This is not a hoax: Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of cynical hucksterism

From Akis Gavrielides'* "Was Tsipras ultimately a 'populist' who 'reneged on his promises'?"

[...]

As I have already argued in the past, it is time we throw the concepts of promise and acceptance, that is, the concept of a contract, to the garbage bin as tools for the understanding of politics. These are concepts of moral(istic) and legal descent, that don't help us understand the motion of the multitude. It is also time to get rid of an idea with a long past, especially in the discourse of the Left and of social movements: the concept of a demand, and the conception of political discourse as a "plan" that "materializes." Politics is elsewhere; politics doesn't mean that some sovereign subjects meet and delegate to some other, "even more sovereign" subject, the "materialization" or the "satisfaction" of some of their demands [...] This is the scenario of classic bourgeois political philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries, based on the model of the market and of contracts.

[...] This schema is desperately inadequate. It can account only for normality, normalcy, accountability -- that is  to say, non politics. Politics is not communication; or at least, it is not, and it is not desirable or possible that it becomes, communication based on rules where all messages are transparent, regulated and distortion-free. Politics is that which escapes, that which is not planned. It is noise, the parasite. What is politically interesting is that which deconstructs, not that which institutes palliative equivalences.

Invisible Aspects of Opportunism: Semioticization

As is the case more broadly in postmodernism, the history of the communist movement is transformed for opportunism into an object of semiotic cannibalism. Cannibalism is of central importance for the semiotic politics of opportunism: anthropologically, it is part of the triumph over a defeated opponent; similarly, the opportunistic cannibalization of the communist past is a sign of triumph over historical communism. At the same time, cannibalism is a means of "incorporating" the communist Other, transforming him/her into something harmless and manipulable. Cannibalism is both murder and mourning over murder, an attempt to retain the trace of the now harmless dead as a "souvenir" -- hence the horrifying cannibalistic habit of retaining "souvenirs" of victims -- shrunken heads, teeth, hair, etc. Similarly, in opportunism's own semiotic cannibalism, communist history is "mourned" as a trophy, as a violently disjointed memory of a now dismembered (precisely into "signs") body (remember the exemplary anticommunist "trophy" of the 90s, a piece from the Berlin wall). Like actual cannibalism, semiotic cannibalism suggests both sadistic violence and imaginary identification with the object of this violence (I transform the Other, whom I swallow, into myself), and hence its character is both sadistic and narcissistic: it is an extreme form of simultaneous hatred for the Other and narcissistic libido so intense that it transforms this hated Other into a part of one's  own Ego.