academic postmodernism
Todd Emerson Bowers
I'm presently studying under Stephen Seidman, out of SUNY- Albany, and
have corresponded with Stephen Pfohl, BC, on several occasions. I know
they are postmodernists, which is a growing wave in Sociology as I see it.
Can anyone tell me something about their work? Either points of affinity
or contention are well appreciated. Thank you in advance.
G*rd*n
I found Stephen Pfohl's work pretty repellent. It seems
that in a mere three or four decades we have gone from a
sociology that felt it was necessary to emit textbooks
whereof the first third had to be used to justify the mere
idea of sociology as a science, to something like a
Baudrillard cut-up done by a washing machine with a bad
rinse cycle. But maybe I'm just cranky this evening.
I guess I'll never get invited to B.C. for lunch again.
Here's the blurb to _Death_At_The_Parasite_Cafe_,
which has to have been written by Pfohl himself. It
says it all:
How does it feel to be penetrated by liquid capital? Is it
like sheeding a tear, only in reverse? When the Black
Madonna Durkheim arrives at the cafe the orphans crawl
serpentine to the base of the control deck, masking strange
attractors with repulsive laughter and cries for revenge.
Revenge for all the corporate straight whitemale machine
death squads and techno-sacrifices! Revenge for the
terroristic host of cyber-doubles that feed off the
digitally-coded flesh of others! Welcome to the Parasite
Cafe -- a postmodern war zone at the (dis)autobiographical
crossroads of it's author's life and an implosive New World
Order of televisionary power.
Here Marx meets Durkheim, Derrida, Kristeva, Cixous and
Irigaray, while Bataille, Foucault, Lacan, and Baudrillard
encounter Zora Neale Hurston, Lusia Valenzuela, Donna
Haraway, Cornel West, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Judith Butler,
Patricia Hill Collins, Rada Rada, and the enigmatic Jack O.
Lantern. A performative collage of social-psychoanalytic
criticism, deconstructive ethnography, and social science
fiction, Death at the Parasite Cafe enacts both as reflexive
theoretical critique of contemporary heterosexist, racist,
and economic hierarchies and a fresh evocation of postmodern
sociological (w)riting.
Har har. Wonder how he missed Elvis Presley.
O, _Sociologia_, errant and traduced sister (or at least
cousin-in-law), what will become of thee?
More later, when I've actually read some of the book.
--
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
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