"Postmodern critique"

Seyed Javad writes:

> Within academia there have been many who argued that the
> postmodern critique is nothing but a shambolic move by some
> irrationalists who don't comprehend the very basic assumptions of
> knowledge pursuit. ... I think there is more to the deabtes of
> relativism versus rationalism
With no disrespect intended towards Seyed, who seems to be 
questioning these claims, not asserting them, can I just make a 
general plea that people stop making such idiotic, uninformed, 
sweeping, reductionist statements about "the postmodern critique"? 
Can we get over primitive, trite cliches about "irrationalism" and 
"relativism"? I realize that thinking is hard work, and that most 
people are infinitely better at handling "empirical data" than at 
handling conceptual relations, but can we at least *try*?

"The postmodern critique" (though there are actually several quite 
distinct, and mutually antagonistic, such critiques) turns on two 
principal realizations:

(1) that resistance, including heterodox theory, is a necessary part 
of any power structure - with the obvious next question of how to 
resist given this recognition; and

(2) that modernist universalisms were anything but universal (were, 
in fact, generalizations of self-images of the reigning 
particularism) - with the obvious next question of how a genuine 
universalism is possible in the face of irreducible, unabstractable 
particularity.

These are real questions, arguably the most important questions 
facing the left today. Yes, they involve disposing of the easy, naive 
notions of "reason", "truth", "reality", "exteriority" and 
"interiority", "self" and "other", etc., that have become so familiar 
- and so beholden to power. Yes, they even involve reconceptualizing 
the relation of "intellectuals" to "the movement". But that is no 
excuse for seeking convenient outs by recourse to antique, 
reactionary theoretical pseudo-debates. There is work to be done. 
Let's do it!

Chris