Quintessential Postbozotica.
James 'Kibo' Parry
What comes after postmodernism? Why, postbozoticism, of course.
Here's something I didn't write. (It was found.) Enjoy.
-------------------------------------------------------- >8 clip 'n' save ----
THE AYE OF ERGON
================
It was a dark and stormy storm of creamed corned beef and lime green jello.
I inhaled my pocket cellular phone and turned into a drugstore on West
Third Street. The cops thought "Urinating now would melt the jello into a
small mess." So they leaped over the quick brown fox into a tar baby of
donuts with too many exploding heads and chocolate glazed eclairs.
The desks looked like little girls singing about Ethernet. But the
pots stopped Spot's tops to a sot which was too evil. Spot screamed! And
then he wet his legs and the slime in the network throughout western
Europe's communistic trade zones that couldn't FTP to anywhere outside
Spot's sphere of Slack. Then the evil Chex mix soaked up all the doggy
Jell-O(TM) FRUM DEE GREENE of the golf cabby's cart.
So the taxi ran the light. Spot munched happily on the extra donuts.
A Jell-O monster flew from the ugly dormitory building into the pits of
Pittsburgh's sexy hills and valley where the river flowed into the center
of the empire state building in Flight Simulator and ran out of eyeballs.
"Waah!" cried Kibo, rushing to the kitchen grabbing the chex and the
balances. The `frop bucket of Bolov Reisczechs grew little feet and threw
up into the chex and flew by the blazing phoenix.
The Phoenix, Sil, (aka Sil La, Master of Reorganizations), flamed by
all, loved by herpes, reborn in ashes of burned popcorn and corned beef.
Spot fiddled with the knob on his swallowed phone and choked on his tongue!
"Waah! Woxxing son of the Dragaeran Empire and the Unholy Acid-Squirting
Eye Of Newt!! Begone you unspeakable Ak'ar scumbag spaqn of Heaven!!! I
urinate on the loaves of Miyamoto's Restaurant."
While the gods destroyed my ability to think on kibology and be
allowed. So Spot ran up his nose, down his throat and into his urinary
tract. He sat down. "Hmmmm.... I think this Einsteinian universe stuff
is for the hell-spawned dark stars. He heard beeps.
He ran back into the train of thought that fell from Felan's cat's paw.
He answered the phone.
It was the cops calling about the extreme acid levels in the area.
They wanted to urinate, but they all had phones in their stomachs.
"Hey! Shut up!", cried Spot. "My friends need their beauty sleep in
their Beautyrest beds. So the cops at the Jell-O(TM). Factory walked
outside amid sleet and Fleet enema equipment. They inserted the phone
jacks into each other, shorting out the Jell-O(TM) and each other."
The cops oggled! The stars frotzed! The Phoenix sparkled!
Kibo wept for home, and Kansas. Dorothy dodged the punctuation skid
marks and ran into the Jell-O. He ate it and then urinated on the cops,
who threw the telephone back into Spot. Spot ran away but died anyhow.
Felan's cat, hearing Spot die, decided to commit seppuku. However,
electric midgets grabbed the phone, killing Spot again.
THIHEN BIIIIFFFFFFSSSTTEERRRR!!!! APEEARUD AND SED "D00DZZZZZZ!!!!!
Would you have REELY POSTED TWO COPIEZ OF UR STUPID LITTLE PUPPY SIGNATUR
TO MISC.BIFF.R00LEZZ? THATZ GRATE!!!111" He met Felan's cat's keeled
over, dead body, and proceeded to remove its head from BIFF's shoe.
Dorothy waved from the drugstore--and held me away from the--what was it?
dead cat. BIFF looked confused (naturally), because he wasn't completely
dead yet, though he was a major bozo, and couldn't keep from staring at
the--what the fuck?--building agrees with what he thought about sex.
Some Chicken Noodle fell from the soupmaster's deadly ladle. Chris
believed that the soup was really soap, and he cleaned up with ckd's help.
"Who's ckd?" asked BIFF. "HOWZ THUH SOUP??/??/?"
Chris thought until his head LIKEE BURSTID FRUM the unaccustomed
effort. 1963 was the year Kennedy fell on bingo night. He fell into jello
and life was beautiful again.
I'm eating rice and figgy pudding. The jello is all dried up. The
policemen wept. The phone stopped this story here.
T H E E N D
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I particularly liked the way one character symbolizes Enkidu when the
action begins, but the symbolism has been transferred to another character
when the "block" begins. Truly masterful.
--
.............................................................................
James "Kibo" Parry ki...@world.std.com Independent graphic designer
271 Dartmouth St. #3D (specialty: logos & corporate
Boston, MA 02116 (617) 262-3922 identities) and type designer.
Andrew C. Aiken
[ parts deleted ]
>I particularly liked the way one character symbolizes Enkidu when the
>action begins, but the symbolism has been transferred to another character
>when the "block" begins. Truly masterful.
This reminds me of that early seventies computer program ELIZA.
What is the point? Anyone could write that junk. Watch:
Box of sky in a two-by-four distant dream smacking warm
on a smackable smackwarm warm woman's thigh. Pizza in
the oven. Wha? Did someone say rain? Green lightning
arced across the rainy night sky. And with my woman. The
green image of a dream of rain. Primal craze, this harem
of ideas. These ideas that scream that there is no rain.
Preen our box of dust, you scar of hallowed wound. Scoot
your mane. Wane, my friend. I assure you that it is quite
possible: the rain, a dream, a plaza. He was shot in the
plaza. The stagecoach seemed to float on air, slowly, without
turbulence. The death came with cheers. All of a sudden the rumor
started spreading. The sky convulsed and all was void.
This is a bunch of nonsense, of course. It took me perhaps 1.5 min.
to write and type it. Like much of this strain of melarky, it is
utterly without value.
Andrew Aiken
Premodernist
Joe Zitt
> This is a bunch of nonsense, of course. It took me perhaps 1.5 min.
> to write and type it. Like much of this strain of melarky, it is
> utterly without value.
Value? Some of us find both examples to be fun. Congratulations on being
able to generate it quickly.
It is happening again. It is happening again. It is happening again.
Joe Zitt ...cs.utexas.edu!kvue!zitt!joe (512)450-1916
Andrew C. Aiken
>aai...@mango.ucs.indiana.edu (Andrew C. Aiken) writes:
>> This is a bunch of nonsense, of course. It took me perhaps 1.5 min.
>> to write and type it. Like much of this strain of melarky, it is
>> utterly without value.
>Value? Some of us find both examples to be fun. Congratulations on being
>able to generate it quickly.
Well, that sort of stuff is fun to write, too.
I take my statement back - neither piece is without value, but
I just think that some people write in that genre much better than
I ever could. Take Donald Barthelme, for example. Now, he has been
described as postmodern. All I know is that his works are very
enjoyable. He had a gift for skewering bureaucracy, scientism, and
Educationspeak.
My apologies to the previous writer.
Andrew Aiken
Jeff Beer
What about Ilya ( Order Out Of Chaos ) Prigogine?
Is he a post modern biologist? His theories were very big about a
decade ago, is he still big in biology circles?
Jeff
Dan Gezelter
I'd certainly call his work one of the prime examples of post-modern
science. Prigogine's biggest contribution was his explanation
of reaction-diffusion systems (such as his "Brusselator" model of
the BZ reaction). Certainly reaction-diffusion systems are
applicable to many other fields, and this is (in my opinion) what
makes him a "post-modern" scientist. Slime mold populations and Cesium
ion concentrations and abstract geometrical figures are all studied
with the same tools. One science borrows the tools of all others and
pastes them together to solve many common problems. Pastiche in
the pursuit of scientific knowledge. *That* is post-modern science.
--
____________________________________________________________________________
Ceci n'est pas un .sig. geze...@lithium.cchem.berkeley.edu
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew C. Aiken
> I'd certainly call his work one of the prime examples of post-modern
>science. Prigogine's biggest contribution was his explanation
>of reaction-diffusion systems (such as his "Brusselator" model of
>the BZ reaction). Certainly reaction-diffusion systems are
>applicable to many other fields, and this is (in my opinion) what
>makes him a "post-modern" scientist. Slime mold populations and Cesium
>ion concentrations and abstract geometrical figures are all studied
>with the same tools. One science borrows the tools of all others and
>pastes them together to solve many common problems. Pastiche in
>the pursuit of scientific knowledge. *That* is post-modern science.
Post-modern science? As opposed to other types of science?
Since when did the laws of biology contradict the laws of chemistry?
I suggest you find _On Growth and Form_ by D'Arcy Thompson (1917) in
your library. By your definitions, it is pre-modern post-modernism.
The pre's and post's cancel, and you are left with just plain Science.
Andrew Aiken
Premodernist
Margaret Kritzer
>joe@zitt (Joe Zitt) writes:
>
>>aai...@mango.ucs.indiana.edu (Andrew C. Aiken) writes:
>
>>> This is a bunch of nonsense, of course. It took me perhaps 1.5 min.
>>> to write and type it. Like much of this strain of melarky, it is
>>> utterly without value.
>
>
> Well, that sort of stuff is fun to write, too.
>
>I take my statement back - neither piece is without value, but
>I just think that some people write in that genre much better than
>I ever could. Take Donald Barthelme, for example. Now, he has been
>described as postmodern. All I know is that his works are very
>enjoyable. He had a gift for skewering bureaucracy, scientism, and
>Educationspeak.
>
Gee, I thought you were "doing" William Burroughs. Was that
cut-up text, or just "randomly" generated?
Margaret
--
==========================================================================
Robert Hooker
> I'm eating rice and figgy pudding. The jello is all dried up. The
and the story went on;
Post on, Robert, post on. The voices of an entire generation are
with you.
No. A new cover, underlying the first, was revealed. But if you
consider all the books in the bookstore, you will realize the the
covers fall off very few of them. Or are turned back.
However, a religion whose precepts include something like "this worksfor
us, but may not or will not work for all people at all times, andis
revisable by us if we find it no longer works" would not be
considered by me to be in opposition to "postmodernist" philosophy.
I agree. Just what the fuck does postmodern mean?
An entirely blank article seems more like late modernism to me
than postmodernism, although I suppose one could regard it as
postmodern in the sense of satirizing, and thereby criticizing,
modernism. Reference to _4:37_ and whatever whoever called that
completely black painting back in the '50s are obvious.
Personally, I find null objects too dependent on their context
to be interesting.
>Personally, I find null objects too dependent on their context
>to be interesting.
Robert, your wit, humor, and intellectual prowess have amazed the
members of this newsgroup. We wait with baited breath for every
morsel of abuse that filters sweetly from your mouth. Who would
ever have thought that some soul like yourself would be capable
of poking fun at a lifeless intellectual movement after reading
the newsgroup for only two weeks. But your brilliance and presciencehave
convinced us that we sit at the feet of a true master.
For the new kids on the block ("What _is_ this here
Postmodernism, anyway?") and lovers and haters of PC-spelled-
backwards, there's the latest Village Voice. It has Camille
right on the cover, looking pretty serious, if you know what I
mean, plus a long article in the Voice Literary Supplement about
the latest in pomo thought and writing. I haven't read the
articles; it is enough for me to know that they are there.
The term "postmodernism" alone can serve as an example of the inadequacy
of a
single signifier toward the representation of complex thoughts -- in this
case, "post-modernism" seems to hyper-generalize our conceptualization of
culture. I am not sure who was the culprit: who added the "ism"? Lyotard
discusses "the post-modern condition"; his perspective seems to focus upon
the
state of our cultural trajectory which he indicates has been shaped by the
once
revolutionary "modernist" philosophies and aesthetics. This shaping has
brought about new aesthetic and philosophical counter-revolutions.
Consider
the common question in architecture: what relationship does form have to
functionality? Currently, many architects have expanded the earlier
modernist
notions of stark, minimal forms to favor forms that are embellished with
the
intention of providing historical and/or cultural reference. This is a
cultural tenet (which is infact "modern" in normal denoted terms) which is
often attached to the concept of post-modernism. As this cultural tenet
can be
denotatively perceived as "modern", and connotatively perceived as
"post-modern", I contend that we have an extremely dysfunctional state of
communication. Although "post-modernism" as a concept seems to be vague
and
damaging to communications, the cultural tenets that it attempts to
represent
are themselves real -- they are often ignored by those who attempt to
police
their pretentiousness; this behavior has been clearly exhibited by
Barrington
King's comments about intellectuals in the Lower East side. Sure, you may
think they are pretentious and misguided, but you are not communicating
tangible concepts either.
Banal artistic endeavors passed off as high culture
Reality? Whose reality?
In postmodernism, we can tell a book by its cover because a book_is_ its
cover
Perceived meaninglessness is the failure for an audience to
attribute meaning. As I believe that I can attribute meaning to any
stimulus, meaning is the receptor's responsibility.
"Open-mindedness only occurs during surgery"
>This joke has an infinite number of endings since there
>are an infinite number of potential readers, each of whom
>brings a different cultural background to the textual encoding
>of this form of humor. Take the phrase "...to screw in a
>lightbulb..." What are we to make of this? First we have
>a verb that is strongly connotative of sexual activity. But
>coitus "in a lightbulb" is fertilizes our minds with images
>of sexual exhibitionism on the part of "postmodernists" and
>voyeurism on the part of the reader. The initial word "How"
>is a qualitative modifier of that image of exhibitionist
>postmodernists. It is a weakly veiled attempt to bring
>satire into an intellectual domain that has hence had a
>dearth of this kind of mental perversion. Only through
>further deconstruction of humourous references to ourselves
>can we hope to escape the tyrranny of satire.
Not everyone here is a proponent, or even an opponent of
postmodernism. Most people in alt.postmodern are also
intelligent enough to notice when posters have followed
up their own messages with equally inane flames. You've
made your point, a point that I don't completely
agree with, but that probably isn't a concern of yours.
Just be careful in assuming that everyone on the net
is exactly what they seem to be. Some are more subtle
dissemblers than yourself.
Post-modernism technically refers to stuff that will happen tommorow or
afterwards: The philosophical version of "the check's in the mail".
The idiot psuedo-intellectuals that get hung up on it look at it
differently. "Modernism", roughly from Descartes through Kant, places
primacy on the fact of individual consciousness and postulates the
existence of objective reality to which we relate indirectly,
buteffectively. "Postmodernism" is the movement that considers this
stuff passe'. "Surely no one believes we can know anything" say the
french, and as far as it goes, they're right. In the postmodern world
everything is decentralized - heaven forefend there should be a right and
a wrong. There are a million equally valid interpretations of everything,
so when you said you loved your sweetheart the other day you just as
really meant you wish she was dead, or a penguin, and thus did irreperable
violence (everything in the postmodern world "does violence", it's a
buzzword) to her.
Though we are radically decentralizing meaning, meaning is in fact to
be found "in context". The most truly useful illustration of this is in
"post-modern" architecture that strives to look right in a building's
particular surroundings (actually an idea that Ayn Rand, who definately
was not a post-modernist, pushed maniacally for in "Atlas Shrugged"),
unlike the classic modern skyscraper a la Meese Van der Roe that seems to
have been designed without much reference to its environment -- it would
lookpretty much the same (and they look good, in my opinion) anywhere.
This stuff about context works great for buildings, but it falls
short in human things. The sweetheart example above, for one. Any ethical
problems (this is the infamous "situational ethics" beast). I once partook
in a job interview with a derridian/foucaultian candidate who expressed
interest in applying this stuff to medical ethics. How? By letting each
situation reveal its self to the participants and breaking down
thetraditional roles...Right, care for a french-fry? With this kind of
thing you never get an answer, and that, they say, is a good thing. Just
shows you that your values are false and how dare you force your
interpretationon, gulp, do violence to me by suggesting that you would
like to eat atanother resteraunt? Or that requiring students to read Plato
is any betterthan requiring students to read Marx, or Hitler, or Mother
Goose (scratch that, it has eurocentric, male-dominated, traditional
values). These
people are dumb, french, and evil.
But you *have* a point, even if you claim to have no point, which
has been my point all along.
Robert Hooker
Xref: utkcs2 alt.prose:1109 alt.postmodern:1699
In article <aaiken.687659032@silver> aai...@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Andrew
C. Aiken) writes:
> I suggest you find _On Growth and Form_ by D'Arcy Thompson (1917) in
> your library. By your definitions, it is pre-modern post-modernism.
> The pre's and post's cancel, and you are left with just plain Science.
>
>
> Andrew Aiken
> Premodernist
This post modern science shit is an effort to give meaning to word that
for many menaing is empty and coolness is rich.
The word sounds kind of cool, and I guess it is cool enough that we will
have it in our lexicon for some time.
Whats intersting is here we can see the process of a word attaching to a
meaning.
Ofcourse most dumps will give meaning to the world that is silly, like
postmodern science.
Pomo as a word is going the way of funky, it's becoming a meaningless
sound to most.
Ofcourse that was why many of my postings found there way here, they
enjoyed an situation in which there stupidity could take on a greater
meaning, which they clearly have.
On alt.urbanfolklore and or alt.logic they would have been taken as the
work of a mad man, but here they have meaning.
Real cool man.
Gordon Fitch
| >>> This is a bunch of nonsense, of course. It took me perhaps 1.5 min.
| >>> to write and type it. Like much of this strain of melarky, it is
| >>> utterly without value.
joe@zitt (Joe Zitt) writes:
| > Well, that sort of stuff is fun to write, too.
aai...@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Andrew C. Aiken) writes:
| >I take my statement back - neither piece is without value, but
| >I just think that some people write in that genre much better than
| >I ever could. Take Donald Barthelme, for example. Now, he has been
| >described as postmodern. All I know is that his works are very
| >enjoyable. He had a gift for skewering bureaucracy, scientism, and
| >Educationspeak.
marg...@igor.tamri.com (Margaret Kritzer) writes:
| Gee, I thought you were "doing" William Burroughs. Was that
| cut-up text, or just "randomly" generated?
Just a technological note: there are computer programs which will
randomly generate text in an author's style, given a sample of
the author's text. The text is nonsense, but the identity of the
author is usually obvious, even though what the program does is
generate each letter based on the probabilities given the
foregoing four or five letters. In other words, style seems to
be determined at a very low linguistic level. Burroughs cut
things up at the word, phrase, and sentence level.
Nonsense is pre-postmodern, though; people have been doing it for
a long time. However, as with alleged non-nonsense, we now have
texts you can talk back to. There are BBS's where everyone writes
like "Postbozotica" -- which should encourage those who find
alt.postmodern unbearably stuffy.
the way.
--
Gordon Fitch * uunet!cmcl2.nyu.edu!panix!mydog!gcf
Bx 1238 Bowling Green Station / NYC 10274
"... a master of disingenuous subtlety." -P.McGuinness
Curt Sampson
geze...@magnesium.cchem.berkeley.edu (Dan Gezelter) writes:
> Certainly reaction-diffusion systems are
> applicable to many other fields, and this is (in my opinion) what
> makes him a "post-modern" scientist. Slime mold populations and Cesium
> ion concentrations and abstract geometrical figures are all studied
> with the same tools. One science borrows the tools of all others and
> pastes them together to solve many common problems. Pastiche in
> the pursuit of scientific knowledge. *That* is post-modern science.
Hmmm. This gives me visions of great paradigms colliding into each
other with huge crashing noises. :-)
If that's postmodern science, then is object-oriented programming
pomo programming? Having a bunch of windows *be* a linked list
(and moving themselves about in it on request) rather than being
put into a linked list is certainly a very different concept from
traditional functional programming; but is it pomo just because
it's so different?
I think that there's more to postmodernism than just being the
latest thing and very different. But I'm at a loss to say what
would characterise postmodernism outside of the arts sphere.
So what are the characteristics of postmodern X, where X is not
art?
cjs
--
| "If every site run by an asshole were cut off,
Curt Sampson | much of the net would disappear."
cu...@cynic.uucp | Rod Johnson (rjoh...@vela.acs.oakland.edu)
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca | in alt.fan.john-palmer
Robert Hooker
In article <9110180...@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
writes:
> Nonsense is pre-postmodern
Does pre-postmodern equal modern or is there something that only the few
enlightened understand here?
James 'Kibo' Parry
Actually, Post Modern is a version of Post Antiqua with unbracketed
hairline serifs and vertical stress. It was designed by Herb Lubalin's
older sister Sue "Boo-Boo" Lubalin for the Saturday Evening Post in 1928
and was used on the cover every week, except that the Norman Rockwell
painting always covered it completely to render it harmlessly
invisible.
-- Kibo
Mark Evenson
geze...@magnesium.cchem.berkeley.edu (Dan Gezelter) writes:
[...]
Hmmm. This gives me visions of great paradigms colliding into each
other with huge crashing noises. :-)
If that's postmodern science, then is object-oriented programming
pomo programming? Having a bunch of windows *be* a linked list
(and moving themselves about in it on request) rather than being
put into a linked list is certainly a very different concept from
traditional functional programming; but is it pomo just because
it's so different?
I think that there's more to postmodernism than just being the
latest thing and very different. But I'm at a loss to say what
would characterise postmodernism outside of the arts sphere.
The start of an attempt to answer these kind of questions can be found in
Jean-Francois Lyotard's _The Postmodern Condition: A reprot on
knowledge_. Here, I'll run a few quotes by on you (and drop a little theory).
Notes about Jean-Franois Lyotard, The postmodern condition: a report on
knowledge. (Tr. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minnesota
University Press, 1984.)
>>[..] Technical devices orignated as prosthetic aids for the human organs for
>>the human organs or as physiological systems whose function it is to
>>receive data or condition the context. They follow a principle, and it is
>>the principle of optimal performance: maximizing output (the information or
>>modifications obtained) and minimizing input (the energy expendend in the
>>process). Technology is therfore a game pertaining not to the true, the
>>just, or the beautiful, etc., but to effieiency: a technical "move" is
>>"good" when it does better and/or expend less energy than
>>another. [44]
Yeah, but this cannot be extended to their operation as technical objects.
In the domain of utility, technical devices also seek to maximize their
input as to what range of uses they can be put too in their common use.
Thus, a contradction arises in the portrayal of techne (I'm
probably not using the word in its proper sense) as continually
self-modifying, self-transforming process, identical on both the level of
production, and reproduction. For its production there exists the tendancy
to minimize the necessary conditions, for its reproduction, the need to
proliferate without end.
>>[...] By the end of the Discourse on Method, Descartes is already asking for
>>laboratory funds. A new problem appears: devices that optimize the
>>performance of the human body for the purpose of producing proof require
>>additional expenditures. No money, no proof and that means no
>>verification of staements and no truth. The games of scientific language
>>become the games of the rich, in which whoever is wealthiest has the best
>>chance of being right. An equation between wealth, efficiency, and trtuh
>>is thus established.
>> What happened at the end of the eightteenth century, with the first
>>industrial revolution, is that the reciprocal of this equation was
>>discovered: no technology without wealth, but no wealth without rechnology.
>>A technical aparatus reuqires an investment; but since it optimizes the
>>efficiency of the task to which it is applied, it also optimizes the
>>surplus-value derived from this improved performance. All that is needed
>>is for the surplus-value to be realized, in other words, for the product of
>>the task performed to be sold. And the system can be sealed in the
>>following way: a portion of the sale is recycled into a research fund
>>dedicated to further performance improvement. It is at this precise moment
>>that science becomes a force of production, in other words, a moment in the
>>circulation of capital. [44-45]
Lyotard links the entrance of information as a force of production with the
advent of science and its associated research funding cycles, internal
politics, etc. But didn't information (dictated by the appropiate matrix
of technological, ideological forces) exists before the turn of the
nineteenth century as a system for the production of surplus value? Isn't
the trajectory of Rome in the West, China in the East, the Mayan empire in
the Americas, a result of goverments mediating needs of an empire with
trade routes miltary forces, dipolomatic negotiations, an equivlant
extractor of surplus-value from a wealth-knowledge engine. Wealth, but no
wealth without an associated technical aparatus ? That self-organizing
forces (supra-historical?) brought these systems into power, evolving
themselves in place and authority via changing strategies? And did not an
initial success reserve a part of this surplus-value for the formulation of
new schemas for the maintance of power?
Science as different from government: distinction between say
explicit/implicit political goals.
Gordon Fitch
| >> Nonsense is pre-postmodern
hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Robert Hooker) faithfully writes:
| >Does pre-postmodern equal modern or is there something that only the few
| >enlightened understand here?
|
ki...@world.std.com (James 'Kibo' Parry) writes:
| Actually, Post Modern is a version of Post Antiqua with unbracketed
| hairline serifs and vertical stress. It was designed by Herb Lubalin's
| older sister Sue "Boo-Boo" Lubalin for the Saturday Evening Post in 1928
| and was used on the cover every week, except that the Norman Rockwell
| painting always covered it completely to render it harmlessly
| invisible.
Kibo, you've improved. Maybe there _is_ hope.
Gordon Fitch
| ...
| Lyotard links the entrance of information as a force of production with the
| advent of science and its associated research funding cycles, internal
| politics, etc. But didn't information (dictated by the appropiate matrix
| of technological, ideological forces) exists before the turn of the
| nineteenth century as a system for the production of surplus value? Isn't
| the trajectory of Rome in the West, China in the East, the Mayan empire in
| the Americas, a result of goverments mediating needs of an empire with
| trade routes miltary forces, dipolomatic negotiations, an equivlant
| extractor of surplus-value from a wealth-knowledge engine. Wealth, but no
| wealth without an associated technical aparatus ? That self-organizing
| forces (supra-historical?) brought these systems into power, evolving
| themselves in place and authority via changing strategies? And did not an
| initial success reserve a part of this surplus-value for the formulation of
| new schemas for the maintance of power?
|
| Science as different from government: distinction between say
| explicit/implicit political goals.
It is true that the Roman Empire (for example) was greatly
assisted in its program of conquest by the military and political
technologies it developed -- as well as some material ones -- but
in general once supremacy was established, development stopped
(because there was no further reason for it). Under capitalism,
however, it has almost always been necessary to continue
development, because no entity has been able to capture even a
major portion of the elements of production worldwide, and thus
secure its position.
Another significant difference has been the way in which surplus
value is extracted from labor. Since the invention of slavery,
which created the first surplus, up to the Industrial Revolution,
surplus value was exactly the time and energy taken away from the
laborer by whoever ruled her. But the possibility of investing
the surplus in mechanisms and technological development meant
that _more_ than what was taken was produced -- an unstable, or
dynamic, situation, since the managers of the surplus have to try
to dispose of the surplus without giving it away (thus ceasing to
be managers, to have a special role). That dynamism is quite
different from classical slavery (the aforesaid empires) which as
far as I know were comparatively stable.
Robert Hooker
Xref: utkcs2 alt.prose:1117 alt.postmodern:1726
In article <9110202...@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
writes:
> But the possibility of investing
> the surplus in mechanisms and technological development meant
> that _more_ than what was taken was produced -- an unstable, or
> dynamic, situation, since the managers of the surplus have to try
> to dispose of the surplus without giving it away (thus ceasing to
> be managers, to have a special role).
And it is what happens to surplus production, how production is converted
into value via a market which seems to be one of the basic foundations of
the postmodern.
First a critique of Marxs, Marxs saw labor as imparting surplus value-
while Classical Analysis relied on the Markets. Marx must have
understood that the Market caused his theory some problems, (that is all
work is not worth the same amount) so he appealed to the fiction of
abstract labor.
Sadly such fictions are what has died with postmoderness.
Say in some society more is produced then is consumed. Producers will want
to sell part of it, they will also what to invest capitial in new research
and developement.(They will want the capitial before they make profits) So they want a market and they want savings in banks, a good place
to start is exporting your goods and encouraging your workers to save.
But forgein markets are unsure, and Producers will often want to encourage
the home market. This means saving will go down. Thus Producers see
consumption as more important then production. But with increased consuption investment will tend to drop (See Keynes, Any Classical Economist or any Econ Class for details)
Moving from a production, work ethic, save and never smile society of
inventors and careful housekeepers to a society of consumption.
Advertising becomes the basis of economics not engeenering. The ability
to sell to convince becomes more important then the ability to prove.
Soon information and the ability to create a world independent of more
classical reality rise in importance. Communication becomes power. So we get Ronald Reagan the first Postmodern president.
This brings us to the condition america finds herself in, a consumption
driven econcmy with a huge information transmission capacity.
For lack of a better word I would call this Postmodern.
Robert Hooker
Parry) writes:
> >enlightened understand here?
>
> Actually, Post Modern is a version of Post Antiqua with unbracketed
> hairline serifs and vertical stress. It was designed by Herb Lubalin's
> older sister Sue "Boo-Boo" Lubalin for the Saturday Evening Post in 1928
> and was used on the cover every week, except that the Norman Rockwell
> painting always covered it completely to render it harmlessly
> invisible.
Again I slip through the repression of some, strange the oddness of "Kibo"
response.
More dreamlike-
More surrealist-
To those Odepial teenagers blocking me out of the Alt.postmodern discourse
I emerge again. Odd shape, odd content.
A postmodern dream emerges. And I am the unconscious force behind it all.
Wow
RichHalbs
>
> In postmodernism, we can tell a book by its cover because a book_is_ its
> cover
And in talk.bizarre we can say "See that volcano? Get to it, you pretentious
newt" because we're feeling especially tolerant today.
Richard Carlson
> Another significant difference has been the way in which surplus
> value is extracted from labor. Since the invention of slavery,
> which created the first surplus, up to the Industrial Revolution,
> surplus value was exactly the time and energy taken away from the
> laborer by whoever ruled her. But the possibility of investing
> the surplus in mechanisms and technological development meant
> that _more_ than what was taken was produced -- an unstable, or
> dynamic, situation, since the managers of the surplus have to try
> to dispose of the surplus without giving it away (thus ceasing to
> be managers, to have a special role). That dynamism is quite
> different from classical slavery (the aforesaid empires) which as
> far as I know were comparatively stable.
This is very interesting. I know that Marx referred to that
portion of surplus labor that went into the purchase of machinery
as "congealed labor" -- and the machines themselves represented
this "congealed labor." Did he forget to take technological
progress into account, that machines would become more and more
efficient?
Btw, for a while managers really did just about give away the
surplus profit -- to workers in the form of higher wages and
shorter hours and to consumers in the form of lower prices, part
of which seems to have been motivated by altruistic or generous
impulses in the face of the enormous surplus. I know that a lot
of revisionist economists are looking at the wage settlements GM
made with their unions in the '50s and asking if it was short-term
greed (they wanted to get to making cars so they could outsell
Ford) or if it was an altruism born of the huge surplus values
which looked as if they would continue to increase indefinitely.
--
Richard Carlson | r...@depsych.gwinnett.com
Midtown Medical Center | gatech!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia |
(404) 881-6877
Richard Carlson
> I think that there's more to postmodernism than just being the
> latest thing and very different. But I'm at a loss to say what
> would characterise postmodernism outside of the arts sphere.
>
> So what are the characteristics of postmodern X, where X is not
> art?
I think the term postmodern has its major meaning as a contrast to
the term modern, when "modern" means _high modern_ or modernIST.
Some cultural historians have pinpointed the age of high modernism
with such precision that it almost demands refutation. They begin
the high modern era on a specific date in, I think, 1911, when the
Paris Metro opened and some artistic innovation occurred -- the
first imagist poem or something -- and they contend that people in
general, not just avant-garde intellectuals, looked around and
realized that they were now in the modern age. The modernist age
is sometimes also said to have an ending that can be just a
precisely fixed, namely a specific moment on a specific day in
1968 when the self-styled Maoist intellectuals who dominated
French academia and journalism decided not to support the
incipient student revolution. Again, the claim is that everybody
sort of realized that they were living in a postmodern world where
what had been modern and up-to-date _until that very moment_
(i.e., modernist, or high modern, like Bauhaus buildings and
experimental plays and shiny toasters that looked like they should
be sold in the commissary on the Starship Enterprise) were now
old-fashioned, like handlebar moustaches and we could pick and
choose from any of the many sets of artistic idioms, styles (i.e.,
handlebart moustaches themselves weren't old-fashioned any more)
and social ideologies we liked because they were all equally
valid. (As it happens I was alive and an adult in 1968 and,
although I can't remember the exact day and time I do recall
looking at a modern building and thinking that since yesterday
everything had changed and now that was only one of many styles
that was legitimate because we were now past everything and living
in a kind of post-world. That is true, it really happened and
isn't merely rhetorical/literary.)
Of course the notion that changes in eras, along with the cultural
structures of eras, are made in Paris and somehow instantly
exported to the rest of the world -- and notice that the start of
the modern era was signalled by a technological event and an
artistic one, while the end of it was signalled by a political
event -- somewhat violates (a modernist) common sense, although
there is a lot of phenomenological evidence for it.
Gordon Fitch
First of all, Robert Hooker didn't write that; I did. Secondly,
anything which appears vaguely rational is officially pretentious
in talk.bizarre. Third, use of terms like "newt" shows a deplorable
lack of imagination, part of the decline of talk.bizarre which
becomes more evident every day. I don't wonder that Kibo is
trying to escape (which is how this cross-posting occurred).
You can have Robert, though; he's just about your speed -- he's
done nonsense articles, articles with random characters, and
copies of other people's articles for us in alt.postmodern, as if
no one had ever thought of such things before.
There they are, Robert! They're waiting for you! Woof, woof!
Robert Hooker
Xref: utkcs2 alt.postmodern:1789 talk.bizarre:64101 alt.slack:4188
In article <5w880...@cellar.org> ri...@cellar.org (RichHalbs) writes:
> hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Robert Hooker) writes:
>
> >
> > In postmodernism, we can tell a book by its cover because a book_is_
its
> > cover
>
> And in talk.bizarre we can say "See that volcano? Get to it, you
pretentious
> newt" because we're feeling especially tolerant today.
I'm afraid that honesty will not allow me to take credit for such a
wonderful bit of thinking, this statement with goes beyond any little
insight that I could ever come up with was produced by no other
then:'"Gordon Fitch * uunet!cmcl2.nyu.edu!panix!mydog!gcf
Bx 1238 Bowling Green Station / NYC 10274
"... a master of disingenuous subtlety." -P.McGuinness" of CurGor + n
fame.
I'm surprised he didn't claim his right to it, soo very pomo.
I am being controlled by; "If every site run by an asshole were cut off,
Robert Hooker
writes:
> First of all, Robert Hooker didn't write that; I did. Secondly,
> anything which appears vaguely rational is officially pretentious
> in talk.bizarre.
So what does that have to do with alt.postmodern you logocentric
> You can have Robert, though; he's just about your speed -- he's
> done nonsense articles, articles with random characters, and
> copies of other people's articles for us in alt.postmodern, as if
> no one had ever thought of such things before.
Ah you think you can give me away CurGor + n!! Hah just as I have
deconstructed all along, you need to try an keep alt.postmodern pure so
that it can serve as a reflection of a fictional self that you have
projected on to it. Like the most evil of white male you need to control
the structure, but you give new insight into the process of
marginalization. Blacks and Gays and Women have been excluded because
they didn't fit into the boys club projection.
> There they are, Robert! They're waiting for you! Woof, woof!
CurGor + n no one would notice me there, but I have learned that CurGor +
n has enough bad will here on alt.postmodern that I can live off the
energy for a while.
Gordon Fitch
| In article <5w880...@cellar.org> ri...@cellar.org (RichHalbs) writes:
| > hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Robert Hooker) writes:
| >
| > >
| > > In postmodernism, we can tell a book by its cover because a book_is_
| its
| > > cover
| >
| > And in talk.bizarre we can say "See that volcano? Get to it, you
| pretentious
| > newt" because we're feeling especially tolerant today.
|
| I'm afraid that honesty will not allow me to take credit for such a
| wonderful bit of thinking, this statement with goes beyond any little
| insight that I could ever come up with was produced by no other
| then:'"Gordon Fitch * uunet!cmcl2.nyu.edu!panix!mydog!gcf
| Bx 1238 Bowling Green Station / NYC 10274
| "... a master of disingenuous subtlety." -P.McGuinness" of CurGor + n
| fame.
|
| I'm surprised he didn't claim his right to it, soo very pomo.
|
| I am being controlled by; "If every site run by an asshole were cut off,
| > Curt Sampson | much of the net would disappear."
| > cu...@cynic.uucp | Rod Johnson (rjoh...@vela.acs.oakland.edu)
| > cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca | in alt.fan.john-palmer
Yow! You've got the genuine article, now!
(Aside to Robert: see the follow-up line? Woof, woof!)
--
* Gordon Fitch | g...@panix.uucp | uunet!cmcl2.nyu.edu!panix!mydog!gcf *