Post/Modernism, Berlin's use of it and otherwise

Faith and her b/f were at the same shindig as I and my g/f were over the weekend and while we were there, she mentioned my penchant for name-dropping--which I promplty admitted to, but I'm not gonna lay off of it here (I'm too much of a junkie).

Kevin's post about Jameson brought a smile to my face because I had written in the margins of the shorter Berlin piece--among other things--"Always historicize!"--a declaration Jameson makes in _Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism_. I found a hint of Jameson (beyond Berlin's explicit nod), myself, and while I disagree in part with Berlin's (and Jameson's) assessment of pomo, I think I've already formulated my reasons for doing so (more about that in a minute).

I also must admit that while I was reading "Rhetoric and Ideoloy in the Writing Class," I was interested in Berlin's respective histories and assessments of Cognitive Rhetoric and Expressionistic Rhetoric, but I also felt a bit lost, having no background in the history of Rhet/Comp. But when he got to Social-Epistemic Rhetoric, I kept hearing myself saying "Yes! Yes! That's it exactly!" To get to the "why," however, I wanna back up a bit and address what Berlin says about Althusser and Foucault (Ronald Reagan would say "There you go again!"), and tie that in with what David S has to say about pomo in his post and what Faith asks of social-epistemic (Berlin) and invention (LeFevre)--and all of this is by way of getting to why I disagree with Berlin/Jameson on pomo.

Berlin says that he relies on Goran Therborn's usage of the word "ideology" and that he does so because Therborn marries Althusser to Foucault without relying on Althusser's Marxist positivism or without Foucault's "placing subjects within a seamless web of inescapable, wholly determinative power relations"--as Berlin goes on to comment, "For Therborn, power can be identified and resisted in a meaningful way" (478). I read that to mean that Berlin is arguing that Foucault does not allow for any such move. While it's a small matter here, I want to say something about what seems to be Berlin's assessment of Foucault as it will illustrate the bigger concern I have in regards to David S' and Faith's posts. Faith commented--and this is by no means should be read as an indictment of her (guilt by association):

"When Berlin says I am “lodged within a hermeneutic circle” (489), does he mean that there's no chance for my escape?
I still don't understand how I'm supposed to be simultaneously inside of a culture and critique it. Is this like asking a fish
to critique water? (Or like asking a fish to critique other fish? Or maybe kelp?)"

Many have made a charge against Foucault that he does not allow for escape--that he critiques power but constructs power as a "seamless web" from which the subject can never escape. But I find Foucault--both in terms of his biography and what he wrote--to be much more liberating. Explicitly, Foucault states the following in _Questions of Method_:

"The necessity of reform mustn't be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: 'Don't criticize, since you're not capable of carrying out a reform.' That's ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn't have to be the premise of a deduction which concludes: this then is what needs to be done. It should be an instrument for those who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confronation: essays in refusal."

Sounds a lot like epistemic rhetoric to me--and it gets at the larger issue Berlin addresses and that David S questions in terms of pomo. I wrote a seminar paper on pomo for 8070--Contemporary Approaches to Critical Theory--last semester in which I basically posit that one can speak of at least two forms of postmodernism (or Post/Modernism, as I formulate it)--the post-Fordist, late capitalist economic strand (a postmodernsim of repression) which Berlin outlines in Chapter 3, and a critique of those developments and other forms of repression (a postmodernism of resistance) which Berlin outlines (and critiques, it would seem) in Chapter 4. The quote David S includes from Berlin (from page 67) was one that I underlined--besied it I wrote "hooks quote." bell hooks, in fact wrote something strikingly similar in her essay "Postmodern Blacknesss":

"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."

But hooks, like Berlin I suspect, sees the emancipatory potential of a postmodernism of liberation--the essay's thrust, for me, is a call to get pomo out of the academy and into the streets, for critics/scholars to engage those that the write about (women, non-whites, the poor, queers--in every sense of the word, the oppressed wherever they are). It's a call for marrying theory with practice (praxis). This call is what drew me to both hooks and Freire, and it's what led me to say "Yes!" reading about Berlin's formulation of social-epistemic rhetoric. *This* is what I want to do when I teach. *This* is what brought me to the English department to begin with--I had read (ironically enough, considering Berlin's critique of them) Graff and Ohmann, as well as hooks and Freire, as well as Saussure and Levi-Strauss, as well as Althusser, Foucault and Derrida (teacher, student and student, again by the way) and Lyotard and Habermas. I must say, I came away not seeing how embracing one set made embracing another impossible--to me, there's nothing mutually exclusive about any two of them. They are all building on the same orientation in my opinion. It'll be my project to synthesize that belief as the semester progresses.