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Pocket Guide to Postmodernism
that would seem to follow from a subjectivity of values. Postmodernist literary critic Fredric Jameson’s remark that “everything is ‘in the last analysis’ political” is illuminating: if an epistemology of objectivity and truth lends itself to a politics of domination and submission, certainly an epistemology of subjectivity and irrationality will also lend itself to another kind of human social organization.
Marx’s Counter-Enlightenment Other inconsistencies abound. Left-wing politics, such as socialism and communism, have tended to be defended on traditional modernist grounds of reason and science. Karl Marx, the famous German economist, founded much of the territory of left-wing economics and called his politics “scientific socialism.” Another seemingly contradictory stance of postmodernists is the rhetoric and tactics of postmodern politics. In the classrooms and boardrooms engaged by postmodern political activists, we have seen a great deal of hostility to debate, ad hominem arguments, and advocacy of the inherently authoritarian “political correctness.” We can cite several examples: (in)famously, Fish calling the opponents of affirmative action bigots and associating them with the Ku Klux Klan; Dworkin’s male-bashing to the extent of associating all penetrative sex with violence and having a “Dead Men Don’t Rape” slogan above her desk; or Saul Alinsky in Rules for Radicals advocating violence and deception as political tactics by. How did the far-Left strategy, which often traditionally upheld civility, tolerance, and justice, become so illiberal? Classical Marxism argued along modernist lines, via reason and evidence, that socialism was the next logical
