Poststructuralist theory reduces politics by condemning totalizing knowledges
Evidence
For these more recent developments in ‘theory’, especially for those sections of literary theory which surely set the terms for dealing with issues of empire, colony and nation, this general situation had peculiarly disorientating effects. In one kind of pressure, politics as such has undergone remarkable degrees of diminution. Any attempt to know the world as a whole, or to hold that it is open to rational comprehension, let alone the desire to change it, was to be dismissed as a contemptible attempt to construct ‘grand narratives’ and ‘totalizing (totalitarian?) knowledges’ The theorist spoke often enough of imperialism and nationalism, sometimes as dialectical opposites but increasingly as twin faces of the same falsity, bur the main business of radicalism came to reside in the rejection of rationalism itself (the Enlightenment project, as it came to be called). — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 281
Categorization
- XREF: Directly connects to this reader’s central research: the discourse-determinist move Ahmad critiques — dismissing systemic/class analysis as totalizing ‘grand narrative’ — is the mechanism by which strategic recourse to essentialism and identity discourse displaces material structural critique. — connects to: Poststructuralist concepts drop the ideological dimension that social analysis needs. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 722; The actualist State-as-superior-entity theory reduces individuals to abstractions
- SEED: Essay angle: how poststructuralist suspicion of ‘grand narratives’ functions as a class politics in disguise, privileging those with the literacy and leisure to afford anti-rationalism.
Broader Connections
- Poststructuralist concepts drop the ideological dimension that social analysis needs.
#corroborates(0.78) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 722 - The actualist State-as-superior-entity theory reduces individuals to abstractions
#qualifies(0.72)