Absolutely correct, dear David, I could not agree more. But there are tons of misplaced good intentions involved in this.
Identity politics has exploded because of the internet's hidden deceitful promise that all children were finally going to get their spot in the limelight. Which of course never happened because we all have attention constraints. And being drowned in mediocre floods of cat and baby pictures (95% of Instagram postings are completely ignored, blogs peaked already in 2006), why is the audience to blame when the flood of junk was so mediocre to begin with? No wonder people turn to Netflix these days. It was all 99% fake news like media always produced tons of fake news. Better then to have quality amusement to death to make it more enjoyable.
So it is wrong to call this a desire for recognition (what an infantile desire to begin with) but rather a desire for attention that became an obsession with the distorted supernova called the Cartesian Self. Just when individualism died and became an underclass phenomenon (the shift toward dividualism was the successful use of the Internet of course, the netocratic one).
Class was lost in all this. And as a Deleuzian I then have to decide whether I go down the drain with Rosseauian identity politics or ally myself with the real Marxist class struggle. Deleuzians can not escape and stay in between any longer. Those are my ten cents. I see class as heroic tribe so I stay the course and work on developing stories about the Heroic Tribe, which today is to celebrate and lift people up toward the Cultural Engineer who is the true proletarian of the the 21st century. Which means I also ally with the masses against the (academic and financial) elites. Self-pity is a dead end. No wonder Jordan Peterson is huge these days.
Postmodernism was meant as a CRITIQUE. That was the Frankfurt School's intentions all along. Not meant to kill modernism and replace it.
When that shift happened, when postmodernism killed modernism and became the de facto ideology of Western Academia, we also lost Marx to Rousseau. It's the shift from Lenin to Stalin again for all I care.
And here is the blind spot. Postmodernism essentially claims that "all grand narratives are dangerous narratives, therefore there must not be any grand narrative." Well, stupid, you just created a rand narrative with that statement and the most dangerous one of them all, the Rousseuian one. Unless stopped, PoMo will undoubtedly lead to slaughter. It always did in the past, so why not now?
Attention-seeking belongs to daycare centers and kindergardens. When prevalent among grown-up people it should be called its proper name, narcissism and/or infantilization.
Not that I don't desire variety and diversity like every other decent human being. But I seek it and I don't need it thrown in my face from pathological cry-bullies.
Back to Marx! Meanwhile, prepare for Trump round 2. "The Left" has learned nothing but lost its roots. Next Bolsonaro in Brazil. I'm spending this winter in Rio.
Best
Alexander Bard