synthesis (which Grant alludes to in the Lyotard
> quote) to and instead to integrate a diversity of perspectives (from the
> stanpoint of the many and diverse victims of the system and their
> cultures and ideologies and from their allies within the system-  which
> might include 'critical' community
> psychologists) - but within an integrative whole - not a fragmentary
> 'postmodern' melange!
>
> I do have to come back to a strong sense of what's at stake hear.  We
> are living in a world dominated by a monster that is destroying not just
> people, families, communities, wealth and welfare, publically owned
> goods,  cultures and ways of being, but also the planet itself.  That
> monster is the untamed capitalism resurgent since the early 70s, now in
> a full blown expansionist phase.  I still see much of the postmodernist
> tradition as a fashionable diversion that engages with this at the wrong
> level altogether
> - that of the particular, often at the level of the word, rather than at
> the level of social relations.
>
> Mark Buron
>
>
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-- 
From Mark Burton
Manchester UK

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