Quaco Cloutterbuck's List: Pomo

• Postmodernist discourses are often exclusionary even when,  having been accused of lacking concrete relevance, they call attention  to and appropriate the experience of "difference" and "otherness" in  order to provide themselves with oppositional political meaning,  legitimacy, and immediacy. Very few African-American intellectuals have  talked or written about postmodernism.
• Critical of most writing on postmodernism, I perhaps am more  conscious of the way in which the focus on "otherness and difference"  that is often alluded to in these works seems to have little concrete  impact as an analysis or standpoint that might change the nature and  direction of postmodernist theory
• Since much of this theory has been  constructed in reaction to and against high modernism, there is seldom  any mention of black experience or writings by black people in this  work, specifically black women (though in more recent work one may see  reference to Cornel West, the black male scholar who has most engaged  postmodernist discourse).
• This is especially the case with works  that go on and on about the way in which postmodernist discourse has  opened up a theoretical terrain where "difference and otherness" can be  considered legitimate issues in the academy
• Confronting both the lack  of recognition of black female presence that much postmodernist theory  reinscribes and the resistance on the part of most black folks to  hearing about real connections between postmodernism and black  experience, I enter a discourse, a practice, where there may be no ready  audience for my words, no clear listener, uncertain, then, that my voice  can or will be heard.
• This was an ironic reply to the aggressive unmet demand by  decentered, marginalized black subjects who had at least for the moment  successfully demanded a hearing, who had made it possible for black  liberation to be a national political agenda. In the wake of the black  power movement, after so many rebels were slaughtered and lost, many of  these voices were silenced by a repressive state and others became  inarticulate; it has become necessary to find new avenues for  transmitting the messages of black liberation struggle, new ways to talk  about racism and other politics of domination. Radical postmodernist  practice, most powerfully conceptualized as a "politics of difference,"  should incorporate the voices of displaced, marginalized, exploited, and  oppressed black people.
• It is sadly ironic that the contemporary discourse which talks  the most about heterogeneity, the decentered subject, declaring  breakthroughs that allow recognition of otherness, still directs its  critical voice primarily to a specialized audience, one that shares a  common language rooted in the very master narratives it claims to  challenge.
• If radical postmodernist thinking is to have a  transformative impact then a critical break with the notion of  "authority" as "mastery over" must not simply be a rhetorical device, it  must be reflected in habits of being, including styles of writing as  well as chosen subject matter. Third-world scholars, especially elites,  and white critics who passively absorb white supremacist thinking, and  therefore never notice or look at black people on the streets, at their  jobs, who render us invisible with their gaze in all areas of daily  life, are not likely to produce liberatory theory that will challenge  racist domination, or to promote a breakdown in traditional ways of  seeing and thinking about reality, ways of constructing aesthetic theory  and practice.
• To be sure, much postmodernist critical inquiry  has centered precisely on the issues of  "difference" and "otherness." On the purely  theoretical plane the exploration of these  concepts has produced some important results, but  in the absence of any sustained research into what  artists of color and others outside the mainstream  might be up to, such discussions become rootless  instead of radica
• Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy which seeks  to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot  cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic  exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial  difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications  of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are  struggling to find new strategies of resistance.
• Postmodern theory that is not seeking to simply appropriate  the experience of "otherness" in order to enhance its discourse or to be  radically chic should not separate the "politics of difference" from the  politics of racism. To take racism seriously one must consider the  plight of underclass people of color, a vast majority of whom are black.
• Now because of the  deindustrialization, we also have a devastated  black industrial working class. We are talking  here about tremendous hopelessness. This hopelessness creates longing for insight and strategies for change  that can renew spirits and reconstruct grounds for collective black  liberation struggle.
• The overall impact of the postmodern condition is  that many other groups now share with black folks a sense of deep  alienation, despair, uncertainty, loss of a sense of grounding, even if  it is not informed by shared circumstance. Radical postmodernism calls  attention to those sensibilities which are shared across the boundaries  of class, gender, and race, and which could be fertile ground for the  construction of empathy--ties that would promote recognition of common  commitments and serve as a base for solidarity and coalition.
• "Yearning" is the word that best describes a common  psychological state shared by many of us, cutting across boundaries of  race, class, gender, and sexual practice. Specifically in relation to  the postmodernist deconstruction of "master" narratives, the yearning  that wells in the hearts and minds of those whom such narratives have  silenced is the longing for critical voice.
• The postmodern sensibility appropriates practices  as boasts that announce their own--and  consequently our own--existence, like a rap song  boasting of the imaginary (or real--it makes no  difference) accomplishments of the rapper. They  offer forms of empowerment not only in the face of  nihilism but precisely through the forms of  nihilism itself: an empowering nihilism, a moment  of positivity through the production and  structuring of affective relations.
• We should indeed suspicious of postmodern critiques of the  "subject" when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated  people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time.
• Criticisms of directions in postmodern thinking should not  obscure insights it may offer that open up our understanding of African- American experience. The critique of essentialism encouraged by  postmodernist thought is useful for African-Americans concerned with  reformulating outmoded notions of identity
• We have too long had  imposed upon us, both from the outside and the inside, a narrow  constricting notion of blackness. Postmodern critiques of essentialism  which challenge notions of universality and static over-determined  identity within mass culture and mass consciousness can open up new  possibilities for the construction of the self and the assertion of  agency.
• The unwillingness to critique essentialism on the part  of many African-Americans is rooted in the fear that it will cause folks  to lose sight of the specific history and experience of African- Americans and the unique sensibilities and culture that arise from that  experience. An adequate response to this concern is to critique  essentialism while emphasizing the significance of "the authority of  experience." There is a radical difference between a repudiation of the  idea that there is a black "essence" and recognition of the way black  identity has been specifically constituted in the experience of exile  and struggle.
• When black folks critique essentialism, we are empowered to  recognize multiple experiences of black identity that are the lived  conditions which make diverse cultural productions possible. When this  diversity is ignored, it is easy to see black folks as falling into two  categories--nationalist or assimilationist, black-identified or white- identified. Coming to terms with the impact of postmodernism for black  experience, particularly as it changes our sense of identity, means that  we must and can rearticulate the basis for collective bonding
• Certainly I do not think I am the only black  person engaged in forms of cultural production, especially experimental  ones, who is constrained by the lack of an audience for certain kinds of  work. It is important for postmodern thinkers and theorists to  constitute themselves as an audience for such work. To do this they  must assert power and privilege within the space of critical writing to  open up the field so that it will be more inclusive. To change the  exclusionary practice of postmodern critical discourse is to enact a  postmodernism of resistance. Part of this intervention entails black  intellectual participation in the discourse.
• In his essay "Postmodernism and Black America," Cornel West  suggests that black intellectuals "are marginal--usually languishing at  the interface of Black and white cultures or thoroughly ensconced in  Euro- American settings" and he cannot see this group as potential  producers of radical postmodernist thought. While I generally agree with  this assessment, black intellectuals must proceed with the understanding  that we are not condemned to the margins. The way we work and what we  do can determine whether or not what we produce will be meaningful to a  wider audience, one that includes all classes of black people.
• Postmodern culture with its decentered subject can be the  space where ties are severed or it can provide the occasion for new and  varied forms of bonding.
• On the  terrain of culture, one can participate in critical dialogue with the  uneducated poor, the black underclass who are thinking about aesthetics.  One can talk about what we are seeing, thinking, or listening to; a  space is there for critical exchange

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• Knowledge is inseparable from processes of its production, re-production, representation, distribution, reception and realization. At the same time, it also should not be disconnected from the question of the legitimization of its truth-value.
• The inner goal of any education is normalization of the subject in the service of re-producing the hegemonic social-cultural order and its realm of self-evidence.
• Traditionally the protection of these borders was entrusted to educators, teachers, intellectuals and administrators, who were expected to demarcate and preserve culture from nature, true from false, moral from immoral, nice from nasty, and good from evil.
• The protection of the wall of (worthy, true, and legitimate) knowledge is a precondition for social control and cultural productivity, and for the prevention of essential change in hegemonic knowledge. It reflects concrete powers, operating in specific historical moments and contexts. With the historical development of certain social power relations on the one hand, and of specific symbolic settings on the other, knowledge is changed and transformed.
• Since knowledge relates to the world, to the human subject, and to knowledge about knowledge, strong linkage exists among changes in the image of knowledge, the stability of the body of knowledge, and the creation of new human possibilities.
• Control of the legitimization, production, representation, and distribution of knowledge makes possible the reduction of the human subject into a “subject” who will function as an object or an agent of “her” system. In this sense control of knowledge allows much more than the possibilities of policing social behavior: it provides the means for establishing an unchallenged legitimization for a certain hegemonic version of the production of the “subject”, the normalized subject, her possibilities and limitations. Such control is usually called “education”.
• Normalized education constitutes and commands the “subject” on four levels: (1) Control of the psychic constitution of the “subject”, her psychological possibilities, and strivings, as well as the limits of controlling and changing their borders. (2) Control of the conceptual apparatus and associations, and their integration with the psychic level and its presence on the conceptual level. (3) Control of the collective and private self-conscious. (4) Control of the function of the “subject” in “her” reality and the minimization of the possibilities for change in the representation of reality that normalizing education reflects and serves.
• This preordained control that normalizing education is posted to guard is to be understood historically and contextually. It is in constant evolution, subject to struggles between conflicting interests and social powers, and influenced by the threatening, actual, or expected invasion of new conceptual and psychic possibilities.
• When a new spirit chances to burst into the relatively protected realm of self-evidence, a new setting and power relations become reality, new ways for control of knowledge are established, and new horizons are opened for education and counter-education.
• Within this tradition ideology, or false conscience, provides and legitimizes means for controlling the conscious and the performance of people in relation to their class, ethnicity, race, nationality, gender, and sexual preferences. Ideologies of the hegemonic as well as the marginalized collectives affect the ways they conceive and articulate their Others, their identity, and their positioning and re-positioning.
• The naturalization of the violence of normalizing education veils oppression and presents the knowledge, standards, aims, and pre-positions of the hegemony as legitimate or self-evident. As such, hegemonic knowledge alienates human beings from their world, domesticated human beings from their (abandoned) otherness, them from their Others, and current reality from possible other, more humane, realities. According to Karl Marx this relation is not ontological. It only reflects a certain historical moment in the material production (which includes the production of knowledge). Marx conceives this stage as pre-history.
• For Michel Foucault, knowledge is one of the manifestations of the presence of power (Foucault 1979, 27), which also produces the subjects that will enhance it, change it, and resist it – as one of its manifestations Foucault 1995, 210).
• Normalizing education cannot be challenged when there is only room for change – not for advancement or emancipation, for a different gaze or representation – not for reflection and critical dialogue. Within such a postmodern setting there is no room for the promise of the humanist and critical tradition
• From a coherent postmodern perspective only naivete can today offer to resist the hegemonic social powers and to allow a more humane context: that of a critical dialogue which opens new possibilities for the self-constitution of each of its participants.
• From the perspective of counter-education the stance of knowledge is in permanent historical change. With it, also change human possibilities for resistance as “subjects” within the system and as part of it on the one hand, and the possibilities for struggling for emancipation from functioning as “subjects” and becoming subjects who transcend normalizing education on the other. Technological progress and changes in capitalist production as well as in social organization emphasize the relevance of instrumental knowledge.
• In postmodern arenas knowledge is transformed in seemingly two opposite directions. In one, knowledge is reduced to bits of information, a symbol targeted at successful control in the service of aims which are produced with their ways of satisfaction. In the other, an alternative is introduced to instrumental rationality, to linear thinking, to hierarchies, to domination, and to aims that were typical in traditional male-oriented phallogocentrist knowledge (Turkle 1993).
• One can claim, however, that here too knowledge – even as contingent symbolic play and rhetorical gestures – must comply with the demands of the logic of control and the commitment to reduce the subject to a mere “subject” who complies with the imperatives of normalizing education.

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• systematic account of history and group struggle. In addition to presenting a new critical theory of society based on a synthesis of psychology and sociology, Critique qualified Sartre’s earlier, more radical view of existential freedom.
• Sartre’s pioneering combination of Existentialism and Marxism yielded a political philosophy uniquely sensitive to the tension between individual freedom and the forces of history
• Marxist he believed that societies were best understood as arenas of struggle between powerful and powerless groups. But as an Existentialist he held individuals personally responsible for vast and apparently authorless social ills
• hief existential virtue—authenticity—would require a person to lucidly examine his or her social situation and accept personal culpability for the choices made in this situation
• His theoretical account of oppression re-worked Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, arguing that oppression is a concrete, historical instance of mastery.
• To oppress another is to attempt to validate one’s sense of self by denying the freedom of another
• He answered the perennial question “What defines a social group?” with an ingenious re-working of Hegelian recognition. His account of the fusion and disillusion of social groups remains unique to this day.

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