Deconschmucktions
Matt Kozusko (mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu)
Thu, 10 Dec 1998 19:34:37 -0500
J J R wrote:
> ...promoting a specific
> value system and using his theory of reading and writing to support that
> value system--without offering a justificaction or an explanation of the
> value system to begin with--at least not in the few works I've read.
Browsing through old xeroxes for a reference, I found this, which seems
maybe to address your concern, and if not, qualifies as post-able
material by virtue of its academic tone and diction:
"It is its distance from the status quo that gives postmodernism power
and appeal as an alternative discourse--not because it is immune to its
own implications, but because it acknowledges its own position as merely
equal in the fray. Lyotard's "language games" essentially characterize
the contemporary status of knowledge as a matter of various language
games that have no means of nominating themselves as master narratives.
Instead, innumerable language games, mininarratives of a sort, can
coexist on the same level of legitimacy. Each narrative contains within
itself the reasoning for its own existence, its own self-contained and
self-proclaimed legitimization, but none of those legitimizations has
recourse to other language games as a means of creating a heirarchy,
with the result that none is afforded the position of master narrative.
How can Lyotard's narrative recommend itself, then? Lyotard makes no
apologies for pursuing value judgements that appeal to his own master
narrative. And in the end, it seems that most poststructuralist
narratives aren't concerned with the problems posed by their own
inevitable appeals to metanarratives, their own "structurality." Even
writers who "perform" postmodernism as they write by doing such things
as violating the conventions of organization or clarity here and there
or indulging in wordplay on a fantastic scale or just writing dense,
ambiguous prose cannot disguise the fact that they have theses, and that
those theses make value judgements about what sort of world is
desirable. But they don't seem especially anxious to make excuses. The
poststructural vision is in some senses only the most recent wave of the
utopian narratives that have punctuated the history of western thinking
all along, and the writers of those visions apparently see no
insuperable obstacles in pursuing their projects along familiar lines.
The most powerful gesture in poststructuralism at this point--the gem it
has to offer--is the motion of acknowledging the constructed and
arbitrary nature of "truth," reason, science and law, etc."
-Geraldo Consuelo Bustamantaguatavini, "Ideological Wrinkles:
Arsebucketted Behavior in the Academy" (_The Saturday Evening Post_, May
12, 1975)
--
Matt Kozusko mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu