Lost up the Kilburn High Road

Last week I received an invitation to a showing of the new film about Stuart Hall (not that one – this one) – you can watch a trailer here - which has prompted me to dust off a half-written post that I started earlier this year.

Stuart Hall was one of my heroes. I discovered him in the early 1980s via his classic articles about Thatcherism in Marxism Today and, as I wrote in my last post, went on from there to explore his work at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. I also have him to thank for introducing me to the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Back then Hall carved out an original and sophisticated political position, clearly critical of Thatcherism and its ‘authoritarian populism’, but attempting to understand its popularity (in Gramscian terms, the ‘good sense’ in its ‘common sense’) and to develop a contemporary progressive response that embraced ‘New Times’. It was a world away from the shrill sloganeering of the old revolutionary left, whether Trotskyite or ‘tankie’, and showed a much clearer understanding of how Britain, and its working class, had changed, than the ‘one-more-push’ oppositionalism of the Bennites. At a personal level, too, I found it easy to identify with Stuart. Like him, I had begun as a student of literature, had worked in adult education, and my politics were also grounded in an attempt to understand the intersection of class and culture. Hall soon joined William Morris, Raymond Williams and E P Thompson in the pantheon of my political and cultural heroes.

Some time later, I found myself on a postgraduate adult education course at Nottingham, supposedly run along ‘dialogic’ Freirean lines, but in fact an induction into a distinctly old-school Marxism, from which dissent was difficult. The tutors were particularly hostile to Hall and to ‘New Times’ analysis, regarding it as a betrayal of the true Marxist gospel, and I found myself regularly forced into defending him – which only strengthened my attachment to his ideas. It wasn’t long after this that I came to work at The Open University, where Hall himself had migrated from Birmingham. In fact, my first piece of course writing – on ‘culture’, as it happened - was sent to him for critical reading. Stuart was characteristically generous and helpful in his response to this piece of callow apprentice work. It was a few years before I actually plucked up the courage to speak to him – or rather, before a mutual colleague introduced us. I shyly muttered a few words about how his Marxism Today articles had kept me going through the Thatcher years, and Hall said something self-effacing about how ‘a few of us’ were hoping to get a similar venture going again soon. That venture turned out to be Soundings, the journal of culture and politics that has now produced its own political programme – the Kilburn Manifesto – which prompted the writing of this post.

I think my unadulterated admiration of Stuart Hall’s work began to diminish some time in the late 1990s, for both political and academic reasons. Marxism Today, which had collapsed along with its Communist Party sponsors after the events of 1989, revived itself for a special edition to mark Labour’s landslide victory of 1997. As someone who had rejoined the Labour Party shortly after Tony Blair was elected leader, in part because the New Labour project seemed to embody much of what Hall’s ‘New Times’ thinking was pointing towards (modernisation of the progressive message, new kinds of alliances, an understanding of the changing identities and aspirations of post-Thatcher Britain), I was deeply disappointed by the analysis that Hall and his fellow contributors now offered. Not that I was completely uncritical of Blair, but the simple negativity of that response seemed indistinguishable from the knee-jerk oppositionalism of the ‘old’ left, whether parliamentary or otherwise, from which Hall’s writings had once offered such a refreshing change.

Academically, too, but over a much longer period, I had gradually became disillusioned with the direction that cultural studies, the discipline that Stuart Hall had founded virtually singlehandedly, and of which he was still the key theoretical luminary, had begun to take. In my view it had become increasingly obsessed with high-theoretical hairsplitting, riddled with obfuscating jargon, and divorced from any engagement with practical politics. Theoretically, cultural studies seemed lost in a post-structuralist fog that I came to see not just as aloof from politics but dangerously apolitical and morally relativist, exemplified (to cite two of the most egregious examples) by Michel Foucault’s endorsement of the ayatollahs and Judith Butler’s claim that the racist, misogynist Hamas was part of the ‘global left’.

Of course, I should acknowledge that I too had changed in the interim. No longer describing myself as any kind of Marxist, like many others in the aftermath of 1989 I had come to accept that any form of progressive change worth having must be rooted in individual liberty, representative democracy and – yes, free markets.  As I explained in my last post, I had moved away from both the Bennite Labourism of my youth and the Gramscian Eurocommunism of later years and was now an unashamed social democrat. Then, in the wake of 9/11 and the rise of the new global threat of militant fundamentalism, I began to find myself in sympathy with the anti-totalitarian democratic leftism of the Euston Manifesto.

There’s a definite nod to that document, of course, in the name of the Soundings team’s latest intervention, which I suppose Eustonites should take as some kind of compliment. Given my earlier engagement with Stuart Hall’s work, it was with mixed feelings that I read his introduction to the Kilburn Manifesto in The Guardian back in April, and then the first instalment of the programme itself that has been published online (more instalments have since been published, but I have to confess that I haven't read them thoroughly yet). There’s much in the document and the article that resonates, particularly the delineation of our current ills. Who on the Left could take issue with this description of where we are currently:

The breakdown of old forms of social solidarity is accompanied by the dramatic growth of inequality and a widening gap between those who run the system or are well paid as its agents, and the working poor, unemployed, under-employed or unwell. 

But while the diagnosis may be (partly) sound, the prognosis often feels like a blast from the past, as if nothing has really changed since those heady days of the late Seventies and early Eighties. The language and style of argument used, the forms of address, all seem to be resonant of that earlier era in our political history – and in my personal political journey.

I say ‘partly’ sound because I think the Kilburnites also get some things wrong about the current state of things. Of Margaret Thatcher, who died shortly before his article was written, Hall writes that her funeral ‘was designed to install her as the emblem of a unified nation, and set the seal on three decades of work by three political regimes – Thatcherism, New Labour and the coalition – to fundamentally reshape Britain.’ Leaving aside the way this skates over very real differences between three democratically elected governments, the model of political change assumed here is of a unified exercise of power by a dominant elite. We’re back in the mechanistic, top-down world of Louis Althusser, and a world away from the multiple sites of power identified by Foucault, one of Hall’s key influences, never mind the unending struggle for hegemony described by Gramsci. It’s not far removed, in fact, from conspiratorial thinking about a hidden hand pulling the strings behind the scenes, with democratic ‘choice’ being little more than an illusion.

A similar one-way model of the exercise of power is evidenced in these words about popular culture:

Market forces have begun to model institutional life and press deeply into our private lives, as well as dominating political discourse. They have shaped a popular culture that extols celebrity and success and promotes values of private gain and possessive individualism. 

There’s a grain of truth in this, of course, as there is in much of what Hall and the Kilburnites have to say – the good sense in their common sense, one might cheekily say. But one gets the feeling that, in this political worldview, it’s only external forces – of which market forces are one example – that have any agency and are able to ‘shape…extol…promote’. Reading this, you’d think that people never voluntarily watched a television programme or freely voted for measures that encouraged individualism. The same forces are said to have ‘thoroughly undermined the redistributive egalitarian consensus that underpinned the welfare state’. But what if that consensus failed because it lost credibility and popular support? Where now the complex ‘New Times’ understanding of Thatcherism, the past failures of the Left, and new class formations?

Moreover, Hall’s use here of the word ‘regime’ for the elected British government, as if this were the Soviet Union or some tin-pot dictatorship, rather grates. It’s the sign of a worrying inability to distinguish between western democracies, however fallible, and truly oppressive systems. In fact, you’ll search in vain in this article, or in the online extract from the Kilburn Manifesto, for any acknowledgement that every radical social experiment of the kind advocated here has ended in some form of tyranny.

I found it telling, too, that the only footnote in the first online extract is a reference to Althusser, the anti-humanist Marxist theorist whom E P Thompson so memorably excoriated in The Poverty of Theory, and whose mechanistic, top-down systematizing of culture and society were robustly criticised in Hall’s earlier writings. And then, while it’s only a footnote, there’s surely something awry when your sole secondary reference is to a theorist whose name will mean nothing beyond the social scientific academy.

The writers of the manifesto still seem, after all this time, to be seeking new social movements to unite with the traditional working class (whatever that might be, these days), to form a majority for their progressive project. This leads to an unwarranted excitement about entirely marginal, unrepresentative and sometimes worryingly illiberal insurgencies like the Occupy movement. Behind this chimeric search for an extra-parliamentary alliance is a tacit admission that the existing electoral system has, time and again, failed to provide a majority in favour of radical socialist change. This comes across as fundamentally elitist, as if the British public were wrong to vote repeatedly for New Labour, and more recently to reject all forms of Labourism and elect a coalition of Conservatives and the Liberals. To quote Brecht, it sounds like a call to dissolve the people and elect another.

Where do the Kilburnites look for templates for their political programme? Two get a mention in Hall’s piece: ‘the short era of Ken Livingstone's GLC and the radical experiments under way in Latin America’, and indeed our Ken’s image adorns the head of the article. But you’ll find no reference here to critiques of Livingstone’s communalism or to his more dubious alliances in the interests of civic multiculturalism. And which Latin American ‘radical experiments’ are signified here, or is it left deliberately vague? One hopes it doesn’t mean Hugo Chavez’ dictatorial regime: now there’s ‘authoritarian populism’ for you. Once again, there’s little sense of the failures and shortcomings in these socialist experiments, whether at the local or national level, nor of the risks of history repeating itself if the same formula is followed.

So while I shall watch the new film about Stuart Hall with interest (not least for its cool jazz soundtrack), and continue to value his huge contribution to our understanding of the intersection of politics and culture, and of course to my own intellectual development, I shan’t be signing the Kilburn Manifesto. My politics will remain firmly rooted in NW1, rather than NW6.

Closed conference

If you’d been in the San Francisco Bay Area last month, you might have been tempted to drop in on this event:

Or maybe not. A closer look at the conference programme would have given you pause. The event seems to have drawn its inspiration from a Huffington Post article by one M. J. Rosenberg, which ‘summed-up possibly for the first time and in clear fashion the primary motivations behind the increasing intensity of the Islamophobes’ campaign’. The programme note goes on:

Rosenberg's analysis makes a connection between domestic Islamophobia production and dissemination in the US and foreign policy objectives related to the Muslim world, which centers on fomenting hate and bigotry at home so as to create the needed condition for continued support of militarism and endless war abroad.

The organisers then make the following claim:

At present the airwaves, news, TV shows and centers of culture production are filled with Islamophobic content thus making racism directed at Muslims and Islam a fully sanctioned discourses [sic] affecting American Muslims as well as shaping foreign policy discourses.

In response to these developments, ‘the conference will seek to document the ideological, institutional and financial interests entangled in the production and dissemination of Islamophobic contents in the US and in Europe and exploring the primary desired outcomes, in the short and long terms.’

In other words, if it was an open-minded, diverse, academic exploration of the causes of anti-Muslim prejudice you were looking for – then think again. The organisers of this event had clearly made up their minds in advance, and their programme reads like a political manifesto rather than an academic prospectus. You can just tell there wouldn’t have been much point attending if, for example, you thought it was something of an overstatement to claim that the airwaves are 'filled with Islamophobic content' or if, whatever your opinion of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, you believed they were motivated by something other than hatred of Muslims. Or if you suspected that the very notion of ‘Islamophobia’ might have been dreamed up (‘produced’, to use the conference’s preferred jargon), or at the very least exploited, by fundamentalists seeking to constrain criticism of their beliefs.

Then again, your interest in attending this event might have been somewhat undermined by reading that ‘the conference will bring together researchers, academics, community advocates and representatives of the Organization of Islamic Conference’. Even if you knew nothing about the latter group, a quick Google search would have thrown up some rather worrying information: such as that its political headquarters is in Tehran, that a virulently antisemitic speech at one of its conferences received a standing ovation, and that this was the outfit that tried to persuade the UN to introduce a ‘defamation of religion’ law that would have effectively outlawed criticism of Islam. You might begin to wonder what a responsible academic institution, let alone one one with a 'liberal' reputation, was doing collaborating with an organisation of this nature.

And finally, you might question why a ‘Centre for Race and Gender’ was devoting its resources to an 'Islamophobia project' in the first place. Surely a more urgent priority would be to analyse the racism (antisemitism, repression of ethnic and religious minorities) and sexism (honour killings, forced marriage,  absence of civil rights for women) perpetrated in the name of Islam - which are arguably both more widespread and more deadly than the prejudices of supposed 'Islamophobes'?

All in all, this absurd conference is a striking illustration of a number of things that are wrong with the postmodern academic 'left'.  Firstly, there’s the ingrained habit of responding to any new development that doesn't fit its existing narrative - in this case, the growth of radical Islam - by looking studiously in the opposite direction. Secondly, and related to this, is the tendency to trace the blame for any problem in the world to the sins of the West, and the United States in particular: so it's our racism that's the cause of all these wars, not their terrorism. And thirdly, there's the temptation to see any anti-western movement - in this case the blatantly patriarchal, anti-free-speech OIC - as objectively progressive - as, in postmodern feminist Judith Butler's notorious phrase about Hamas and Hezbollah, 'part of the global left'.

Alan Johnson analysed this pseudo-leftist cast of mind earlier this week, in a post over at the World Affairs site:

After 1989, and especially after 9/11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the old idea that Stalinism (its crimes notwithstanding) was objectively progressive against the West, morphed into the idea that all opposition to 'US imperialism' or 'Empire' was a 'resistance' or 'multitude' that must be (its crimes notwithstanding) supported, or at least not opposed energetically.

This pro-tyrant left thinks it holds the key to the entire world in the palm of its hand. If America is opposed to a tyrant, then—there is some dubious logic here, but this really is the crucial move—the tyrant must be opposing America. And—this is the last stretch, stay with me—therefore the tyrant is an 'anti-imperialist' and, objectively, 'progressive.'

The programme for the 'Islamophobia Production' conference' ends with this promise: 'The papers presented at the conference will be published in UC Berkeley’s Islamophobia Studies Journal inaugural edition Fall, 2011'. I can hardly wait. That a respectable university even publishes something called 'Islamophobia Studies' (do you think they have a parallel 'Islamist Studies' journal?) is yet anther symptom of the sorry decadence of the academic 'post-left'.

(H/T Martin Kramer via Facebook)

The blinkered vision of the 'post' left

A couple of interesting pieces about anti-imperialism and the myopia of the modern left:

First, Michael Tomasky on the 'fatuous gas' of Michael Moore's open letter to President Obama 'about America, Afghanistan and empire', in which the film-maker repeats the lazy trope about US involvement repeating mistakes made by Britain and Russia:

I really don't see what America's mission in Afghanistan has to do with what the British did or what the Soviets did. People love lazy historical parallels, and have a tendency to have over-learned the famous Santayana maxim and believe that invoking it makes them sound smart. But every historical situation is different. Why wouldn't someone with Moore's lefty politics be righteous in the conviction that we owe it to the Afghan people to try to help them establish a proper nation-state for the first time in their history?

And in response to this from Moore - 'Stop the insane idea that men with guns can reorganize a nation that doesn't even function as a nation and never, ever has' - Tomasky writes:

That sentence of Moore's [...] is pretty condescending, isn't it? It's never been a nation, isn't now, and (implied) never will be. Ain't our problem. Well, I think it is our problem. It's true that some places and peoples on this earth just get dealt a bad hand. Afghanistan, with no ports or water access and an impossible terrain, is one of those places. It's always going to be poor. But it can adopt the structures of a functioning society. Having invaded it, we ought to try to help it, not just throw up our hands and say forget about it.

Tomasky interprets Moore's position as symptomatic of the political tunnel vision of many on the modern left:

Anyway, this is the thing about the left, at least of Moore's generation. The anti-imperialist reflex -- the tendency and sometimes even eagerness to see America as an empire bent on imperial designs and dominance -- always trumps everything else.

Along similar lines, here's Joshua Leach writing about the work of postcolonial critic Ashis Nandy (via B&W):

Had William Hazlitt written his essay “On Persons with One Idea” today, he would surely have found room for the field of postcolonial studies. It is a field with only one idea: namely, that imperialism and racism are such dominant features of modern life, and had such a foundational role in the construction of our present society, that they inform every aspect of our ideas, culture, and history. Postcolonialism is, in theory, anti-hierarchical and anti-oppressive. But because it has only one idea, it can easily become oppressive in practice, and to quite a large extent.

I recommend reading the whole article: it carefully takes apart the hoary myth that liberal universalism is nothing more than a cover for western imperialism, and highlights the logical contradiction of criticising the evils of imperialism from a standpoint of cultural relativism, in the belief that 'egalitarian ideologies, the ideals of democracy and human rights [are] mere hierarchies and oppressions in disguise'. As Leach writes:

But how does one know that such hierarchies are reprehensible if equality is not a goal? If egalitarian ideologies, democracy, and self-government are not legitimate ideals, why should it be the case, as Nandy maintains, that imperialism is so wrong?

Like Tomasky, Leach points to the dangers of the single-minded focus on imperialism by the post-colonialist, post-modern left:

What is important to realize, however, is that imperialism is not the only evil in the world, even though it is a serious one. The failure to see this rather elementary fact characterizes a great deal of postcolonial scholarship. One must avoid imperialism, but one must not be so desperately fearful of intervening in other countries that one seals off the victims of cruelty within their respective nations and refuses to promise aid.

The danger of this position, of course, is that self-proclaimed progressives end up endorsing the most reactionary social movements in the name of anti-imperialism:

Nandy is tempted, thanks to the entire spirit of postcolonialism, to attribute all of the world’s evils to imperialism. And because of this, he ends up tacitly condoning all of the world’s injustices which predate imperialism, such as patriarchy, religious intolerance, and the violence of tradition. Given Nandy’s personal views in his public life, he would no doubt be shocked to be accused of defending such things. But he has in fact fallen victim to the postcolonial trap: he has focused so exclusively on one injustice—imperialism—that he has rendered himself inured to all the other injustices in the world which are also crying out for redress.

UCU does something right

Credit where it's due: the Universities and Colleges Union seems to be doing the right thing (for a change) with regard to the situation in Iran.

On Saturday UCU general secretary Sally Hunt represented the union at a protest outside the Iranian embassy, as part of the Justice for Iranian Workers campaign.

The UCU has also condemned the Iranian government's arrest of 70 university professors, as part of the crackdown on opposition protestors.

Here's a video about the workers' rights campaign from the International Transport Workers' Federation (ignore the misleading date at the top):

Support Simon Singh: keep libel laws out of science

I've just added the 'Keep libel laws out of science' button to the bottom of this page. See here for the original story about the British Chiropractic Association's legal moves to silence science writer Simon Singh's challenge to claims about the efficacy of their treatments. And go to the Sense about Science site for more information on the campaign to defend Singh. I'm not a scientist, but this looks like a clear case of academic and intellectual freedom under attack. It also makes a mockery of the UK's antiquated and illiberal libel laws.

A sad day for union democracy and academic freedom

Back in February I urged UCU members to vote for candidates for election to the union's National Executive Committee who would stand up to the pro-boycott far left. Last week, Jon Pike, chair of Engage and elected NEC member, described attempts by the SWP/UCU Left to block calls for a ballot of members before any boycott is introduced. Now, sadly, Jon has resigned from the committee, in response to its resolution in support of an academic boycott of Israel, in defiance of the majority of the union's members. In his letter of resignation, Jon writes:

Whether or not such resolutions can be implemented, or have been declared void, their adoption is a violation of the democratic principle that the union ought to represent its membership.

It will be said that the UCU, on behalf of its membership, and on behalf of the academic community in Britain, would wish to push for an academic boycott of Israel, but is prevented from doing so by legal means.

This claim is entirely false. The members have not supported such a proposal, and they have not been asked their views.

In their reaction to Jon's resignation, Norman Geras and Eve Gerrard speak for many:

Jon's presence on the executive council meant that there was a courageous voice trying to bring the union to an understanding of what it was doing, and how ruinous for union values, and for the membership, its trajectory was and is. That voice is now gone from the NEC, which is even more than before given over to the pernicious ideology of the SWP and its sympathizers, who are utterly unrepresentative of the Union membership and of academics more broadly.

Honour to Jon, who has fought with great resilience and intelligence for the preservation of democracy, academic freedom and anti-racism in the union; dismay and a sense of chill for academics - Jewish and others - who share those values; yet deeper discredit for the union itself, whose overwhelming and febrile obsessions about Israel and 'Zionists' may now be irremediable.

Some thoughts on the post-modern academic left

I was at a seminar the other day, when one of the speakers, a prominent feminist academic, made some remarks about racism after 9/11 that both annoyed me and prompted some thoughts about the inadequate response of the post-modern academic left (a broad-brush term, I admit, but I think you'll know what I mean) to recent world events. 

In her lecture, the speaker suggested that racism had not gone away in recent years, but since 9/11 had mutated into a hostility to the culture, values and religion of the (implicitly Muslim) 'other'. Part of my frustration at this claim (which wasn't followed up by considered argument, but was almost a throwaway line, as if the speaker knew her like-minded audience would instinctively agree) derived from the fact that I had spent the previous evening watching this compelling exchange between Irshad Manji and Salman Rushdie (recommended by Max here), in which these two writers from Asian Muslim backgrounds argued passionately that white liberals should not hold back from criticising Islam out of a wrongheaded fear of causing 'offence' to particular faiths or cultures. Now this white, liberal academic appeared to be suggesting exactly the opposite: that any critique of Islamic ideas and practices was a manifestation of racism and therefore off-limits.

This prompted a number of thoughts. Firstly, that those elements of the academic left who cite (as did this speaker) Foucault as a major influence on their thinking, often have a remarkably un- or pre-Foucauldian take on the operations of power. As I read him, Foucault was trying to move away from what he saw as a crude Marxist view of power as only held at the centre - by the state - and operating in a unidirectional, transmission-belt kind of way, thinking of power instead as something dispersed throughout society and as having positive as well as negative effects. However, some of these po-mo post-Foucauldians seem precisely to assume that 'real' power only exists in one place - broadly, the capitalist / imperialist / racist west. All else is the  'resistance' of the powerless. Therefore, when any new event occurs in the world, the instinct of the po-mo leftist is to look beneath the apparent causes, to see how it's 'really' the result of actions by 'us'.  (I'm not suggesting, by the way, that because these people mis-read Foucault, the latter was somehow 'right': see this post for the political consequences of his theories).

Secondly, po-mo theorists like my feminist academic appear to have a strangely static and un-dynamic vision of the world, in which there's no room for progressive change. Rather than charting the ways in which racism, for example, has been fought over the years, and acknowledging that there might (just possibly) have been some diminution in oppression and discrimination, she instead conjured up a picture of racism as some unchanging, ahistorical 'thing', standing outside and looming above history, unable to 'really' change but capable only of appearing in new guises. This is philosophical idealism and reification, not historical materialism. So po-mo leftists see the military-industrial complex, or imperialism, or capitalism, not as dynamic, contested processes involving real people, but almost as entities with a transhistorical life of their own. It's close to a conspiracy-theory view of history, and perhaps helps to explain why some on the po-mo left have succumbed so easily to myths about the influence of the supposed Zionist lobby, etc.

Thirdly, I was reminded of how po-mo academic leftists have been unable to face up to the new phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalist terror, and instead have often tried to change the subject. When they discourse about the 'post-9/11 world', they're not interested in analysing the roots or nature of Islamist ideology. No, they'd much rather talk about the west's reaction to it - the supposed threats to our liberties, the rise of 'Islamophobia', and so on - as if this was the 'real' story. What a gift the Bush administration's response was to this brand of leftist theorist! The Patriot Act, Guantanomo, Iraq - these all enabled po-mo leftists to turn their attention back to something they felt comfortable criticising - yet another manifestation of that same old western power complex. You could almost hear the sighs of relief in the seminar rooms and lecture halls.

Of course, if po-mo theorists don't succeed in changing the subject, and end up having to engage with the phenomenon of militant Islam, all they can do is attempt to fit it into familiar categories. If 'the west' is the only real nexus of power in the world, and is unequivocally oppressive, then those who oppose it must be the 'resistance', and therefore progressive. So you get the distasteful phenomenon of leading feminist theorist Judith Butler claiming that the misogynist, racist Hamas are part of the 'global left.' Or the media studies professor, injured in the 7/7 attacks, writing an imagined 'open letter' to one of the bombers, in which he attempted to 'understand' their rage at British foreign policy, while wishing they had chosen a different means to express it. Can you imagine someone injured in the bombing of a gay pub a few years back writing to the homophobic bomber trying to 'understand' his anger at anti-discrimination legislation? - and yet the perpetrators of 7/7 were just as reactionary and anathema to all progressive values. Or imagine a left-wing academic in the Thirties suggesting that, since Nazism was born out of anger at Germany's humiliation by the European powers, it was part of the global resistance to capitalism (hmm, having read Nick Cohen's book, maybe that's not so unimaginable).

These are unconnected, semi-articulate thoughts at the moment, but I'd be interested to hear of any more considered critiques of post-modern academic leftism, in the wake of 9/11. One of the reasons I find the whole thing so annoying and frustrating is that people who express these views are often those whose work I've admired in the past - people who have fought against oppression and inequality, but now seem to be avoiding facing up to the biggest threat to progressive values in the world today.  More on all of this another time, perhaps.