I’m happy to witness you learning about poststructuralism for the first time. Strange that such a serious Marxist has never come across it, what with how practical and intellectual you are. Go have fun learning about it; seriously, go look up what it is and why it exists.
Yeah, no. I am familiar with poststructuralism, and even read some Foucault a couple of decades back. I’m also well aware of its historical ties to relativity and (to a lesser extent) quantum physics, and that, similarly to how those discoveries ruptured ideas of objective reality in physics, poststructuralism did so for objective meaning and the primacy of authorship in literature, history, and other humanities.
Poststructuralism is very useful for understanding how fascism takes hold and the power of propaganda. It allows us to better understand how Western colonialists shaped ideas of race to enforce their own supremacy. What it does not do is demand that we all choose to obfuscate and intentionally distort perspectives to obtain our goals. I would actually argue that, on the contrary, one of the important lessons of poststructuralism is that we should focus on the factual if we want to address the world’s problems in a non-zero-sum manner - it is often our attempts to codify subjective meaning into false narratives of supposed truth that are the source of strife and anomie when a society (or humanity at large) is capable of materially supporting itself.
All of which is to say, in a thoroughly roundabout and unnecessarily academic way, that’s its fucking annoying when you put words in people’s mouths and make assumptions about their beliefs based on things they didn’t even say. Please learn to take simple statements at face value, and don’t assume that everything is said for the purpose of trying to shape people’s understanding of the world. A prediction is not the same as an endorsement, and an acknowledgement of factual events is not a value judgement as to whether that reality is desireable or not.
I’m happy to witness you learning about poststructuralism for the first time. Strange that such a serious Marxist has never come across it, what with how practical and intellectual you are. Go have fun learning about it; seriously, go look up what it is and why it exists.
Yeah, no. I am familiar with poststructuralism, and even read some Foucault a couple of decades back. I’m also well aware of its historical ties to relativity and (to a lesser extent) quantum physics, and that, similarly to how those discoveries ruptured ideas of objective reality in physics, poststructuralism did so for objective meaning and the primacy of authorship in literature, history, and other humanities.
Poststructuralism is very useful for understanding how fascism takes hold and the power of propaganda. It allows us to better understand how Western colonialists shaped ideas of race to enforce their own supremacy. What it does not do is demand that we all choose to obfuscate and intentionally distort perspectives to obtain our goals. I would actually argue that, on the contrary, one of the important lessons of poststructuralism is that we should focus on the factual if we want to address the world’s problems in a non-zero-sum manner - it is often our attempts to codify subjective meaning into false narratives of supposed truth that are the source of strife and anomie when a society (or humanity at large) is capable of materially supporting itself.
All of which is to say, in a thoroughly roundabout and unnecessarily academic way, that’s its fucking annoying when you put words in people’s mouths and make assumptions about their beliefs based on things they didn’t even say. Please learn to take simple statements at face value, and don’t assume that everything is said for the purpose of trying to shape people’s understanding of the world. A prediction is not the same as an endorsement, and an acknowledgement of factual events is not a value judgement as to whether that reality is desireable or not.