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March 15, 2006
This is why I have little time for the cultural conservatives in Australia. In this editorial in Quadrant written by P.P. McGuinness we find this statement:
The reality is that the humanities are being, and largely have been, destroyed in the name of the meaningless subject of “cultural studies” and corrupted by “postmodernism”, which has become a substitute for thought and scholarship. Little of value is produced by the adherents or fellow travellers of this school, who are more concerned with political fashion amongst the lumpen intelligentsia than any analysis. Much of what they produce is propaganda or worse. Absurd subjects like “gender studies” or, even worse, “queer studies” are solemnly treated as worthy of respect, and projects of research are proposed which add precisely nothing to the sum of human knowledge.
Really? It indicates an ignorance of the texts of postructuralism that is covered up through bluster and avoidance of intellectual engagement of this attempt to free us from the limitations and distortions of the bourgeois cultural and social order inherited from the Enlightenment, so that we may understand the inadequacies of concepts and presuppositions that are taken for granted by and so imprison most of our contemporaries.
And then this:
The ARC, advised by experts who are drawn from such fields (or from the modern school of history-as-propaganda) allocates money to ridiculous projects on the advice of people who are products of the same belief system or secretly nurse their residual loyalty to Stalinism or Maoism, many of them to be found in the phony areas of the social sciences, like most sociology, much anthropology, and the tendentious mish-mash called political economy. The scientists are incapable of understanding just what rubbish is proposed for funding (with few exceptions, as in America with Alan Sokal and his famous hoax). The collegiality to which they still give lip service prevents their pointing to the emperor’s nakedness.
The phony areas of the social sciences? The dismissal is based on politics rather than the critique of limitations and distortions of the dominant world-view in contemporary Western societies
This view is based on a conception of choices and actions as expressions of individual subjective preferences, a conception of the point and purpose of knowledge as deriving from its usefulness in enabling us to predict and control our environment, and a conception of the rules that are to govern our moral and political lives as constraints upon our interactions with others in the form of universal laws or principles about which we would, under certain circumstances, all agree.
This view is part of the kind of social order which we inhabit not only frustrates the satisfaction of human needs and oppressively distorts human relationships, but also inculcates illusions about its own character, illusions that inform not only many of our everyday beliefs, but the standard academic disciplines. Hnece the need for critique.
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