OK! This piece which many of you have found difficult and some of you have become quite annoyed with. It addresses postmodern ideas in its own language but whereas postmodernism seeks to complicate & confuse, this piece seeks to show the workings. 1 of many.https://twitter.com/thesadredearth/status/972840550717181952 …
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So, that (somewhat cut) is clear enough. The aim here is to distinguish a liberal desire for progress from the ideological mess on the far-left. To do so, requires understanding said ideological mess.
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"Many people have come to identify a necessary disambiguating idea for this recognition as that of postmodernism." Yes, that would be me. "I believe a deeper understanding — the more essential, yet particular and activating difference — can be found in “logocentrism.”" Do go on.
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So, logocentrism is commonly understood to be the idea that language reliably refers to what is out there. Derrida, particularly, rejected this. Everything is a text and every understanding of a text is an interpretation.
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Adler argues that a better understanding of 'logocentrism' is a more literal breakdown of the word. Making language the centre and reality secondary to that. He says that this is what the New New left is doing & understanding this makes so much else clear.
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I have argued that it is essential to understanding so much of what seems bewilderingly nuts on the postmodern left to understand the degree to which language (discourses) are understood to construct reality. We cannot get anywhere if we miss this vital part of the puzzle.
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This is essentially the same point but Adler breaks it down and pinpoints the reversal that has happened much more distinctly and how profound an epistemological shift this is.
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"...we might claim that the far left bookoisie cannot think without continually revising the means of thinking, the instruments of knowledge production. Epistemology is ontology. To know is to be, and how you know is how you be."
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"Thus, the far, New New Left has turned logocentrism on its head, jettisoning one sense of it for another, truer sense of the word. The new form seeks knowledge not *through* language, but *in* language." Language is not a tool, for them. It is the construction material
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"Instead of seeking knowledge in the belief that thought and word are roughly, reliably coordinate to the world they reference, true logocentrism finds free-floating meaning almost religiously in the word itself. "
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This profound epistemological shift has impact "What has all this meant in political practice? In political practice, true logocentrism produces a turn to subjectivity: subjective experience is raised in value over the objective description that is no longer warranted as valid."
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Identity politics emerge. "It has produced a particular nexus of anti-free speech linguistic correctness aimed at protecting interior lives — human subjective experience — politically represented on the level of group identity."
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End of conversation
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