Matt McManus
Actually, the problem begins with the title of the book itself. It assumes that postmodernism itself can be explained such that it does not just involve the author's own accumulated collection of moral and political and philosophical prejudices. All rooted existentially in dasein given the manner in which the trajectory of his life predisposed him to one set of prejudices rather than another.The Enlightenment and Its Discontents
The book’s problems begin on the very first page, with Hicks’ list of seminal postmodern authors. He includes obvious picks such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard, three of Hicks’ four horsemen of postmodernity. But others—Richard Rorty and Jacques Lacan—have a debatable association with postmodernity and some of those included were even outright critics of postmodernism, such as the feminist legal scholar Catherine Mackinnon, author of “Points Against Postmodernism,” and Luce Irigaray, whose work is a frequent target of postmodern feminists due to its alleged essentialism.
That's why I ask those like Satyr who embrace much of Hick's own political bigotries to explore an assessment of postmodernism in regard to a particular set of circumstances. Race, gender, sexual preferences, abortion, guns, the role of government. How are they encompassed in a postmodern frame of mind?
Or how about this:
Indeed, how does one go about examining American foreign policy in the Middle East as a postmodernist? As opposed to, say, a Marxist? Where from the Marxist frame of mind, the American government [Democratic or Republican] has always been utterly preoccupied with the oil there. Political economy in a nutshell.These problems persist throughout the book. Hicks completely misinterprets Lyotard’s quotation about Saddam Hussein in his 1997 book Postmodern Fables. Lyotard claims that, “Saddam Hussein is a product of Western departments of state and big companies,” which Hicks interprets to mean that Hussein is a “victim and spokesman for victims of American imperialism the world over.”
To wit:
"The irony was that Saddam had been a close American ally ever since Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic Revolution in Iran removed the Shah in 1979 and all through during the 1980s. Iraq was seen as an essential bulwark against the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The Americans had poured money and aid into Iraq to help it fight the Iranians during the eight years of the Iran-Iraq War from 1980 to 1988." WORLD
And, of course, the only reason that Iran became an enemy to the American government [Democratic and Republican] revolves around this:
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/69036340 ... -four-days
"On Aug. 19, 2013, the CIA publicly admitted for the first time its involvement in the 1953 coup against Iran's elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh."
We installed the autocratic Shah. Which eventually led to the Ayatollah Khomeini and this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_Revolution
Thus...
Exactly. It's not postmodern thinking that is explained so much as why the right wing/conservative objectivists are clearly deemed more rational and virtuous than the left wing/liberal objectivists.In fact, Lyotard’s essay discusses the early support Hussein received from the American government during his prolonged war against Iran in the 1980s. These interpretive problems immediately make one suspicious that this book may be less about explaining postmodernism in a liberal and charitable way and more about lumping together and dismissing all forms of left-wing criticism that may owe an intellectual debt to continental European thought.
By Hicks. By Satyr.
By Alexis Jacobi here?