Many Regressive Returns!

Here is something that might bring a smile. :)

"Graphs on the Death of Marxism, Postmodernism, and Other Stupid Academic Fads":

http://tinyurl.com/3zhq8y

And a snippet from the above (from Sept. 2008):

"We are living in very exciting times -- at long last, we've broken the stranglehold that a variety of silly Blank Slate theories have held on the arts, humanities, and social sciences. To some, this may sound strange, but things have decisively changed within the past 10 years, and these so-called theories are now moribund. To let those out-of-the-loop in on the news, and to quantify what insiders have already suspected, I've drawn graphs of the rise and fall of these fashions."

Marxism! Psychoanalysis! Deconstruction! Feminism! Hegemony! Narratology! Oh my! Is it possible that all of these doctrines are "going south"? What the graphs appear to indicate, is that such things are being talked about less in the academic journals! And if they are being talked about less in the journals, it's a pretty safe bet they're being talked about less in academia at large. Furthermore, if academic people are talking about those things less, it means that they are edging those things out of their speech and out of their minds in favor of something else. . . .

Try to understand what is happening with those declining graph lines. Those lines suggest that the intellectual guts of political correctness are steadily rotting away!

All right, here is another item in a related vein of "news", of which the keen, sophisticated, cutting-edge readers of this most excellent of all possible web logs will not fail to grasp the importance. Well all right, perhaps it is mainly of interest to those who have got the patience to sift the arcane in search of the significant. (The purpose of the arcane, you see, is precisely to conceal the significant, like a needle in a haystack!) I myself occasionally have such patience, and it looks like THIS was one of those occasions:

"Beyond Reform: Agency 'after theory' ":

http://fty.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/3/315

As you will note, this is an academic article from a journal called Feminist Theory, dated December 2007 — which is fairly recent. Best of all, Sage Publications offers the article for download free of charge. Follow the link, and look for the red word free at the upper right.

Here is the abstract from the article:

"This article assesses the peculiar condition of being `after' theory. Any attempt to better understand why theory now haunts contemporary intellectual practice more than it challenges it must make use of the archive of feminist theory's critical distance with poststructuralism. In fact, feminist theory's traditional concern with the possibilities of/for agency gives us the most useful framework for assessing both the in/adequacy of theory and the in/adequacy of any `after theory' return (whether to aesthetics, intentionality, universalism, liberalism, the literary, etc.). If the question of agency puts pressure on theory's shortcomings, and the continued failure to locate agency within a constructivist framework gives legitimacy to regressive returns, then a more sustained discussion of agency is urgent. In turn, locating agency requires, philosophically and critically, a recuperation of `experience' as a way of knowing. If it can be argued that the constructive process is what occasions experience, and experience, finally, is the site of agency, then we can theorize the `how' of agency without relying on externalized positionalities (which are phenomenologically untenable). Finally, if, politically speaking, the failure to locate agency leaves us oscillating between the avowal and disavowal of reform, then a sustained discussion of agency promises to take us `beyond reform' altogether."

Even if this is not your preferred style of literature, I would encourage you to give it a go. Hint: something important is happening here; an intellectual crisis is brewing in academia. Read the rest of the article, and you will learn of a loss of faith which bedevils the intellectual ruling class! It seems they have reached a point on the cliff where they can climb no higher, and yet they can't go DOWN again! And those orange-highlighted passages jump right out and sock me in the eye — that is why I highlighted them!

Pay special attention to that little word 'agency'; it speaks tons. Then read THIS again: http://tinyurl.com/d2t6w6

. . . . where, as you will note, that little word likewise occurs.

Finally, allow me translate the meaning of "regressive return" to "an age of pre-theoretical innocence" into layman's English. It simply means throwing political correctness overboard. So in the end, the big question which the article looks into is this: how to move beyond (cultural Marxist critical) "theory" without sacrificing political correctness.

Because "theory", as we see from the first-linked website, is in decline.

I'll leave you connect more dots on your own. . . .