I've been putting it off but here goes. THREADhttps://twitter.com/novus_prime2/status/1040394668607889408 …
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2/ Read a traditional history wth its kings and battles, and you could be forgiven for forgetting that half the population in question were women, some were minorities, others insane or handicapped, etc. They are mentioned, perhaps, but in the shadows Foucault mentioned.
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3/ The truth is that you are reading a history viewed through the lens of an extreme minority with definite class interests. This is what Nietzsche and post-modernists mean when they say that narratives are an expression of power.
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4/ Anyone interested in filling out their understanding must account for these other perspectives, esp given the extreme minority origins of traditional narratives. It's simply the intellectually responsible thing to do.
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5/ Example: When reading about Jonestown, it took a pomo feminist author to show me the central role and power of women in the movement. Traditional accounts all discuss the all-female inner-circle, but portray them through the eyes of Jim Jones as victims.
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6/ The feminist author showed by their own words that they had far more agency and responsibility for the tragedy. The traditional narrative both dehumanized and protected the women by victimizing them: They were mere puppets of Jones, but therefore not responsible for Jonestown.
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7/ The women were always there, but lurking in the shadow of Jones. The truth was that as Jones became increasingly incapacitated by drugs and paranoia, the inner-circle of women ran the commune and played a large, perhaps decisive, role in the decision to commit mass suicide.
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8/ This was an archaeology of the shadows of a traditional narrative. Such dig sites are littered all throughout the terrain of the history of events and intellectual life. Any responsible thinking person would be interested in challenges of this kind.
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9/ Now, the follow-on political project - for example, following the recognition that traditional narratives are mostly the perspective of men with the assertion that they are therefore morally suspect supports for gender oppression that shpuld be destroyed - is a separate issue.
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10/ JP makes the elementary mistake of attacking the straw man of intellectual relativism: insisting that post-modernists believe that since things can be interpreted many ways, one way is as good as any other. The truth is that no one, anywhere, believes that or ever has.
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11/ Deconstruction is in some ways unfortunately named, implying a project of destruction rather than one of taking apart language to determine whether we truly mean what we say and think.
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12/ Derrida (JP's chief villain) insisted that no final interpretation or statement of truth was possible because language lives with us in the real world, and changes over time. A final statement of truth today would be misunderstood tomorrow by new users of the same words.
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13/ Is this the deadly moral relativism everyone fears? In the hands of a dillettante, yes. But should Derrida be accountable for their actions merely for mentioning what is obvious once it's stated plainly?
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14/ Derrida saw deconstruction as a sort of linguistic hygiene; Language is always picking up grime as it moves with us through the world - biases, misunderstandings, etc - and deconstruction is an ongoing project of taking it apart to ensure that we are accounting for for it.
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15/ Peterson is engaging in a type of critical theory in his psychological reinterpretations of the Bible, insisting that the stories can't simply mean what they say, but must be reinterpreted to account for alterations in our understanding and use of language and concepts.
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16/ I don't say that you shouldn't judge post-modernism by its political fruits. It was probably inevitable that it would come into alliance with third worldism, feminism, communism, and other movements whose logical conclusions are disorder and insanity.
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End/ But the post-modern deconstruction of meta-narratives, incl the modern human subject, was equally inevitable in an age dominated by capital, technology, media, and advertising.
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(There is a lot more to say, but this is already a bad format for what I've managed so far)
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End of conversation
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