Rejecting Marxism foreclosed self-critique, so poststructuralism replaced rather than corrected nationalism

Evidence

When the limits of the nationalism of the national bourgeoisie became altogether evident, the hostility towards rigorous kinds of Marxism that had been assimilated from the postmodern avant-garde made it impossible for this literary theory to produce a rationally historicized autocritique of its own prior enthusiasms for that kind of homogenized nationalism. Instead, poststructuralism itself was offered as the determinate answer to nationalism, while – in at least some versions – some discrete elements of Marxism (not to speak of feminism) were reworked into the subordinate clauses of poststructuralism. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 70

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how a theory’s refusal to autocritique leads it to substitute new dogmas rather than revise — applies across disciplines from literary theory to tech criticism.
• XREF: connects to: Habermas’s poststructuralism critique is shaped by German anxieties over reactionary challenges — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 367; Poststructuralist critique rejects nationalism wholesale instead of judging its specific historical forms — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 169; Rejecting Marxism reframed colonial conflict as nations and culture, not classes and capital (+2 more)

Related

• Poststructuralist critique rejects nationalism wholesale instead of judging its specific historical forms (similarity 0.89)
• Rejecting Marxism reframed colonial conflict as nations and culture, not classes and capital (similarity 0.87)
• Literary theory’s rejection of nationalism mirrors poststructuralism’s rise (similarity 0.86)
• Poststructuralist debunking of nationalism succeeded Third-Worldist nationalism as the dominant academic counter-canon (similarity 0.85)
• Habermas’s poststructuralism critique is shaped by German anxieties over reactionary challenges (similarity 0.84)
• Frame choices that collapse politics into nationalism versus postmodernism erase socialist alternatives. (similarity 0.83)
• Poststructuralist Third World theory arose as a substitute for failed nationalist ideology (similarity 0.82)
• Poststructural literary theory’s nationalism critique tracked the national-bourgeois state’s rise and fall (similarity 0.81)
• Poststructuralist theory is itself a postmodernist symptom, not a neutral tool (similarity 0.79)
• Poststructuralism’s anti-essentialism is itself a repressive bourgeois position (similarity 0.78)
• Repudiating Marxism reframed global power as a West-non-West relation of nations rather than classes (similarity 0.78)
• Post-structuralist critics marginalize Marxist empire scholarship through jargon rather than argument (similarity 0.78)