Postmodernism: Materialist?

[Ben B. Day]

> (This guy has a LOT of trouble addressing any point _I_ made; but then,
> this List is an 'academic exercise', isn't it..?)

Jim, I was addressing only one of your claims, which I quoted at the top of
my post. Namely, that "much of 'postmodernism'... is just the latest
of bourgeois reaction against marxist clarity."
You seem to have treated my post as circling about your quesiton of
whether postmodernism is (or potentially is) materialist, but I never
intended to address this matter. Which is not to say that it's not an
interesting question - it is - but you threw out this claim as if it
were uncontroversial in order to make the postmodernism-materialism
question more problematic. If seminal postmodernists have been
committed to the worker's movement - as I tried to show Lyotard, at
least, was - then allowing them a materialist (in the Marxist sense)
approach certainly doesn't seem as paradoxical.
I appreciate the other poster's comments on Deleuze in this respect.

> I would think that it would be quite crystal clear by now that any mode
> of thought which does not explicitly or implicitly posit a
> post-capitalist reality, objectively supports the opposite of that.

This is patently absurd, unless developmental political economy is a
'mode of thought.' The authors I mentioned in this regard - such as
Heidegger and Gadamer - contain very little in the way of substantive
political agendas. Heideggerian philosophy prescribes a mode of
authentic and inauthentic existence, but one can be authentic in almost
any endeavor. It's not a perscription for how one should stand on
political issues, it's a relation that one has to oneself and how we
assume responsibility for our own choices, or instead defer them to
others.
Although it's not uncommon for vociferous critics of Heidegger's
philosophy to attempt to link it implicitly with Heidegger's brief
stint with Nazism - as Adorno does in a way in _The Jargon of
Authenticity_ - these seem like extremely facile, polemically based
attempts. Perhaps the best argument against them is to note the
vast range of political stances taken up by Phenomenologists.
Sartre - who took Heidegger's "jargon of authenticity" to extremes
and placed it at the very base of his philosophy - is probably the
clearest counterexample. And we can put Merleau-Ponty in this camp
as well.
Since it's a trademark of the Frankfurt legacy to link philosophy with
polity - the true with the good (and Habermas is the shining apex of
this mingling - I think there's a tendancy of Frankfurt-leaning
scholars to be weary of the notion of an "apolitical philosophy." And
I agree that it's a notion to be weary of, but I don't think that one
should presuppose that there is an underlying political ideology
behind every philosophy. My previous post was an attempt to demonstrate
this.

----Ben