In a word it's a hoot - one of the funniest books I've read this year, although presumably not in the way that Lucy intended.
After the preceding post I'm tempted to say that it as a luscious work, a work of gonzo-ish excess that like much of Derrida, Zizek and Lyotard embodies a fundamental slipperiness.
Lucy frets that -
The problem for those who oppose postmodernism, as I see it, isn't 'postmodernism' as such; the problem is that there's too much questioning of authority going on nowadays, especially among young people, which is troublesome for the powerful interests that authorities - government, businesses, the churches, the media and so on - represent. 'Postmodernism' is only ever condemned in order to protect the interests of a particular authority or even the general concept of authority'.Really? All business and "the media" are the same? Any criticism, any questioning of "postmodernism" is repressive?
Is all "authority" bad? Lucy apparently doesn't think so, given recurrent invocations of Derrida and Kinsella, along with snark such as his dismissal of Gavin Kitching -
... a professor of politics who is not, in any sense that an accredited philosopher would acknowledge, a philosopher! This also from someone who can't read Wittgenstein and doesn't understand postmodernism, who's spent the past fifteen years of his career supervising and examining Honours dissertations on postmodern (or, as Kitching prefers, 'postmodernist') theory without actually having any expertise in the field.Criticism is "breathtaking in its presumption", apparently, when one doesn't have "expertise in the field" - an absence that's apparently demonstrated by the act of criticism. To adopt Derrida's aphorism, "There is nothing outside the text" - his text, it seems, or the text of the brave band of heroes who are fending off the relentless attacks of The Conservatives and those with a different interpretation of Wittgenstein.
Pomo Oz is an echo of The War on Democracy: Conservative Opinion in the Australian Press: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the Australian Dream (University of Western Australia Press, 2006) by Lucy & Steve Mickler, intermittently entertaining but vitiated by a caricatural view of "conservatives", "business", "the media" and "democracy". Margaret Simons acutely reviewed that work by saying -
Why have conservative newspaper commentators been more successful than the left wing in capturing public debate? After reading this book I am tempted to answer "because they write better".
Getting to grips with Lucy and Mickler's arguments involves wading through a sea of double negatives, more qualifying clauses than News Limited has neo-cons and sentences that seem to exist in fear of the full stop.
After the self-conscious prose, one is left with a few good points spoiled by the authors' seeming inability to acknowledge a simple fact: that it is possible for people of goodwill to fundamentally disagree. Instead, the authors seem to believe that those they dub "conservatives" must necessarily be fools, charlatans or both. ...
The definition of conservative seems to be circular. What makes these commentators conservative? The thesis of the book is that they are anti-democratic. Democracy is defined as being more than a system of representative government. It is an "idea as well as an ideal" - the never completed process of spreading freedom and justice. Hence the "war" of the title. The conservative columnists are united, in the authors' view, in their hatred of emancipation and their defence of the established order.
This is promising ground for intellectual analysis but the guts of the book disappoints. The logical leaps are breathtaking. One example: the authors point out that the head of asbestos manufacturer James Hardie, Meredith Hellicar, is also chairwoman of Gerard Henderson's Sydney Institute and speculate about whether this means the institute is funded by James Hardie. But from this speculation, they move seamlessly to this: "While (Henderson is) up to his neck in asbestos filings, he's never been made accountable for this in the public sphere."
It's quite a slur, and without the benefit of any evidence. The legitimate point - that Henderson rarely turns his critical faculties on corporate Australia - is lost. There is a leap of logic like this in almost every chapter.
I would like to like this book. I find some - not all - of the columnists the authors attack fundamentally intellectually dishonest, relying on labels, abuse, while often eschewing or distorting all evidence that does not reinforce their argument.
But this book doesn't help things much. In its worst excesses of ad hominem argument, generalisation, leaps in logic, smear, labelling, pretension and attack-dog attitude, it matches the worst excesses of the columnists who are its subjects - but in more turgid prose.
