Political Language: this is how you start a takedown!

Oh, hell yes! A postmodernist takedown! (via ilyagerner, evgenymorozov):

The first paragraph of Matt Cartmill’s review of Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions book. It appeared in the International Journal of Primatology (Vol. 12, No. 1, 1991)

This is a book that contradicts itself a hundred times; but that is not a criticism of it, because its author thinks contradictions are a sign of intellectual ferment and vitality. This is a book that systematically distorts and selects historical evidence; but that is not a criticism, because its author thinks that all interpretations are biased, and she regards it as her duty to pick and choose her facts to favor her own brand of politics. This is a book full of vaporous, French-intellectual prose that makes Teilhard de Chardin sound like Ernest Hemingway by comparison; but that is not a criticism, because the author likes that sort of prose and has taken lessons in how to write it, and she thinks that plain, homely speech is part of a conspiracy to oppress the poor. This is a book that clatters around in a dark closet of irrelevancies for 450 pages before it bumps accidentally into its index and stops; but that is not a criticism, either, because its author finds it gratifying and refreshing to bang unrelated facts together as a rebuke to stuffy minds. This book infuriated me; but that is not a defect in it, because it is supposed to infuriate people like me, and the author would have been happier still if I had blown out an artery. In short, this book is flawless, because all its deficiencies are deliberate products of art. Given its assumptions, there is nothing here to criticize. The only course open to a reviewer who dislikes this book as much as I do is to question its author’s fundamental assumptions—which are big-ticket items involving the nature and relationships of language, knowledge, and science.

My favorite bit is the end (because it sums up all I find abhorrent about postmodernism:

In its denial of external reality as something given, its obsession with motifs of dominance and power, and its rejection of logical dualisms (war is peace, freedom is slavery, and what is untrue is above all not simply false, and vice versa), the postmodernist sensibility displayed in this book is strangely reminiscent of the official philosophy of Orwell’s posttotalitarian state. Haraway is, of course, no propagandist for Big Brother, but she has chosen not to acknowledge a truth that Orwell, like Marx, always insisted on: that there is a world antecedent to human ambition and desire, and that the powerful and arrogant are occasionally constrained to acknowledge that objective reality by having their noses rubbed in it. To deny that reality is to deny that there are external constraints on human power. It amounts to saying that the right TV programs can keep the masses hypnotized forever, because there is nothing beyond the screen that might wake them up unexpectedly. Saying tha.t may feel like a brave gesture of defiance to Haraway, but from where I sit it looks like a capitulation.

 Full review can be read here (academic paywall!)

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   Notes EM: this is how you start a takedown!

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   Notes EM: this is how you start a takedown!

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