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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