Postmodernism: Materialist?

[Ben B. Day]

> ... while much of 'postmodernism'
> (despite whatever it HAS to offer that is truly insightful or new) is
> just the latest installment of bourgeois reaction against marxist
> clarity...

Well, if we take Lyotard as the spokesman of postmodernism (since he
brought the term to philosophy), this accusation would be totally off-
base. Both the Frankfurters and Postmodernists tend to accuse one
another as propounding philosophies that effectively justify the
free capital ethos, although both explicitly claim to be opposing
advanced capitalism. I'm not quite sure that I consider this a terribly
effective form of criticism, especially when the two schools seem to
be leveling the same exact criticism (on different grounds, of course).

However, if we look instead at their actual political involvement of
the thinkers of these various schools, i.e. what movements they have
supported or opposed, it doesn't seem like the "school" they belong
to matters at all. Lyotard was a deeply involved in the French student
protests of the 60s, openly advocated the independence of Algeria,
and helped in various organizing efforts of the French working class,
helped Unions, etc. He also occupied the administration building at
Nanterre in 1968 where Paul Ricoeur was the dean at the time (a notion
I find hilariously appealing - philosophers holding one another hostage).
I can't really speak about Derrida, nor Foucault (although he disavowed
the title "postmodern"). But on the other side of the fence, we all
know what Adorno's relation to the student movement ended like in his
last year - calling the police to expel protestors from his building.
Marcuse, on the other hand, has a spotless record of supporting student
movements and the working class, and he criticized Adorno for the
incident mentioned above (which I think Horkheimer was involve with as
well).

In short, although it seems fashionable for various schools of
philosophy today to lambaste one another as being talking heads for
the bourgeoisie, I'm very skeptical of the claim that there is something
/about/ these philosophies that promotes capitalism or advocates
its overturn in any given situation (this is also the claim that Adorno
levels against Heidegger, and that Habermas levels against Gadamer -
that phenomenology/hermeneutical philosophies of history lead to
political quietism). Even though I suspect that all of these thinkers
are revolutionary, in that they would advocate a revolutionary change
from the present social structures, whenever a real movement rises up
in opposition to the status quo, the incredibly complex decision of
whether one is to support it as something that will bring about a
better world simply cannot be made based on the broad dictums of a
school's philosophy. This type of decision is "practical" wisdom
(Aristotelian phronesis) at its best, and can't be boiled down to
whether one's school is "really" justificatory or "really" socially
critical. The party lines here draw brush strokes that are simply too
broad, IMO. Even a Marxist is faced with an extremely difficult
decision in whether to support a self-proclaimed Marxist uprising, and
this awareness was extremely kean especially in the time that most of
these schools of philosophy are coming out of...

----Ben