Pity all the literary theorists (was: The "Jesse" Sig)
Andy Perry
I'm not sure whether Michele reads the other two groups, I thought I'd put
it back.
I've only read the first half of this post so far. I need some caffeine
before I can finish the damn thing, but rest assured, a reply is
forthcoming in a day or two...
In article <3pb91d$5...@peaches.cs.utexas.edu>, tur...@cs.utexas.edu
(Russell Turpin) wrote:
> -*------
> In article <3pamm7$4...@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>,
> Michele Tepper <mi...@umich.edu> wrote:
> > And with most of those damn French theorists who are destroying
> > Western Civilization. ...
>
> Tsk, tsk. Such hyperbole.
>
> Those French theorists are not a problem, only an adaptation.
> Their destiny is to become a chapter in (psuedo-)intellectual
> history, of interest only to future incarnations of themselves.
>
> Let me explain how it works. Today, writing stories, reading
> stories, and talking about stories rarely puts a person in a
> position with the power and respect that are accorded other parts
> of academia. Literature professors desparately want to be taken
> as seriously as physicists, biochemists, and even historians.
> They desparately want to differentiate themselves from mere
> novelists and critics. To do this, they have to create an
> important academic arena for themselves. This endeavor is called
> literary theory.
>
> The secret that no one voices out loud is that it is a theory
> without a subject matter. Literary theory is not just making and
> critizing stories, because that is what authors and critics do,
> and they work for magazines, or with publishers, or
> independently, or (more commonly) fund their creative efforts
> through a less glamorous job. Literary theorists work for big
> universities, and so they have to do more than this. Literary
> theorists cannot study history, because historians do this.
> Literary theorists cannot study human psychology, because
> psychologists do this. Literary theorists cannot study politics,
> because political theorists and economists do this. Literary
> theorists cannot study truth or morality or aesthetics, because
> the philosophers do this. And -- as the postmodernists are
> learning on their way out -- literary theorists cannot study
> language, because linguists and cognitive scientists do this.
>
> When a new fashion in literary theory slouches in the direction
> of some other field, there is sometimes a din and roar as it
> grows into a fad. But if the scholars in this other field start
> to look at it, they realize pretty quickly how empty the new fad
> is. Derrida is neither seminal nor controversial among those who
> study human language. He is largely irrelevant. (This is not
> surprising. If someone really has a passion to understand --
> sticking with the example -- human language, they will find their
> way to one of the academic departments, typically linguistics or
> cognitive science, that has developed the theoretical tools and
> depth of empirical data to study this. They will spend their
> years in graduate school learning about natural language
> structure, language development, grammar theory, linguistic
> evolution, neural nets, brain anatomy, empirical psychology,
> cognitive disorders, etc. A scholar who spends years reading
> French theorists, German novelists, and passe lit theorists has
> studied literary theory, not human language.)
>
> The trick for the literary theorists is to create a new "theory"
> every decade or two to replace the one whose veil was most
> recently pierced. If they can get the goat of William Bennett,
> all the better! If they can be credited as shaking the
> foundations of western Civ ... well, that one went over quite
> well, didn't it? Complexity for the sake of opacity, terminology
> for the sake of novelty, and controversy for the sake of renown
> are all the friends of literary theory. Its enemy is the
> realization that there is no there there. Unlike religion,
> literary theory has not earned a safe patronage separate from the
> rest of academe. Once its bubble is burst, universities will
> hire a few people to teach writing. They might honor a few
> writers as university poets or novelists. They might even have a
> few critics if these actually write cogent criticism of books
> that are NOT primarily aimed at scholars in English departments.
> But "literary theorist" will become an obsolete profession.
>
> Literature will remain. Stories will still be told (and turned
> into movies and put on CD-ROM). People will still say what they
> think about those stories. Ideas will be discussed. Opacity,
> useless terminology, and confusion will become just a little bit
> less. Western Civ will go on. Only the literary theorist will
> shed a tear.
>
> Career change is tough.
>
> Russell
> --
> "Why does our innate subjective spacing of qualities accord so well with the
> functionally relevant groupings in nature as to make our inductions come out
> right? ... Creatures inveterately wrong in their inductions have a pathetic
> but praiseworthy tendency to die before reproducing." -- W. V. O. Quine
--
Andy Perry "We look before and after,
Brown University We pine for what is not;
Dept of English Our sincerest laughter
Andrew...@Brown.edu OR With some pain is fraught."
st00...@Brownvm.bitnet -- Shelley, d'apres Horace Rumpole
Russell Turpin
In article <Andrew_Perry-1...@cis-ts5-slip1.cis.brown.edu>,
Andy Perry <Andrew...@Brown.edu> wrote:
> Russell rather rudely cut out a.c.j-g from the newsgroup line,
> and since I'm not sure whether Michele reads the other two groups,
> I thought I'd put it back.
Oops. I did not mean to cut anyone out. As a rule, I try to avoid
alt.* newsgroups ending in a person's name.
> I've only read the first half of this post so far. I need some
> caffeine before I can finish the damn thing, but rest assured, a
> reply is forthcoming in a day or two...
No need to rush (with drugs or otherwise).
Gordon Fitch
| > > And with most of those damn French theorists who are destroying
| > > Western Civilization. ...
(Russell Turpin) wrote:
| > Tsk, tsk. Such hyperbole.
| >
| > Those French theorists are not a problem, only an adaptation.
| > Their destiny is to become a chapter in (psuedo-)intellectual
| > history, of interest only to future incarnations of themselves.
| >
| > Let me explain how it works. ...
It seems odd to write such a long (for the Net) article
about people who are irrelevant and uninteresting because
they are only literary theorists. This would seem to make
the article at hand theory about literary theory, doubly and
damnably hyper-irrelevant.
Of course, that makes _this_ article a theory about a theory
about a theory about literature, but never mind that.
--
>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
Russell Turpin
In article <3pcolt$s...@panix.com>, Gordon Fitch <g...@panix.com> wrote:
> It seems odd to write such a long (for the Net) article
> about people who are irrelevant and uninteresting because
What *is* somewhat interesting (at least to me) is how well they
have succeeded in keeping the game afloat.
> ... This would seem to make the article at hand theory about
> literary theory, doubly and damnably hyper-irrelevant.
Is irrelevancy doubled and damned as one passes from a topic to
the meta-topic? If so, I am left few excuses. "They started it."
Or maybe: it was just cheap entertainment during a coffee break.
Omar Haneef '96
> Michele Tepper <mi...@umich.edu> wrote:
> > And with most of those damn French theorists who are destroying
> > Western Civilization. ...
> Tsk, tsk. Such hyperbole.
Indeed.
> Those French theorists are not a problem, only an adaptation.
Adaptation? As OPPOSED to a problem?
> Their destiny is to become a chapter in (psuedo-)intellectual
> history, of interest only to future incarnations of themselves.
Quite possibly.> Let me explain how it works. Today, writing stories,
reading
> stories, and talking about stories rarely puts a person in a
> position with the power and respect that are accorded other parts
> of academia. Literature professors desparately want to be taken
> as seriously as physicists, biochemists, and even historians.
This may be true enough for some of them, others think they
are taken seriously (and this is true for a lot of them)
> They desparately want to differentiate themselves from mere
> novelists and critics. To do this, they have to create an
> important academic arena for themselves.
Is it any different from biologists and doctors and neuroscientists
the millions of subdivisions for the sciences? What about Sociology which
(I understand) nearly died in the US before its marriage to Anthropology
because nobody was doing anything exciting that wasn't already being done
in other departments?
> This endeavor is called
> literary theory.
True enough.
> The secret that no one voices out loud is that it is a theory> without a
subject matter.
Take a look at Art History. What exactly is not art? You can look at
advertising
or MTV or posters. What do philosophers look at? Anything they want. So why
should the English department be aby different? Why can't EVERYTHING (as
opposed
to nothing, which is what you gesture towards) be the subject matter of a
critic?
> Literary theory is not just making and
> critizing stories, because that is what authors and critics do,
> and they work for magazines, or with publishers, or
> independently, or (more commonly) fund their creative efforts
> through a less glamorous job. Literary theorists work for big
> universities, and so they have to do more than this.
Now here is the important bit: Literary THEORISTS talk about the THEORY
of criticism. They have to talk about WHY critics judge something better
than others and they (we?) would be stupid to ignore other departments.
Literary critics used to believe it was the MORALITY in a piece that made
it so good, things have changed.
> Literary
> theorists cannot study history, because historians do this.
But theorists learn lessons from history: look, says Foucault, the
historians were doing the same thing we were doing. Looking at texts
and interpreting it the way we interpret texts: producing truths as a
function of power.
> Literary theorists cannot study human psychology, because
> psychologists do this.
But literary critics can look at Freud and say: look, Henry James' Turn of
the screw is criticised quite heavily. I wonder why this is so? Freud may
be right in that the critics repressions show up in the criticism.
> Literary theorists cannot study politics,
> because political theorists and economists do this.
Guys, says the literary critic, all this talk of morality in texts is
rubbish. Marx was right when he said we are just perpetuating a certain
class' morality. Look here in this book (considered great) the good guys
act like a different class from the bad guys.
> Literary
> theorists cannot study truth or morality or aesthetics, because
> the philosophers do this.
But the theorist learns not to look for truth or morality or aesthetics in
texts when such things, the philosophers tell him/her don't really exist or
are cultural, or some philosphers would say exist ONLY in art (what the
critics were looking at in the first place).
> And -- as the postmodernists are
> learning on their way out -- literary theorists cannot study
> language, because linguists and cognitive scientists do this.
What kind of thing is this to say? The theorists use language ALL the time.
Critics are surrounded by language, they speak, talk , examine, grind, chew,
tear up, look at, see through, produce, reproduce language. They HAVE to
listen long and hard at all theories of how language works. That's an
ignorant statement, sort of like "engineers can't study computers because
computer scientists already do that."
> When a new fashion in literary theory slouches in the direction
> of some other field, there is sometimes a din and roar as it
> grows into a fad. But if the scholars in this other field start
> to look at it, they realize pretty quickly how empty the new fad
> is. Derrida is neither seminal nor controversial among those who
> study human language. He is largely irrelevant.
But Derrida doesn't care about language the way "those who study human
language" do. Its entirely different. Derrida is responding to a historical
debate: the question of being which is the central problem of western
metaphysic
since Aristotle. Derrida is not concerned with language's fallibility as such
(which is boring) but language's relationship to being in the tradition of
Kand and Heiddeger. I don't understand how you can entirely ingore the man's
project and write him off in an arena he is not engaged in? Have you read any
Derrida? He is more a philosopher than a literary critic and there isn't much
difference nowadays. If you forgive one set of activities you must forgive
the
other.
> (This is not
> surprising. If someone really has a passion to understand --
> sticking with the example -- human language, they will find their
> way to one of the academic departments, typically linguistics or
> cognitive science, that has developed the theoretical tools and
> depth of empirical data to study this. They will spend their
> years in graduate school learning about natural language
> structure, language development, grammar theory, linguistic
> evolution, neural nets, brain anatomy, empirical psychology,
> cognitive disorders, etc. A scholar who spends years reading
> French theorists, German novelists, and passe lit theorists has
> studied literary theory, not human language.)
That is EXACTLY right. People should not be learning language as such
when they study literary criticism but questions concerning the activity
of meaning making which is ALWAYS changing. The question of meaning making
always finds itself to be the wrong question so Literature is always changing
(how many fields do you know that have evolved this fast? The lack of stable
subject matter is a boon)
> cognitive science, that has developed the theoretical tools and
> depth of empirical data to study this. They will spend their
> years in graduate school learning about natural language
> structure, language development, grammar theory, linguistic
> evolution, neural nets, brain anatomy, empirical psychology,
> cognitive disorders, etc. A scholar who spends years reading
> French theorists, German novelists, and passe lit theorists has
> studied literary theory, not human language.)
That is EXACTLY right. People should not be learning language as such
when they study literary criticism but questions concerning the activity
of meaning making which is ALWAYS changing. The question of meaning making
always finds itself to be the wrong question so Literature is always changing
(how many fields do you know that have evolved this fast? The lack of stable
subject matter is a boon)
> The trick for the literary theorists is to create a new "theory"
> every decade or two to replace the one whose veil was most
> recently pierced. If they can get the goat of William Bennett,
> all the better! If they can be credited as shaking the
> foundations of western Civ ... well, that one went over quite
> well, didn't it?
The foundation shaking is not done in a literal sense (pun intended). It is
done in the sens of what the department itself believes. The lens is not
changed per se but recognized to be always out of focus.
> Complexity for the sake of opacity, terminology
> for the sake of novelty, and controversy for the sake of renown
> are all the friends of literary theory.
This is sadly true but not necessary to the activity of theory (no
contradiction
there). SOME of the writers actually need to be dense because they are trying
to produce a new activity of reading but most of them really are going for
novelty (I think).
> Its enemy is the
> realization that there is no there there. Unlike religion,
> literary theory has not earned a safe patronage separate from the
> rest of academe.
Has philosophy? Of course, not having an external patron may be a blessing
because then one is not burdened by the demands of other people's agendas.
> Once its bubble is burst, universities will
> hire a few people to teach writing. They might honor a few
> writers as university poets or novelists. They might even have a
> few critics if these actually write cogent criticism of books
> that are NOT primarily aimed at scholars in English departments.
> But "literary theorist" will become an obsolete profession.
Absololutely. It is high time the name was changed to philsophy or cultural
theory or meaning studies or something.
> Literature will remain. Stories will still be told (and turned
> into movies and put on CD-ROM). People will still say what they
> think about those stories. Ideas will be discussed. Opacity,
> useless terminology, and confusion will become just a little bit
> less. Western Civ will go on. Only the literary theorist will
> shed a tear.
Someone is going to have to talk about how and why we talk about ideas a
certain way. I don't want someone telling me its a great CD ROM game because
of XYZ, I want them to tell me why XYZ goes into making a CD Rom game great.
> Career change is tough.
Why do you hate them so?
> Russell
> --
-Omar Haneef
Gordon Fitch
| ...
| the meta-topic? If so, I am left few excuses. "They started it."
| Or maybe: it was just cheap entertainment during a coffee break.
A long coffee-break! But as you know, I approve of
slacking. And it may be that Jacques and his friends have
done no more than this; yet they have gone us one better --
they have made money and fame off it, which I shall envy
tomorrow while grinding bits in the cellars of the masters
of Capital.
--
>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
Thomas Franklin Harris Jr.
: tur...@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin):
: | ...
: | Is irrelevancy doubled and damned as one passes from a topic to
: | the meta-topic? If so, I am left few excuses. "They started it."
: | Or maybe: it was just cheap entertainment during a coffee break.
: A long coffee-break! But as you know, I approve of
: slacking. And it may be that Jacques and his friends have
: done no more than this; yet they have gone us one better --
: they have made money and fame off it, which I shall envy
: tomorrow while grinding bits in the cellars of the masters
: of Capital.
Recipe for fame and fortue: get tenure in a fairly well-respected
university by learning the vocabulary of the people in charge in your
field of inquiry; once in, get together with a few friends and attack the
establishment that just hired you with your own vocabulary; make yor
vocabulary so complex and jargon-ridden that no one realized that your
criticims have already been advanced before a generation ago; talk a lot
about "misunderstanding" in terms no one can understand, thus proving
your point. The popular press will think you're "kewl" and legions of
faddish graduate students in your field will buy your books in order to
be kewl too. (Meanwhile, the establishment's books are sold in popular
form and sit rotting on library shelves in libraries that actually have
enough money to carry more than the collected works of John Grisham and
Barbara cartland.)
Recipe for decline: After years of being kewl and giving all those
graduate stuents you influenced tenure, the little bastards turn on you
and attack you in a vocabulary you can't understand. Pretty soon your
books gather dust in the larger libraries.
T. Franklin Harris, Jr.
Russell Turpin
Gordon Fitch (g...@panix.com) wrote:
>> ... And it may be that Jacques and his friends have
>> done no more than this; yet they have gone us one better --
>> they have made money and fame off it, which I shall envy
>> tomorrow while grinding bits in the cellars of the masters
>> of Capital.
Entertainment is a valid and booming industry. I do not begrudge
Jacques and friends their success at that. More power to them!
In article <3pe6p6$k...@fly.HiWAAY.net>,
Thomas Franklin Harris Jr. <tfha...@HiWAAY.net> wrote:
> Recipe for fame and fortue: get tenure in a fairly well-respected
> university by learning the vocabulary of the people in charge in your
> field of inquiry; once in, get together with a few friends and attack
> the establishment that just hired you with your own vocabulary; make
> your vocabulary so complex and jargon-ridden that no one realized that
> your criticims have already been advanced before a generation ago;
> talk a lot about "misunderstanding" in terms no one can understand,
> thus proving your point. ...
This raises the more serious issue. What kind of art and artists
should our universities support? Mapplethorpe never held a
tenured position. So why does Sandra Harding?
My only objection is that Sandra Harding (to keep the example) is
presented as a scholar who has insightful thoughts to offer in
the philosophy of science, when at best, she offers sophistry.
Now: sophistry can be entertaining and stimulating. But let's
keep in mind its nature when we judge it, when we compare it to
other work, and when we decide who to hire and promote. I think
we should fire nine out of ten postmodern "scholars" and replace
them with guerilla artists, street poets, daring photographers,
radical pornographers, 'zine publishers, entactogen
experimentalists, web pioneers, and Gordon Fitch. If the regents
need a structure to organize this group, we could call it the
Department of Fringe Culture! Academe would become both more
enjoyable and more stimulating.
Universities rightly harbor people whose accomplishments are
better described as "odd and interesting" than as "scholarly and
edifying." But postmodernism is only odd in small doses, and
only interesting until one gets the hang of the lingo. Having
infiltrated a variety of the "soft" academic departments, each to
the extent that it suffers an identity crises, it becomes tedious
and wasteful, much like cotton candy that a child discovers at
the carnival and then wants for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Let's move it aside so we can have more variety and interest in
our buffet of academic entertainment.
Russell
(aspiring Dean of Fringe Culture)
Michele Tepper
>| > > And with most of those damn French theorists who are destroying
>| > > Western Civilization. ...
>
>| > Tsk, tsk. Such hyperbole.
Precisely, Russell. Hyperbole in the cause of humor. A little
linguistic playfulness. Look in to it.
>| > Those French theorists are not a problem, only an adaptation.
>| > Their destiny is to become a chapter in (psuedo-)intellectual
>| > history, of interest only to future incarnations of themselves.
>| >
>| > Let me explain how it works. ...
>
>It seems odd to write such a long (for the Net) article
>about people who are irrelevant and uninteresting because
>they are only literary theorists. This would seem to make
>the article at hand theory about literary theory, doubly and
>damnably hyper-irrelevant.
Well, if that's how he gets his rocks off, far be it from me to damn him
for it. As to literary criticism, I have (blessedly) enough psychic and/or
emotional remove from the field that I don't feel the need to attack its
attackers anymore, particularly those who are not sensitive to linguistic
playfulness, an appreciation of which seems to be a sine qua non of good
literary criticism and theory of any sort.
>Of course, that makes _this_ article a theory about a theory
>about a theory about literature, but never mind that.
Then this is a response to a theory of a theory about a theory of
literature. Quel meta. (hint, Russell: that was meant *playfully*)
Michele "at play in the fields of the electron" Tepper
--
Michele Tepper <mi...@umich.edu>
"Michele's only known weakness is that after she breaks your nose, she
sometimes forgets to taunt you for your inability to breathe properly."
-- Tjames Madison
Gordon Fitch
| >Of course, that makes _this_ article a theory about a theory
| >about a theory about literature, but never mind that.
mi...@umich.edu (Michele Tepper):
| Then this is a response to a theory of a theory about a theory of
| literature. Quel meta. (hint, Russell: that was meant *playfully*)
Metissima! And hence we have a new ideology and value-
system, metissimism, where meta is good and the one who
metas the most other people's metas wins. It's sort of like
Pac-Man.
--
>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
Daniel Nexon
: Recipe for fame and fortue: get tenure in a fairly well-respected
: university by learning the vocabulary of the people in charge in your
: field of inquiry; once in, get together with a few friends and attack the
: establishment that just hired you with your own vocabulary; make yor
: vocabulary so complex and jargon-ridden that no one realized that your
: criticims have already been advanced before a generation ago; talk a lot
: about "misunderstanding" in terms no one can understand, thus proving
: your point.
Just because it takes some work to understand the theory, and because it
might mean you need some interdisciplenary knowledge, doesn't mean it is
impossible to understand.
: The popular press will think you're "kewl" and legions of
: faddish graduate students in your field will buy your books in order to
: be kewl too. (Meanwhile, the establishment's books are sold in popular
: form and sit rotting on library shelves in libraries that actually have
: enough money to carry more than the collected works of John Grisham and
: Barbara cartland.)
Why not attack all academia while you're at it? I don't see a lot of
people reading Morganthau, Clausewitz, Waltz, Toqueville (his more
important work, _The Old Regime and the French Revolution_), Huntington,
Hegel, Rousseau, Mill, James Q. Wilson, Bennedict Anderson, etc. for fun.
: Recipe for decline: After years of being kewl and giving all those
: graduate stuents you influenced tenure, the little bastards turn on you
: and attack you in a vocabulary you can't understand. Pretty soon your
: books gather dust in the larger libraries.
Well, what do you expect them to do, be serious academics by not
advancing knowledge? Whatever.
Besides the blatant inaccuracy of this little system you presented.
Waltz's desciples still think he's God (Mearsheimer and Walt still
defend neorealism).
--
Regards,
Dan
"It is not that he cannot take his old black mammy with him that troubles
the mind of the Senator, but that if we make the Territories free, he
cannot sell the old black mammy when he get her there." Benjamin Wade, 1854.
Brian Dell
::: And with most of those damn French theorists who are destroying
::: Western Civilization. ...
It is, of course, quite romantic to style oneself as a dangerous
dissident or dreaded subversive who piques the smug bourgeosie
growling, "I'm the nemesis of the Establishment!" Yes, perhaps
we should all aspire to be the terror of the Academy, the Jesse
James of the intelligentsia, the James Dean of the literati!
Outlaw lovers in a dangerous intellectual time, perhaps?
Except now that deviancy is the norm it is not the avante-garde but
the conservative thinker, the sheriff enforcing an ethics based
on "Western metaphysics," who has been exiled from the norm! Just
what does it mean to be an _out_law when it's the _in_ thing to be?
Russell Turpin:
:: The secret that no one voices out loud is that [lit crit as
:: a discipline demanding an academic department] is a theory
:: without a subject matter.
I'd say that it has a subject matter, but this subject matter is
Meaning, which is, in a word, Unsayable. Now if literary theory
is indeed an attempt to Say the Unsayable, then it certainly would
seem to be an exercise in futility. T.S. Eliot once observed
that there no method for its discernment except to be very
intelligent, and it is certainly the case that no procedure can
be constructed for the task it in the same way that a computer can
be taught to "understand" Chinese by telling it to parse the
characters according to formal rules. Meaning does not surrender
herself to the cold tentacles of a remotely piloted machine like
a lifeless diamond waiting to be extracted from the earth by some
mechanical contraption. All theories or models are abstract
mechanisms that attempt to capture Meaning like an aborigine that
is shackled and shipped back to Europe where she can be paraded
about. She will never survive the journey, however, and if the
Europeans wish to see her alive in the flesh they'll have to leave
their northern climes for the southern seas.
There is a place for literary criticism, but one must recognize
that its subject matter must be approached obliquely. This is
only reasonable, because if a given work of creative fiction can
be completely reduced to a systematic philosophical argument or
what have you then obviously the medium of creative fiction was
quite superfluous to begin with! No, the medium is necessary
because any less subtle approach, any method more transferable or
objective, would be akin to using a 2 dimensional vehicle to
deliver a 3 dimensional object. Meaning must be wooed, charmed,
flattered; she must be wined, dined, danced! Some say there is
a science to seduction, but any woman will tell you that she
remains quite unable to express the exact procedure that won
her heart. No, just as she cannot give definition to the precise
outline of the key to her sentiments so it is that there will
never be a master key to meaning that another might copy and
wield like a panacea for every philosophical ailment.
This is not to say that no key exists, but rather to note that
there is an art to locksmithing of this sort and the skill is
not really a skill as such. To be truly loved by another is not,
for example, a result produced by any action directed at an some
promptly self-serving end, however skillfully it might have been
executed, but is more the result of _being_; _be_ a person
_worthy_ of esteem and you will be esteemed. Know _thyself_ and
Meaning will make herself known to you. This is only natural,
given that Meaning was never really "out there" to begin with
and is rather the product of introspection.
Omar Haneef:
: Derrida ... is more a philosopher than a literary critic and
: there isn't much difference nowadays.
The best critics, I think, are of a philosophical bent and the
best philosophers, I suspect, recognize the greater breadth of
expression that literature can give.
--
Brian Dell
http://gpu.srv.ualberta.ca/~dellb/index.html
A J Mims
Brian Dell and Michele Tepper posted excellent points concerning
criticism and writing.
Forgive my uninformed intrusion.
The elite seem to place too high a regard upon their IQ and education.
The ordinary reader is the ultimate judge, common sense is the rule.
It may be hard to produce a good work or a good criticism, but it is
easy to tell the bad ones. You don't have to be a critic to detect a
lousy critic; a PhD to see how foolish a philosophical idea, or a poet
to perceive a bad poem. You don't have to know how to lay an egg to
detect a rotten one.
Chris Kostanick
>Why not attack all academia while you're at it? I don't see a lot of
>people reading Morganthau, Clausewitz, Waltz, Toqueville (his more
^^^^^^^^^^
>important work, _The Old Regime and the French Revolution_), Huntington,
>Hegel, Rousseau, Mill, James Q. Wilson, Bennedict Anderson, etc. for fun.
He's still read, because he has something to say. As is Sun Tzu,
after 3500 years. Do you think anyone will read the post modernists
in as little as 200 years?
Chris Kostanick
--
Chris Kostanick
chr...@gomez.stortek.com
Chris Kostanick
>The elite seem to place too high a regard upon their IQ and education.
>The ordinary reader is the ultimate judge, common sense is the rule.
>It may be hard to produce a good work or a good criticism, but it is
>easy to tell the bad ones. You don't have to be a critic to detect a
>lousy critic; a PhD to see how foolish a philosophical idea, or a poet
>to perceive a bad poem. You don't have to know how to lay an egg to
>detect a rotten one.
Anti-intellectualism was a Boomer trick. You're a generation late.
A J Mims
writes:
Sorry, Chris... Generational analysis was over two years ago, few
people remember "Boomer". Smart educated people are a joy. Fools and
their ideas are always with us; fools with degrees are just a little
more obvious and downright funny. It will be the same in a hundred
years as now.
Gordon Fitch
| >>The elite seem to place too high a regard upon their IQ and
| education.
| >>The ordinary reader is the ultimate judge, common sense is the rule.
| >>It may be hard to produce a good work or a good criticism, but it is
| >>easy to tell the bad ones. You don't have to be a critic to detect a
| >>lousy critic; a PhD to see how foolish a philosophical idea, or a
| poet
| >>to perceive a bad poem. You don't have to know how to lay an egg to
| >>detect a rotten one.
chr...@gomez.stortek.com (Chris Kostanick):
| >Anti-intellectualism was a Boomer trick. You're a generation late.
They ran out of intellectuals....
a...@ix.netcom.com (A J Mims):
| Sorry, Chris... Generational analysis was over two years ago, few
| people remember "Boomer". Smart educated people are a joy. Fools and
| their ideas are always with us; fools with degrees are just a little
| more obvious and downright funny. It will be the same in a hundred
| years as now.
No, it won't. Take my word for it.
--
>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
A J Mims
Gordon, You are surely right,most will change. I just hope that
humans are still the best poets [let the computers and neural nets
lamblast the critics].
C. Mccormick
>From: han...@engin.swarthmore.edu (Omar Haneef '96)
>Subject: Re: Pity all the literary theorists (was: The "Jesse" Sig)
>Date: 17 May 1995 15:44:21 GMT
>> In article <3pamm7$4...@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu>,
>> Michele Tepper <mi...@umich.edu> wrote:
>
Much deleted; go back and read it.
Just wanted to say that as an neophyte English student I have found this
to be an extremely interesting thread with [reasonably] informed arguments on
both sides. It's good to know there are people who discuss this stuff besides
English profs; I can never get my friends to debate it with me...
Off again into the inky night, Chris McCormick
The Forever Newbie.
Omar Haneef '96
I think that is exactly right. Theory, then, is meta-ing (can meta be a
verb? I guess "doing theory" is the verb form of the adjective "meta-"). In
any case, all of culture: art, language, imagination, etc. is all based on
well, what shall I call it? the metaphor, the lie, the representation, the
untruth, calling something what it is not, the ACT of NAMING. If this
process is at the heart of what makes us humans, as I believe it is, then
how can anyone blast "theory" because it is too abstract or too removed or
too obvious? Are Van Gogh's sunflowers obvious? What does that mean? Sure,
they are obviouslt sunflowers. But someone shelled out a fortune for it
because it re-presents sunflowers. Once the act of presentation is named,
once someone has written a thought or produced a piece of imagination then
that thought or piece of imagination itself becomes subject to meta-ing. A
theory on a theory. We TALK about PICTURES that are representative of
something we CALL flowers. Why stop at that? We then TALK of TALK and once
this has been well estrabilished, we TALK of the TALK of TALK. I wonder if
we even need to answer "What is the point?" As if TALK about TALK is any
different from the original TALK. We are compelled to do it. It is what
makes us human, re-presenting a re-presentation is not really all that
different from the original re-presentation. Isn't Shoshanna Felman's
article "Turning the Screw of Interpretation" (on the criticism of "Turn of
the Screw") as interesting as Henry James' original novel? At least
arguably? Not only is all criticism philosophy but all writing is art.
-Omar Haneef
Russell Turpin
>> where meta is good and the one who metas the most other people's
In article <3pqoe7$a...@larch.cc.swarthmore.edu>,
Omar Haneef '96 <han...@engin.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> I think that is exactly right. Theory, then, is meta-ing (can meta be a
> verb? I guess "doing theory" is the verb form of the adjective "meta-").
> In any case, all of culture: art, language, imagination, etc. is all
> based on well, what shall I call it? the metaphor, the lie, the
> representation, the untruth, calling something what it is not, the ACT
> of NAMING. If this process is at the heart of what makes us humans, as
> I believe it is, then how can anyone blast "theory" because it is too
> abstract or too removed or too obvious? Are Van Gogh's sunflowers
> obvious? ...
Thus, Omar Haneef suggests that all life is art and everything
subject to only aesthetic criticism. A person who really
believed this would choose a map not because it was accurate, but
because its metaphors achieve an aesthetic (rather than
utilitarian) measure. Such a person would always choose teachers
who excel at metaphors, lies, and untruths, rather than ones who
know something about the subject concerned. A surgeon with
beautiful spiel rather than low mortality rate. Such a person
creates statistics to prove the desired point rather than
carefully applying statistical analysis to become more informed.
This is the person whose every utterance is ALWAYS designed to
entertain, play on words, and go one meta- further, and NEVER to
give clear instructions, express important information simply, or
even communicate plainly in the small transactions of everyday
life, such as ordering food or making a purchase.
Of course, there is no such person. Before we learn language,
which is required for the outlook that Haneef describes, we each
acquire important cognitive functions that are prerequisite to
language. These cognitive functions include the identification
of objects and people in the world around us, the use of sensory
feedback vis-a-vis our actions, and basic interaction with other
people. (Yes, an infant learns these *before* language and could
not learn language otherwise.) If Haneef's meta-person were
miraculously created (by a meta-god?), its life would be
infinitely interesting, playful, meta- ... and short. (We have
all encountered people who occassionally aspire to this state,
usually -- it seems -- in the adjacent airplane seat or in front
of a grocery or bank line. Everyone who has refrained from
cutting short such artful lives deserves applause. Art, like all
else in life, has its place.)
> ... Not only is all criticism philosophy but all writing is art.
Some artists think that all life is art. Some musicians, that it
is music. Some lovers, that is is their beloved. Some cooks,
food. Some physicists, a set of problems to solve. Some
engineers, a set of possible things to create. Some thieves,
things to steal.
They are all wrong. Each tries to jam into their philosophy
something that is much bigger than that. One might forgive the
artist (and the thief, his lover, and her cook) who makes this
mistake. The artist's work, after all, is judged by the art
created, not by the aesthetic theory advocated. But the critic
who makes this mistake is wrong and should be called to task for
it.
I think Omar Haneef correctly characterizes many literary
"theorists." They excel at "the metaphor, the lie, the
representation, the untruth, calling something what it is not,
the ACT of NAMING." They are ignorant of logic, science,
engineering, history, and other fields that necessarily go beyond
"the metaphor ... [etc.]," and whose criteria for success goes
beyond the things that these "theorists" discuss. (This is why I
put scare-quotes around "theorist" in referring to these literary
critics: because they have lost the things that make important
the work of those from whom they borrow the term.)
Omar Haneef '96
> Russell
Russel,
You've go me figured all wrong. I explained by art I meant a
representation. Philosophy is a lie in the sense that Newton's physics is a
lie. Its a useful lie, it helps us build bridges, but its a lie nonetheless.
And what has art got to do with aesthetics(TROLL)? Philosophy, like art, is
necessarily a MODEL of the world, an abstraction, a theory, a representation
like a bridge modelled in a computer.
-Omar Haneef
Russell Turpin
In article <3pt74a$n...@larch.cc.swarthmore.edu>,> ... I explained by art I meant a representation. Philosophy is a lie
> in the sense that Newton's physics is a lie. Its a useful lie, it
> helps us build bridges, but its a lie nonetheless. And what has art
> got to do with aesthetics(TROLL)? Philosophy, like art, is
> necessarily a MODEL of the world, an abstraction, a theory, a
> representation like a bridge modelled in a computer.
I cannot express with what delight I see the word model in
Haneef's post. Not only present, but capitalized! Most of my
professional life has involved models in one form or another, and
so it is a subject with which I have some familiarity. (And,
indeed, it is one reason I am here, since at various times in the
past, various people have suggested that postmodern philosophers
know something of modeling.)
To begin, let me note that there are many measures of a model that
are important in various contexts:
domain What is the subject matter modeled?
accuracy How accurate are the results of the model?
scope Within what portion of the domain does the model
retain its accuracy?
performance How useful is the model in calculating results
with practical time and resources?
clarity Does the model explain well its subject matter?
depth Does the model concern only a few elements of the
domain, does it concern many elements, or does it
span multiple subject domains?
structural How do the model's elements correspond (if at all)
fidelity to the subject matter's elements?
openness How well can the model be used with other models,
or with other tools?
extensibility How well can the model be extended to capture larger
domains?
There are more. People working in different modeling domains
have different terms for these. Nonetheless, these are the kinds
of issues that concern those who study models professionally,
from CASE analysts to logicians to metereologists to linguists.
Having said that, let me continue our conversation with several
points.
(1) Newtonian mechanics is NOT a lie. The notion that its accuracy
is perfect or that it is fully applicable to dynamics
without taking into account its scope (non-relativisitc speeds,
non-quantum size) is wrong. Purposely advocating this wrong notion
would be a lie. But Newtonian mechanics itself is just a model,
which has some accuracy and scope within its domain.
(2) I have yet to see anyone in this newsgroup who wants to talk
much about modeling. Oh, yes, I know. There is lots of
talk about re-presentation and abstractness and even lies, but I
have never seen anything more than verbiage when it comes to
discussion of models. (This stands in strong contrast to
newsgroups such as sci.logic, where modeling is discussed in
depth and often with considerable sophistication.)
(3) So let me ask this question: what do the postmodern
philosophers have to say about modeling? One or two
examples of where they say something interesting about this would
greatly change my view of them. I understand modeling from the
viewpoint of a computer scientist and logician, and even a little
from some more general viewpoints, so it should not be too
difficult to explain what the postmoderns have to offer on this
subject.
Anxious to hear,
Russell
Omar Haneef '96
> > in the sense that Newton's physics is a lie. Its a useful lie, it
> > helps us build bridges, but its a lie nonetheless. And what has art
> > got to do with aesthetics(TROLL)? Philosophy, like art, is
> > necessarily a MODEL of the world, an abstraction, a theory, a
> > representation like a bridge modelled in a computer.
> I cannot express with what delight I see the word model in
When I said models, I mean't like Cindy Crawford. (just kidding) -Omar Haneef
Russel,
This thing with lies has to be solved. When I say lie I DO NOT mean
it in the sense of a MALICIOUS untruth, I mean it in the sense that we call
something that which it is not. This is the fundamental lie. Newton wasn't
lying in the sense that he thought he was fooling people. Of course not! No
one, not even the postmodernists (haha!), would say something that silly.
Newton was lying in that his model was a representation. He had to CALL the
mass induced curvature of mass-space, the "force" of "gravity". Both notions
are relatively false when compared with relativity or QM but the important
thing is that it is an abstraction or theory.
I am pleased that the talk of models has sparked your interest. I am
a little suprised that you don't see an awareness of modelling in pomo
theory. In one sense that is all there is. Postmodernism might be
successfully if not exhaustively described as an acute cultural awareness
that all information is modelling, that all knowledge is theory, that all
data is always already theory laden. The model is not formed after the data
is collected but before. That the model affects the process of collecting
data.
There has been a problem with models in the humanities (and to a
lesser extent the social sciences) because the models cannot be properly
tested with control experiments and all, because they need to account for
especially detailed and extensive systems of phenomema and because they are
so pervasive. Furthermore, in the humanities the models are created with
tools that are effected by the models themselves more significantly then the
sciences. In the humanities, a model cannot be tested, it will convince
based on
> Anxious to hear,
> Russell
Russell Turpin
In article <3ptjs1$1...@larch.cc.swarthmore.edu>,
Omar Haneef '96 <han...@engin.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> This thing with lies has to be solved. When I say lie I DO NOT mean
> it in the sense of a MALICIOUS untruth, I mean it in the sense that
> Newton was lying in that his model was a representation. He had to
> CALL the mass induced curvature of mass-space, the "force" of "gravity".
> Both notions are relatively false when compared with relativity or QM
> but the important thing is that it is an abstraction or theory.
I doubt that you can find a physicist today who confounds the set of
phenomena that gravitational theories explain with those theories. It
surprises me that anyone would make this confusion. "Elephant" is a
word. Elephant is a large mammal with a trunk. Most children learn
the difference as a matter of basic linguistic competence. Every once
in a while you will find one who writes "an elephant is large, gray,
and has three syllables," but even then, I suspect they are playing
games by purposely conflating this difference rather than showing
confusion. Children learn this from the Cheshire cat.
Let me turn around and ask the question: what does the postmodern
terminology ("fundamental lie," etc.) add to our understanding of this
distinction?
> I am pleased that the talk of models has sparked your interest. I am
> a little suprised that you don't see an awareness of modelling in
> pomo theory. ...
I am aware of their awareness of modeling. I have not observed that
they understand modeling.
> ... Postmodernism might be successfully if not exhaustively described
> as an acute cultural awareness that all information is modelling, ...
They are late. Beginning with Shannon, communications engineers have
been dealing with this for several decades.
> ... The model is not formed after the data is collected but before. ...
Yes, but this begs the question of what model and which data. We are
continuously collecting data and making models. Clearly the data I
collected yesterday precedes the model I make today, which in turn
precedes the data I collect tomorrow.
> There has been a problem with models in the humanities (and to a
> lesser extent the social sciences) because the models cannot be
> properly tested with control experiments and all, because they
> need to account for especially detailed and extensive systems of
> phenomema and because they are so pervasive. ...
I often think that people in the humanities would be better off if
they banished the words "control" and "experiment" from their
vocabulary, since these are usually trotted out just when they are
displaying their ignorance of science. Note that there are no
controlled experiments in stellar evolution, but that does not keep
astronomy from being a science. I doubt that the humanities can match
the sciences with regard to detailed systems. (Consider the human
genome project.) As for pervasiveness, consider the subject matter of
linguistics.
> ... Furthermore, in the humanities the models are created with
> tools that are effected by the models themselves more significantly
> then the sciences. ...
Really? More significantly than mathematics has been affected by
physical models??
> ... In the humanities, a model cannot be tested, it will convince
> based on
Did you mean to finish that sentence?
Gordon Fitch
| >> ... And hence we have a new ideology and value-system, metissimism,
| >> where meta is good and the one who metas the most other people's
| >> metas wins. ...
|
| > I think that is exactly right. Theory, then, is meta-ing (can meta be a
| > verb? I guess "doing theory" is the verb form of the adjective "meta-").
| > In any case, all of culture: art, language, imagination, etc. is all
| > based on well, what shall I call it? the metaphor, the lie, the
| > representation, the untruth, calling something what it is not, the ACT
| > of NAMING. If this process is at the heart of what makes us humans, as
| > I believe it is, then how can anyone blast "theory" because it is too
| > abstract or too removed or too obvious? Are Van Gogh's sunflowers
| > obvious? ...
tur...@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin):
| Thus, Omar Haneef suggests that all life is art and everything
| subject to only aesthetic criticism. A person who really
| believed this would choose a map not because it was accurate, but
| because its metaphors achieve an aesthetic (rather than
| utilitarian) measure. ...
I thought you were the one envaluing metaization, saying
that your meta was preferable to Derrida's because it had
metaed his meta. Now you talk about utility. You forget
that philosophy is the disease for which it is the cure,
thus combining in itself the greatest utility and
disutility. Derrida, then, is useful in that he enables us
to meta (cure) previous philosophies, but if institutional-
ized becomes himself a disease requiring a cure (meta) which
you had apparently provided, at least to your own
satisfaction.
And now you're going to backslide?
--
>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
Russell Turpin
In article <3pud58$5...@panix.com>, Gordon Fitch <g...@panix.com> wrote:
> I thought you were the one envaluing metaization, saying
> that your meta was preferable to Derrida's because it had
As the saying goes, it isn't funny if one has to explain
it.
Sigh. Must I really resort to smileys?
Gordon Fitch
| > I thought you were the one envaluing metaization, saying
| > that your meta was preferable to Derrida's because it had
| > metaed his meta. ...
tur...@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin):
| As the saying goes, it isn't funny if one has to explain
| it.
|
| Sigh. Must I really resort to smileys?
You can throw smileys, but you will not escape. You went to
the trouble of writing a long article to meta Derrida. In
this you showed seriousness as well as humor, and indeed, I
have validated your method, even against your will. I
ironize your irony, and raise you one.
--
>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
Omar Haneef '96
> Omar Haneef '96 <han...@engin.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> > This thing with lies has to be solved. When I say lie I DO NOT mean
> > it in the sense of a MALICIOUS untruth, I mean it in the sense that
> > Newton was lying in that his model was a representation. He had to
> > CALL the mass induced curvature of mass-space, the "force" of "gravity".
> > Both notions are relatively false when compared with relativity or QM
> > but the important thing is that it is an abstraction or theory.
> I doubt that you can find a physicist today who confounds the set of
> phenomena that gravitational theories explain with those theories. It
> surprises me that anyone would make this confusion. "Elephant" is a
> word. Elephant is a large mammal with a trunk. Most children learn
> the difference as a matter of basic linguistic competence. Every once
> in a while you will find one who writes "an elephant is large, gray,
> and has three syllables," but even then, I suspect they are playing
> games by purposely conflating this difference rather than showing
> confusion. Children learn this from the Cheshire cat.
And why are you looking for someone who would confuse the word with the
notion? I don't see what you are getting at here? Did you understand the
point I was making? I don't understand how yours is related to anything I
said.
> Let me turn around and ask the question: what does the postmodern
> terminology ("fundamental lie," etc.) add to our understanding of this
> distinction?
The "fundamental lie" is NOT postmodern technology. I was using it as an
example of "meta-"ing (which is what started us off on this). Other examples
of meta-ing include metaphors and theories. I was not adding to any
distinction, I was providing examples of that would reveal all of culture as
an excercise in abstraction.
> > I am pleased that the talk of models has sparked your interest. I am
> > a little suprised that you don't see an awareness of modelling in
> > pomo theory. ...
> I am aware of their awareness of modeling. I have not observed that
> they understand modeling.
Who are "they"? What models have they note understood? When Foucault says
that history is a model, has he misunderstood its nature?
> > ... Postmodernism might be successfully if not exhaustively described
> > as an acute cultural awareness that all information is modelling, ...
> They are late. Beginning with Shannon, communications engineers have
> been dealing with this for several decades.
Surely you see the difference between the way a communications
engineer models "information" and a pomo models "knowledge". We are not
talking about the representation of vocal vibrations as electronic
frequencies. We are talking about the representation of, say, cultural
morality as universal Truth.
> > ... The model is not formed after the data is collected but before. ...
> Yes, but this begs the question of what model and which data. We are
> continuously collecting data and making models. Clearly the data I
> collected yesterday precedes the model I make today, which in turn
> precedes the data I collect tomorrow.
Ah, but before ANY data is collected one has to form the notions of data and
model and how they relate. This is in itself a model. All models are based
on models. We are born into modelling (Althusser and Lacan, I suppose)
> > There has been a problem with models in the humanities (and to a
> > lesser extent the social sciences) because the models cannot be
> > properly tested with control experiments and all, because they
> > need to account for especially detailed and extensive systems of
> > phenomema and because they are so pervasive. ...
> I often think that people in the humanities would be better off if
> they banished the words "control" and "experiment" from their
> vocabulary, since these are usually trotted out just when they are
> displaying their ignorance of science.
An ignorance surpassed by your distaste for them, it seems.
> Note that there are no
> controlled experiments in stellar evolution, but that does not keep
> astronomy from being a science. I doubt that the humanities can match
> the sciences with regard to detailed systems. (Consider the human
> genome project.) As for pervasiveness, consider the subject matter of
> linguistics.
You are right here. Successful models in the humanities tend to be obvious
to be believable but that does not make them unoriginal. They do tend to
lack the detail.
> > ... Furthermore, in the humanities the models are created with
> > tools that are effected by the models themselves more significantly
> > then the sciences. ...
> Really? More significantly than mathematics has been affected by
> physical models??
Again, there is a difference. That vector math arose from the need to
describe forces is a different evolution then, say, history being written by
the victors of any given war. That America won WWII had a greater effect on
WWII then the fact that it occured. To put it another way, the very same
event in WWII, say, the Battle over Britain, would have been written very
differently had Germany won the war. The model of the war is transformed by
the war.
> > ... In the humanities, a model cannot be tested, it will convince
> > based on
> Did you mean to finish that sentence?
I did but someone "talked" to me so I quickly quit. I was going to erase
that sentance because I'm not quite sure why one model wins over others.
-Omar Haneef
Russell Turpin
In article <3pv7gj$f...@panix.com>, Gordon Fitch <g...@panix.com> wrote:
> I ironize your irony, and raise you one.
Call. Let's see your cards.
Russell Turpin
Before responding to some of Omar Haneef's particular points, I will
attempt to make explicit the issue that we seem to be nibbling around.
In an earlier post, Haneef wrote:
Postmodernism might be successfully if not exhaustively described
as an acute cultural awareness that all information is modelling, ...
I have often remarked that postmodernism seems to vacillates between
discovering (quite late) things that were known and (better!)
understood before the postmodernists, and then making a botch of the
subject matter that they "discovered." The assertion above falls into
the former category. From Aristotle, through Boole and Frege, to
today's cognitive scientists, this much has been clear: knowledge is a
kind of representation. In some sense, we should be pleased that the
literary theorists are catching up to what western philosophy and
science has adumbrated for two millenia and has started to explore in
some depth beginning a century ago.
If the pressing issue is modeling, then the question I have is this:
what -- if anything -- are the postmodernists adding to our
understanding? If all today's graduate students in English were to go
back and read Frege, Godel, Putnam, Quine, and even McCarthy, could
they ditch Derrida without loss? I know that the former have some
important things to say about modeling and knowledge. I have yet to
understand what the latter adds to these subjects.
Omar Haneef previously wrote:
>>> ... When I say lie I DO NOT mean it in the sense of a MALICIOUS
>>> untruth, I mean it in the sense that we call something that
>>> which it is not. ... Newton was lying in that his model was a
>>> representation. ...
I responded:
>> I doubt that you can find a physicist today who confounds the set of
>> phenomena that gravitational theories explain with those theories. ...
In article <3pvdqs$3...@larch.cc.swarthmore.edu>,
Omar Haneef '96 <han...@engin.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> And why are you looking for someone who would confuse the word with the
> notion? ... Did you understand the point I was making? ...
Actually, I was pointing to the difference between the model and its
subject matter. (My example of the child who said that elephants have
three syllables may have confused matters.) In any case, is this not
the distinction that concerns you when you wrote about the
"fundemental lie" when "we call something that which it is not"?
> Surely you see the difference between the way a communications
> engineer models "information" and a pomo models "knowledge". We are
> not talking about the representation of vocal vibrations as electronic
> frequencies. We are talking about the representation of, say, cultural
> morality as universal Truth.
Oh, yes. I see a great difference here. Shannon had some important
things to say about information and its communication. On the other
hand, I have no idea what a postmodernist might mean by capitalizing
truth, or preceding it with the adjective "universal." And I have
no idea how it would be an expression of cultural morality. Is there
something significant here?
> Ah, but before ANY data is collected one has to form the notions of
> data and model and how they relate. This is in itself a model. All
> models are based on models. We are born into modelling (Althusser
> and Lacan, I suppose)
This seems confused to me. Yes, we are born into modeling. The
infant has some cognitive functions at birth and develops a more
complex set soon after, all of which can be viewed as modeling
functions. But much of this occurs before the infant acquires
language, and long before one develops any "notion of data and model,"
which is a fairly advanced notion that an individual may not acquire
for many years!
Postmodernist writers have a tendency to assume -- wrongly -- that all
such models depend on language and that they are culturally acquired.
They then make up a lot of nonsense about language constituting
reality, incommensurability between cultures, etc. Those who study
language development, neurology, and cognitive science know better.
Once again, it seems to me, the postmodernists came into the game
late, proceeded on their own tangent, and got a lot of things wrong
that others had already figured out.
Janet Dowd
>about people who are irrelevant and uninteresting because
>they are only literary theorists. This would seem to make
>the article at hand theory about literary theory, doubly and
>damnably hyper-irrelevant.
>about a theory about literature, but never mind that.
>>< Gordon Fitch >< g...@panix.com ><
***....which might mean - given enough gimmickry - we ALL have
the potential to be literary theorists at some point in our
cRAPpy lives :) WOW! Here's our chance at 15 seconds of
fame, gang!
......now here's my theory blab blab blab..on propagating RAP blab
blab blab...throw in a little ontology flame flame flame....
eschatological ramblings burn burn burn.....mix with angst..rage..blab..
...blab blab.....profess to be the BEST poet on RAP...blab blab blab...
Jesse Garon
> ......now here's my theory blab blab blab..on propagating RAP blab
> blab blab...throw in a little ontology flame flame flame....
> eschatological ramblings burn burn burn.....mix with angst..rage..blab..
> ...blab blab.....profess to be the BEST poet on RAP...blab blab blab...
I beg your pardon. I have NEVER mixed Angst into ANY of my posts.
Angst is for candyasses who can't handle science fiction.
__________________
http://www.primenet.com/~grifter
I am the God damnedest mass of tact known to the human race
BEATRICE -- MAXIMUM CINEMA -- INTERNATIONAL POP OVERTHROW
Read a book, Dobie Gillis: you're embarrassing yourself
Gordon Fitch
| > I ironize your irony, and raise you one.
tur...@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin):
| Call. Let's see your cards.
You can see what's on the table, and I'm holding _The_
_Magician_ and the Six of Pentacles.
--
}"{ Gordon Fitch }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
DAVID BRUCE ROSENTHAL
: tur...@cs.utexas.edu (Russell Turpin):
: | Call. Let's see your cards.
Mr. Turpin, you can't just say "call," you have to match the bet...or fold.
: You can see what's on the table, and I'm holding _The_
: _Magician_ and the Six of Pentacles.
Now that's strong meta-cine.
--DaveBR
Christopher D. Ritter
>I think Omar Haneef correctly characterizes many literary
>"theorists." They excel at "the metaphor, the lie, the
>representation, the untruth, calling something what it is not,
>the ACT of NAMING." They are ignorant of logic, science,
>engineering, history, and other fields that necessarily go beyond
>"the metaphor ... [etc.]," and whose criteria for success goes
>beyond the things that these "theorists" discuss. (This is why I
>put scare-quotes around "theorist" in referring to these literary
>critics: because they have lost the things that make important
>the work of those from whom they borrow the term.)
>
>Russell
So where does one go with the theory that life is what we make of it. I believe
that
is it somewhat egotistical of someone to believe that they have defined what we
can only make metaphore for. If the American Indians did speak the true name
of some object or what have you, why is their words correct and ours not? Why
should we believe that everything in our language or art metaphore? Could a
sculpture be another version of the reality that exists?
I guess you could base this philosophy on a skewed version of actualism, that
what actually is.. is. Look in front of you, that is fact. Any complications
given
to the situation come from theory, and should have no bearing on fact. This crap
that I might not exist comes from a lonley, self-absorbed creature that wants
more
from its life and can't grasp reality, so it in turn reaches for the un-reality
and
blurs what exists with theory. No names are needed to support what I see, I can
say I see it with no other author to back me up. Taking life from that stand
point
doesn't do much for an academian, but it helps out those who fight the battles
of
the real world quite well... even the philosophers.
....Critter
Christopher D. Ritter
>Russel,
> This thing with lies has to be solved. When I say lie I DO NOT mean
>it in the sense of a MALICIOUS untruth, I mean it in the sense that we call
>something that which it is not. This is the fundamental lie
The way to prove something is first to look at it from all POVs then see what
the most true view is.. so, let's say that all these lies are truths, what we
call
something is actually what we call it, not a metaphore.. where does that theory
pick up at then?
....Critter
Christopher D. Ritter
>representation. Philosophy is a lie in the sense that Newton's physics is a
>lie. Its a useful lie, it helps us build bridges, but its a lie nonetheless.
>And what has art got to do with aesthetics(TROLL)? Philosophy, like art, is
>necessarily a MODEL of the world, an abstraction, a theory, a representation
>like a bridge modelled in a computer.
> -Omar Haneef
Okay, this is getting interesting. Now, if both philosophy and physics are lies
in
themselves, believing both to be halfs of a duality, if you're a dualist and not
a believer in the third unknown as I am, what would you be building "bridges"
to?
Once you get there what will you find but philosophy or physics? Now, I'm a
believer in the third unknown as I said, so that is a discussion in itself with
no
real answer but theory anyhow, but my question still stands...
.....Critter
Christopher D. Ritter
>> blab blab...throw in a little ontology flame flame flame....
>> eschatological ramblings burn burn burn.....mix with angst..rage..blab..
>> ...blab blab.....profess to be the BEST poet on RAP...blab blab blab...
>
>I beg your pardon. I have NEVER mixed Angst into ANY of my posts.
>
>Angst is for candyasses who can't handle science fiction.
You people are seriously beginning to worry me. I am twenty-one, coming into my
third year in literature at a second rate university, and treated as somewhat of
a urban legend here in Dayton because I whooped my school's ass in court all
before graduation and now I'm one of the top slammers in Dayton (though I do
bow down to the greats as I know them). I say this because I have accomplished
nothing in my life, and I still aspire to do more. I am viewed as somewhat of a
radical-- head shaven, slamming poetry that attacks even my own morals-- but
where I gain all my insight and wisdom from does not lie between hard or soft
back novels, but in the heart of man.
I work third's at a large company, and I normally find myself on a smoke break
with
computer analysts three times my age. When then tell me their life stories--
which
I have no idea why they do, must be my personality-- I LISTEN! That is the heart
of wisdom. No god-damned theory, no authors or any of that shit, but the gears
of the world, the pumping soul of this century. Sit back and listen, like I'm
about
to do, and leave the theory alone! You can learn a lot from a actualist.
....Critter
Omar Haneef '96
> > You've go me figured all wrong. I explained by art I meant a
> >representation. Philosophy is a lie in the sense that Newton's physics is a
> >lie. Its a useful lie, it helps us build bridges, but its a lie nonetheless.
> >And what has art got to do with aesthetics(TROLL)? Philosophy, like art, is
> >necessarily a MODEL of the world, an abstraction, a theory, a representation
> >like a bridge modelled in a computer.
> > -Omar Haneef
> Okay, this is getting interesting. Now, if both philosophy and physics are lies
> in
> themselves, believing both to be halfs of a duality, if you're a dualist and not
> a believer in the third unknown as I am, what would you be building "bridges"
> to?
> Once you get there what will you find but philosophy or physics? Now, I'm a
> believer in the third unknown as I said, so that is a discussion in itself with
> no
> real answer but theory anyhow, but my question still stands...
> .....Critter
Not lies as in untruths. No. Lies as in not the thing-in-itself. Lies as in
a thing-as-other. To call a PLAN of a bridge a "bridge" is not false, it is
simply not true. Its okay though, not a bad thing.
-Omar Haneef
What is the third unknown?
Omar Haneef '96
> what -- if anything -- are the postmodernists adding to our
> understanding? If all today's graduate students in English were to go
> back and read Frege, Godel, Putnam, Quine, and even McCarthy, could
> they ditch Derrida without loss? I know that the former have some
> important things to say about modeling and knowledge. I have yet to
> understand what the latter adds to these subjects.
of language to being which these other thinkers you listed do not attempt to
answer (maybe Frege does, I confess not to have read him (gulp!)). I feel he
has made some geniune contributions to western metaphysics in this regard,
again, with particular regard to the Aristotle->Kant->Husserl->Heidegger->
Derrida debate. No English students cannot do away with him because English
students work with language all the time. The need to understand metaphysics
inside of language, or better yet, as a FUNCTION of language is vitally
important.
> Oh, yes. I see a great difference here. Shannon had some important
> things to say about information and its communication. On the other
> hand, I have no idea what a postmodernist might mean by capitalizing
> truth, or preceding it with the adjective "universal." And I have
> no idea how it would be an expression of cultural morality. Is there
> something significant here?
So when Foucault examines how homosexuality was treated, scientifically, as
a mental disease for most of the history of psychoanalysis, you fail to see
any point has makinf regarding universal truth and cultural morality?
any point he was making regarding universal truth and cultural morality?
> This seems confused to me. Yes, we are born into modeling. The
> infant has some cognitive functions at birth and develops a more
> complex set soon after, all of which can be viewed as modeling
> functions. But much of this occurs before the infant acquires
> language, and long before one develops any "notion of data and model,"
> which is a fairly advanced notion that an individual may not acquire
> for many years!
The infant may not call it data and modelling but the infant percieves data
through the infant's senses and operates in that data to produce a response.
This operation and response is necessarily related to a model (conscious or
otherwise). Example: Baby cries, need (for milk) fulfilled. Baby cries when
needy.
> Postmodernist writers have a tendency to assume -- wrongly -- that all
> such models depend on language and that they are culturally acquired.
The structuralists thought it depends on language. A lot of post-modernists
actually criticize this notion. And it is not at all clear whether ALL such
models or MOST or SOME of these models are culturally acquired. As I
understand it, Noam Chomsky has recently re-opened the debate regarding the
acquisition of these models but writing off any one camp is as silly as
writing off the other.
> They then make up a lot of nonsense about language constituting
> reality, incommensurability between cultures, etc. Those who study
> language development, neurology, and cognitive science know better.
But "those who study language, nuerology and cognitive science" are
the ones to propose these models in he first place. Take a look: Chomsky
(linguisit: 60's his theory of deep structures), Whorf (linguist, 60's:
Language as ideas), Saussure (linguist, rediscovered: language as model of
reality).
In fact the idea that meaning is not cultural is what held back AI
research in the 60s and 70s and a lot of the 80s. Recently, scientists have
taken a page out of the books of linguist and cognitive psychologists to
re-implement old models that were abandoned and that treat reality as a
function of signifyed experience (hence the recent rise of neural nets that
had taken a back seat to symbolic manipulation for over 2 decades).
> Once again, it seems to me, the postmodernists came into the game
> late, proceeded on their own tangent, and got a lot of things wrong
> that others had already figured out.
Look, the English students have been looking at texts, representations, for
years. The people you call postmodernists are doing EXACTLY what you want
them to: letting the English departments learn more about these other
disciplines AS THEY RELATE TO LANGUAGE. Roughly, these are the fields that
have been married to language and texts by these thinkers:
Derrida: Philosophy (esp. metaphysics)
Foucault: Phil., but more clearly criminal studies, ethics and political
studies (in the Political Science, Gavinta had discoverd what Foucault did
in the 60s, I think)
Lacan: Psychoanalysis
Levi-Strauss: Anthropology
Note that these guys are considered successful, or at least not complete
jokes, in their fields. They are especially important to the English
department because they deal with texts and language.
> Russell
-Omar Haneef
Russell Turpin
In article <3q56hi$i...@larch.cc.swarthmore.edu>,
> of language to being which these other thinkers you listed
That question being ...?
> So when Foucault examines how homosexuality was treated,
> scientifically, as a mental disease for most of the history
> of psychoanalysis, you fail to see any point has makinf
> regarding universal truth and cultural morality?
Please elucidate. As I said before, I have no idea what "universal"
means when used to modify truth, and I have no idea at all what
this might have to do with cultural morality.
I wrote of the postmodernists:
>> They then make up a lot of nonsense about language constituting
>> reality, incommensurability between cultures, etc. Those who study
>> language development, neurology, and cognitive science know better.
Haneef responds:
> But "those who study language, nuerology and cognitive science" are
> the ones to propose these models in he first place. Take a look:
> Chomsky ...
Chomsky? A postmodernist?! I would think that his notions of a
Universal Grammar would be anathema to postmodernists.
> ... Whorf ...
Whose ideas have been losing credence.
> In fact the idea that meaning is not cultural is what held back
> AI research in the 60s and 70s and a lot of the 80s. Recently,
> scientists have taken a page out of the books of linguist and
> cognitive psychologists to re-implement old models that were
> abandoned and that treat reality as a function of signifyed
> experience (hence the recent rise of neural nets that had taken
> a back seat to symbolic manipulation for over 2 decades).
I eagerly await Haneef's explanation of how neural nets more than
symbolic reasoning inject culture into AI. I have read a lot about
neural nets, and this is the first I have heard about this!
Russell
Omar Haneef '96
Russell Turpin (tur...@cs.utexas.edu) wrote:
> -*-----
> In article <3q56hi$i...@larch.cc.swarthmore.edu>,
> Omar Haneef '96 <han...@engin.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> > Derrida is asking a fundamental question about the relation
> > of language to being which these other thinkers you listed
> > do not attempt to answer ...
> That question being ...?
The fundamental question of Western Metaphysics, as *I* see it:
Question: What is the relationship of the mind to the body?
> > So when Foucault examines how homosexuality was treated,
> > scientifically, as a mental disease for most of the history
> > of psychoanalysis, you fail to see any point has makinf
> > regarding universal truth and cultural morality?
> Please elucidate. As I said before, I have no idea what "universal"
> means when used to modify truth, and I have no idea at all what
> this might have to do with cultural morality.
Okay. The idea works something like this. Psychoanalysts used to call
homosexuality a mental disease. The implication being that it was a terrible
vice, something gone awry with the patient's psyche, that could be and needed
to be cured. Foucault thinks, as many others do, that labelling
homosexuality produced the idea that homosexuality was different from
heterosexuality (which it is) for a specific purpose: to put homosexuality
in the category of a disease. The psychoanalysts had not "found" the
"universal truth" about homosexuality: that it is a disease. Instead, they
had produced homosexuality as a mental illness. This was a result of the
culture that these psychoanalysts lived in, it was a function of a cultural
morality.
> I wrote of the postmodernists:
> >> They then make up a lot of nonsense about language constituting
> >> reality, incommensurability between cultures, etc. Those who study
> >> language development, neurology, and cognitive science know better.
> Haneef responds:
> > But "those who study language, nuerology and cognitive science" are
> > the ones to propose these models in he first place. Take a look:
> > Chomsky ...
> Chomsky? A postmodernist?! I would think that his notions of a
> Universal Grammar would be anathema to postmodernists.
NOT a postmodernist. But his unviversal grammar is VERY basic. Chomsky
certainly believes in the primacy of very basic COGNITIVE apparatus but this
universality does NOT extend to the production of morality and effects to a
large degree but does determine the modelling of reality.
> > ... Whorf ...
> Whose ideas have been losing credence.
Modified, sure. But I don't think nobody takes him seriously. I think he was
very important and has layed the ground for lotws of important work. The
operative word being "losing", not "lost".
> > In fact the idea that meaning is not cultural is what held back
> > AI research in the 60s and 70s and a lot of the 80s. Recently,
> > scientists have taken a page out of the books of linguist and
> > cognitive psychologists to re-implement old models that were
> > abandoned and that treat reality as a function of signifyed
> > experience (hence the recent rise of neural nets that had taken
> > a back seat to symbolic manipulation for over 2 decades).
> I eagerly await Haneef's explanation of how neural nets more than
> symbolic reasoning inject culture into AI. I have read a lot about
> neural nets, and this is the first I have heard about this!
Okay, here we go:
In the 40's and 50's America underwent the "cybernetic revolution" with the
production of von Neumann Machines, early neural networked AI machines.
In '56 at the conference in Dartmouth (unattended by the sick and dying von
Neuamnn who was a connectionist) saw the triumph of the symbolic model over
the connectionist model for about two decades.
The connectionist model: We will model "artificial" intelligence on "real"
intelligence, so we should see how nature constructs networks of messages
and realys.
The Symbolic Model: No! Machines aren't animals. We can obtain the same
results programming machines to produce results instead of attempting to
mimic nature (look at flight, you don't fly like birds do!).
The symbolic model was rule driven so it could be implemented with
algorithms but it needs a well defined domain and range set and clear rules
on how to get the right answer. Neural nets don't need complete information
and can get you close enough (so they have more success at recognizing
faces).
In 1964 Chomsky said language is rule based. In 65 Whorf said language is
thought. By implication, thought is rule based. More reason for the
symbolicists.
'69, Minsky and Papert write "Perceptrons" which kills neural nets for a
while.
The symbolicists win out! They have success in limited fields such as expert
systems where a lot of information is fed, about a VERY narrow field into a
machine which breaks it down into a small number of rules, a few hundred or
thousand, and successfully diagnoses patients like experts with decades of
experience.
But they don't understand MEANING. The word "Tiger" can be stored in an
array, it can be associated with a telephone number, there can be rules to
search for its address of alphabetize it. But HOW do you get the damn word
to MEAN anything? How does a computer answer
What IS a tiger?
(Derrida and Heidegger work on this question. What does it mean to be? What
is IS?) The symbolicists had silly approaches: break the sentance down into
parts of speech, apply grammatical rules etc. (NO, says Heiddeger, that does
not help the language apprehend BEING. You need ASSOCIATIONS)
The network model is far smarter. Like Saussure would have told them,
meaning is predicated on a system of similarity and difference. You need to
have the computer ask:
Is it living or dead? (living)
IS it an animal or plant? (animal)
Does it fly? (No)
Is it a mammal? (yes)
Does it have four legs? (yes)
Is it a dog? (no)
At this point the computer asks: What is it? (TIGER)
Give me a question to differentiate it from dog: (Is it domestic?)
This is actually a mimicked model of the symbolic approach to meaning. The
neural network would assign each of these answers a value, would ask the all
at once (in a different way, of course) and come up with better answers
faster.
In 1974, when Werbos invented back propogation, neur-nets were suddenly
empowered and in the 80's backpropogation was rediscovered as the
possibilities with the symbolic approach were being saturated.
1980, Lackaff and Johnson insist that language and concepts FEEDBACK to each
other.
Neural Nets have great success now at recognizing handwritting, predicting
the stock exchange and chemical reactions and recognizing 2d shapes.
NONE of these approaches have solved the big AI problems: Common sense
judgement (whatever that is, NO research done in this area. Not even FUZZY
LOGIC is any good), Human-Like speech manipulation and recognition of three
dimen objects like faces in a crowd.
Whatever theory comes up will now have to recognize the contradictions in AI
theory: is language parrallel or serial? Is it quantum or continous? How can
it be BOTH?
Meaning comes from interacting. One interesting appraoch to meaning is to
examine how meaning is produced when objects are physically manipulated and
managed. Nets have had great success here. In any case, they have to be
programmed to find meaning as other human beings would, with associations
which are PRIORITIZED, with a built in set of judgements that change (nets
learn of course).
Hope that sort of answers your question (I brought up the symbolic model so
you could compare it). More later, if you want. I gotta get back...
-Omar Haneef
> Russell
Russell Turpin
In article <3q5f2p$m...@larch.cc.swarthmore.edu>,
Omar Haneef '96 <han...@engin.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> The fundamental question of Western Metaphysics, as *I* see it:
> Question: What is the relationship of the mind to the body?
And what is the postmodernist answer?
-*------
Putting aside The Question for the nonce, let's proceed to some
more mundane issues. I commented that:
>> ... I have no idea what "universal" means when used to modify
>> truth, and I have no idea at all what this might have to do
>> with cultural morality.
Omar Haneef writes:
> Okay. The idea works something like this. Psychoanalysts used to call
> homosexuality a mental disease. The implication being that it was a
> terrible vice, something gone awry with the patient's psyche, that
> could be and needed to be cured. Foucault thinks, as many others do,
> that labelling homosexuality produced the idea that homosexuality
> was different from heterosexuality (which it is) for a specific
> purpose: to put homosexuality in the category of a disease.
Let me go further: *all* medicine is an innately normative task, and
all disease is merely the set of biological processes involving
ourselves that we do not approve. As I explicitly stated in my
previous post, nature does not dictate how we should evaluate things.
One implication is that there are as many criteria for disease as
there are moral outlooks.
Note well: the fundamental mistake made by these psychoanalysts was
not that they viewed homosexuality a disease. Rather, it was in
thinking that something other than human preference determines what
counts as disease and what is worth the effort to cure. (I do not
view homosexuality as a disease, but I also recognize that this
reflects my moral outlook, not some fact of biology I have at hand.)
> ... The psychoanalysts had not "found" the "universal truth" about
> homosexuality: that it is a disease. Instead, they had produced
> homosexuality as a mental illness. This was a result of the culture
> that these psychoanalysts lived in, it was a function of a cultural
> morality.
I hate to sound like a broken record, but I *still* have no idea what
"universal" means when used to modify truth, and I *still* have no
idea at all what this might have to do with cultural morality. I
understand the mistake that Omar Haneef describes, that some
psychoanalysts have made. Indeed, I have several times corrected the
same error made by posters in sci.med. But that does not answer the
two questions I have now twice posed.
-*------
Now on to the really fun stuff:
>> I eagerly await Haneef's explanation of how neural nets more than
>> symbolic reasoning inject culture into AI. I have read a lot about
>> neural nets, and this is the first I have heard about this!
Haneef proceeds with a fairly long explanation that never addresses
this issue, though it does wonder into some interesting AI topics.
> The connectionist model: We will model "artificial" intelligence on
> "real" intelligence, so we should see how nature constructs networks
> of messages and realys.
>
> The Symbolic Model: No! Machines aren't animals. We can obtain the
> same results programming machines to produce results instead of
> attempting to mimic nature (look at flight, you don't fly like
> birds do!).
A lot of people in AI think that posing this as a "debate" between
opposing sides is wrong-headed, almost silly. Neural nets and
rule-based systems are different kinds of algorithms. Arguing for one
over the other is much like arguing for hammers over screwdrivers.
For some problems they are best combined. Similarly, modeling natural
processes and performing "smart" tasks in entirely artificial ways are
*both* valid goals of AI research.
Neural nets provide a (quite) coarse model of how nerve cells work
individually and in small clusters. It is not at all clear the extent
to which symbolic processing is a model of higher level cognitive
processes in animals or humans. It would be quite speculative at this
point to say that natural thinkers do not do that. (Especially when
it seems that -- at one level -- they do.)
> The symbolic model was rule driven so it could be implemented with
> algorithms but it needs a well defined domain and range set and
> clear rules on how to get the right answer. ...
Pretty much. There are rule-based systems that use probabilities
and heuristics to cope with incomplete or inconsistent information.
Non-monotonic reasoning is also used for this purpose.
> ... Neural nets don't need complete information and can get you
> close enough (so they have more success at recognizing faces).
Yep. Neural nets are proving quite adept at pattern recognition.
> '69, Minsky and Papert write "Perceptrons" which kills neural
> nets for a while.
Neural nets went nowhere for a while because no one could get them to
do very much. They became interesting again when somewhat more
sophisticated architectures proved good at handling certain problems.
> But they don't understand MEANING. The word "Tiger" can be stored
> in an array, it can be associated with a telephone number, there can
> be rules to search for its address of alphabetize it. But HOW do you
> get the damn word to MEAN anything? ... (Derrida and Heidegger work
> on this question. What does it mean to be? What is IS?) The
> symbolicists had silly approaches: break the sentance down into
> parts of speech, apply grammatical rules etc. (NO, says Heiddeger,
> that does not help the language apprehend BEING. You need ASSOCIATIONS)
The "symbolicists" are not quite as silly as Haneef describes,
and very little is as silly as Haneef's paragraph above. (Meaning
requires association? No shit. Now tell me something useful.)
> The network model is far smarter. ...
No. It is smart in a different way.
> ... Like Saussure would have told them, meaning is predicated on
> a system of similarity and difference. ...
Genus and differentia? Where have I heard that before?
> ... You need to have the computer ask:
> Is it living or dead? (living)
> IS it an animal or plant? (animal)
> Does it fly? (No)
> Is it a mammal? (yes)
> Does it have four legs? (yes)
> Is it a dog? (no)
> At this point the computer asks: What is it? (TIGER)
> Give me a question to differentiate it from dog: (Is it domestic?)
> This is actually a mimicked model of the symbolic approach to
> meaning. The neural network would assign each of these answers a
> value, would ask the all at once (in a different way, of course)
> and come up with better answers faster.
The kind of information Haneef describes above is very well and very
quickly handled symbolically. A neural net is not good at dealing
with these kinds of questions at all, one at a time or in parallel.
Neural nets excel at a very different kind of problem. Suppose one
does not want to keep a lot of predicative informations about tigers
(orange, striped, feline, mammal, quadraped, sharp of tooth and claw,
old World, etc.), but rather, wants to scan pictures and pick out
tiger-like images. This is where symbolic processing fails miserably
and where neural nets do well. (Actually, this problem is a bit too
hard, but it is the kind of thing neural nets do well.)
> Neural Nets have great success now at recognizing handwritting,
> predicting the stock exchange and chemical reactions and
> recognizing 2d shapes.
But it isn't by asking in parallel a group of questions that might
be asked by a rule-based system. Rather, it is by pattern
recognition. An acquaintance of mine founded the company that uses
neural nets to make chemical processes more efficient. This is,
after all, a kind of modeling. (Yay!)
> NONE of these approaches have solved the big AI problems: Common
> sense judgement (whatever that is, NO research done in this area.
> Not even FUZZY LOGIC is any good), Human-Like speech manipulation
> and recognition of three dimen objects like faces in a crowd.
Both Doug Lenat and Vladimir Lifschitz (to use local examples) would
take exception to the claim that no research has been done in the area
of common sense judgment. (The first is tackling the problem by
giving a rule-based system a *lot* of information to work with, the
second, through non-monotonic logic.) I think neural nets have been
applied to dividing speech into phonemes (which is not as easy a
problem as it might seem).
> Whatever theory comes up will now have to recognize the
> contradictions in AI theory: is language parrallel or serial?
> Is it quantum or continous? How can it be BOTH?
Oh, bosh. This is as silly as asking whether a car is round and
rubbery or square and metallic, and expressing puzzlement that it
is both.
> Hope that sort of answers your question ...
No. Nothing you have said said above tells how neural nets inject
culture into knowledge. (If anything, I would argue that it is the
other way around. Since rule-based systems depend on humans to create
rules, these are always culturally influenced. Neural nets can learn
from sequences of patterns where the teacher tells only the category
for each pattern, and lets the net decide which features are best
used.)
dev...@smart.net
Russell:
I just came on in your posts with Haneef, and I couldn't agree with you more. In my many, many
years of arguing about postmodernism, I have never met someone who so exactly shared my
views. I just completed a diss that covers almost all the same points you have raised with Haneef.
Postmodernist thoerists betray everywhere their unfamiliarity with "thewesternmetaphysicaltradition"
e.g. the belief prevalent among such theorists that the idea that reality is mind- or language-
dependent is "postmodern." There is much waffling on this issue: postmodernists are vague about
what they mean by claiming that language constructs reality. On the hand, if taken literally, it's
absurd (but of course an old and venerable position in the western phil. tradition); on the other, pomos
often suggest that what they mean by such a claim is that our experience of reality is mediated
by language, to which one has to say, "Who would ever deny it?" So you've got either a claim ( a silly
one, but still a claim) as old as western phil itself, or a claim so utterly banal one wonders why anyone
would bother making it. I continue to debate this stuff with postmodernists, and I have found many
of them saying that postmodernist theory doesn't claim to be new (of course, many postmodernists
do in fact suggest this), but when I ask them what exactly it's supposed to be adding to what there
already is, I get nowhere. I have done alot of reading on Newtonian physics and quantum mechanis
because a characteristic postmodernist claim is that literary realism is the "refelction" of the "outdated,
pernicious Newtonian system" (this is a quote--Susan Strehle "Fiction in the Quantum Universe")
and that postmodernist fiction is the "reflection" of Einsteinian and post-Einsteinian physics. Suffice
it to say that postmodernists don't know very much about the history of science, and they are
especially prone to thinking that all sorts of metaphysical/epistemological/moral positions are _entailed_
by Newtonian and quantum physics (they are also, as you pointed out to Haneef, prone to thinking
that Newtonian physics is _wrong_, rather than just limited, rather than just now a special case of
the new theory). So one finds pomo critics and theorists claiming that it follows from Einstein's
special relativity that "everything is relative" and that relativism is definitive of a "postmodern"
epistemology (and again, these claims are made in a way that suggests pomos think relativism is new).
Bohr's complementarity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle get hugely distorted in postmodernist
accounts of them, to the point that it's not even clear why pomos invoke these principles at all. That
is, they want to talk vaguely about how everything is indeterminate or uncertain, and so the speficic
force and meaning of "indeterminacy" as a quantum mechanical term of are gets lost. The phsyics
becomes superfluous; it doesn't do any work. Their understanding of basic logic is appalling--I
have devoted about 100 pages to the so-called "logic of both/and" which is supposed to violate
the law of concontradiction, and the bottom line is that postmodernists fail to understand what
a contradiction is--I very much appreciated your "bosh" to Haneef on this. The claim, which
Linda Hutcheon makes, that postmodernism is contradicotry because it is both a continuation of
and a break from modernism is much like what Haneef was doing--confusing two states of
affairs that are completely compatible with a violation of the LNC.
I am here now to join the front with you.
MJ Devaney
devaney@smartnet
Omar Haneef '96
How about we break the discussion into "Absolute Truth" (different post) and
"really fun stuff" in this post. So its all in one place, I'll say it here
again
> -*------
> Now on to the really fun stuff:
> >> I eagerly await Haneef's explanation of how neural nets more than
> >> symbolic reasoning inject culture into AI. I have read a lot about
> >> neural nets, and this is the first I have heard about this!
> Haneef proceeds with a fairly long explanation that never addresses
> this issue, though it does wonder into some interesting AI topics.
I thought I did address this issue. If neural networks don't access
associations in a linear manner but do so in parrallel and are rigged, with
weights, so that they are able to prioritize those connections, then (I am
proposing) they are able to associate symbols in a manner that resembles the
simeltaneous, prioritized associations that make a culture. (let's define
culture as "those who study culture" would: culture is a set of signifying
experiences shared by a group of people. I think that definition would work
for most cultural studies schools).
> > The connectionist model: We will model "artificial" intelligence on
> > "real" intelligence, so we should see how nature constructs networks
> > of messages and realys.
> >
> > The Symbolic Model: No! Machines aren't animals. We can obtain the
> > same results programming machines to produce results instead of
> > attempting to mimic nature (look at flight, you don't fly like
> > birds do!).
> A lot of people in AI think that posing this as a "debate" between
> opposing sides is wrong-headed, almost silly. Neural nets and
> rule-based systems are different kinds of algorithms. Arguing for one
> over the other is much like arguing for hammers over screwdrivers.
> For some problems they are best combined. Similarly, modeling natural
> processes and performing "smart" tasks in entirely artificial ways are
> *both* valid goals of AI research.
So, again, remember all those dates and events that I brought out for you?
That was an ARGUMENT, a reason why I would label it a debate because ONE
SIDE was ignored at the expense of the other (the 1 connectionist who went
to the conference came back and did symbolic AI for the next decade). If you
have similair ARGUMENTS, as opposed to assertions, I'd be happy to entertain
your retorts. As it stands, almost everyone now agrees the original debate
was a waste and that the two approaches should have been combined but they
WERE NOT.
> Neural nets provide a (quite) coarse model of how nerve cells work
> individually and in small clusters. It is not at all clear the extent
> to which symbolic processing is a model of higher level cognitive
> processes in animals or humans. It would be quite speculative at this
> point to say that natural thinkers do not do that. (Especially when
> it seems that -- at one level -- they do.)
SO?
> > The symbolic model was rule driven so it could be implemented with
> > algorithms but it needs a well defined domain and range set and
> > clear rules on how to get the right answer. ...
> Pretty much. There are rule-based systems that use probabilities
> and heuristics to cope with incomplete or inconsistent information.
> Non-monotonic reasoning is also used for this purpose.
(Notice you agree with me here. If I were you, I could respond with "No
shit! Tell me something I don't know!")
> > ... Neural nets don't need complete information and can get you
> > close enough (so they have more success at recognizing faces).
> Yep. Neural nets are proving quite adept at pattern recognition.
(And here again. I'm drawing your attention to this because you pull
something along these lines with me down below.)
> > '69, Minsky and Papert write "Perceptrons" which kills neural
> > nets for a while.
> Neural nets went nowhere for a while because no one could get them to
> do very much. They became interesting again when somewhat more
> sophisticated architectures proved good at handling certain problems.
And that IS what the Minsky/Papert paper attacked the
early nets for, being too slow and not robust enough. Back propogation
breathed life into nets (as did improving hardware). If you were to read out
the chronology that I typed out, you would see this too.
> > But they don't understand MEANING. The word "Tiger" can be stored
> > in an array, it can be associated with a telephone number, there can
> > be rules to search for its address of alphabetize it. But HOW do you
> > get the damn word to MEAN anything? ... (Derrida and Heidegger work
> > on this question. What does it mean to be? What is IS?) The
> > symbolicists had silly approaches: break the sentance down into
> > parts of speech, apply grammatical rules etc. (NO, says Heiddeger,
> > that does not help the language apprehend BEING. You need ASSOCIATIONS)
> The "symbolicists" are not quite as silly as Haneef describes,
> and very little is as silly as Haneef's paragraph above. (Meaning
> requires association? No shit. Now tell me something useful.)
Ah, here it is. All your rudeness in three short lines. Let's deal with it:
(1) Silly is an ugly word so please don't use it again
(2) I am outlining the problem that faced the symbolicists, not their
solution. I don't know WHY you think I am characterizing them as silly
because I am not. Please re-read my posts before you respond as you seem to
be missing the point of my arguments.
(3) That you already know that meaning requires association is not something
I could have known. As you may know, it takes a bit of thinking to arrive on
this conclusion. If you agree with something you could just stay silent
about it or say, "true enough, we agree on this, but I disagree with this
point of departure because ...". In any case, I can't help but reproduce
some information you already have so please be patient and go through it
since I extend the same courtesy to you and wade through lots of information
that I already have in order to understand your point.
> > The network model is far smarter. ...
> No. It is smart in a different way.
Yes, you are right. My mistake, they are smart in a differnt way. In my
defence I would like to refer you to the paragraph immediately above where I
talked about association. I mean't that neural nets are far smarter when it
comes to association and producing meaning through association.
> > ... Like Saussure would have told them, meaning is predicated on
> > a system of similarity and difference. ...
> Genus and differentia? Where have I heard that before?
So? How is it that you manage to find arguments even in areas of agreement?
Where HAVE you heard it before and who develops it NEARLY as clearly and
articulately as Saussure?
> > ... You need to have the computer ask:
> > Is it living or dead? (living)
> > IS it an animal or plant? (animal)
> > Does it fly? (No)
> > Is it a mammal? (yes)
> > Does it have four legs? (yes)
> > Is it a dog? (no)
> > At this point the computer asks: What is it? (TIGER)
> > Give me a question to differentiate it from dog: (Is it domestic?)
> > This is actually a mimicked model of the symbolic approach to
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > meaning. The neural network would assign each of these answers a
> > value, would ask the all at once (in a different way, of course)
> > and come up with better answers faster.
> The kind of information Haneef describes above is very well and very
> quickly handled symbolically.
And that is what I said. I underlined, above where I said that.
> A neural net is not good at dealing
> with these kinds of questions at all, one at a time or in parallel.
I guess I didn't explain this very well in my post but the net doesn't asl
these questions in the sense of proposing them and having answers typed. The
neural net doesn't deal well with the grammatical rules. It is much more
likely to "ask the questions" graphically or in terms of binary logic
(because it is easy enough to make logic gates with neural nets). But it'll
find a close answer faster. Do the following, make a "tree" structure of the
questions, then link them up with varying weights and activation functions.
We now have a neural network.
Now for culture: depending on CONTEXT, change the activation functions and
weights! That is a socio-cultural context for you.
> Neural nets excel at a very different kind of problem. Suppose one
> does not want to keep a lot of predicative informations about tigers
> (orange, striped, feline, mammal, quadraped, sharp of tooth and claw,
> old World, etc.), but rather, wants to scan pictures and pick out
> tiger-like images. This is where symbolic processing fails miserably
> and where neural nets do well. (Actually, this problem is a bit too
> hard, but it is the kind of thing neural nets do well.)
You repeat what I said in different parts without recongizing that I already
know this. I have already described the success that nets have with
recognition, right? So you know I know this. Then, if you give me some
credit, I must be making a point that is different from the text-book drivel
about the potential of neural nets (reall research papers is the way to go,
those books are always waaay behind unless its an anthology and then the
editors usually have some insightful comments).
> > Neural Nets have great success now at recognizing handwritting,
> > predicting the stock exchange and chemical reactions and
> > recognizing 2d shapes.
> But it isn't by asking in parallel a group of questions that might
> be asked by a rule-based system. Rather, it is by pattern
> recognition.
Read above.
> An acquaintance of mine founded the company that uses
> neural nets to make chemical processes more efficient. This is,
> after all, a kind of modeling. (Yay!)
?
um....congratulations?
> > NONE of these approaches have solved the big AI problems: Common
> > sense judgement (whatever that is, NO research done in this area.
> > Not even FUZZY LOGIC is any good), Human-Like speech manipulation
> > and recognition of three dimen objects like faces in a crowd.
> Both Doug Lenat and Vladimir Lifschitz (to use local examples) would
> take exception to the claim that no research has been done in the area
> of common sense judgment. (The first is tackling the problem by
> giving a rule-based system a *lot* of information to work with, the
> second, through non-monotonic logic.)
I'd be very interested to hear of this research. Tell me more. References?
> I think neural nets have been
> applied to dividing speech into phonemes (which is not as easy a
> problem as it might seem).
> > Whatever theory comes up will now have to recognize the
> > contradictions in AI theory: is language parrallel or serial?
> > Is it quantum or continous? How can it be BOTH?
> Oh, bosh. This is as silly as asking whether a car is round and
> rubbery or square and metallic, and expressing puzzlement that it
> is both.
No, its not silly. (Heavens, Russel. Do you think you are the only one who
does any thinking around here? If you think something I said was "silly"
then please give me the benefit of the doubt and look deeper.) Its not silly
because, to use your analogy and the chronolgy (again), there WERE
assertions that the caris round and rubbery VS. square and mettalic. It is
only in the late 80s and early 90s that people have realised how "silly"
this appraoch was.
> > Hope that sort of answers your question ...
> No. Nothing you have said said above tells how neural nets inject
> culture into knowledge. (If anything, I would argue that it is the
> other way around. Since rule-based systems depend on humans to create
> rules, these are always culturally influenced. Neural nets can learn
> from sequences of patterns where the teacher tells only the category
> for each pattern, and lets the net decide which features are best
> used.)
I hope my new response has been more illuminating for you. You raise an
interesting point about symbolic systems already being culturally influenced
and I think you are right. They are and were. I suppose AI itself has to
mean nothing more than injecting more culture into computers.
-Omar Haneef
Omar Haneef '96
> Russell:
> I just came on in your posts with Haneef, and I couldn't agree with you more. In my many, many
> years of arguing about postmodernism, I have never met someone who so exactly shared my
> views. I just completed a diss that covers almost all the same points you have raised with Haneef.
> Postmodernist thoerists betray everywhere their unfamiliarity with "thewesternmetaphysicaltradition"
> e.g. the belief prevalent among such theorists that the idea that reality is mind- or language-
> dependent is "postmodern."
Who are "such thoerists"? Where did you get this from? It is patently false.
I suspect you think you have a better account of what the Western
Metaphysical Traditoin is. If so, would you please share it with us?
> There is much waffling on this issue: postmodernists are vague about
> what they mean by claiming that language constructs reality. On the hand, if taken literally, it's
> absurd (but of course an old and venerable position in the western phil. tradition); on the other, pomos
> often suggest that what they mean by such a claim is that our experience of reality is mediated
> by language, to which one has to say, "Who would ever deny it?" So you've got either a claim ( a silly
> one, but still a claim) as old as western phil itself, or a claim so utterly banal one wonders why anyone
> would bother making it.
Devaney. You will agree that the postmodernists have written a great deal
of, well, writing. Whatever your opinion of their writing may be, I suspect
you don't think they kept repeating one point over and over again. Each of
them have different points of view and a different account of HOW langauge,
meaning and being interact. Furthermore, this is only the starting point,
most of the work would cover the corrollaries of their statment. NOBODY is
arguing that the mediation of being through language is original or
brilliant but what those big fat tomes are dedicated to is the exposition
and development of what that MEANS. So what is being is mediated? Well, what
does that mean for technology? or art? (Heiddegger and Derrida look at
issues like this) What does it mean for power? knowledge? (Foucault examines
these issues). I'm sure you disagree with some of the points they make, as I
certainly do. Notice, for instance that when Derrida comes up I DO NOT
defend him on the basis of "signifyers slip, its hard to locate meaning" or
"meaning is only in context" because that is not interesting (to me) outside
the context of being and language.
> I continue to debate this stuff with postmodernists, and I have found many
> of them saying that postmodernist theory doesn't claim to be new (of course, many postmodernists
> do in fact suggest this), but when I ask them what exactly it's supposed to be adding to what there
> already is, I get nowhere.
I hope my little discussion above helped.
> I have done alot of reading on Newtonian physics and quantum mechanis
> because a characteristic postmodernist claim is that literary realism is the "refelction" of the "outdated,
> pernicious Newtonian system" (this is a quote--Susan Strehle "Fiction in the Quantum Universe")
> and that postmodernist fiction is the "reflection" of Einsteinian and post-Einsteinian physics. Suffice
> it to say that postmodernists don't know very much about the history of science, and they are
> especially prone to thinking that all sorts of metaphysical/epistemological/moral positions are _entailed_
> by Newtonian and quantum physics (they are also, as you pointed out to Haneef, prone to thinking
> that Newtonian physics is _wrong_, rather than just limited, rather than just now a special case of
> the new theory). So one finds pomo critics and theorists claiming that it follows from Einstein's
> special relativity that "everything is relative" and that relativism is definitive of a "postmodern"
> epistemology (and again, these claims are made in a way that suggests pomos think relativism is new).
> Bohr's complementarity and Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle get hugely distorted in postmodernist
> accounts of them, to the point that it's not even clear why pomos invoke these principles at all. That
> is, they want to talk vaguely about how everything is indeterminate or uncertain, and so the speficic
> force and meaning of "indeterminacy" as a quantum mechanical term of are gets lost. The phsyics
> becomes superfluous; it doesn't do any work.
Who are these postmodernists? Where did you find them? There are other
super-major figures. Maybe you should read some people who have been
associated with the word more directly. There is a thread right now having
to do with some person asking for a basic reading list. I'll wager none of
those, or at least very few of them, are making any claims about the
correlation of pomo to science EXCEPT as simeltaneous indicators of broader
cultural changes. The idea is that the belief in Truth, as produced in the
enlightenment, is giving way to a belief in knowable truth. There is a
difference.
> Their understanding of basic logic is appalling--I
^^^^^^
> have devoted about 100 pages to the so-called "logic of both/and" which is supposed to violate
> the law of concontradiction, and the bottom line is that postmodernists fail to understand what
> a contradiction is--I very much appreciated your "bosh" to Haneef on this. The claim, which
> Linda Hutcheon makes, that postmodernism is contradicotry because it is both a continuation of
> and a break from modernism is much like what Haneef was doing--confusing two states of
> affairs that are completely compatible with a violation of the LNC.
*I* did not think they were incompatible. *NOBODY* I know thinks they are
incompatable. *On the contrary* they ARE compatable, that is the problem.
The *theories* do not account for these compatibilities. That is the problem
I have (and the researchers doing this sort of thing have) with the original
models.
> I am here now to join the front with you.
Well, please also read MY posts. Its only fair.
> MJ Devaney
> devaney@smartnet
Omar Haneef '96
> -*------
> In article <3q5f2p$m...@larch.cc.swarthmore.edu>,
> Omar Haneef '96 <han...@engin.swarthmore.edu> wrote:
> > The fundamental question of Western Metaphysics, as *I* see it:
> > Question: What is the relationship of the mind to the body?
> And what is the postmodernist answer?
What the hell is a postmodernist? Do you want Derrida's answer? Foucault's?
Lacan's?
> Omar Haneef writes:
That is EXACTLY the answer to your question. If something OTHER than human
preference accounts for what is a disease, i.e. a non-preference, then the
implication is that there is a truth to what is a disease and this truth is
universal.
> > ... The psychoanalysts had not "found" the "universal truth" about
> > homosexuality: that it is a disease. Instead, they had produced
> > homosexuality as a mental illness. This was a result of the culture
> > that these psychoanalysts lived in, it was a function of a cultural
> > morality.
> I hate to sound like a broken record, but I *still* have no idea what
> "universal" means when used to modify truth, and I *still* have no
> idea at all what this might have to do with cultural morality. I
> understand the mistake that Omar Haneef describes, that some
> psychoanalysts have made. Indeed, I have several times corrected the
> same error made by posters in sci.med. But that does not answer the
> two questions I have now twice posed.
When people say "universal truth" they mean it is applicable to everyone.
Surely that is not the answer you are looking for!
> -*------
> Now on to the really fun stuff:
> >> I eagerly await Haneef's explanation of how neural nets more than
> >> symbolic reasoning inject culture into AI. I have read a lot about
> >> neural nets, and this is the first I have heard about this!
> Haneef proceeds with a fairly long explanation that never addresses
> this issue, though it does wonder into some interesting AI topics.
> > The connectionist model: We will model "artificial" intelligence on
> > "real" intelligence, so we should see how nature constructs networks
> > of messages and realys.
> >
> > The Symbolic Model: No! Machines aren't animals. We can obtain the
> > same results programming machines to produce results instead of
> > attempting to mimic nature (look at flight, you don't fly like
> > birds do!).
> A lot of people in AI think that posing this as a "debate" between
> opposing sides is wrong-headed, almost silly. Neural nets and
> rule-based systems are different kinds of algorithms. Arguing for one
> over the other is much like arguing for hammers over screwdrivers.
> For some problems they are best combined. Similarly, modeling natural
> processes and performing "smart" tasks in entirely artificial ways are
> *both* valid goals of AI research.
Look, I just wrote out pages of text showing you why it is a debate, and how
one was ignored in favour of the other. Before you call anything "silly" or
"wrong headed" pleas have some equivelant argument, not merely assertions.
> Neural nets provide a (quite) coarse model of how nerve cells work
> individually and in small clusters. It is not at all clear the extent
> to which symbolic processing is a model of higher level cognitive
> processes in animals or humans. It would be quite speculative at this
> point to say that natural thinkers do not do that. (Especially when
> it seems that -- at one level -- they do.)
And where do you think I said symbolic processing is a model of higher
cognitive processes? Or not? That is, of course, entirly beside the point.
The researchers didn't APPROACH the development of the symbolic system by
examining, say, cognitive processes but instead would (for instance) examine
grammar.
> > The symbolic model was rule driven so it could be implemented with
> > algorithms but it needs a well defined domain and range set and
> > clear rules on how to get the right answer. ...
> Pretty much. There are rule-based systems that use probabilities
> and heuristics to cope with incomplete or inconsistent information.
> Non-monotonic reasoning is also used for this purpose.
> > ... Neural nets don't need complete information and can get you
> > close enough (so they have more success at recognizing faces).
> Yep. Neural nets are proving quite adept at pattern recognition.
> > '69, Minsky and Papert write "Perceptrons" which kills neural
> > nets for a while.
> Neural nets went nowhere for a while because no one could get them to
> do very much. They became interesting again when somewhat more
> sophisticated architectures proved good at handling certain problems.
I am getting frustrated because I feel like you misundestand me on purpose.
The paper, perceptrons, deals with early neural nets that didn't do much at
all. It is only after back-propogation that neural nets really become
powerful.
> > But they don't understand MEANING. The word "Tiger" can be stored
> > in an array, it can be associated with a telephone number, there can
> > be rules to search for its address of alphabetize it. But HOW do you
> > get the damn word to MEAN anything? ... (Derrida and Heidegger work
> > on this question. What does it mean to be? What is IS?) The
> > symbolicists had silly approaches: break the sentance down into
> > parts of speech, apply grammatical rules etc. (NO, says Heiddeger,
> > that does not help the language apprehend BEING. You need ASSOCIATIONS)
> The "symbolicists" are not quite as silly as Haneef describes,
> and very little is as silly as Haneef's paragraph above. (Meaning
> requires association? No shit. Now tell me something useful.)
In the paragraph above I am NOT describing the symbolic solution. I am
describing the PROBLEM posed to symbolicists. I do NOT think this is SILLY
(and SILLY is an ugly word, so please drop it) and I am not describing THEM
as SILLY.
> > The network model is far smarter. ...
> No. It is smart in a different way.
yes, you are right. I didn't mean that.
More LATER....
Christopher D. Ritter
>a thing-as-other. To call a PLAN of a bridge a "bridge" is not false, it is
>simply not true. Its okay though, not a bad thing.
Alright, now I see where you are coming from. In other words, what is a mere
description of an object is not necessarily the object, though it is a "sense"
of the object.
>What is the third unknown?
I was babbling about this somewhere some time ago: Essentially the third unknown
is an extention of the dualist intrepretation of the universe, where a dualist
would believe that there is only good or bad, right or wrong, light or darkness,
and so on, to believe in the third unknown is to look for what you are missing,
to see what you haven't equated in the dualist principle. In other words, what
lies beyond light and darkness, or what is not good nor evil? There are a
thousand possibilities.
...Critter
Omar Haneef '96
> I was babbling about this somewhere some time ago: Essentially the third unknown
> is an extention of the dualist intrepretation of the universe, where a dualist
> would believe that there is only good or bad, right or wrong, light or darkness,
> and so on, to believe in the third unknown is to look for what you are missing,
> to see what you haven't equated in the dualist principle. In other words, what
> lies beyond light and darkness, or what is not good nor evil? There are a
> thousand possibilities.
> ...Critter
The strucutralists, Levi-Strauss especially, have talked about how
cultures define things in terms of bianry opposites. Its not that there is
only good and evil (as you agree) but that when one defines ANY one thing,
say good, one must also simeltaneously define its opposite. The thing which
it is not. Light is not a pencil but Light is also not-Darkness. Light and
Darkness have to be defined at the same time because they describe each
other.
I mean, if you're interested in that sort of thing.
-Omar Haneef
Omar Haneef '96
Firstly, Devaney, you are clearly a postmodernist. Welcome aboard.
Secondly, the characters fit the screen better now, thanks.
> > > Are you seriously trying to deny that it's a characteristic
> postmodernist claim that "language constructs reality"?
> >
> > YES! YES! YES! A million time YES! Where do you find these ideas?
> Does
> > Lyotard hold such ideas? Baudrillard? Who? You are thinking of the
> > STRUCTURALISTS who are a different breeed.
> >
> Again, in the books and articles listed above, amongst other books and
> articles I have not listed. I am most certainly _not_ thinking of the
> structuralists--they may well have been linguistic idealists, but their work
> generally strikes me as evasive on the question of the nature of reality,
> and I have never once come across the phrase "language constructs
> reality" or "reality is a construct of language" in structuralist writing. I have
> come across such phrases in almost every work by a self-proclaimed
> postmodernist/poststructuralist that I have read in the course of nearly
> four years of researching postmodernist and poststructuralist theory and
> criticism.
Do you think there are any postmodernists who DO NOT make such claims?
Foucault, for example, MIGHT be saying that it is power that constitutes
reality and THEN language (instead of vice-versa). If you think there are
postmodernists who do not make this bizarre claim, but more sober related
claims, then perhaps there is some theory there that is worth keeping on the
books. In addition, as I said, Metaphysics (capitalize because the term is a
joke like postmodernism) is concerned with the relationship of being to
thinking in much the same way as you claim that postmodernism is concerned
with the relationship of reality to language. If you want to say that
postmodernism is contemporary metaphysics (and I'm SURE you do not), then I
am inclined to agree with you.
> >
> > > Yes, I can do better than this: the history of western philosophy is not
> the monolith postmodernists make it
> > > out to be, and it is certainly not a history of the attempt "to master the
> world once and for all."
> >
> > WHOAH! Let us not confuse Western Philosophy with Western
> Metaphysics. Those
> > are different beasts. If you have a BETTER account of Western
> Metaphysics
> > then please present us with it instead of talking about it. What is
> Western
> > Metaphysics?
> I am not the one confusing western philosophy with western capital M
> "Metaphysics"--you are confusing me with postructuralists and
> postmodernists. That is, western philosophy does not ="Metaphysics".
> Metaphysics (with a small "m") is one branch of western philosophy,
> and the history of it within western thought is complicated. But to describe
> it in a sentence, it is the history of many and varied competing accounts
> of the nature of reality.
Ah, you said it. "accounts of the nature of reality" must surely deal with
being, with how we understand being, with how consciousness apprehends
reality and, basically, what I said earlier.
> That is, Flax's claim that "this real is understood to
> be an external subject or substance existing "out there" independent of
> the knower" presumes that most metaphysicians in the west have been
> realists, which is patently false.
That Flax is wrong is not the argument. I haven't read Flax and am perfectly
comfortable with you saying what you will of Flax.
> And Flax is not the only postmodernist
> under such an illusion--it is precisely the ill-informed notion that western
> metaphysics = realism that produces the belief amongst many
> postmodernists that the claim that reality is a construct of language
> represents a radical overturning of western metaphysical thought.
I grant this as well, but it is YOUR burden to show that most, if not every,
(and certainly all the "major") postmodernists hold a similair view. Derrida
insists on respecting Plato and Aristotle. The task of reading them, he said
last year at Villanova, is always ahead of him. He never masters or
completes these texts. And when he writes, he carefully situates ideas, and
himself, historically. HE believes he is ADDING to the tradition.
For another matter, look at Foucault who practically has Nietzche tattooed
on his forehead!
Interesting how we constantly focus on different exemplars but yours is that
harder task because you launched an attack on ALL of postmodernism while I
claim to defend only a small portion.
>
> But let me ask you this: what is supposed
> > > to be the force of the term "postmodernist" or "postmodern"?
> >
> > There is a HUGE debate about the term, whether it is a real
> phenomenon or
> > not and what exactly it means. There are many, many postmodernists
> who hate
> > the term and desperately try to disassociate themselves from the term.
> > However, even those arguing against the term are producing the term
> as a
> > debate and constituting certain thinkers as postmodernists. I vacillate
> > wildly between thinking the term is a crock that should be gotten rid off
> > and thinking of it as useful. The point, however, is that I think a lot of
> > the thinkers who do get labelled pomo are really bright people with
> > interesting ideas that deserve to be heard.
> > The more interesting claims that the term need to exist, in my opinion,
> are
> > those that gesture to post-industrial culture. Pomo analysis is really
> > useful when it comes to MTV and pop culture, Sci-Fi and pop culture
> and
> > global tensions and the media. That these analyses are grounded in
> > metaphysics makes them very exciting to me.
> > To sum: the ideas may not be pomo but the culture is, thus an analysis
> of
> > pomo culture is pomo.
> You say that even those arguing against the term are producing the term
> as a debate and constituting certain thinkers as "postmodernist." But
> what does it mean, then, to call a thinker "postmodernist"? What are the
> tenets roughly shared by such thinkers that constitutes them as
> "postmodernists"?
A focus on the ability of reality to shape consciousness and the ability of
consciousness to filter reality. Very metaphysical indeed.
> This is the sticking point for me, for as I've suggested,
> the claims identified as "postmodernist" are either banal or as old as
> western thought itself. Again if Derrida is egaging the question of
> representation, which I agree with you that he is, then since such a
> question has been central in western thought, what is it about egaging
> this question that constitutes him as a "postmodernist" thinker?
Nothing. He hates being called a postmodernist, and I don't feel the need to
defend the word as applied to him. Sure, if you argued that Derrida is not
postmodernist, I would forgive you.
> Hold on a minute: > you say pomo analysis is really useful when it
> comes to MTV, sci-fi, and pop culture, and then claim that the ideas
> may not be pomo but the culture is, so an analysis of pomo culture is
> pomo. For one thing, there's not just one way of analyzing a particular
> cultural phenomenon.
You are right, I made a mistake. I should have left my statement at "pomo
analysis is useful at analyzing contemporary culture" and thats what makes
me see it as postmodernity. There are "other" ways of analysis that are
equally valid and not pomo.
> For another you're simply asserting that
> contemporary culture is pomo. In what sense is it pomo? Contemporary
> culture is not any "ism" in itself--it's theorists and critics who have
> described in terms of "postmodernism." That is, it is the ideas that are
> ostensibly supposed to be postmodernist, and it's just that that I'm
> disputing--e.g. many of the analysis of contemporary cultural
> phenonmena by postmodernists that I have read suggest describe
> suhc phenomena in terms of "fragmentation," "uncertainty," and so on,
> but fragmentation and uncertainty are hardly peculiar to the postwar
> period.
I find myself resonating with these readings of culture. I think there is
something startinglingly interesting about post-war culture having to do
with media and a new way of shaping consciousness that needs to be analyzed.
There has been "uncertainty" and "fragmentation" before and its here again
but its different now, thats why the postmodernists surround those words
with tomes of other words which explain the difference.
> Moreover, since many other of the claims postmodernists make
> about contemporary culture are not borne out by it, what is useful about
> their analysis? Take Baudrilllard, for example--in his case it's not that
> what he says isn't borne out by contemporary culture, but rather that if
> what he says were, no one could know it (that is, reality _could_ be a
> simulacrum, but if it were no one could assert that it were). I don't find that
> useful at all or in the least bit interesting.
You are doing it again. Why take him as an example? What about other
examples where the writer DOES argue? What about Foucault? He argues till he
is blue in the face and even presents exotic examples.
> What do you mean, "that these analyses are grounded in metaphysics is
> very exciting to me"? What sort of metaphysics, exactly, do you see
> these anaylses as being grounded in?
Read above.
> > > If indeed as you claim what's being addresed is the question of
> > > what it means that language mediates our experience of reality, then
> since this question has been a
> > > central concern in western philosophy, then what do we need the
> word "postmodern" for? It doesn't
> > ^^^^^^^^^^ (metaphysics, which is different)
> > > then seem to me to be doing any work. Now I think many
> postmodernists believe it is doing work because
> > > they believe that what they're claiming is somehow new and radical.
> > Um, no, "they" are not. Some of them are and some of them are not.
> Your
> > belief in their newness has nothing to do with the validity of their
> > arguments.
> >
> As I've noted, I never see much in the way of arguments--the substance
> of many postmodernist' claims is _just_ the claim. Where a
> postmodernist simply asserts in a sentence that "reality is x," other
> philosophers devote 300 page books to arguing why "reality is x."
Are you seriously ASSERTING that POSTMODERNISTS do not ARGUE? Can I see an
ARGUMENT for this? (ANd not just an example consisting of some High School
graduates thesis, make an argument that ALL pomo is assertive and not
argumentative so I wont simply be able to produce counterexamples)
> And I
> don't believe in the newness of postmodernist claims; rather it is
> postmodernists who initmate that they believe as much by asserting that
> "reality is x" radically undermines the western philosophical tradition's
> claims about reality.
Thats okay, I'm not defending there newness (not today).
> If you think that
> > > Derrida, for instance, is engaging the question of representation and
> what it means, if you agree with
> > > what I've said above, then why not abandon your investment in the
> term "postmodern"? It ( the term)
> > > serves no purpose other than to encourage a kind of Zeitgeist thinking
> that is reductive, totalizing and
> > > ill-informed.
> > Derrida hates the term. I hate the term in *some* contexts and find it
> > useful in others. For example, in this (not-so-great-but-okay) book,
> > Cyberia, the author was making claims to the global village that pomo
> > society is reverting and art hitorians speak of the rebirth of the visual
> > over the linguisitic. Whether these changes are True of False does not
> > makes the word pomo useful, instead, what makes "pomo" useful is its
> > ability to empower us to discuss these ideas. Argh. Thats not very
> clear.
> > Let me say it again: Whether such changes are occuring is beside the
> point
> > to the author's need to discuss them which is served by the tern
> "postmodern".
> >
> I don't see how "pomo" as a term is useful in its ability to empower us to
> discuss certain ideas. We can just as easily talk about the ideas. And of
> course it matters whether what critics and theorists claim is the case is in
> fact either the case or not. If "postmodernism" describes changes that
> have not in fact occurred, what is its point?
You never NEED any term, a chicken is simply "that animal that runs around
with the red thing on its head". And are you now arguing that changes have
not occured? Do you thing television has an impact on how we see the world?
Is it different from before? What about advertising? Do you thing there are
more changes down the road?
Thanks, now do you see?
> >
> > Well, certain changes ARE occuring in society, we need a term for it.
> The
> > argument over what the term describes is at once the argument over
> what the
> > changes are.
> >
> > > Yes, of course, there are changes, but no, I disagree with you, I don't
> think we need a term to describe them--rather we can just describe them.
WHAT? And why not? I want a term? I don't want to be constantly referring to
"all this new stuff". I want to NAME it. Why call metaphysics metaphysics?
Why call philosophy philosophy? Why call Chemistry chemistry? Should I argue
for the advantage of naming? (not rhetorical, let me know)
> The problem with postmodernist theorists and critics is the huge
> philosophical claims they want to attach to such changes because as it
> turns out, the huge philosophical claims they make and that they want to
> think of as distinctively "postmodernist" are precisely the claims I'm
> arguing have been made "since at least Plato."
This is simply not true for all postmodernists. All I need you to say is
"yes Omar, I agree: some postmodernism is goo and some bad, the term is
useful sometimes and misleading othertimes"
> To claim that cyberspace
> is "postmodernist," for example, raises the question "how is it so?" which
> inevitably leads to some grand philosophical assertion that could be
> claimed of almost anything at all, and so the term loses its force as
> something that would pick out what is distinctive about now.
On the contrary, we find out what is different ONLY IF we find out what is
similar. To say, for instance, cyberspace is postmodern because you
literally assume any identity you want ONLY makes sense if you show how
identity in "real" life is limited by, say, appearance. (I can "be" a woman in
cyberspace FAR MORE EASILY than I could be in "real" life, for instance).
> The problem
> is that "postmodernism" is an oppositional term--postmodernists have
> had to create all sorts of strawmen ("modernism," "enlightenment
> thought," "realism") in order to justify a spurious teleological sentiment.
> The term ought to be abandonned because it has by now too much
> ill-informed, uncritical baggage attached to it to salvage it.
This is true of many contemporary terms. Look at feminism. These differences
are being hammered out. Nobody is entirely sure what realism is either but
we have that more worked out them pomo. Pomo is still being experienced so
it can't be bottled untill post-pomo when we can look at it and, to use a
Fitch term, "meta" it.
> Of course I
> want to abandon "modernism" and "enightenment thought" as well
> (postmodernists aren't the only theorists and critics who appeal
> uncritically to such notions--that is, the idea of "the enlightenment"
> predates postmodernists.
Exactly. Do you want me to start arguing for the utility of naming movements?
> If there's one thing that requires a radical
> undermining, it is the way, generally, both the history of philosophy and
> the history of literature have been written).
You are postmodern! Well done! I knew you would see it our way!
> >
> > > and second, what the hell is Truth as
> > > opposed to "knowable truth"? What exactly would be an "unknowable"
> truth? Something can be true
> > > that I don't know to be true, but that something will be known to
> someone, otherwise it can't be a truth,
> > > since the ascription of truth is bound up with knowing by someone.
> There is and has never been such
> > > a thing as "unknowable" truth.
> > Truth, as opposed to knowable truth, is (getting back to Western
> > Metaphysics) belief in an ontological Truth whereas a knowable truth is
> an
> > epistimilogical (sp?) truth.
> > -Omar Haneef
> > Ontological truth? What are you talking about it? As I said, truth is
> bound up with knowing, that is, with epistemology, and it always has
> been. Truth is a property of propositions, statements, or sentences
> (depending on whether you believe in propositions or not), and it has
> always been thought of as such.
> That is, things are not true or false--the
> moon, the table, the chair, etc... is neither true nor false, rather it's the
> statement or sentence or proposition expressed by the sentence, say,
> "The moon is round" that is true or false.
I don't see your last point? Who is arguing that "things are false"? One
MIGHT argue that our PERCEPTION of things are false, who is arguing that
"things" are false?
> MJ Devaney
> dev...@smart.net
Also, you switch between attacking the ideas of postmodern philosophers and
then the term and discourse of postmodernism which are not the same thing.
Why not start two seperate threads so I can defend them seperately.
-Omar Haneef
dev...@smart.net
> Two important things to begin with:
> Firstly, Devaney, you are clearly a postmodernist. Welcome aboard.
> Secondly, the characters fit the screen better now, thanks.
>
I've said it before and I'll say it again--I did not constitute the roughly
shared assumptions and tenets that define "postmodernist theory" as an
_identifiable_ school of thought--that has been done by those thinkers
who call themselves postmodernists. So a thinker who identifies herself
as a postmodernist _could_ disagree with the claim that language
contstructs reality, but if she failed to agree with most or all of those
shared assumptions and tenets that mark postmodernist theory as a
school of thought, then I'd suggest she wasn't a postmodernist. That said,
I'll repeat that the claim that reality is a construct of language is one of the
most frequently articulated claims made by postmodernists--competing
with claims about the loss of the so-called "stable and unified subject."
And as I've also pointed out, it is not entirely clear what any number of
postmodernists mean by the claim that reality is a construct of
language--which is what I'm getting at, to address what you bring up
below, when I say that postmodernist theorists tend not to present
arguments; rather, they are very often more interested in showing that a
novel, poem, film, etc...instantiates, in some respect, the idea that
language constructs reality than they are in clarifying the meaning of the
phrase. But there are a number of interpretations that present
themselves, and the context in which a particular theorists makes the
claim helps somewhat. Many postmodernists seem to mean by it that
language literally contstructs reality, and though I agree with you that that
is a bizarre claim, it has a long and venerable place in the history of
western philosophy (western philosophy is chock full of bizarre
claims--for a rather witty and amusing account of these bizzarities, see
David Stove's _The Plato Cult_--he's a crank, but a witty crank). What I
object to here is that these postmodernists represent this claim as
"subverting" western "metaphysics." That is, it's not the claim itself, but
the fact that it is used by such postmodernists to suggest their
"difference" from "the western philosophical tradition." Other
postmodernists who make this claim seem to be suggesting that
language mediates our experience of the world, and in the case of a
number of theorists I have, they are, in suggesting as much, explicitly
responding to the notion that
postmodernists/postructuralists/deconstructionists are claiming "il n'y' a
pas hors de text." The problem here is that such theorists still want to
represent this idea as "new"--that is, the claim is to the effect "No one is
arguing that 'everything is a text' but rather that we have no direct access
to reality," as if _that_ were something worth remarking upon. In other
theorists I have read, finally, there is some sort of conflation going on
between the claim that language literally constructs reality and that
language mediates our experience of reality, to the effect that it follows
from the fact that language mediates our experience of reality that
language contstructs reality.
I would not deny that postmodernist theorists make metaphysical claims,
though many, many of the theorists I have read seem to think they're
_escaping_ metaphysics, and I think they think this because they tend
to identify "metaphysics" as such with metaphysical realism, so that they
believe in claiming that language constructs reality, they are not doing
metaphysics. I would deny that "postmodernism is contemporary
metaphysics" because postmodernists are not the only ones around right
now making metaphysical claims. Indeed, there are a number of
philosophers around now making very different metaphysical claims from
postmodernists.
Well, for one, metaphysics and epistemology are not the same thing (you
say "with how consciousness apprehends reality"--that is an
epistemological question). Secondly, so what? Western philosophy is still
not identical with one line of questioning within it, it is not identical with
"Metaphysics" Thirdly, my main objection to capital m "Metaphysics" as it
rears itself in postmodernist theory is the reductivism and
homogeneonizing of the western philosophical tradition that often
accompanies its invocation.
I have never claimed Derrida or Foucault to be postmodernists. I don't find
either to be very interesting philosophically, and I have objections to
particular aspects of the work of both (I disagree with you about Derrida's
historicism, and I have trouble with Foucault's notion of "episteme," as
well as his all-pervasive notion of power and oppression, which presents
conceptual--not empirical--difficulties, that Charles Taylor discusses
well), but if you want to call them postmodernists, why do you want to do
so? Many of the postmodernists theorists I have read _claim_ to derive
their ideas from Derrida, Foucault et al., but that doesn't necessarily
mean they are accurately representing the thought of Derrida and
Foucault.
But anyway, you say below that you'd forgive me if I said Derrida is not a
postmodernist. And so perhaps you'll also forgive me if I say Foucault is
not a postmodernist. So, then, what you claim to be defending when you
say that your burden is less than mine, cuz you're only claiming to defend
a small portion of postmodernist theory, is dwindling rapidly. You may
want to defend Derrida or Foucault, but what you'd be defending by your
own account, at least with respect to Derrida (I have to wait to see
whether you agree that Foucault is not a postmodernist), is not
postmodernist theory. I can discuss Derrida and Foucault with you and
the question of postmodernism need never come up. That's how it should
be.
So, now that we've eliminated Derrida, and possibly Foucault, as "major"
postmodernist theorists, who is left? It can't be Baudrillard, since you
dismiss him below as worthwhile in response to my pointing out the
pragmatic self-refutation involved in claiming that reality is a simulacrum.
Rorty? (one of my readers, but I doubt you'd put him in the running. I
certainly wouldn't, but prolly for different reasons). Jameson? I'd agree
he's a major thinker--I don't know exactly whether I'd call him
postmodernist, but that aside, though he's smart, he is confused (he falls
prey to some of the stuff I was talking about above--I _will_ give you the
relevant passages, if you want them--they have to do with his
understanding of realism (literary realism, that is). Lyotard? With the
exception of _The Postmodern Condition_, which I think is rubbish, what
has he produced that would qualify him as a "postmodernist"? He's a
Wittgensteinian through his own lenses.
Hardly warrants the term "postmodernist."
> For another you're simply asserting that
> > contemporary culture is pomo. In what sense is it pomo?
Contemporary
> > culture is not any "ism" in itself--it's theorists and critics who have
> > described in terms of "postmodernism." That is, it is the ideas that
are
> > ostensibly supposed to be postmodernist, and it's just that that I'm
> > disputing--e.g. many of the analysis of contemporary cultural
> > phenonmena by postmodernists that I have read suggest describe
> > suhc phenomena in terms of "fragmentation," "uncertainty," and so
on,
> > but fragmentation and uncertainty are hardly peculiar to the postwar
> > period.
>
> I find myself resonating with these readings of culture. I think there is
> something startinglingly interesting about post-war culture having to do
> with media and a new way of shaping consciousness that needs to be
analyzed.
> There has been "uncertainty" and "fragmentation" before and its here
again
> but its different now, thats why the postmodernists surround those
words
> with tomes of other words which explain the difference.
>
Yes, but many postmodernists focus on the uncertainty and
fragmentation part, as if _that_ were new..instead of just talking about
media and technology.
It's not something I can _argue_--there is no argument that
postmodernists don't argue; rather it's something one demonstrates via
many, many examples. If there are exceptions, as you seem to think, I
would say they are exceptions to the rule. And I only say that cuz I have
so many examples.
> > > Let me say it again: Whether such changes are occuring is beside
the
> > point
> > > to the author's need to discuss them which is served by the tern
> > "postmodern".
> > >
> > I don't see how "pomo" as a term is useful in its ability to empower us
to
> > discuss certain ideas. We can just as easily talk about the ideas. And
of
> > course it matters whether what critics and theorists claim is the case
is in
> > fact either the case or not. If "postmodernism" describes changes
that
> > have not in fact occurred, what is its point?
>
> You never NEED any term, a chicken is simply "that animal that runs
around
> with the red thing on its head". And are you now arguing that changes
have
> not occured? Do you thing television has an impact on how we see the
world?
> Is it different from before? What about advertising? Do you thing there
are
> more changes down the road?
> Thanks, now do you see?
>
> > >
> You're misreading me, maybe cause I misread you, but you said that
whether such changes are occuring is besides the point; rather it is the
author's need to discuss them in such terms that is the point. I wasn't
saying there aren't any changes--I was saying that it is very much to the
point that that the changes pomos describe are occuring.
But the sort of changes pomos describe have to do with vague things like
"subjectivity." This is point I've made before--rather than talking about the
changes, there is this urge to make rather large philosophical claims, for
which the particular changes merely serve as an instantiation of. TV, film,
MOOing, none of this actually has undone any existing notions of
personal identity. The questions about the nature of all sorts of things
remains constant; the changes in our world have not changed the
questions. There are different emphases--for instance, I think cyberspace
provides for a different kind of community than there has even been
before, but it doesn't affect my sense of myself as a person--e.g. an entity
that manages to persist over a certain given amount of time, nor does it
make me feel any more "fragmented" or "uncertain" than I was before I
started spending so much time on the net. You see, I don't think
technology actually does impact in fundamental ways on, for instance,
identity. I dunno. It's hard to explain my point of view here. I could prolly
give a fuller account if I hadn't already been writing so long.
> > > Well, certain changes ARE occuring in society, we need a term for
it.
> > The
> > > argument over what the term describes is at once the argument
over
> > what the
> > > changes are.
> > >
> > > > Yes, of course, there are changes, but no, I disagree with you, I
don't
> > think we need a term to describe them--rather we can just describe
them.
>
> WHAT? And why not? I want a term? I don't want to be constantly
referring to
> "all this new stuff". I want to NAME it. Why call metaphysics
metaphysics?
> Why call philosophy philosophy? Why call Chemistry chemistry?
Should I argue
> for the advantage of naming? (not rhetorical, let me know)
>You may want to name it, but that's a "masterful" gesture, to allude
back to Flax. Talking about "all this new stuff" in their particularities would
be far more interesting than just lumping it all under the term
"postmodernist." Not to mention far less dangerous, and way more
responsible. Not all names are the same, as you seem to imply by
asking why call philosophy "philosophy," or chemistry, "chemistry."
Period terms aspire to speaking generally about decades and
decades of all sorts of different stufff--the term "philosophy" does not
reduce all philosophical thought to the same thing. We can talk about
"philosophy" because that can include any kind of philosophy--this is not
so with a term like "Victorianism." The term "philosophy" is not set against
some period or another, the way "Victorianism" is supposed to be set
against "Romanticism." I have never seen a critic appeal to such
periodizing terms without appealing to abstract notions to define those
terms, abstract notions that, of course, fail to define something
particularly "Victorian." Instead of speaking in such terms, why not just
talk about the specificities? Talk about Darwin's infuence on any number
of 19th c novelists without abstracting to some claim (which with
postmodernts is usually something to the effect that "Victorians believed
in certainty" or belived in a "unified, coherent subject") that doesn't hold
any water?
The problem with postmodernist theorists and critics is the huge
> > philosophical claims they want to attach to such changes because as
it
> > turns out, the huge philosophical claims they make and that they want
to
> > think of as distinctively "postmodernist" are precisely the claims I'm
> > arguing have been made "since at least Plato."
>
> This is simply not true for all postmodernists. All I need you to say is
> "yes Omar, I agree: some postmodernism is goo and some bad, the
term is
> useful sometimes and misleading othertimes"
I await an example of "good" postmodernist theory.
>
> > To claim that cyberspace
> > is "postmodernist," for example, raises the question "how is it so?"
which
> > inevitably leads to some grand philosophical assertion that could be
> > claimed of almost anything at all, and so the term loses its force as
> > something that would pick out what is distinctive about now.
>
> On the contrary, we find out what is different ONLY IF we find out what
is
> similar. To say, for instance, cyberspace is postmodern because you
> literally assume any identity you want ONLY makes sense if you show
how
> identity in "real" life is limited by, say, appearance. (I can "be" a woman
in
> cyberspace FAR MORE EASILY than I could be in "real" life, for
instance).
But what's different is not those fundamental things postmodernists tend
to claim are different.
>
> > The problem
> > is that "postmodernism" is an oppositional term--postmodernists
have
> > had to create all sorts of strawmen ("modernism," "enlightenment
> > thought," "realism") in order to justify a spurious teleological
sentiment.
> > The term ought to be abandonned because it has by now too much
> > ill-informed, uncritical baggage attached to it to salvage it.
>
> This is true of many contemporary terms. Look at feminism. These
differences
> are being hammered out. Nobody is entirely sure what realism is either
but
> we have that more worked out them pomo. Pomo is still being
experienced so
> it can't be bottled untill post-pomo when we can look at it and, to use a
> Fitch term, "meta" it.
>
I don't think "realism" _is_ any more worked out than
"postmodernism"-indeed I don't think anything so broad could ever be
worked out. "Postmodernism" could never be worked out, if it
took--"Postmodernist theory" _could_ because it presents itself as a
school of thought. Postmodernism, like modernism, the enlightenment,
victorianism, doesn't exist. "Postmodernist theory," on the other hand,
does.
> > Of course I
> > want to abandon "modernism" and "enightenment thought" as well
> > (postmodernists aren't the only theorists and critics who appeal
> > uncritically to such notions--that is, the idea of "the enlightenment"
> > predates postmodernists.
>
> Exactly. Do you want me to start arguing for the utility of naming
movements?
You'll never convince me of that.
>
> > If there's one thing that requires a radical
> > undermining, it is the way, generally, both the history of philosophy
and
> > the history of literature have been written).
>
> You are postmodern! Well done! I knew you would see it our way!
>
> > >
As I said at the top, if anything, or at least with regard to this point, you are
not a postmodernist.
I'm asking what "ontological" truth is supposed to be--I was attempting a
go at what you could possibly mean.
>
> Also, you switch between attacking the ideas of postmodern
philosophers and
> then the term and discourse of postmodernism which are not the same
thing.
> Why not start two seperate threads so I can defend them seperately.
>
I haven't been attacking the ideas--see above--just the discourse of
postmodernism. I can argue about the ideas, though, if you want.
-MJD
Jesse Garon
then send that post to alt.culture.jesse-garon, then it damn well better
include some stuff on REAL models. Either the kind in bikinis or the
kind that you can glue together what are made of plastic.
But all this semantical syntactical shit is getting boring, and it is
not part of my culture. So snap to, true believers!
Omar Haneef '96
I'm going to try to be simple and clear.
Devaney believes that
(1) No historical period should be labelled as this is reductive and
inherently misrepresentational.
(2) Devaney believes that Postmodernism is a useless term because it does
not add meaning.
(3) Devaney believes that there are two main ideas that constitute a
postmodernist stance: the linguistic construction of reality and the
dissolution of the subject. These, he believes, are wild assertions that are
not argued for and are defended under the useless bannes or "postmodernism"
(4) Devaney has listed a large number of theorists he calls postmodernist
based on their own employment of the term, he excludes Derrida and Foucalt
(!) from the category of postmodernist.
Okay. Lets see now, I'll grant the first point and simply say that
postmodernism is not merely a historical period.
I must take issue with 2 but that will have to wait for the other thread we
have started since I have ended up defending this point there.
Lets start at
(3) Postmodernism can also be considered a post-linguistic discourse as a
lot of postmodernism is sight/sound. Postmodernism has an aesthetic, it is
post-industrial Gothic (I guess). Anyway, lets take a look at the main 5
pomos: Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Jameson. Does any of them
claim that language constructs reality? Not really. Does any of them claim
the subject is dissolving? Sure, Foucault does. And yet you want to exclude
him from your list. And what DO Baudrillard and Lyotard focus on? Well, on
(to be reductive) the artifical quality of life and the end of
metanarratives. In a sense, someone could misinterpret Baudrillard's
simulacrum, this copy which is used instead of an original-which-is-not, as
an example of a constructed reality. But this is a reduction. Baudrillard
looks at the technological re-production of experience as the de facto
experience. In my opinion, a useful tool. I don't remember saying Derrida is
not pomo, the poor chap has been glued to the label. And the Lyotard,
Baudrillard and Jameson are pomo celebrities. They made the label up. How
can you write off these 5 and then attack pomo?
(4) I guess I got to this in 3.
-Omar Haneef