I found this account helpful in contextualizing postmodern fields. Insofar as they come from good intentions, postmodern grievance studies is a response to a society that won’t pay for criticism; in the absence of epistemic trade relations or functioning civil courts, the main alternative way to make criticism ecologically sustainable is predation, in which critics expropriate from the agents being criticized, making use of the information advantage derived from possessing a valid critique.
Once you understand clearly that academic fields are not generically natural clusters in inquiry-space, but are social constructs exercising narrative power in the service of political agendas (including their own survival), the natural next step is to learn how to construct a performance that can claim resources to further your own agenda.
Postmodern academic grievance studies seems to be an attempt to construct a sort of church which uses its influence over a credentialing system to exercise moral authority over its members, i.e. to compel signs of submission, and sometimes material concessions.
It doesn’t seem like an adequate social substrate for a free, technological society, but it does seem like it might be good at de-escalating some kinds of modern warfare in ways that might make me safer from state violence, and it seems like it might be easy for well-intentioned people who can talk with each other (a huge information advantage) to appease once we abandon the delusion that we live in a liberal society and stop trying to assist genocidal oppressors.
I found this account helpful in contextualizing postmodern fields. Insofar as they come from good intentions, postmodern grievance studies is a response to a society that won’t pay for criticism; in the absence of epistemic trade relations or functioning civil courts, the main alternative way to make criticism ecologically sustainable is predation, in which critics expropriate from the agents being criticized, making use of the information advantage derived from possessing a valid critique.
Once you understand clearly that academic fields are not generically natural clusters in inquiry-space, but are social constructs exercising narrative power in the service of political agendas (including their own survival), the natural next step is to learn how to construct a performance that can claim resources to further your own agenda.
Postmodern academic grievance studies seems to be an attempt to construct a sort of church which uses its influence over a credentialing system to exercise moral authority over its members, i.e. to compel signs of submission, and sometimes material concessions.
It doesn’t seem like an adequate social substrate for a free, technological society, but it does seem like it might be good at de-escalating some kinds of modern warfare in ways that might make me safer from state violence, and it seems like it might be easy for well-intentioned people who can talk with each other (a huge information advantage) to appease once we abandon the delusion that we live in a liberal society and stop trying to assist genocidal oppressors.