IF a long, opaque passage, whether pomo or from some other school, is intended to argue that such and such is the case then I reject it because to argue that something is the case is a matter of logic. Logic can always be expressed concisely and clearly if one is prepared to work hard enough at it, and failure to do so is often an indicator of laziness, incompetence or arrogance on the part of the author. — andrewk
GR helps me whenever I use GPS, which would be hopelessly inaccurate without it.how does QM, GR, thermo, etc help you instrumentally? — darthbarracuda
I agree with this mcdoodle.The supposed difference in readability between analytic and pomo philosophy seems to me mistaken. There are hard-to-read analytics and hard-to-read pomos. At the mo', for example, I am stalled in the midst of 'Sameness and Substance' by David Wiggins, because it defies your ideas andrew and makes logic very hard work — mcdoodle
"Race is a social construct" for instance is neither accurate nor useful, and it by definition discards the genetic reality that modern science holds as the objective differences between races. While it's true a specific distribution of genetic traits exists on a spectrum (i.e: the genetic trends of characteristics which delineate ethnic groups), to ignore that ethnic gene-pools do have different characteristics is to ignore reality. — VagabondSpectre
In the political context, it does mean outright maliciousness in many cases. What else can we call killing those who think differently to you to hold power? Or systematically devaluing a particular sort of person so you can just take whatever they own? Or closing a border to people fleeing conflict? Power is maliciousness a lot of the time. Do people realise at the time? Not necessarily, some just think they are doing God's will, helping savages or stopping terrorists, but that doesn't change its cruelty and malicious goal. — TheWillowOfDarkness
It's hard. My first post in this thread was dismissive, and I feel bad about that.
I think in some ways it's mainly a difference in attitude toward logic and science. Do you see them as liberative or oppressive? There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here:
I shall be very happy if this book contributes to the wider diffusion of logical knowledge. The course of historical events has assembled in this country the most eminent representatives of contemporary logic, and has thus created here especially favorable conditions for the development of logical thought. These favorable conditions can, of course, be easily overbalanced by other and more powerful factors. It is obvious that the future of logic, as well as of all theoretical science, depends essentially upon normalizing the political and social relations of mankind, and thus upon a factor which is beyond the control of professional scholars. I have no illusions that the development of logical thought, in particular, will have a very essential effect upon the process of the normalization of human relationships; but I do believe that the wider diffusion of the knowledge of logic may contribute positively to the acceleration of this process. For, on the one hand, by making the meaning of concepts precise and uniform in its own field and by stressing the necessity of such a precision and uniformization in any other domain, logic leads to the possibility of better understanding between those who have the will to do so. And, on the other hand, by perfecting and sharpening the tools of thought, it makes men more critical--and thus makes less likely their being misled by all the pseudo-reasonings to which they are in various parts of the world incessantly exposed today.
That's Tarski writing from Harvard in 1940, having fled Poland before the German invasion.
Some of us still cling to the hope and the heritage of the Enlightenment. And for us, clarity is itself a value. — Srap Tasmaner
1. For those that like pomo, do you think these features are fair characterisations of pomo writing? If so, do you think they are related in any way or is it just historical happenstance that they both occur in the same movement? — andrewk
That's a really strange list. DeLillo and Pynchon, sure. But not Dick, Faulkner, Gibson, McCarthy, or O'Connor. (Roth and Morrison I haven't read.)
Calvino's the other obvious choice. Maybe Vonnegut? Maybe John Barth. Maybe DFW?
To this end, Groundhog Day has probably done more to advance philosophical thinking than most (if not all ) post-modernist philosophers for the reasons I've stated.
You seem to have taken what I said as a claim to know for a fact that, for instance, Phil Dick is not a postmodernist writer, rather than an expression of my opinion that he is not.
But not Dick,
Given a precise definition of "postmodernist," I suppose it could be a fact that Dick either is or isn't a postmodernist. By and large literary criticism does not achieve this level of precision. For example, it has never seemed to me that Blake and Wordsworth and Keats and Byron have all that much in common. I don't particularly care if someone wants to call them all "Romantics," but I remain largely skeptical of "schools" of art except where a group of artists are demonstrably self-conscious about it (as with the Surrealists, say). Even then, differences regularly overwhelm similarities.
So you are working with a definition of "postmodernist" broad enough to encompass these diverse writers, and given this definition and your method of applying it, it is a fact that the authors you mention are postmodernists. If I could be compelled to embrace this definition and the method of applying it, then I would be compelled to accept it as a fact that Phil Dick was a postmodernist. We would be doing literary history as science.
But part of the point of any science is what it cares about and what it doesn't. If you're doing orbital mechanics, the color of the bodies involved is irrelevant. If you want to select particular features and ignore others, you can of course classify authors however you like, and those classifications are objectively right or wrong, relative to the criteria of classification. What do you choose to ignore about a writer's work? Not only is there room for debate on what to count and what to ignore in a given artist's work, it is clearly acceptable to ignore nothing at all, and forego doing science here at all.]
I don't have any such science. I think of certain authors as postmodernists, and have some rough and ready reasons for doing so: there was a cohort of authors coming up in the late fifties and sixties who began taking the conventions of fiction as something they could play with within their works of fiction. They produced fiction that was noticeably odd by the usual standards. I call those guys "postmodernists," not least because John Barth did, and because some of them were self-conscious about it. It's also the point in history when most writers become academics.
I don't see Phil Dick doing anything remotely like that, despite being a contemporary, so I don't think of him as a postmodernist.
↪Thanatos Sand
Btw, have you read D. H. Lawrence's book about American literature? He describes Poe in terms that would strike the contemporary ear as "deconstruction." Might be up your street.
And Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron have a lot in common since they all focus on Poetry of the self, hence they are Romantic — Thanatos Sand
Strap Tasmaner--See, this is the sort of thing that makes sense if you want to do literary history or cultural history as a science. From my point of view, reading Don Juan is about as different an experience as you could hope to have from the experience of reading The Prelude. From that point of view, lumping together Wordsworth and Byron is bizarre. That's not a critique of your approach; it is a statement that my purposes in reading and discussing poetry are different.
For your purposes, everything you said may make sense. I have no doubt that it makes sense to someone like Jameson. But I am not interested in doing literary history or criticism as a science. That's why I'm not rebutting each and every one of your points. I'm not doing science. I explained my historically based usage of the term "postmodernist" and it is avowedly unscientific, but it provides, I think, a complete explanation of why I don't apply the term the way you do.
My usage has a certain provenance. Pre-Jameson & friends it was the standard way to use the word. It may not work in your circles, but you're not claiming some sort of "ownership" of the word, are you?
Btw, do you really think Barthes couldn't have given Hawthorne a postmodernist reading if he had wanted to? I'm betting he could have. Guy was a magician.
P.S.: It is not a good habit to assume that the people disagreeing with you just don't know what they're talking about, haven't heard of or haven't read certain authors, etc. Sometimes people might just disagree with you.
Further society's interest in, and considerable investment in, science is principally driven by its instrumental value, not by any philosophical beliefs about Truth. We invest in science because it brings us useful things. — andrewk
No, I was musing about why most other people are interested in those subjects. My primary reason for loving those topics is neither instrumental nor about truth, but aesthetic. I love the beautiful patterns they make. I feel like a child lying on the grass looking at the clouds, saying 'Oooh, look at that one!'.Are you really interested in QM, GR and thermodynamics because of their instrumental value? — Marchesk
Where is Landru? I fervently agree with half he says and fervently disagree with the other half. I haven't heard from him in ages. I miss him.So you've adopted Landru's beliefs about science. *sigh* — Marchesk
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