Zen and the Art of Mediocrity Marketing (was: Re: Amorality (was: "Postmodern" literature))
Robert Hooker
In article <9109262011.1732@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
writes:
> In postmodernism, we can tell a book by its cover because a book
> _is_ its cover
In postmodern we can pass judgement on things of which we have not read
very closely, see all human action a guided by the baser intentions (they
being the only intentions we understand) and are stupid enough to pass
judgement on books by their cover.
When is this bullshit all going to blow over?
The cover to my copy of Gravity's Rainbow fell of, did the book then stop existing.
If this is true I will rip the covers of all of Derrida's works.
Then again their empty as it is.
Gordon Fitch
In <35...@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu> hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Robert Hooker) writes:
|
| In article <9109262011.1732@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
| writes:
| > In postmodernism, we can tell a book by its cover because a book
| > _is_ its cover
|
| In postmodern we can pass judgement on things of which we have not read
| very closely, see all human action a guided by the baser intentions (they
| being the only intentions we understand) and are stupid enough to pass
| judgement on books by their cover.
|
| When is this bullshit all going to blow over?
"Stop me before I post more"? But only you can stop Robert
Hooker postings. I hope you don't, though; they're pretty funny.
| The cover to my copy of Gravity's Rainbow fell of, did the
| book then stop existing[?]
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.
| If this is true I will rip the covers of all of Derrida's works.
| Then again their empty as it is.
If they're empty, why are you so passionate about them?
--
Gordon Fitch * uunet!cmcl2.nyu.edu!panix!mydog!gcf
Bx 1238 Bowling Green Station / NYC 10274
"... a master of disingenuous subtlety." -P.McGuinness
Robert Hooker
In article <9109262011.1732@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
writes:
> Postmodernistically, ZatAoMM rehashes a lot of this sort of thing
> -- whence the quote -- without much structure or point.
?????????????????????????????????????????????
STRUCTURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
POINT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
!
POSTMODERN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Now think about this alittle
Robert Hooker
writes:
> If they're empty, why are you so passionate about them?
A hole in the street where little children play is empty, why am I
passionate about them, huh?
Who me?
Need I deconstruct?
Robert Hooker
writes:
Well Okay here is the posting about Zen that you never rsponded to;
Just to be true to the facts;
In article <9109262011.1732@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
writes:
> followed by a sour rehash
> of Aristotelian philosophy
Robert Pirsig goes into several philosophers besides Aristotle. Also
Pirsig attacks Aristotle and the University of Chicago dependence on him
throughout the novel.
"...What I find in Aristotle is mainly a quite dull collection of
generalizations, many of which are impossible to justify in the light of
modern knowledge, whoses organization seems exteremly poor....."
--page 324
to name other philosophers mentioned:
Poincare-in Chapter 21
Kant and Hume- throughout the entire book
Plato- nearer the end in the University of Chaicago sections
Hegel
> he tells us that Aristotle's
> concept of "quality" is "Zen", as I recall, which is something
> like saying a bicycle is just like a pterodactyl
This is not true, Unless you meant to say that he tells us that
Aristotle's concept of "qualityt " in *not* "Zen".
"...Phadreus (the authors name for an earlier self) saw Aristotle as
tremendously satisfied with with the neat little stunt of naming and
classifying everything."
page 325
Unless we assume that Pirsig did not understand the word Zen and believed
that Zen could be named and classified but:
"There...is a definition of quality that existed for thousands of years
before the *dialectians* ever thought to put it in word traps. Anyone who
can not understand this meaning without (definitions) is either lying or
so out of touch with the common lot of humanity as to be unworthy of
receiving any reply whatsoever."
page 340
Later Pising asks if "dharma" of India and "arete" of the Greeks. He also
speculates on a relationship between Plato's Quality and Zen. To assert
that the above is true Gordon must equate all greek males with each other.
> Telling us what is good, of course, was
> precisely the business of people like Plato and his friends;
> but deception must be practiced as a matter of course. So, just
> as their creepy hero Socrates pretends to ask unsophisticated
> people questions while actually guiding them to exactly the
> conclusions he planned in the first place, so his disciples tell
> us they're not going to tell us what's what, but reveal to us
> what we already know. The proper answers are, of course, coded
> into the questions; the crudest form of this sort of thing is
> "Have you stopped beating your wife?" In a way, it's a clever
> method, a kind of judo, at least when practiced by slinky old
> Plato.
Pirsig story climaxes with his own attack on the dialectic;
"Dialectic-the usurper. That is what he sees. The parvenu, muscling in
on all that is Good and seeking to contain it and control it."
page 334
So the above sentences has nothing to do with Pirsig's book. That is
attacking Pirsing by attacking dialectic is like attacking Reagan by
attacking Cuba or Carter.
> The
> author probably didn't understand what Plato and Aristotle were
> about, even superficially;
Please be fair, get Pirsig's ideas correct before passing such aggressive
conclusions.
> I'm too anarchistic to tell you whether it's good or bad.
Is that the reason you can write a critic of a book to be exposed
internationally on the net without getting facts correct.
> And no Zen. If
> there is anything the author lacks, it is Zen. It is better to
> never open the book, but to see it on the shelf and think,
> "Wow! Zen! And motorcycles!
On the authors notes;
"However, it should in no way be associated with the great body of factual
information relating to othodox Zen Buddhist practice"
This is said before
the book begins
> In postmodernism, we can tell a book by its cover because a book
> _is_ its cover. And no book I can think of exemplifies this
> more than _Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance_.
Even in the Post-modern world let us hope that the conditions of good
scholarship have not fallen so much that this is true.
Gordon Fitch
| In article <9110100...@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
| writes:
| > I hope you don't, though; they're pretty funny.
|
| Well Okay here is the posting about Zen that you never rsponded to;
Robert, let me explain something. Every fall, certain people
encounter Usenet and begin to realize its possibilities. It
occurs to some of them that you can not only write things read
all over the world, but you can mess around with the medium
itself. That is, you can post blank articles, articles
consisting of one word, articles which have a few lines repeated
dozens or hundreds of times, or nonsense articles. Another
favorite is posting the same article over and over again. Or
following up one's own articles combatively. Or copying many
other people's articles, and reposting them. Or posting a dump
of a large executable.
There are two problems with this sort of thing. The first is
that your audience, at least those of them who have been around
the net for more than a year, have seen it all already and are
bored with it. The second is that, if it becomes a problem for
anyone, they may write to your SA and make it _your_ problem, in
the sense that you may get kicked off the net. Now, _I_ would
never do this -- not while my news reader has a kill function --
but there are some real soreheads out there, and I wouldn't mess
with them by doing any volume-intensive "postmodern" creativity.
You seem to have a problem in my not answering your reply to
my "review" of _Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance_.
First, I thought the book was worthless and my review was
pretty light -- although I like the idea of a Harley with Ionic
forks. And I thought your rebuttal was pretty light, too.
Finally, I thought you would like to have the last word, as if
you had cleared the field of all contenders. I'm a pretty nice
guy that way. Adding it all up, it seemed that silence was
golden. I think you should take it that way, too -- just
consider me utterly abashed and confounded and unable to
reply, okay?
Robert Hooker
> > if it becomes a problem for
> > anyone, they may write to your SA and make it _your_ problem, in
> > the sense that you may get kicked off the net.
Oh me, I just wanted to explore my creativity and I thought that this
anarchisitc net would be the best possible place.
Now I learn that I may lose my net connection, oh God I'm afraid.
Look Gordan, I have no question that somebody might try to get me off the
net, but so what I mean that would be real cool when you think about it
because ;
1. I would just go to another machine to read news.
2. It would be super postmodern to be censured by postmodern
3. It would increase my angst thus making me more artistic.
But lets face it Gordan, this is not a freindly warning, after all I'm
sure that maybe only three people have read my work. The small Berkely
postmoderns want control.
ANd for the last time I've been reading net for over a year!
Robert Hooker
In article <9110121...@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
writes:
> if it becomes a problem for
> anyone, they may write to your SA and make it _your_ problem, in
> the sense that you may get kicked off the net.
Postmodern martyrdom, gee cool.
> Every fall, certain people
> encounter Usenet and begin to realize its possibilities
Okay, look back at the meat for the wolzes articles in the spring and you
will find that I posted on that.
> I thought the book was worthless and my review was
> pretty light -- although I like the idea of a Harley with Ionic
> forks. And I thought your rebuttal was pretty light, too.
> Finally,
Just you told me to post on now you give me threads, I',m so confused.
Robert Hooker
In article <36...@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu> hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu
(Robert Hooker) writes:
> > > if it becomes a problem for
> > > anyone, they may write to your SA and make it _your_ problem, in
> > > the sense that you may get kicked off the net.
Okay, I surrender my little selfish mindless romp through postmodern is
now over.
I see that I offended the established order of alt.postmodern and may have
offended some of the individuals who hold power over what contents having
meaning on alt.postmodern and those that don't.
I see that expressing any point of veiw which is not considered
appropriate to the established postmodern powers that be will result in
some to their addressing University authority to prevent me from access to
the information.
I apolpgize for thinking for a moment that this net was at all creative,
free thinking and open and now relieve that the old boys of postmodern
deserve respect.
I now clearly see that *it is necessary that groups defend the integrety
of their means of communication and establish strict rules regarding
meaning and properness of discourse*
Thank you Gordan you have opened my eyes.
Robert Hooker
In article <9110121...@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
writes:
> And I thought your rebuttal was pretty light, too.
But seriously, you said things about the book that were untrue, now I
found pages where Pirsig says things that contradict your statements. I
didn't think more depth was necessary.
In normal logic (logic where you don't just kill that which you don't
like) if you say a and I show you not a then that's that.
I guess I better go now before someone writes to the gods that be trying
to ban me.
Oh but before I say good bye from alt.postmodern forever just one comment.
In the year I have been called a "racist" a "stupid liberal" an "asshole"
a"dick" a "twit".
I have headed and mindless post but never, never, never has anyone
mentioned banning me or anyone elsa as far as I've known.
In fact the only two cases I've heard of banning nationally has involed
homophobic attacks and a threat of rape.
You must have a high sense of yourselves to even think that someone would
want to ban me for having alittle mindless fun on the net.
What garbage alt. postmodern is.
Good bye and back to your excliusive little masternbation projection. Your just as exclusive, conservative, close minded and mean as any dead white male.
P.S. Your posting a trash and if you ever stopped using such long words
and canned phrases you might find that you are as losted concerning the
truth as the rest of us.
But, what truth? Where is truth?
Good Bye, to those that I may have cheered up alittle, sent me more
e-mail, maybe we'll start our own postmodern.
Gordon Fitch
Usenet:
| > > if it becomes a problem for
| > > anyone, they may write to your SA and make it _your_ problem, in
| > > the sense that you may get kicked off the net.
hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Robert Hooker) writes:
| Oh me, I just wanted to explore my creativity and I thought that this
| anarchisitc net would be the best possible place.
Successful anarchies require a certain amount of self-discipline
and consciousness on the part of the participants. A playpen is
not an anarchy.
| Now I learn that I may lose my net connection, oh God I'm afraid.
|
| Look Gordan, I have no question that somebody might try to get me off the
| net, but so what I mean that would be real cool when you think about it
| because ;
|
| 1. I would just go to another machine to read news.
|
| 2. It would be super postmodern to be censured by postmodern
|
| 3. It would increase my angst thus making me more artistic.
|
| But lets face it Gordan, this is not a freindly warning, after all I'm
| sure that maybe only three people have read my work. The small Berkely
| postmoderns want control.
There's no question of censorship, and my warning is completely
friendly. Usually, the next step after putting up a few blank,
nonsense, or recycled articles -- when no one pays much attention
to them -- is to wow everybody with something they _have_ to
notice, because it's so long. If you're not on this route, fine.
Those whom you bore -- and this will be everyone before long, if
you continue with the messing-with-the-medium stuff -- can just
skip over your articles when they see them coming.
The cognitive parts of your material -- about how text is dead,
and so on -- seem to be popularized McLuhan, from about twenty-
five years ago. This may not be tremendously exciting to people.
McLuhan did not see that television is a kind of text, nor did he
forsee texts you can talk back to (like the net, or talk radio).
As far as I know -- I'm not a McLuhan authority.
| ANd for the last time I've been reading net for over a year!
Then why do talk.bizarre stuff in this newsgroup?
Andrew C. Aiken
>McLuhan did not see that television is a kind of text, nor did he
>forsee texts you can talk back to (like the net, or talk radio).
>As far as I know -- I'm not a McLuhan authority.
As far as I'm concerned, Marshall McLuhan was
full of Globaloney.
Andrew Aiken
Premodernist
" ... Seven years since I wed wide warm woman, white-thighed. Wooed and
wed. Wife. A knife of a word that for all its final bite did not end
the wooing."
-- John Updike
Robert Hooker
In article <9110150...@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
writes:
> The cognitive parts of your material -- about how text is dead,
> and so on -- seem to be popularized McLuhan, from about twenty-
> five years ago. This may not be tremendously exciting to people.
> McLuhan did not see that television is a kind of text, nor did he
> forsee texts you can talk back to (like the net, or talk radio).
> As far as I know -- I'm not a McLuhan authority.
Gordan, everything you write is so tinged with egoism, and soo untinged
with knowledge it turns you into a total joke.
Your comment about McLuhan working being about 25 years old therefore not
interseting and important shows what an academic nothing you are. So it
was 25 years ago, that means it has not value. Why not Gordan you never
say why not. You say oh it's McLuhan therfore it's old. Not only that
you that just say McLuhan but you show your true nature by saying
"popular" but then againt your "not a McLuhan authority", but you and
everyone else no every thing else about McLuhan. You say my statements on
Pirsig are light. Why, did the quotes that I found that contradicted what
you said wrong, does Pirsig say something else later on. Is looking to
the text and finding the authors own works and the arguing that certain
interpretations are not fitting with the clear facts light. What is good.
> Successful anarchies require a certain amount of self-discipline
> and consciousness on the part of the participants. A playpen is
> not an anarchy.
Gordan, since you don't seem to think about what you say I feel we have
something in common. Look if you say that you are an anarchist then say
that "Successful anarchies require " one can only ask who decides what
"Successful anarchies require " or even "Successful anarchy" is. Does not
"Successful anarchies require " that people start questioning and
disregarding any limiting social orders they see, indluding the net.
Gordan, since you need to learn alot to be as stupid as I am, since I know
the truth. Give up on trying to tell people what "Successful anarchies
require ". That was were Stalin fucked up, he said Worker Revolutions
need for the Workers to do. You can go around saying "Successful
anarchies require " without imposing you will and ideas on others.
> Usually, the next step after putting up a few blank,
> nonsense, or recycled articles -- when no one pays much attention
> to them --
Gordan, you have a talent for contradicting yourself that makes me envy
you. You say no one is paying attention to me, for the past 4 months I
have tried to enter in a conversation with someone on alt.postmodern. I
responded to posting, I made postings and nothing. I start playing I now
I have you in conversation and you respond to everything I say. Therfore
clearly "when no one pays much attention
> to them -:" is a self contradiction since it's being written when early
more serious post were ignored.
> and my warning is completely
> friendly.
Right, and your use of the word popular to adress a writer you claim
limited familiarity with was normal speech.
Look I spoke to my SA about that above possibility and he laughed at the
idiot who could think such a thing., secondly you can hid behind word
games but your post boiled down to "stop posting or someone will shut you
up".
To even think that someone might censure me, to assert anarchy yet to go
around telling people what anarchy will be and how it has to be
structured, speaks of a mind set not contradicting the popular
imaginations concept of postmodern scholarship.
Curt Sampson
> Okay, I surrender my little selfish mindless romp through postmodern is
> now over.
At last?
> I see that I offended the established order of alt.postmodern and may have
> offended some of the individuals who hold power over what contents having
> meaning on alt.postmodern and those that don't.
Oh, render unto me a break etc. etc. *Every* individual here holds
that power. I decide what has meaning for me and use my 'n' key
appropriately.
> I see that expressing any point of veiw which is not considered
> appropriate to the established postmodern powers that be will result in
> some to their addressing University authority to prevent me from access to
> the information.
Garbage. Being a twit (and a rather boring one most of the time, at
that) is what's going to get complaints. You seem to have this
impression that you're constantly posting meaningful, illuminating
stuff. Well, you're not. Sorry.
I wouldn't worry too much about your sysadmin booting you off the net,
though. The worst that's likely to happen is that Gordon and I will
put you in our kill files.
> I apolpgize for thinking for a moment that this net was at all creative,
> free thinking and open and now relieve that the old boys of postmodern
> deserve respect.
It is for creative and free thinking people. But keep in mind that
this group is for *discussing* postmodernism. If you want to do
strange pseudo-intellectual pseudo-pomo experiments, there are other
places to do that. If you're too lazy to find them, don't blame us
for getting annoyed at you.
> I now clearly see that *it is necessary that groups defend the integrety
> of their means of communication and establish strict rules regarding
> meaning and properness of discourse*
Damn right.
I didn't mean to get this close to a flame (although I have won a
trophy for flaming--take that, KPD!), but I do get a little annoyed
when somebody gets tedious and then whines becuase somebody tells him
so.
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 <1991Oct16....@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca>
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
> Garbage. Being a twit (and a rather boring one most of the time, at
> that) is what's going to get complaints. You seem to have this
> impression that you're constantly posting meaningful, illuminating
> stuff. Well, you're not. Sorry.
Who Me? Yes I thought posting blank posting was very meaningful. But;
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.
> I wouldn't worry too much about your sysadmin booting you off the net,
> though. The worst (correction the best that will happen) that's likely
to happen is that Gordon and I will put you in our kill files.
You have kill files, so repressing, so Freudian. I mean deconstruct the
kill file for a second. It is the techno repression. I wonder if techno
repression causes pomo anxiety?
Clearly it does.
> It is for creative and free thinking people. "Open-mindedness only
occurs during surgery" But keep in mind that
> this group is for *discussing* postmodernism.
Really, who said. When was it decided that alt.postmodern would be about
and solely about " *discussing* postmodernism". And after all, the ever
present question is ; "I agree. Just what the fuck does postmodern
mean?". So how can you know a post is about pomo in the first place if it
can't be defined.
"I don't know what pomo is, but I know things that are not pomo"
> don't blame us
> for getting annoyed at you.
I don't blame you at all, I just think a net where this is posted:
"Reality? Whose reality?"
"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. "
"Telling us what is good, of course, was
> precisely the business of people like Plato and his friends;
> but deception must be practiced as a matter of course."
"I'm too anarchistic to tell you whether it's good or bad."
And then one person acts like an idiot you two get all flamed and offended
is funny. I really don't think you get what is going on in a meta sense
here. I don't blame you for getting made, I expect it. Thats it, I
expect to be flamed because what I did was stupid and wrong and
disrespectful and there is *a stupid* and there is *a wrong* and you and I
believe that there is such things and it would be impossible for us to
live our lives if we did not.(If you respond that I am just quoting Plato
and therfore dumb you prove your unworthness of respect)
Ofcourse where we get this knowledge is a difficult question.
You guys say that since you don't know the source, the knowledge of good
and evil is false.
But you still need the knowledge. You need to know that certain things
are right and that all other people (except mad men) will know that they
are right. You need to have a general universal idea of the world and if
someone and this local end, say Chicago say me, suddenly decided that
alt.postmodern was a place to order McDonalds food they would be WRONG.
If someone in say Chicago decided that the menaing of the net was it's
ability to post messages messages as header to blank content. That the
header had meaning and the body was useless since few people ever read it,
that person would be wrong. (Even though the idea is an intersting
statment)
> but I do get a little annoyed
> when somebody gets tedious and then whines becuase somebody tells him
> so.
Sadly the reason a flame is possible is that I can take any information
out of a post at will and take it out of context.
Ofcourse the above sentence is idiotic, I was delighted that Gordan said I
was tedious because it showed that " As I believe that I can attribute
meaning to any stimulus, meaning is the receptor's responsibility." is
not quite correct. I whined (as you so pomoly put it) as you put it
because Gordan said that if I didn't stop some unnammed person might ban
me from the net, a very sick thing to think which shows an individual of
the ability to connect concept and practice.
If you and Gordan want to put me on kill, your welcome to do so. In fact
please do so so. It would be meta-intersting that I and the other cynics
who have sent me e-mail could watch a messages about your personality
could develope on many levels on the net. (Levels you would be unaware of)
All along you two , UNaware since you are represseing.
You could make me your pomo unconscious, Messages of anger and sex
related to every single post you make, repressed. The artistic statement
turns me on. 21st Century dreams might emerge. Someone call William
Gibson there is a book here somewhere.
Robert Hooker
In article <1991Oct16....@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca>
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
> I didn't mean to get this close to a flame (although I have won a
> trophy for flaming--take that, KPD!), but I do get a little annoyed
> when somebody gets tedious and then whines becuase somebody tells him
> so.
Curt, this was a flame. So let me deconstruct.
Oddly the Gordan Curt branch of alt.postmodern (and they are a branch in
that they stand up for each other and they are pomo in that they happily
live on different sides of the lower 48 yet still work together)
But back to the subject. It is very odd how the aggressive intention of
their posts are denied within their post. Gordan tells me to get off
alt.postmodern (that was clear) and it is "friendly" Curt calls me a twit
and it is not a flame. Very odd? Let us look deeper.
What does it mean to assert that one does not have an intention and then
use your text to serve that intention. Cynical manipulation seems as good
a word as any.
The question is who is being manipulated and who is manipulating.
Clearly Curt and Gordan are trying to control me and my behavior. They
are trying to prevent me from posting. Threats and personal attacks from
the two. But is it me or themselves that are the victims of their
textualacity?
It's also odd that Curt and Gordan are two of the very few actually taking
part in the odd projection of contradiction that has been come to be known
as alt.postmodern. In that past every college had it's one communist,
it's one jungian. Isolated these individuals pursued their esoteric ideas
until they rejoined the rest of the community or madness followed.
I admit that for three months (three low points of my life) I was a strong
Randian objectivist. Happily I did not have someone who agreed and soon I
came to understand why; Rand does not talk about the real world.
But now, in our pomo world, their is Usenet, and Curt and Gordan are
clearly proud that they have had Net connections for *more then a year***.
Now Curt and Gordan (who normally should be their Universities one of two
postmodern nuts eating at the cafeteria table with the Freudians and
Marxist and Objectivist and Born Agains arguing about whether good is a
product of the Unconscious of the ruling class or the workers and losing
their minds just a little more after every B+ in philosophy.)
Well Curt and Gordan have Usenet now, and they are very proud that they
are not freshmen and have had Usenet for *more then a year***. They find
each other across country and experience something that they have never
experienced before; they share a common belief about Pomo.
Sadly ever dinner table conversation is interrupted by the presence of the
world out there. A reality that they never can experience. Sometimes one
of their members, in my case the objectivist, are sucked into this real
world and soon forget their conversations.
The greatest hope and the greatest fear of the Freudians and Marxist and
Objectivist and Born Agains and Postmoderns is that they will be
confronted by the outside world in the form of a beer or a women or a real
friendship of a frat boy poking fun at them.
Now their is Usenet, one can partake in the dinner table conversation with
the 5 or 7 people in the entire nation who are their Universities
Freudians and Marxist and Objectivist and Born Agains and Postmoderns --
paradise, and all without interruption.
Slowly the self projections become more and more stagnant. The rules
firmer and firmer. Till even they know quite clearly that they are a "a
lifeless intellectual movement".
But always the fear, what if it ends, what if someone enters our
projection and doesn't fit into the structures we have developed to combat
the isolation of our own existences. What if they make fun of it. What
if they build that behavior into a program based on our own assertions
about meaning and art and text and they crash through mirrored self-cage?
If it happens first they laugh and try to act as if they are better;
"Post on, Robert, post on. The voices of an entire generation are with
you."
When the patient finds that laughter doesn't work they become upset and
try to scare the monster away;
" The second is that, if it becomes a problem for
anyone, they may write to your SA and make it _your_ problem, in
the sense that you may get kicked off the net. Now, _I_ would
never do this -- not while my news reader has a kill function --
but there are some real soreheads out there, and I wouldn't mess
with them by doing any volume-intensive "postmodern" creativity."
Then they play the ignore it by labeling it as a non threat or just
something stupid;
"25 year of McLuhan"
Then they take the Odepial step, to keep the self image intact against he
collapse of the support structure , they blind themselves to that
something in a fashion so Freudian that one can only laugh;
> I wouldn't worry too much about your sysadmin booting you off the net,
> though. The worst that's likely to happen is that Gordon and I will
> put you in our kill files.
Perhaps here the game ends. They keep the illusion, the imago of self by
repressing those individuals who are putting in the structure reflections
they find unpleasing. This is the step into decadence, the first steps
in the decline of power, the weakening of the instincts to know and
question and and argue infavor of a stable self structure.
Or they except that their hiding place is organic and let other jeeks who
see themselves as pomo in, not worrying to much if the new does not make
sense, not anxiety ridden by the collapse of the old structure. They let
pomo grow and strive to master and develope.
What will it be? I think I alrady know the answer.
Robert Hooker
In article <1991Oct16....@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca>
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
> Garbage. Being a twit (and a rather boring one most of the time, at
> that) is what's going to get complaints. You seem to have this
> impression that you're constantly posting meaningful, illuminating
> stuff. Well, you're not. Sorry.
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.
Mark Evenson
Curt, this was a flame. So let me deconstruct.
Oddly the Gordan Curt branch of alt.postmodern (and they are a branch in
that they stand up for each other and they are pomo in that they happily
live on different sides of the lower 48 yet still work together)
But back to the subject. It is very odd how the aggressive intention of
their posts are denied within their post. Gordan tells me to get off
alt.postmodern (that was clear) and it is "friendly" Curt calls me a twit
and it is not a flame. Very odd? Let us look deeper.
What does it mean to assert that one does not have an intention and then
use your text to serve that intention. Cynical manipulation seems as good
a word as any.
The question is who is being manipulated and who is manipulating.
Clearly Curt and Gordan are trying to control me and my behavior. They
are trying to prevent me from posting. Threats and personal attacks from
the two. But is it me or themselves that are the victims of their
textualacity?
It's also odd that Curt and Gordan are two of the very few actually taking
part in the odd projection of contradiction that has been come to be known
as alt.postmodern. In that past every college had it's one communist,
it's one jungian. Isolated these individuals pursued their esoteric ideas
until they rejoined the rest of the community or madness followed.
[...]
[...]
"25 year of McLuhan"
Then they take the Odepial step, to keep the self image intact against he
collapse of the support structure , they blind themselves to that
something in a fashion so Freudian that one can only laugh;
> I wouldn't worry too much about your sysadmin booting you off the net,
> though. The worst that's likely to happen is that Gordon and I will
> put you in our kill files.
Perhaps here the game ends. They keep the illusion, the imago of self by
repressing those individuals who are putting in the structure reflections
they find unpleasing. This is the step into decadence, the first steps
in the decline of power, the weakening of the instincts to know and
question and and argue infavor of a stable self structure.
Bravo! Man, this is really good stuff. My reaction is really mixed.
Hooker is really prolific, really whacked out, but this post is incredible!
What a reaction. I think I'm parodying myself, here. Interesting.
On the one hand, really kind of true this critique of the "Curt Gordon"
cusp. This flamefest has gotten really interesting. The rherotic has
gotten so heated that actual points are being made. First time I've seen a
flame get cogency that isn't stricily based on systems of words. This
skirmish has interesting contours: alt.postmodern as exclusionary, hop hip
it is not, the whole deal.
Just had to amplify Hooker's response here. Too thos with 'kill' files
set, so check back in. At first I laughed at the whole thing. Now it
seems to have legitmacy.
Curt Sampson
> 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.
The attribution of meaning is a cooperative endevour between the
sender and receiver of a message. In most cases where the receiver
will be attributing meaning to a message (rather than just dismissing
it as nonsense) the sender will have an idea of what kind of responses
various messages are likely to generate. The sender can't know
exactly, but there are conventions. If there weren't, we wouldn't be
chatting right now.
> You have kill files, so repressing, so Freudian. I mean deconstruct the
> kill file for a second. It is the techno repression. I wonder if techno
> repression causes pomo anxiety?
I don't see kill files as being repressing. Who do they repress?
They give me the freedom to easily ignore things that would otherwise
be more difficult to ignore.
> Really, who said. When was it decided that alt.postmodern would be about
> and solely about " *discussing* postmodernism". And after all, the ever
> present question is ; "I agree. Just what the fuck does postmodern
> mean?". So how can you know a post is about pomo in the first place if it
> can't be defined.
I did. Along with a bunch of other people, of course, though a tacet
convention. You have tried to disrupt this convention. The fact that
we have lured you into discussing postmodernism shows that you have
not done a very good job of disrupting this convention.
> ...I expect to be flamed because what I did was stupid and wrong and
> disrespectful and there is *a stupid* and there is *a wrong* and you and I
> believe that there is such things and it would be impossible for us to
> live our lives if we did not.
Indeed there are such things. They change from time to time as
our whims change, but at any particular time, in any particular
situation, for any particular person, there are actions which can
be considered "right" and "wrong."
> Ofcourse where we get this knowledge is a difficult question.
We just make it up as we go along.
Curt Sampson
> Curt, this was a flame. So let me deconstruct.
>
> [etc.]
Well, that was a pretty amusing "deconstruction."
> The question is who is being manipulated and who is manipulating.
>
> Clearly Curt and Gordan are trying to control me and my behavior. They
> are trying to prevent me from posting. Threats and personal attacks from
> the two. But is it me or themselves that are the victims of their
> textualacity?
An interesting question indeed.
Robert, let us say for a moment that Gordon and I do join forces
in this mythical "Them" or "Us" that you have constructed. (I'll
admit that I helped a bit in this construction, actually urging
you toward it, but you were the one that actually did it.)
Now, according to your thesis, We are very self centred. We wish to
manipulate the discussion so that the group as a whole is disussing
those things We wish to discuss, and not discussing those things which
We are not interested in.
Given that We are self-centred, it seems logical that even better than
discussing those things which we want to discuss would be a discussion
about discussing those things we want to discuss. If that is, indeed,
Our aim, we have succeeded admirably. We have co-opted your
discussion of your ideas of postmodernism and transformed it into a
discussion about Our ideas of postmodernism, and our ideas of
discussions of postmodernism.
You think that We are trying to prevent you from posting. Indeed,
that may well be the impression we have given. But that does not mean
that We really do wish this to occur. If we are indeed as self-centred
as you say, would it not be far better for our egos to have you
continue posting, but posting to talk about us rather than to pursue
your own objectives?
Neal Johnson
>
>I don't see kill files as being repressing. Who do they repress?
>They give me the freedom to easily ignore things that would otherwise
>be more difficult to ignore.
>
Though I am an atheist and do not believe in that god in the machine
called "Artificial Intelligence", it is interesting to note how we
have projected many psychological processes into our machines. To wit,
this use of kill files is a good, simplified description of cognitive
dissonance. We seek the simple mechanism to filter out what we do not
want to experience. Is the shutting out of experience, any experience,
really freedom? Sounds like prison to me...
============================================================================
name: Neal Johnson "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law."
mail: n...@apple.COM "Love is the law, love under will."
phone: (408) 974-6246
disclaimer: Everything stated here is disclaimed by all.
============================================================================
Michael Sean Rooney
graphical manner.
However, in article <mumble>, lea...@oxy.edu writes:
>Good and evil are meaningless terms.
This brings me to a subject I raised last spring, namely, the popular
apperception of post-structuralism and other contemporary trends in
philosophy and literary criticism. By blending together various half-
understood second-hand synopses of Barthes, Baudrillard, de Man, Derrida,
Foucault, Lyotard and others, the popular media (and thus the educated
lay public) has conceived that monstrous progeny known as a "movement",
this one christened "post-modernism", or worse still, "pomo". By
associating these intellectual currents with others like multi-culturalism
and feminism, the whole has become a favorite straw person of the
conservative elements so prominent in American society. Talentless
attention-grabbers like Camille Paglia pop up spouting nonsense to
further confuse the issue. And on Usenet, not exactly a favored haunt
of post-structural philosophers (comp.sci majors who barely passed
humanities requirements but think they know it all is more accurate),
we have alt.postmodern, which would be indistinguishable from alt.
existentialism, had Usenet been in existence during the 50s and 60s,
featuring a bunch of (badly) garbled (and often misspelled) comments
on intertextuality or deconstruction. Or "meaninglessness".
The only "meaningless" term used on this group, in the pejorative sense,
is "postmodernism".
Now, we *might* (if some of us took the Brian Eno headphones out for a
sec) try discussing something fairly simple, like why "postmodernism"
has come to stand for such an ill-defined, semi-existent mess, and
what are the implications of it for large-scale intellectual-originated
"movements" in general. Gordon Fitch wrote a good start towards this
in his historical article not too long ago. Maybe from there we can
discuss other, more intricate and thorny, issues in "deconstruction,
semiotics, and the like." [1]
Cordially,
M.S. Rooney
"What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of
philosophy as a kind of assfuck, or, what amounts to the same thing,
an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author
from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would
nonetheless be monstrous."
[1] E.g., problems in constructing an ethics of differ(e/a)nce, re:
Levinas and Derrida.
Robert Hooker
In article <EVENSON.91...@jabberwock.hitl.washington.edu>
eve...@hitl.washington.edu (Mark Evenson) writes:
> Just had to amplify Hooker's response here. Too thos with 'kill' files
> set, so check back in. At first I laughed at the whole thing. Now it
> seems to have legitmacy.
Ah, it becomes more and more Freudian.
My message presented in a raw crude form is repressed. Therefore in the
process of waiting for the eternal windhelp file to compile I start a new
project. The message is the same but the mean of presenting it is just
alittle different.
Suddenly I sneak through some of the repression. My post is posted by
another "a techno dream" a "postmodern slip of the tounge". My latent
content become manifest via the non repressed agents.
Suddenly I have impossed a Freudian structure on alt.postmodern. Suddenly
it has stopped, atleastfor some, being structured like a journal and has become something else, an "event" in the development of media?
For all the mindless shit that I have said, for all the evil hearted
creulness I have joyfully engaged in, I ask only that I not be placed
mindlessly into the catagories and stuctures that "Curt Gordon" have
created to supress my madness.
Atleast I am getting a hearing
> Bravo! Man, this is really good stuff. My reaction is really mixed.
> Hooker is really prolific, really whacked out, but this post is
incredible!
> What a reaction.
This is not as good as being called a gnat (as I was) or being told I
might lose my Net connection but it is very nice of Mark anyways.
No I am not fully mad, and I am not just out to make alt.postmodern look
stupid. The later would only make my own self look idiotic, which I'm
sure I do anyways.
I just want to get to the bottom of what the fuck this "NET" entity is,
how it works, how people interact with it, what it means to myself and
where it might be going.
Therefore I am deconstructing, tearing apart and pushing on things. I am
stressing to find limits, I am trying to see what structures give form to
the "NET" and how attacks on that form are reacted to. The presence of
Kill File fascinated me, I never dreamed of such a thing, how Freudian!!!. I
must say that learning about the kill file has so increased my
understanding of Freud I can't thank Gordan and Curt enough. Why are
there defense mechanism?; to preserve structure.
But why does communication have structure? Economic power? But why do people want power? --- Perhapes structure is an attempt to salidify the self (not a new idea (I'm sure it's over 25 years old) but still very intersting).
Perhapes in our communications we seek images of ourselves. Man is a dialectic entity how needs media not only to communicate but to structure the self. (I think this is Levi-Strauss shit)
But why the structures, how do they work, what intersets do they serve, how are people out side the structures treated.
Madness, race, gender, education, class, repression, kill files, postmodern.
Now I'm starting to get it, wow I was marginalized by a bunch of postmoderns- how totally fucken cool. And it was all impart paid for by tax payers money.
Robert Hooker
In article <EVENSON.91...@jabberwock.hitl.washington.edu>
eve...@hitl.washington.edu (Mark Evenson) writes:
> Now it
> seems to have legitmacy.
Take that back, That is the last thing I want.
Robert Hooker
In article <1991Oct20....@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca>
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
> The attribution of meaning is a cooperative endevour between the
> sender and receiver of a message.
What us?, how does the sender and the sent to cooperate. If I read Mein
Kapft and feel that I understand Hitler's idiots babbiling do I cooperate
with a dead Hitler?
When I read Plato do I cooperate with Plato who has been dead for 2,000
years?
> In most cases where the receiver
> will be attributing meaning to a message (rather than just dismissing
> it as nonsense) the sender will have an idea of what kind of responses
> various messages are likely to generate.
A strange statement to say the least. Even if true, what about books that
will be read after the authors death, is Plato responsable or aware of my
interpretations of him? Then again an author who writes a novel is aware
of the response of his public, the critics?
Have you ever been *fully* understood. Have you ever been miss understood.
Your apology does not solve the meaning problem, nor is it a good faith
defense of the originial question. Sadly Derrida himself (what ever that
is worth) has dealt with these issues at lentgh in Limited Inc, you
should read it. Also Austin and Searle on Speech Acts may show the
difficulty of your statements.
> I don't see kill files as being repressing. Who do they repress?
> They give me the freedom to easily ignore things that would otherwise
> be more difficult to ignore.
Come now what is repression but the ignoring of facts we don't like? A
kill file is so repressing that it's funny you deny=repress the fact.
Then again I think you don't seem to fully understand what Freud meant by
repression, the word has been may I say popularized beyond belief. Freud
saw repression as a means of blocking out that which " would otherwise
> be more difficult to ignore.". Ofcourse the object thus repressed still
exists, like my post and still effects other posts. My metaphor is
perfect and I won't allow CurGor + n to destroy it. But then again you
should read Freuds Civilization and it's Discontents on the issue.
> I did. Along with a bunch of other people, of course, though a tacet
> convention. You have tried to disrupt this convention. The fact that
> we have lured you into discussing postmodernism shows that you have
> not done a very good job of disrupting this convention.
Okay, lets be postmodern, a bunch of you decided what postmodern would be,
I have adressed your conventions long ago. To legitimize this act you have
simply pointed to convention; almost postmodern but still very modern.
So I try to join in the debate and find that my way of talking about
things doesn't lead to a response. I don't understand the subtle
structure that you founding fathers have empossed. So I radicalize my
communication, but I am not discussing postmodern, I am discussing the
group alt.postmodern right now which is very different.
> Indeed there are such things. They change from time to time as
> our whims change, but at any particular time, in any particular
> situation, for any particular person, there are actions which can
> be considered "right" and "wrong."
This is a contradiction, if they change upon a whim, then your later
statement falls apart. How can ethics "at any particular time, in any
particularsituation, for any particular person, there are actions which
can be considered "right" and "wrong." when at the same time they can
"change from time to time as our whims change". Then in any particular
stting if "our" whims change then it changes. So you are saying ethics
are constanl in any *particular* setting except where we have any desire to change them, impossible, silly, unethical. It reduces to this is constant and I know what it is unless anyone decides it's not constant.
Also I can not help but deconstruct your use of "we" and "our". Odd for a
postmodern to speak in such a way. The universal good, corresponding to
Mills greater good, Hobbe's State or Hegel's Spirit is just the kind of
fiction that a postmodern should not have to appeal to. Who is the we of
which you speak. "We the People" come now, I don't even think our Pre-Modernist freind would defend the free use of "we" the way you use it.
> We just make it up as we go along.
Curt, now we are back to square one; nihilism. Since "we" (the ever
present we in CuGor + n postings) can make it up as we go along, that is
what should or should not be done, then there is no reason for me not to
post nonsense and suddenly decide that such is the most ethical thing in
the universe, that "as {I} go along" I "just make up" all kinds of stupid
things.
Ultimately you apeal to an authority and a very Western concept of
ownership via creation.
CurGor + n "We made it so we can decide how it works"
Hooker: "A subgenre of science fiction which emerged in the early to mid
1980's and which features "gritty" film-noirish settings, mind-computer interface(and a generalized intimacy between technology and the human organism), a pol-"
CurGor + n "We will put you into a kill file"
It's so fits into Western myths about phsycology and ownership it's really
funny. You just don't get it. Ownership via creation "Goddamn it we built this country not to see you stupid long haired black ass pinko take it over".
Kill files; "If the defendent will not answer the questions possed to him and stop rabbiling about politics I will have to hold him in contempt".
There is a real problem with your interpretation of postmodern, it fails
very basic tests. Get with it and open up, deconstruct yourself man.
Take acid, read James Joyces, learn Zen Mediatation, Chant Hare Krishna
do something to get out of this thinking trap your in man.
Robert Hooker
In article <1991Oct20....@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca>
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
> Robert, let us say for a moment that Gordon and I do join forces
> in this mythical "Them" or "Us" that you have constructed. (I'll
> admit that I helped a bit in this construction, actually urging
> you toward it, but you were the one that actually did it.)
Well, so you are that strange force I feel impeling my life, It's not God
it's not fate it's Gordan (or are you Curt?)
> Now, according to your thesis, We are very self centred. We wish to
> manipulate the discussion so that the group as a whole is disussing
> those things We wish to discuss, and not discussing those things which
> We are not interested in.
This was not my thesis at all. My thesis was that CurGor + n have turned
alt.postmodern into a structure which reinforces and shapes their image of
self. THis is not a process of being :"self center", an awefully
popularized word now isn't it. If anything it states that you self is
dependent on a structure you have created in the NET for it's stability.
It's not that you are selfishly using the net for some gain, it's that you
have created a reflection of the self via the media.
> Given that We are self-centred, it seems logical that even better than
> discussing those things which we want to discuss would be a discussion
> about discussing those things we want to discuss.
Yes that much is right, as much as you can understand. You are always
discussing yourself, or better said your creating ourself, even better
your holding up an image of yourself. I will go much furhter into a
deconstruction of all this later.
> We have co-opted your
> discussion of your ideas of postmodernism and transformed it into a
> discussion about Our ideas of postmodernism, and our ideas of
> discussions of postmodernism.
Gordan (or our you Curt), do you really expect anyone rational being to
believe that you have been controlling and manipulating me? But that
said, if true your statemnt is correct, it confirms exactly what I said.
> You think that We are trying to prevent you from posting. Indeed,
> that may well be the impression we have given. But that does not mean
> that We really do wish this to occur. If we are indeed as self-centred
> as you say, would it not be far better for our egos to have you
> continue posting, but posting to talk about us rather than to pursue
> your own objectives?
Gordan, (or are you Curt?) You reallyu need to read what I posted more
closely, where you got "self centered" from I don't know.
Once again everytime I come up with alittle idea from my simple brain that
I can be just alittle proud of you muddy it up.
Robert Hooker
In article <1991Oct20....@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca>
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
> Well, that was a pretty amusing "deconstruction."
In order to prevent any confusion I have inserted a copy of the article
that CurGor + n is responding to. If you have any questions or comments
please send me e-mail;
{Following was a response to a flame which asserted that it was not quite
a flame}
Curt, this was a flame. So let me deconstruct.
Oddly the Gordan Curt branch of alt.postmodern (and they are a branch in
that they stand up for each other and they are pomo in that they happily
live on different sides of the lower 48 yet still work together)
But back to the subject. It is very odd how the aggressive intention of
their post are denied within their post. Gordan tells me to get of
alt.postmodern (that was clear) and it is "friendly" Curt calls me a twit
and it is not a flame. Very odd? Let us look deeper.
What does it mean to assert that one does not have an intention and then
use your text to serve that intention. Cynical manipulation seems as good
a word as any.
The question is who is being manipulated and who is manipulating.
Clearly Curt and Gordan are trying to control me and my behavior. They
are trying to prevent me from posting. Threats and personal attacks from
the two.
It's also odd that Curt and Gordan are two of the very few actually taking
part in the odd projection of contradiction that has been come to be known
as alt.postmodern. In that past every college had it's one communist,
it's one jungian. Isolated these individuals pursued their esoteric ideas
until they rejoined the rest of the community or madness followed.
I admit that for three months (three low points of my life) I was a strong
Randian objectivist. Happily I did have someone who agreed and soon I
came to understand why; Rand does not talk about the real world.
But now, in our pomo world, their is Usenet, and Curt and Gordan are
clearly proud that they have had Net connects for *more then a year***.
Now Curt and Gordan (who normally should be their Universities one of two
postmodern nuts eating at the cafeteria table with the Freudians and
Marxist and Objectivist and Born Agains arguing about whether good is a
product of the Unconscious of the ruling class or the workers and losing
their minds just a little more after every B+ in philosophy.)
Well Curt and Gordan have Usenet now, and they are very proud that they
are not freshmen and have had Usenet for *more then a year***. They find
each other across country and experience something that they have never
experienced before; they share a common belief about Pomo.
Sadly ever dinner table conversation is interrupted by the presence of the
world out there. A reality that they never can experience. Sometimes one
of their members, in my case the objectivist, are sucked into this real
world and soon forget their conversations.
The greatest hope and the greatest fear of the Freudians and Marxist and
Objectivist and Born Agains and Postmoderns is that they will be
confronted by the outside world in the form of a beer or a women or a real
friendship of a frat boy poking fun at them.
Now their is Usenet, one can partake in the dinner table conversation with
the 5 or 7 people in the entire nation who are their Universities
Freudians and Marxist and Objectivist and Born Agains and Postmoderns can
speak to each other paradise, and all without interruption.
Slowly the self projections become more and more stagnant. The rules
firmer and firmer. Till even they know quite clearly that they are a "a
lifeless intellectual movement".
But always the fear, what if it ends, what if someone enters are
projection and doesn't fit into the structures we have developed to combat
the isolation of our own existences.
If it happens first they laugh and try to act as if they get the joke;
"Post on, Robert, post on. The voices of an entire generation are with
you."
When the patient finds that laughter doesn't work they become upset and
try to scare the monster away;
" The second is that, if it becomes a problem for
anyone, they may write to your SA and make it _your_ problem, in
the sense that you may get kicked off the net. Now, _I_ would
never do this -- not while my news reader has a kill function --
but there are some real soreheads out there, and I wouldn't mess
with them by doing any volume-intensive "postmodern" creativity."
Then they play the ignore it and it will go away;
> I wouldn't worry too much about your sysadmin booting you off the net,
> though. The worst that's likely to happen is that Gordon and I will
> put you in our kill files.
Perhaps here the game ends. They keep the illusion, the imago of self by
repressing those individuals who are putting in the structure reflections
they find unpleasing. This is the step into decadence, the first steps
in the decline of power, the weakening of the instincts to know and
question and and argue infavor of a stable self structure.
Or they except that their hiding place is organic and let other jeeks who
see themselves as pomo in, not worrying to much if the new does not make
sense, not anxiety ridden by the collapse of the old structure.
What will it be?
Robert Hooker
Also since it seems that this little spat has been oddly moved to another
title by Gordan (or was it Curt?) I fell a strong need to provide our
readership (all three of them) with all the needed facts;
Here is a supportive post on Re: Zen....
Bravo! Man, this is really good stuff. My reaction is really mixed.
Hooker is really prolific, really whacked out, but this post is incredible!
What a reaction. I think I'm parodying myself, here. Interesting.
On the one hand, really kind of true this critique of the "Curt Gordon"
cusp. This flamefest has gotten really interesting. The rherotic has
gotten so heated that actual points are being made. First time I've seen a
flame get cogency that isn't stricily based on systems of words. This
skirmish has interesting contours: alt.postmodern as exclusionary, hop hip
it is not, the whole deal.
Just had to amplify Hooker's response here. Too thos with 'kill' files
set, so check back in. At first I laughed at the whole thing. Now it
seems to have legitmacy.
Curt Sampson
n...@Apple.COM (Neal Johnson) writes:
> In article <1991Oct20....@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca> cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
> >
> >I don't see kill files as being repressing. Who do they repress?
> >They give me the freedom to easily ignore things that would otherwise
> >be more difficult to ignore.
> >
>
> Though I am an atheist and do not believe in that god in the machine
> called "Artificial Intelligence", it is interesting to note how we
> have projected many psychological processes into our machines. To wit,
> this use of kill files is a good, simplified description of cognitive
> dissonance. We seek the simple mechanism to filter out what we do not
> want to experience. Is the shutting out of experience, any experience,
> really freedom? Sounds like prison to me...
This is a fallacious argument. I cannot shut out experience. I
experience things every waking moment, whether I want to or not.
The question is, *what* do I experience.
If, for example, I choose not to experience several hours of
television per day, am I really limiting my experiences? Or am I
acquiring better experiences by spending the time reading or going
to the art gallery instead?
Kill files save me the time and trouble that I would otherwise have to
spend filtering articles manually. There are some newsgroups that I
would not read at all if I couldn't use kill files to do a preliminary
weeding of the things I don't care to read. Kill files are what
enable me to read some groups and thus have that experience.
If you choose not to accept this argument, then perhaps you should
stop shutting out the experience of living in a sensory isolation
chamber for eight hours of every day...
Robert Hooker
> Kill files save me the time and trouble that I would otherwise have to
> spend filtering articles manually. There are some newsgroups that I
> would not read at all if I couldn't use kill files to do a preliminary
> weeding of the things I don't care to read. Kill files are what
> enable me to read some groups and thus have that experience.
Oddly, CuGor + n changes the ground on which it stands, no longer is the
kill file to get rid of the unliked or hated but simply a cleaning
function which saves time. Ofcourse this had nothing to do with the
original argument and CurGur + n has shifted the ground under our feet in
a confussing fashion.
"It's not repression, it's necessary for me to read news groups."
Now we see Postmodern rationalization. It's not bad...it's it's it's the
only way to do it . ANd look at yourself you do it to at work.
Keep it up Gordan,(or are your Curt) I think there is a major article or
novel in you somewhere.
Robert Hooker
In article <187...@tiger.oxy.edu> roo...@oxy.edu (Michael Sean Rooney)
writes:
> we have alt.postmodern, which would be indistinguishable from alt.
> existentialism,
But the group exists before it has an essence.
In article <187...@tiger.oxy.edu> roo...@oxy.edu (Michael Sean Rooney)
writes:
> (and often misspelled)
God, doesn't everybuddy kno that postmodernaty stands for highist
standurds of spelling and gramer!
> Now, we *might* (if some of us took the Brian Eno headphones out for a
> sec) try discussing something fairly simple, like why "postmodernism"
> has come to stand for such an ill-defined, semi-existent mess, and
> what are the implications of it for large-scale intellectual-originated
> "movements" in general. Gordon Fitch wrote a good start towards this
> in his historical article not too long ago. Maybe from there we can
> discuss other, more intricate and thorny, issues in "deconstruction,
> semiotics, and the like." [1]
Because people "r" afraid of what is new, end of discussion.
The intersting question that we should be dicussing is how people, some of
which can't spell, construct the entity; alt.postmodern. What are it's
structures what purposes does it serve.
And what about the NET as a total, what is the NETS structure, what
metaphors do people employ in understanding it and why do they use the
metaphors that they do.
What groups are promoted by the NET and which are excluded?
Curt Sampson
> In article <1991Oct20....@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca>
> cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
>
> > The attribution of meaning is a cooperative endevour between the
> > sender and receiver of a message.
>
> What us?, how does the sender and the sent to cooperate. If I read Mein
> Kapft and feel that I understand Hitler's idiots babbiling do I cooperate
> with a dead Hitler?
>
> When I read Plato do I cooperate with Plato who has been dead for 2,000
> years?
Yes, and yes.
> > In most cases where the receiver
> > will be attributing meaning to a message (rather than just dismissing
> > it as nonsense) the sender will have an idea of what kind of responses
> > various messages are likely to generate.
>
> A strange statement to say the least. Even if true, what about books that
> will be read after the authors death, is Plato responsable or aware of my
> interpretations of him? Then again an author who writes a novel is aware
> of the response of his public, the critics?
It doesn't matter if you read it after his death. Plato assumed
that his readers would place certain meanings on his words, and
the translation of his work from Greek to English certainly
facilitated that. You have, to a greater or lesser degree, fulfilled
his expectations of what someone will see when they read his work.
> Have you ever been *fully* understood. Have you ever been miss understood.
No, and yes.
> Your apology does not solve the meaning problem, nor is it a good faith
> defense of the originial question. Sadly Derrida himself (what ever that
> is worth) has dealt with these issues at lentgh in Limited Inc, you
> should read it. Also Austin and Searle on Speech Acts may show the
> difficulty of your statements.
Actually, Derrida would probably agree with me here, being a
structuralist himself.
> Freud
> saw repression as a means of blocking out that which " would otherwise
> be more difficult to ignore."
Then, by Freud's definition, kill files are repressing.
> So I radicalize my
> communication, but I am not discussing postmodern, I am discussing the
> group alt.postmodern right now which is very different.
Perhaps you are now, but up to this point in the article, and at many
times in many other articles, you have been discussing post-modernism.
What's more, in your replies to me you follow, in a general way, the
conventions that I (and others) have set forth. Face it; you have
been partially co-opted. No doubt you will be co-opted again when you
reply to this.
> > Indeed there are such things. They change from time to time as
> > our whims change, but at any particular time, in any particular
> > situation, for any particular person, there are actions which can
> > be considered "right" and "wrong."
>
> This is a contradiction, if they change upon a whim, then your later
> statement falls apart. How can ethics "at any particular time, in any
> particularsituation, for any particular person, there are actions which
> can be considered "right" and "wrong." when at the same time they can
> "change from time to time as our whims change". Then in any particular
> stting if "our" whims change then it changes. So you are saying ethics
> are constanl in any *particular* setting except where we have any desire to change them, impossible, silly, unethical. It reduces to this is constant and I know what it is unless anyone decides it's not constant.
I've never said that ethics were constant. Ethics change from
person to person, and from time to time. I'm just saying we can
pick one particular person at one particular point in time and find
that there are things that they consider "right" and that they
consider "wrong."
cjs
--
Curt Sampson | "The trouble with having multiple personalities is
cu...@cynic.uucp | that the usual case doesn't seem to have enough
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca | energy for any one of them." --Gordon Fitch
Neal Johnson
> n...@Apple.COM (Neal Johnson) writes:
>
>> In article <1991Oct20....@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca> cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
>> >
>> >I don't see kill files as being repressing. Who do they repress?
>> >They give me the freedom to easily ignore things that would otherwise
>> >be more difficult to ignore.
>> >
>>
>> Though I am an atheist and do not believe in that god in the machine
>> called "Artificial Intelligence", it is interesting to note how we
>> have projected many psychological processes into our machines. To wit,
>> this use of kill files is a good, simplified description of cognitive
>> dissonance. We seek the simple mechanism to filter out what we do not
>> want to experience. Is the shutting out of experience, any experience,
>> really freedom? Sounds like prison to me...
>
>This is a fallacious argument. I cannot shut out experience. I
>experience things every waking moment, whether I want to or not.
>The question is, *what* do I experience.
Please note that I did not say that we/you/they shut out experience.
We filter out things we do not want to experience. Some of this filtering
is conscious and chosen. Some of it is not.
>
>If, for example, I choose not to experience several hours of
>television per day, am I really limiting my experiences? Or am I
>acquiring better experiences by spending the time reading or going
>to the art gallery instead?
There is no answer to either question. Who knows, maybe something
that would change your life is on the tube today. No one other than
yourself would know this to be true. But you missed it. Oh, well...
As to reading and art? Clearly an elitest/intellectual value judgement
of which I too am guilty.
Also, given the rapid amount of information portrayed, say on MTV, one
hour of MTV may provide more raw experience than a whole novel or
art gallery.
>
>Kill files save me the time and trouble that I would otherwise have to
>spend filtering articles manually. There are some newsgroups that I
>would not read at all if I couldn't use kill files to do a preliminary
>weeding of the things I don't care to read. Kill files are what
>enable me to read some groups and thus have that experience.
For years I have avoided the use of card catelogs in libraries (a favorite
haunt) because I prefer to go to the general section and browse. Some of
the most interesting books I have been read have been discovered by
accident and not through conscious search or selection. You will
never know what you missed.
>
>If you choose not to accept this argument, then perhaps you should
>stop shutting out the experience of living in a sensory isolation
>chamber for eight hours of every day...
>
What argument? And how did you know that my open-plan cubicle is
in fact a sensory isolation chamber - a true and actual realization
after returning to it after 10 weeks of freedom.
Christopher Wade Skinner
While I agree with Curt in essence in re: several hours of tv, lets not
drag art galleries and reading into it. I think you than play into
the hands of reformed 'Randian Objectivists' who feel that all
academic/intellectual pursuit is unnecessary, and that their serio-
comic Bugs Bunny routines are invariably interesting. My beef is
that I'd like to talk seriously about things like material culture
and persistance of images (or not) as a student of such things
without having to wade through the acurately described whinings of
people who use volume to mascarade as dialogue.
Let me put this another way: Robert, if you don't like our toys,
go build some of your own. I would like to read about scholarship
and discourse on this net. (Sorry, Mike, prolific != interesting/
relevent).
Chris
Richard Carlson
> > When I read Plato do I cooperate with Plato who has been dead for 2,000
> > years?
>
> Yes, and yes.
>
> > > In most cases where the receiver
> > > will be attributing meaning to a message (rather than just dismissing
> > > it as nonsense) the sender will have an idea of what kind of responses
> > > various messages are likely to generate.
> >
> > A strange statement to say the least. Even if true, what about books that
> > will be read after the authors death, is Plato responsable or aware of my
> > interpretations of him? Then again an author who writes a novel is aware
> > of the response of his public, the critics?
>
> It doesn't matter if you read it after his death. Plato assumed
> that his readers would place certain meanings on his words, and
> the translation of his work from Greek to English certainly
> facilitated that. You have, to a greater or lesser degree, fulfilled
> his expectations of what someone will see when they read his work.
But can a dead person have intentions in quite the same sense that
a living one can? Even if a person is writing "for the ages" and
has a mental image at the time of h/er writing of someone reading
and agreeing with h/er opinions and appreciating h/er prose style
and indeed all that does come to pass and some reader at some
later time, perhaps far in the future, does in fact have precisely
the reaction anticipated and hoped for, that mental image of that
future reader served some contemporaneous function for the writer
who possibly saw h/erself as unjustly ignored in h/er own time.
Let me suggest a possible scenario. Imagine that some time
tomorrow the most influential opinion leader at Oxford should have
the sudden revelation that Derrida has been right all along and
that nothing in the entire English analytic tradition, beginning
with Russell, has been of any value whatsoever except a few random
insights by J. L. Austin, which Derrida has incorporated into his
thinking anyway. This opinion leader convinces the entire British
philosophy world that everything they have been doing is utterly
worthless and they throw out all of the last century of British
thought -- even the manuscripts that are currently nearing
completion (and dealing with topics they now all consider to be
quite beside the point) -- and begin the very next day in their
classes to teach only poststructuralist approaches to philosophy.
In all probability Derrida would enjoy this turn of events --
along with the requests from former pundits, who are now beginners
in his tradition, for names of researchers he has trained to come
and give seminars and workshops in their institutions. Possibly
he even has fantasies that something like this might happen -- the
consternation in Paris at the height of the de Man fuss certainly
suggests that poststructuralists are as involved in academic
politics as the members of any other school of thought.
Suppose, however, that instead of a sudden intellectual revolution
led by one influential thinker who sees the light, all this happens
fairly gradually over the course of a century, with British
philosophy becoming essentially poststructuralist while retaining
the label "analytic?" Finally, long after his death, Derrida is
recognized as the most seminal thinker of his century. Can you
really say that his intentions have been realized in quite the
same way as if it happened in his lifetime? Aren't the
"intentions" of dead people an artifact of the communications
media, beginning with a written language, which allows their
strings of words to survive after their death? Isn't the belief
that one will be vindicated by the ages a form of psychological
recuperation that would seem to require clinical intervention on
account of its irrationality?
--
Richard Carlson | r...@depsych.gwinnett.com
Midtown Medical Center | gatech!emory!gwinnett!depsych!rc
Atlanta, Georgia |
(404) 881-6877 |
Richard Carlson
especially where you say:
roo...@oxy.edu (Michael Sean Rooney) writes:
> And on Usenet, not exactly a favored haunt
> of post-structural philosophers (comp.sci majors who barely passed
> humanities requirements but think they know it all is more accurate),
> we have alt.postmodern, which would be indistinguishable from alt.
> existentialism, had Usenet been in existence during the 50s and 60s,
> featuring a bunch of (badly) garbled (and often misspelled) comments
> on intertextuality or deconstruction. Or "meaninglessness".
because if _this_ isn't the place, what place _is_ the place?
Where would we find the favored haunt of poststructuralist
philosophers? (I've hunted through all the major DOS networks:
ILink, RIME, FidoNet, as well as the biggest commercial on-line
service, CompuServe, and I found a lot of nice people, but nobody
who even seemed to know who Foucault or Derrida are (even though I
would have thought that by now even readers of Time or the New
York Times Book Review would have terms like "deconstruction" and
"delegitimate" as part of their normal speaking vocabularies, if
not tagged as the latest "in" buzzwords.)
> This brings me to a subject I raised last spring, namely, the popular
> apperception of post-structuralism and other contemporary trends in
> philosophy and literary criticism. By blending together various half-
> understood second-hand synopses of Barthes, Baudrillard, de Man, Derrida,
> Foucault, Lyotard and others, the popular media (and thus the educated
> lay public) has conceived that monstrous progeny known as a "movement",
> this one christened "post-modernism", or worse still, "pomo". By
> associating these intellectual currents with others like multi-culturalism
> and feminism, the whole has become a favorite straw person of the
> conservative elements so prominent in American society.
Actually the situation is, I think, even more bizarre than you
suggest. In France and in Europe generally poststructuralism is
recognized to be a conservative and essentially counter-Marxist
discourse. Here in America it is conflated with its ideological
opponent and perceived as itself radical and promoting and
endorsing phenomena which it merely describes. I've also
suspected for some time that the "feminism" which seems so much a
part of deconstruction, while I suppose sincere enough, is
primarily a rhetorical move that Derrida thought was necessary to
trump Marxism. (Classical Marxism had taken the side of the
"workers" against the "capitalists," which amounts to valorizing
the unmarked term of the opposition, i.e., siding with the
underdog, which is itself a bit of human nature which was
valorized by Christianity, and Maoist-Fanon Marxist had gone it
one better by valorizing an even more unmarked term, the
_lumpenproletariat_ or "wretched of the Earth," so Derrida needed
another exploited minority to put in its place and he, quite
deliberately I think, chose women from the very basic man-woman
opposition because, I think, he wanted give his followers an even
more basic sense of "goodness" and "rightness" than the Marxist
had.)
With the Marxist discourse largely discredited there isn't any
longer any need to trump or double-trump it in the ethical
goodness dimension. I think we'll see poststructuralism
deemphasizing its feminism.
Don't you think that a lot of the trouble started with Allan
Bloom's misperception of poststructuralism as part of the
radical-left (i.e., Marxist) initiative of deconstructing American
values? (Remember history. Socrates, who was an anti-Sophist
attempting to defend the "conservative values" of his day from
Sophistic deconstruction, was put to death partly because he was
perceived as a super-Sophist who was undermining faith in the
Gods, Athenian values and the Athenian way of life.)
> Now, we *might* (if some of us took the Brian Eno headphones out for a
> sec) try discussing something fairly simple, like why "postmodernism"
> has come to stand for such an ill-defined, semi-existent mess, and
> what are the implications of it for large-scale intellectual-originated
> "movements" in general. Gordon Fitch wrote a good start towards this
> in his historical article not too long ago. Maybe from there we can
> discuss other, more intricate and thorny, issues in "deconstruction,
> semiotics, and the like."
I agree and I hope I've helped to make a start.
Andrew C. Aiken
>Don't you think that a lot of the trouble started with Allan
>Bloom's misperception of poststructuralism as part of the
>radical-left (i.e., Marxist) initiative of deconstructing American
>values? (Remember history. Socrates, who was an anti-Sophist
>attempting to defend the "conservative values" of his day from
>Sophistic deconstruction, was put to death partly because he was
>perceived as a super-Sophist who was undermining faith in the
>Gods, Athenian values and the Athenian way of life.)
What I got from _Closing_ was that the Left has, since the
radical days of the 1960s, been mysteriously Nietzscheanized and has
co-opted (to use a trope of the Left) the ideas of the European
post-structuralists. He was commenting on the bizarre hybrid this
has produced here in the States. Now, he did not maintain that
these neo-leftists were out to deconstruct American values, only that
their cultural relativism made any set of values impossible.
Andrew Aiken
Gordon Fitch
around here lately, and you may be missing the article.
roo...@oxy.edu (Michael Sean Rooney):
| ...
|"What got me by during that period was conceiving of the history of
| philosophy as a kind of assfuck, or, what amounts to the same thing,
| an immaculate conception. I imagined myself approaching an author
| from behind and giving him a child that would indeed be his but would
| nonetheless be monstrous."
I hope M.S. Rooney will not mind if I _follow_him_up_, even
considering the theme of the last paragraph.
That paragraph inspires me to denominate the creation of the
"Postmodern Movement" as an example of "movementism."
Movementism is the practice of gathering phenomena, especially
cultural phenomena, into "movements." In the arts, prior to the
19th Century, we have "schools" and "periods", e.g. the Venetian,
the Baroque. Consistent with 19th-Century ideas of progress and
revolution, art, or rather, Art, was said to evince "movements",
as if the entire population of artists, like so many lemmings,
suddenly decided as one to start painting (or writing, or
whatever) in a single new way. Thus, the Impressionist, the
Post-Impressionist, the Pre-Raphaelite, the Expressionist
"movements". The financial and political utility of this sort
of thing ought to be clear.
Diffuse as "Modernism" was, it was possible to close the canon
on it around 1960. However, this closing caused a crisis
because the fact of multiculturalism -- that is, different
standards for evaluating cultural artifacts -- had arrived and
was soon to become widely evident. Although one can, with some
effort, draw conceptual lines corralling the Parthenon, La
Gioconda, The Starry Night, and Les Demoiselles d'Avignon into a
single system, it is hard to see how any amount of effort will
incorporate graffiti, van painting, film animation, video, pop
art, conceptual art, and especially interactive art into this
system because the values of the people who evaluate such art
are fundamentally divergent from each other and from the main
line (by which I mean what the uptown galleries in New York
regard as valuable).
However, the habit of categorizing has continued (because the
categorization has the financial and political utility alluded
to, and because it is a habit). Consequently, the term "post-
modern", originally a negation, has been filled with whatever
contents seem available.
But a thing _is_ what we make it -- and if hashing up materials
from previous eras and pasting them on otherwise uninteresting
structures is "postmodern architecture", then, lo, we have
postmodern architecture. Architecture is especially vulnerable
to this sort of treatment; whereas people can write or sing
anything they want at low cost, considerable money has to be
invested in a building, and the investors want to have warranted
aesthetic value along with warranted structural design and
materials. Hence, there is great pressure to find something,
anything, which will validate some form of architecture, and so
it is done. Likewise, if there is sufficient demand, one can
only suppose that "goods" and "evils" can be found which can be
given a kind of artificial halo of the Absolute for the benefit
of those who are willing to pay for it. But it will be only a
local transaction.
Unless the bourgeoisie recohere, or some other agency assumes
the responsibility, it will not be possible to find definitions
of good and evil which are satisfactorily absolute, that is,
possess the authority to justify the traditional death and
domination, at least not in a coherent way. And that being the
case, "good" and "evil" will be meaningless indeed for many
people, and "postmodernism" will continue to be a confession
that "we" can no longer separate the sheep from the goats and
Art from art, aht, aat, ott, and awt. In short, freedom or
chaos, depending on how you look at anarchy.
--
Gordon Fitch * ...!panix.com!mydog!gcf
Bx 1238 Bowling Green Station / NYC 10274
"... a master of disingenuous subtlety." -P.McGuinness
Richard Carlson
> What I got from _Closing_ was that the Left has, since the
> radical days of the 1960s, been mysteriously Nietzscheanized and has
> co-opted (to use a trope of the Left) the ideas of the European
> post-structuralists. He was commenting on the bizarre hybrid this
> has produced here in the States. Now, he did not maintain that
> these neo-leftists were out to deconstruct American values, only that
> their cultural relativism made any set of values impossible.
Relativization is part of the deconstruction process. First all
discourses are relativized and tribalized so that each is seen as
ontologically arbitrary _and_ as representing or justifying some
particularist group, whether ethnic or class. That is a first
step which precedes deconstruction proper in which the actual
texts embodying the ideology or values are deconstructed and what
they exclude is made explicit, what contradictions they are
papering over are spelled out and what the "real" motivations of
the authors actually are is "exposed."
The Marxists were doing deconstruction before there was a name for
it. Derrida deconstructed their deconstructions in much the same
way that Socrates deconstructed the very similar dialectical logic
of the Sophists.
Even "existentialism" as it was presented (by Sartre) in the 40s
and 50s was a part of the Marxist deconstruction of "traditional"
Western values and not at all what it appeared on the surface. The
surface message was that everything is uncertain and undefined and
therefore nothing is worth fighting over, which left a kind of
default universalism represented by international Communism, as
headed by Josef Stalin (in much the same way that the Pope headed
Christianity), which one was more or less forced by the "unforced
force of reason" to fight for with single-minded intensity. From
this point of view the exoteric message that God is dead and
nothing is certain could be experienced as something manufactured
to bug the bourgeoisie rather than as something real that had to
be dealt with in one's own life because one knew that Josef Stalin
and the Party represented something "meaningful" and
supra-individual. (Maybe the certainty given by party allegiance
was a defense against precisely the existentialist uncertainty one
tried to invoke strategically in others, but Sartre and those "in
the know" experienced their lives as filled with [historical]
meaning and not at all as they presented to the world.)
In Europe poststructuralist thought is clearly perceived by
whatever Marxists remain as conservative and directed against
them. Go to a good bookstore with a good magazine rack of leftist
journals and you will see Derrida generally referred to as a
"Fascist." He is a French Algerian, like Camus, and like Camus
apparently more conscious of being French than the average
Frenchman who probably unconsciously associates elements of his
Frenchness with universal humanness (a little like Americans
living in Panama used to be). I believe Derrida is also Jewish,
which would make him a double outsider, namely standing outside of
French Algerian society on account of his Jewishness and outside
of French society proper because of his Algerianness. (I'm not
sure if he is Jewish or not. I saw his name on the cover of one
of the Jewish culture journals in a list of 20th Century Jewish
intellectuals that was opposite a list of gentile intellectuals,
so I assume he is Jewish. But I didn't buy the journal.)
As I recall Blooms's arguments, you are right that he himself did
point out the paradox of the American left using Nietzsche, who is
generally perceived as part of the conservative
counter-enlightenment discourse. I guess it's because his
contribution was so crucial to an understanding of deconstruction
and how it works. Nietzsche's great contribution to thought was
is observation that Christianity, in championing the underdog
(which has probably always been a tendency in human nature), makes
clear thinking difficult because the "inferior" or "marked" term
of an opposition carries more delimited meaning. The full force
of Nietzsche's insight couldn't be appreciated until a
structuralist framework was developed within which it could be
expressed clearly in terms of marked and unmarked features of
oppositions rather than in Nietzsche's own flowery prose.
Robert Hooker
writes:
> I think you should take it that way, too -- just
> consider me utterly abashed and confounded and unable to
> reply, okay?
Interesting concept I had.
What do you think CurGor + n would say and do if they lived in a society
which outlawed smart ass comments and forced people to always use logic in
argumentation.
Also what if their was a social convention against just saying something
was simple minded and not following up why it was simple minded? Or a
convention against saying things like; "that's over 25 years old"?
Interesting concept--I might play with that.
I think it fits into my ultimate deconstruction of CurGor + n which is comong soon.
Robert Hooker
In article <22...@ucsbcsl.ucsb.edu> 650...@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Christopher
Wade Skinner) writes:
> Robert, if you don't like our toys,
> go build some of your own. I would like to read about scholarship
> and discourse on this net.
But I am building my own toys.
And about scholarship, it's simple--there wasn't anything of the kind when
I found this group and there still isn't any.
I just hope in the process of making noise somebody has a thought. Just
Deconstructing.
Robert Hooker
> experience things every waking moment, whether I want to or not.
> The question is, *what* do I experience.
The dept of logical analysis here is getting to a point where I need
several days to sort out just what sounded funnest to me.
CurGor + n has made my life alittle difficult, troubled me with silly
little statements that allow me no rest. Always, my mental picture of
little CurGor + n, conversing in rapid self contradictions.
Shortly after the above we read;
> If, for example, I choose not to experience several hours of
> television per day, am I really limiting my experiences?
Well is "choose not to experience" and "shut out experience" in any way
different? Since CurGor +n can not "shut out experience" but they can
"choose not to experince" I can only assume there is a incredible *play*
of meaning going on here. But which sentence am I to take as meaning what
I think it means and which sentence has shifted in a subtle play?
Then again perhapes neither mean what I think they mean? So what does
CurGor + n mean by this posting?
Ofcourse the metaphysics of logic must be despensed with by CurGor + n
inorder for it to construct this next sentence;
> Kill files are what
> enable me to read some groups and thus have that experience.
If CurGor + n is killing group members then how can they be reading them.
Lets move this sentence to a different context inorder to examine the
contradiction here closer.
Tom:"With my schedule I have no time to read"
CurGor + n : "What do you wnat to read?"
Tom: "Marx's Capital"
CurGor + n: "Well, just cut out things that you don't like. That is just
cut out chapter the titles you don't like. Keep it up till there is
about ten pages left and then; you "have that experience".
Tom: Cool.
If we were ever to see such a conversation we might say; but you haven't
read Capitial at all, nor have you experienced it you have just looked at
what you wanted to.
CurGor +n strikes again. More material for my final full deconstruction
of alt.postmodern (it will be a real shocker when it is finsihed).
Robert Hooker
> > > When I read Plato do I cooperate with Plato who has been dead for
2,000
> > > years?
> >
> > Yes, and yes.
Come now CUrGor + n you can't possibily believe that I cooperate with
Plato. I think that we can all agree that cooperation indicates a state
of working with another towards a common goal. Now how does somebody work
with Plato who is dead?
> It doesn't matter if you read it after his death. Plato assumed
> > that his readers would place certain meanings on his words, and
> > the translation of his work from Greek to English certainly
> > facilitated that. You have, to a greater or lesser degree, fulfilled
> > his expectations of what someone will see when they read his work.
BUNK BUNK BUNK, a writer can nrver be aware of the meaning that other
people will put onto their text. In fact the ability to write something
so clear that any read would understand what the author thought would be
an act of genius.
CurGor + n, I could just let the vast majority eat you apart and sit back
and enjoy the feast I started, but I fell a personal need to take part in
all this.
I can say that I don't understand what Plato meant by Form or Ideal, and I
may never understand.
Kant is always changing under my feet and Derrida confuses me. THe
meaning authors intent is impossible to figure out.
Curt Sampson
hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Robert Hooker) writes:
> In article <9110121...@mydog.UUCP> g...@mydog.UUCP (Gordon Fitch)
> writes:
> > I think you should take it that way, too -- just
> > consider me utterly abashed and confounded and unable to
> > reply, okay?
>
> What do you think CurGor + n would say and do if they lived in a society
> which outlawed smart ass comments and forced people to always use logic in
> argumentation.
>
> Also what if their was a social convention against just saying something
> was simple minded and not following up why it was simple minded? Or a
> convention against saying things like; "that's over 25 years old"?
I wonder what would happen if there was a social convention that
pushed people toward extracting the best part of someone's argument
against them and defending themselves against that, rather than
extracting and isolating the weakest part of someone's argument
against them and beating that to death?
> ...my ultimate deconstruction of CurGor + n which is comong soon.
I'm looking forward to it.
Curt Sampson
that somebody who accuses me of dispensing with logic manages to do it
so often himself.
In article <38...@anaxagoras.ils.nwu.edu>
hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Robert Hooker) writes:
> In article <1991Oct22.2...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca>
> cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
> > This is a fallacious argument. I cannot shut out experience. I
> > experience things every waking moment, whether I want to or not.
> > The question is, *what* do I experience.
>
> ...
>
> Shortly after the above we read;
>
> > If, for example, I choose not to experience several hours of
> > television per day, am I really limiting my experiences?
>
> Well is "choose not to experience" and "shut out experience" in any way
> different? Since CurGor +n can not "shut out experience" but they can
> "choose not to experince" I can only assume there is a incredible *play*
> of meaning going on here. But which sentence am I to take as meaning what
> I think it means and which sentence has shifted in a subtle play?
Yes, they are different. I was not "choosing not to experience," but
"choosing not to experience a particular thing." The original poster
seemed to be implying, when he said it was not a good thing to "shut
out experience," that I would either be experiencing or not
experiencing a particular thing, and that if I were not experiencing
it I would not be experiencing anything at all.
What I am trying to point out by my posting is that it is not a straw
man has been raised. Given a choice between experiencing _Three's
Company_ and not experiencing anything, I would agree that
experiencing _Three's Company_ is the better choice. But that's not
the choice I have. My choice is between experiencing _Three's
Company_ and experiencing Stanislaw Lem's _Solaris_. The choice here
is not "to experience or not to experience," but of which experience
to have in the half hour I happen to have free this evening. My claim
is that not all experiences have equal value.
> > Kill files are what
> > enable me to read some groups and thus have that experience.
>
> If CurGor + n is killing group members then how can they be reading them.
This is getting silly.
In some newsgroups the volume of postings is very high; too high, in
fact, for me to read every posting and still have time to allot to
other things in life. So I have a choice. I can either read some of
the postings in that newsgroup, or I can read none of them.
Now, if I choose to read some of them I am obviously experiencing a
lot more of that group that I would if I choose to read none of them.
Granted, I am not experiencing every last bit of it, but then again,
that is not usually necessary for a general understanding of what is
going on in the group.
Given that I do choose to read some messages in a group, I have a
choice of how to weed out those messages I don't want to read. I
can either do it slowly, by hand, or quickly, with kill files. If
I spend less time weeding out the messages I don't want to read,
that gives me more time to spend on other, more valuable experiences
(such as reading the messages I do want to read, or reading a good
book).
* * *
I've probably bored most everyone (including myself) to tears by this
point. I've made this as simple and clear as I can. Those of you who
want to creatively misinterpret this, go right ahead. I won't bother
replying.
Christopher Wade Skinner
In response to the reading of Plato:
It depends very much indeed on how that reading is being done.
In classical Western Political Theory, Plato initiates a dialogue,
that everyone from Aristotle to Nausic than participates in, even
Emil Durkheim (gasp!), when read in the very narrow construct that
we call _WPT_. In this instance, yes, Plato speaks to you.
However, in the wider (meta?) discourse of philosophy, and outside
of Classicalism, I tend to agree with Robert. Plato has a context
all his own, and as an historian, I must think both synchonically
and diachronally when looking at the GREAT GREEKS. As people
who live in a material culture, our essences are affected very
strongly by our reflections in the mirror of our context. The
actions we take will be influenced by that thing that Thomas
Schlereth et.al. call 'The Built Environment'.
Nonetheless, your example of Derrida is silly. (I know, you ment it to
be to prove a point, but before igniting my hair, one second).
If Derrida knew that he were about to become the Messiah, it would tend
to effect great change in his writing; don't forget, human have
an obsession with the creator of a thing (be it a vase, painting, or
school of philosophy) and the supposed _originality_ of that thing.
Once Derrida was "on top", he would be a different Derrida. My
suspicion is that, had Marx seen or knew what was up, he would
have printed in large red letters on the front of both _Kapital_ and
'The 18th Brumaire', NEVER TO BE APPLIED TO RUSSIA, something he and
Engles only hinted at during their lifetimes.
A minor point, but one I felt obliged to make.
Lata'
CWS
Christopher Wade Skinner
>Actually the situation is, I think, even more bizarre than you
>suggest. In France and in Europe generally poststructuralism is
>recognized to be a conservative and essentially counter-Marxist
>discourse. Here in America it is conflated with its ideological
>opponent and perceived as itself radical and promoting and
>endorsing phenomena which it merely describes. I've also
>suspected for some time that the "feminism" which seems so much a
>part of deconstruction, while I suppose sincere enough, is
>primarily a rhetorical move that Derrida thought was necessary to
>trump Marxism. (Classical Marxism had taken the side of the
>"workers" against the "capitalists," which amounts to valorizing
>the unmarked term of the opposition, i.e., siding with the
>underdog, which is itself a bit of human nature which was
>valorized by Christianity, and Maoist-Fanon Marxist had gone it
>one better by valorizing an even more unmarked term, the
>_lumpenproletariat_ or "wretched of the Earth," so Derrida needed
>another exploited minority to put in its place and he, quite
>deliberately I think, chose women from the very basic man-woman
>opposition because, I think, he wanted give his followers an even
>more basic sense of "goodness" and "rightness" than the Marxist
>had.)
I think perhaps, while I agree with some of Mr. Carlson's observations
he misses one or two important points. First, the post-structualist
discourse has been used by the 'left' (not a term I espouse). Both
Habermaas and Gunther Grass have used the terms of post-structualism
to forward neo-Marxist (or at least left/teleological) views of
history and culture. I'll try and find Grass' excellent article
on the Bundeswehr and the co-option of Picasso's _Guernica_ for
post here. In addition, I think you overlook Kristeva and Carol
Gilliagan, who whether you agree with them or not, have indeed
used the foundation of Foucault's method. Just exactly why you
stress only Derrida's analysis eludes me; the debate and pratice is
wider than that.
>With the Marxist discourse largely discredited there isn't any
>longer any need to trump or double-trump it in the ethical
>goodness dimension. I think we'll see poststructuralism
>deemphasizing its feminism.
The forgoing is a bit limited and limiting. The collapse of Soviet
Communism hardly equal the complete theoretical discredidation
of materialism, determinism, Capital accumulation, etc. If it
discredits anything, it discredits the apparatchik heirs of
Lenin and Trotsky. In addition, Lenin != Marx, Bernstein, Kautsky.
Don't confuse the Soviet system with a theorist. You might as well
say that we shouldn't read Hegel or disscuss his work because the
Prussian state ultimately produced the _Kaiserreich_ which collapsed
in 1918!
As to you second point; Poststrcuralism cannot _abandon_ its
feminism. There may be a move in some poststructualist schools
away from certain modes od discourse, but there are poststructuralist
feminist theorists who will neith go away or be marginalized. Your
statement, Robert, implies that there is one poststructuralism, embodied
by Derrida, and that now it will abandon its feminist component, and
steam ahead. Seems a tad arrogent and ill-considered to me.
>
>Bloom's misperception of poststructuralism as part of the
>radical-left (i.e., Marxist) initiative of deconstructing American
>values? (Remember history. Socrates, who was an anti-Sophist
>attempting to defend the "conservative values" of his day from
>Sophistic deconstruction, was put to death partly because he was
>perceived as a super-Sophist who was undermining faith in the
>Gods, Athenian values and the Athenian way of life.)
Indeed. Straussians are idiots.
>I agree and I hope I've helped to make a start.
Likewise
Christopher Wade Skinner
> What I got from _Closing_ was that the Left has, since the
>radical days of the 1960s, been mysteriously Nietzscheanized and has
>co-opted (to use a trope of the Left) the ideas of the European
>post-structuralists. He was commenting on the bizarre hybrid this
>has produced here in the States. Now, he did not maintain that
>these neo-leftists were out to deconstruct American values, only that
>their cultural relativism made any set of values impossible.
In fact, what Bloom criticizes is really a conflation of several
things, rather than any one movement. Its become fashionable
on both right and left these days to see conspiricy everyplace.
The left and right have both used this method before, and it is
indeed, non-rational. Neustadt and May (of Kennedy School) have
been criticized (by the right, mainly), for assuming that policy
can be based on the rational actions of the adversary. Bloom
decides in his book that there is a liberal--homosexual--radical
feminist conspiricy in academia, directed against him and those
who share his values. This is extreme, and really rather silly.
Indeed, there is no monolithic left in the US at all. In fact,
I tend to think that Bloom would like much multi-cultural
discussion out of sight, and hence, out of mind. There is _no_
Macarthy-ite 'witch hunt' of the left being directed against white
neo-conservative professors at most Universities I've seen.
It's all a straw man, as one intelligent poster pointed out.
Lata'
CWS
Christopher Wade Skinner
>Even "existentialism" as it was presented (by Sartre) in the 40s
>and 50s was a part of the Marxist deconstruction of "traditional"
>Western values and not at all what it appeared on the surface. The
>surface message was that everything is uncertain and undefined and
>therefore nothing is worth fighting over, which left a kind of
>default universalism represented by international Communism, as
>headed by Josef Stalin (in much the same way that the Pope headed
>Christianity), which one was more or less forced by the "unforced
>force of reason" to fight for with single-minded intensity. From
>this point of view the exoteric message that God is dead and
>nothing is certain could be experienced as something manufactured
>to bug the bourgeoisie rather than as something real that had to
>be dealt with in one's own life because one knew that Josef Stalin
>and the Party represented something "meaningful" and
>supra-individual. (Maybe the certainty given by party allegiance
>was a defense against precisely the existentialist uncertainty one
>tried to invoke strategically in others, but Sartre and those "in
>the know" experienced their lives as filled with [historical]
>meaning and not at all as they presented to the world.)
I'm not really sure if Mr. Carlson isn't conflating things
rather drastically here. To go from Sartre to Stalin without
a critical pause rather tends to mimic the rhetoric of
tired cold-warriors such as Wistrich attemtpting to use anti-
Stalinism for their own dubious academic purposes. Sartre was
a bi-sexual drug addict. This I think puts him as much outside
of French mainstream culture as it does Derrida. What, Robert,
it your evidence for the last line there? And, additionally,
what group do you refer to as "in the know"? V.I. Mudimbe?
Foucault? Umberto Eco? Nabakov? Note that both Nabokov and
Eco (not to mention someone like Beckett) could be called followers
of an 'existentialist' paradigm, without any association with
Uncle Joe. Would you draw the same rather broad connection
between Heidegger? And what about openly culpable individuals
such as Paul De Mann? He _lied_. Uh oh. I guess I see you
waving names in the manner of 'Gunner' Joe, without any clear analysis
of what you mean; is it
Sartre (secret follower of Stalin)=traitor to west=black hat;
while
Derrida=debunker of Marxian deconstruction=anti-lefist=white hat?
I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it seems that you
bring Sartre and Stalin together in a very unstable and rather
shoddy fashion.
>In Europe poststructuralist thought is clearly perceived by
>whatever Marxists remain as conservative and directed against
>them. Go to a good bookstore with a good magazine rack of leftist
>journals and you will see Derrida generally referred to as a
>"Fascist." He is a French Algerian, like Camus, and like Camus
>apparently more conscious of being French than the average
>Frenchman who probably unconsciously associates elements of his
>Frenchness with universal humanness (a little like Americans
>living in Panama used to be). I believe Derrida is also Jewish,
>which would make him a double outsider, namely standing outside of
>French Algerian society on account of his Jewishness and outside
>of French society proper because of his Algerianness. (I'm not
>sure if he is Jewish or not. I saw his name on the cover of one
>of the Jewish culture journals in a list of 20th Century Jewish
>intellectuals that was opposite a list of gentile intellectuals,
>so I assume he is Jewish. But I didn't buy the journal.)
I suspect that quite a few people still exist in Europe who
consider themselves followers of a Marxist paradigm in terms of
some general movement in history. The collapse of Soviet
communism provides much ammunition for cheap shots like the
forgoing, but the Marxist intellectual tradition is not yet
done with (I, by the by, am not a follower of said paradigm,
but I dislike intellectual arrogence).
You must realize, that much of the french non-Marxist left dislike
Derrida intensely, and feel that he is a 'pied noir' in the worst
racialist tradition. It's hardly confined to Marxists.
Bloom mis-perceives much about much he writes. I've posted on
that subject before.
Cheers!
CWS
Curt Sampson
hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Robert Hooker) writes:
> > > > When I read Plato do I cooperate with Plato who has been dead for
> 2,000
> > > > years?
> > >
> > > Yes, and yes.
>
> Come now CUrGor + n you can't possibily believe that I cooperate with
> Plato. I think that we can all agree that cooperation indicates a state
> of working with another towards a common goal. Now how does somebody work
> with Plato who is dead?
You read his books. The goals he was trying to achieve don't mysteriously
vanish just because he is no longer alive. One of his goals was to
disemminate his views. By reading and attempting to understand his
book, you are helping to achieve that goal.
> BUNK BUNK BUNK, a writer can nrver be aware of the meaning that other
> people will put onto their text. In fact the ability to write something
> so clear that any read would understand what the author thought would be
> an act of genius.
Great, another logical fallicy. You seem to be trying to say that
EITHER an author knows nothing about how someone will interpret his
work OR an author knows exactly how someone will interpret his work.
Well, neither is true. No author can know exactly what he is
communicating to somebody else. But an author can have an general
idea of what his text will say to certain types of people. As I write
this text, for example, I have a pretty good expectation that you will
be able to read it, since you speak English. If I use the word "dog"
or "cat" I have a fairly good idea of what that will likely mean to
you. If we all went around with no idea of what effect our texts
would have on people, communication would not take place.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson | "There they are, Robert! They're waiting for
cu...@cynic.uucp | you! Woof, woof!"
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca | --Gordon Fitch
tta...@binah.cc.brandeis.edu
Both
>Habermaas and Gunther Grass have used the terms of post-structualism
>to forward neo-Marxist (or at least left/teleological) views of
>history and culture.
Just curious...citation on Habermaas and his use of "post-structuralism"?
Richard Carlson
two points (which are themselves somewhat related). 1.) I've too
narrowly characterized poststructuralism and identified it as a
school or movement or discourse (or whatever it is) with Derrida
and his particular spins on it. 2.) Marxism as a theoretical
structure is not completely discredited by the political collapse
of the Soviet Union (in part because it shares many elements with
poststructuralism). Your perspective (or "angle or vision" or
"point of view" -- whatever) is certainly a reasonable way of
looking at things, and certainly what you have said is literally
"true," but I think there are advantages in foregrounding the
relationships I've stressed. Let's consider:
> I think perhaps, while I agree with some of Mr. Carlson's observations
> he misses one or two important points. First, the post-structualist
> discourse has been used by the 'left' (not a term I espouse). Both
> Habermaas and Gunther Grass have used the terms of post-structualism
> to forward neo-Marxist (or at least left/teleological) views of
> history and culture. I'll try and find Grass' excellent article
> on the Bundeswehr and the co-option of Picasso's _Guernica_ for
> post here. In addition, I think you overlook Kristeva and Carol
> Gilliagan, who whether you agree with them or not, have indeed
> used the foundation of Foucault's method. Just exactly why you
> stress only Derrida's analysis eludes me; the debate and pratice is
> wider than that.
Clearly the "two" discourses, critical theory (as developed by
Adorno and Horkheimer in the 30s and "elaborated" by Habermass in
the 70s) and poststructuralism (as developed by Derrida, Barthes,
Lyotard, et al, in the _late_ 60s and 70s) have quite a few points
of similarity. I think that is due to their common "ancestry,"
namely as the intellectual descendants of Hegel and Husserl. Both
critical theory and poststructuralism are dialectical (as opposed
to analytical) and both are phenomenological (as opposed to either
empiricist or rationalist). The difference, of course, is that one
is "leftist" and the other is "rightist." (Those quotes have a
different meaning than most of my quotes in that they indicate
conventional usage and not a questioning of the conventional
usage, which is what my quotes usually mean -- i.e., I do think
that the characterization of critical theory as leftist and
poststructuralism as rightist is essentially accurate.) Any given
text, especially a short or a specialized text, from one "camp"
may look amazingly like a text from the "other" camp. Certainly
thinkers from either discourse can have valuable insights -- in
much the same way that good ideas can come from either Democrats
or Republicans in our domestic political discourse. (I tend to
like Adorno's observations on 20th century music: popular,
classical, modern and rock and roll, I think he was very
insightful, although it must be clear by now that I favor the
poststructuralists over the critical theorists.)
As to feminism and Derrida, I think he is important because he is
the "front man" for poststructuralism, much as Sartre was the
front man for "existentialism" in the 40s and 50s. Even more
importantly, I think it was Derrida in his early writings who
_consciously_ and _deliberately_ decided to valorize _woman_,
which is clearly the marked term in the opposition "man vs.
_wo_man" and he did it as a rhetorical countermove to Marx's
valorization of the poor or unwashed in the "washed vs.
_un_washed" opposition. "One-upmanship."
> The forgoing is a bit limited and limiting. The collapse of Soviet
> Communism hardly equal the complete theoretical discredidation
> of materialism, determinism, Capital accumulation, etc. If it
> discredits anything, it discredits the apparatchik heirs of
> Lenin and Trotsky. In addition, Lenin != Marx, Bernstein, Kautsky.
> Don't confuse the Soviet system with a theorist. You might as well
> say that we shouldn't read Hegel or disscuss his work because the
> Prussian state ultimately produced the _Kaiserreich_ which collapsed
> in 1918!
While every discourse has logical or theoretical aspects as well
as rhetorical ones, I think that Marxism was primarily rhetorical
from the start. I'm not convinced that there ever was any real
theory there, or if there was, it was rapidly instrumentalized as
a rhetorical device for the upward mobility of mediocre
intellectuals. The notion of the "intellectuals" as the
"vanguard" of the "revolution" traces back to Marx and was not an
aberration introduced by Lenin. The purpose of Marxism, as was
the purpose of liberalism and enlightenment before it, was to
legitimate the movement of a new "elite" into a position of power.
I don't think any real revolution was ever really contemplated by
at least Western Marxists -- their position as "spokesmen" or
"leaders" of the "downtrodden" was sufficient to legitimate their
otherwise traditional movement into places like Hollywood,
Academia and even business generally. Whenever there actually was
a revolution it quickly led to the "killing fields" since everyone
who harbored _resentiment_ quickly joined the party. In other
words I don't think Marxism ever was a legitimate point of view
and I think most Marxists knew that from the start.
Richard Carlson
> things, rather than any one movement. Its become fashionable
> on both right and left these days to see conspiricy everyplace.
> The left and right have both used this method before, and it is
> indeed, non-rational. Neustadt and May (of Kennedy School) have
> been criticized (by the right, mainly), for assuming that policy
> can be based on the rational actions of the adversary. Bloom
> decides in his book that there is a liberal--homosexual--radical
> feminist conspiricy in academia, directed against him and those
> who share his values. This is extreme, and really rather silly.
> Indeed, there is no monolithic left in the US at all. In fact,
> I tend to think that Bloom would like much multi-cultural
> discussion out of sight, and hence, out of mind. There is _no_
> Macarthy-ite 'witch hunt' of the left being directed against white
> neo-conservative professors at most Universities I've seen.
> It's all a straw man, as one intelligent poster pointed out.
The key word in your text is, of course, _monolithic_. If you
eliminate that word then everything Bloom says is as "true" as
what you say. Isn't there always a collection of "outsiders"
marked by some _difference_ from the "insiders" who are, in some
important ways, the _same_ as each other? These outsiders have
always been somewhat conscious of their status and have always
seen themselves as morally better thant the insiders on account of
their greater tolerance for diversity (which includes themselves),
while the insiders have always seem themselves as morally better
than the outsiders on account of their support of values which are
seen as both "traditional" and "universal" (which is of course
"logically" contradictory). William Buckley's description of the
"liberal" professors in the 50s sounds like Bloom's description of
the "radical" professors of the 80s. And I've seen accounts from
the 30s and 20s that are much the same -- Ralph Barton Perry, the
realist philosopher, wrote an interesting book in 1943 or 1944
describing the same intellectual assault on "traditional" American
values (I can't remember the title), which he traced back to the
1890s -- and it is almost always seen as something "new" and
"disturbing."
The difficulty with these various "progressive" discourses is
that, as counterdiscourse to some parody of "traditional"
discourse, and with their insistent moral claims, they further
problematize the identify struggles of late adolescents, which are
difficult enough, and drain intellectual energy away from
scientific and scholarly studies which have potentially more
likelihood of paying off.
Richard Carlson
> while
> Derrida=debunker of Marxian deconstruction=anti-lefist=white hat?
Sure. Some things are more complex thant they seem, but some
things are quite simple.
> I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it seems that you
> bring Sartre and Stalin together in a very unstable and rather
> shoddy fashion.
I thought that was uncontroversial. All the books about Sartre
reviewed in the _New York Review_ over the last ten years seem to
have just assumed that everyone knows about his Stalinism, which
was the analog of the Maoism of the mediocre French academics
circa 1968.
> I suspect that quite a few people still exist in Europe who
> consider themselves followers of a Marxist paradigm in terms of
> some general movement in history. The collapse of Soviet
> communism provides much ammunition for cheap shots like the
> forgoing, but the Marxist intellectual tradition is not yet
> done with (I, by the by, am not a follower of said paradigm,
> but I dislike intellectual arrogence).
I don't think Marxism ever was a legitimate attempt at coming to
grips with any kind of reality. The one aspect of Marx's theory
which deals with the price of labor and the increasing emiseration
of the working class seems to be belatedly relevant, but I don't
know enough economics to know if he had even that right. The
export of manufacturing jobs as manufacturers seek ever cheaper
labor is certainly a problem our society will sooner or later need
to confront. But note the context. Who's being "exploited?" Is
it the Mexican and Taiwanese workers currently working long hours
for low wages, or is it the American workers who are becoming part
of a new _lumpenproletariat_?
Richard Carlson
> I tend to think that Bloom would like much multi-cultural
> discussion out of sight, and hence, out of mind. There is _no_
> Macarthy-ite 'witch hunt' of the left being directed against white
> neo-conservative professors at most Universities I've seen.
> It's all a straw man, as one intelligent poster pointed out.
There's always a straw man. He's easy to find. Since virtually
all discourse is counterdiscourse -- even the discourse that you
(not you personally, _any_ you) insist is the dominant discourse
which you are heroically attacking believes that it is a
counterdiscourse to some even older, and more arrogant or more
hidebound, orthodoxy. And no one bothers to make his opponent's
points effectively, so there's the straw man.
When I first began to try to understand the world, some forty
years ago, the thing that amazed me most was how fragile an
interpretation was. It only made sense in context. You could
always undermine any interpretations by examining the assumptions
it made -- more often than not the assumptions that it conceded to
its rival. It became clear to me that rhetoric and logic are so
intertwined that they really shade into one another rather than
constitute distinct modes of thought or communications. (Oddly
enough that is the first European philosophy to be brought to
these shores. The Puritans brought the ideas of Peter Ramus with
them to Massachusetts. He built a kind of early deconstructionist
philosophy based on Plato's dialectic rather than Hegel's and that
was the high culture of old Massachusetts.)
The difference between Bloom and the "multi-culturalists" is that
he thinks we've got enough multi-culturalism already. I think
Gordon Fitch summed it up in a recent post:
>Unless the bourgeoisie recohere, or some other agency assumes
>the responsibility, it will not be possible to find definitions
>of good and evil which are satisfactorily absolute, that is,
>possess the authority to justify the traditional death and
>domination, at least not in a coherent way. And that being the
>case, "good" and "evil" will be meaningless indeed for many
>people, and "postmodernism" will continue to be a confession
>that "we" can no longer separate the sheep from the goats and
>Art from art, aht, aat, ott, and awt. In short, freedom or
>chaos, depending on how you look at anarchy.
Poststructuralism tries to put a happy face on all the difference
(diversity, deviance, heterogeneity, abnormality, specialness,
variety, or whatever you want to call our fragmented or decentered
society) since it's _there_.
Andrew C. Aiken
>In fact, what Bloom criticizes is really a conflation of several
>things, rather than any one movement. Its become fashionable
>on both right and left these days to see conspiricy everyplace.
>The left and right have both used this method before, and it is
>indeed, non-rational. Neustadt and May (of Kennedy School) have
>been criticized (by the right, mainly), for assuming that policy
>can be based on the rational actions of the adversary. Bloom
>decides in his book that there is a liberal--homosexual--radical
>feminist conspiricy in academia, directed against him and those
>who share his values. This is extreme, and really rather silly.
>Indeed, there is no monolithic left in the US at all. In fact,
>I tend to think that Bloom would like much multi-cultural
>discussion out of sight, and hence, out of mind. There is _no_
>Macarthy-ite 'witch hunt' of the left being directed against white
>neo-conservative professors at most Universities I've seen.
>It's all a straw man, as one intelligent poster pointed out.
This is a distortion of what Bloom wrote.
You are creating the straw man.
Bloom only said that Nietzsche's prophecy is coming true:
we are undergoing a "transvaluation of values" at the hands of a strange
breed of radical. This radical does not believe in truth (unlike all
previous revolutionaries) so there is no rational way to refute him.
Now, I'll agree that Prof. Bloom gets a little curmudgeonly about Rock
Music, and I am not in accordance with his Straussianism, but he
has some valid points.
Andrew Aiken
Premodernist
Andrew C. Aiken
>"logically" contradictory). William Buckley's description of the
>"liberal" professors in the 50s sounds like Bloom's description of
>the "radical" professors of the 80s. And I've seen accounts from
>the 30s and 20s that are much the same -- Ralph Barton Perry, the
>realist philosopher, wrote an interesting book in 1943 or 1944
>describing the same intellectual assault on "traditional" American
>values (I can't remember the title), which he traced back to the
>1890s -- and it is almost always seen as something "new" and
>"disturbing."
When the abnegation of values stops becoming new and disturbing,
then Western Culture is finished. I am not sayinG that WFB, Perry, and
Bloom are entirely correct in their theses, but has our culture not
become far more permissive that it was, say, a century ago? For every
action, there is a necessary reaction, thus the firebrand's demands for
"progress" and "social justice" have made the conservative intellectual
movement possible. Whether modern permissiveness is good, or not, it is
not for me to say. Put into the context of human history, we are not as
decadent as the late Roman Empire, but there has developed a sleazy
perception that turpitude is entertainment -- take, for example, shows
like Geraldo and A Current Affair.
In the end, what's life without a little moral indignation?
Andrew Aiken
Andrew C. Aiken
>Poststructuralism tries to put a happy face on all the difference
>(diversity, deviance, heterogeneity, abnormality, specialness,
>variety, or whatever you want to call our fragmented or decentered
>society) since it's _there_.
But is this not the problem? I remember listening to the
shortwave shortly after the massacre in Tiannemen (sp?) Square. The
station was Radio Beijing, in English. The announcer said that the
"unruliness" had been ended, and that "everyone was very happy." It is
the happy face that offends me. I would rather call a thing by its
name, instead of using euphemisms like a frigid Victorian spinster.
Florence King wrote, "It's not that I hate people. I just
happen to like misanthropes."
Certainly I have no grounds or right to hate people or ideas I
do not agree with. This would be entirely irrational and wrong-headed.
But why should I have to accept as valid anything that I do not
like? To poststructuralism, I prefer good, old-fashioneD, Tory
tolerance. Its popularity has declined, however, proportional to
the dearth of civilty. It seems that the less civil we expect ourselves
to be, the more we demand a "happy face" like poststructuralism to
gloss over our troubles.
Andrew AikeN
Mark Evenson
C. Aiken) writes:
Now, I'll agree that Prof. Bloom gets a little curmudgeonly about Rock
Music, and I am not in accordance with his Straussianism, but he
has some valid points.
I haven't looked at _Closing of the American Mind_ since like the
summer of '88 or something, but a friend looked at it the other week and
told be something about the "anti-rock" aspect of Bloom's arguement. My
friend's paraphrase went something along the lines of "I agree with Bloom
here; it's not that he says that rock music is evil, just that it is
primal. Not as contemplative as say classical, but about exicitng tribal
chants and so forth, opposed to the classical logic of the West".
Interesting distinction, huh? It's not that rock is inherently evil, just
opposed to the "classical education" that Bloom seeks to defend.
I guess I would agree, and then would have to couple a critque of
the academy with an analysis of that huge histriography of the university
that composes the middle of _Closing_. Which when I read it at the time,
was unable to really say much about, and now there are so many more
pressing things to do then re-read the whole thing.
It's weird to me how much _Closing_ became this coffee table book.
It seems that a lot of people read the first ten pages, and then dennounce
or proclaim its "message". The whole genera that follows Bloom (_Tenured
Radicals_, _Illiberal Education_, and my presonal title fav _Profscam_) is
interesting from a distance. I haven't had the time to plow through them
all. Understand that this huge thread went through rec.art.books.
Mark Evenson
WERLING
(Re: Plato)
> You read his books. The goals he was trying to achieve don't mysteriously
> vanish just because he is no longer alive. One of his goals was to
> disemminate his views. By reading and attempting to understand his
> book, you are helping to achieve that goal.
Ah, pure semantics!
Does this logic apply to all authors, or just Plato?
--
Andrew Werling awer...@nmsu.edu Pffff!
Christopher Wade Skinner
What greater liklihood of paying off? Whose to make that judgement?
You, me, who? Or do you go along with 'Big Academia' in saying
screw the student _and_ the professors who want to teach? Are
we to tell students to 'stop questioning' because they are 'confused'
and 'arn't ready to understand' complex issues? You make my
point for me by pointing out the fact that its the _Establishment_
that kicks up the biggest ruckas rather than trying to respond to
change. Your previous posts have been well-reasoned, but this is simply
arrogence.
cws
Christopher Wade Skinner
Much intellegent stuff deleted:
>As to feminism and Derrida, I think he is important because he is
>the "front man" for poststructuralism, much as Sartre was the
>front man for "existentialism" in the 40s and 50s. Even more
>importantly, I think it was Derrida in his early writings who
>_consciously_ and _deliberately_ decided to valorize _woman_,
>which is clearly the marked term in the opposition "man vs.
>_wo_man" and he did it as a rhetorical countermove to Marx's
>valorization of the poor or unwashed in the "washed vs.
>_un_washed" opposition. "One-upmanship."
Yes indeed. My sole point is that the vision has gone beyond Derrida;
Post structuralism cannot lose its feminism, because feminists have
poststructualist theories of their own. Its just really semantic.
>While every discourse has logical or theoretical aspects as well
>as rhetorical ones, I think that Marxism was primarily rhetorical
>from the start. I'm not convinced that there ever was any real
>theory there, or if there was, it was rapidly instrumentalized as
>a rhetorical device for the upward mobility of mediocre
>intellectuals. The notion of the "intellectuals" as the
>"vanguard" of the "revolution" traces back to Marx and was not an
>aberration introduced by Lenin. The purpose of Marxism, as was
>the purpose of liberalism and enlightenment before it, was to
>legitimate the movement of a new "elite" into a position of power.
>I don't think any real revolution was ever really contemplated by
>at least Western Marxists -- their position as "spokesmen" or
>"leaders" of the "downtrodden" was sufficient to legitimate their
>otherwise traditional movement into places like Hollywood,
>Academia and even business generally. Whenever there actually was
>a revolution it quickly led to the "killing fields" since everyone
>who harbored _resentiment_ quickly joined the party. In other
>words I don't think Marxism ever was a legitimate point of view
>and I think most Marxists knew that from the start.
aa
Ah, yes, I've seen this argument before. I rather disagree with it,
though; I see Rosa Luxemburg as something more than a 2nd rate
intellectual, and I see more in Kaustsky as well; what about
Gramschi? He's not second rate! Nor am I a proponant of Marxist
paradigms in revolution, etc. I think, however, than aspects of
Marxist thought go well beyond the objections you state. In re:
vanguardism - read your history; Marx saw the intellectual as the
awakener, not the permanent leader, of the revolution. Yes, a
vanguard, but. like a fuse, it buns bright, then dies out.
Lenin introduced the concept of the disciplined party, Trotsky
the idea of permanent revolution and hence a permanent vanguard.
Marx's heirs in the West wanted and anticipated revolution, but
circumstances intervened in the shape of postwar boom in England
and France, and the (in Marxist eyes) cooption of the Left in
Germany. To say that Marixt intellectuals in the 1920's and 1930's
knew from the outset that their position was groundless and
irrelevent is a selective mis-reading of interwar politics. In the
collapse of Soviet Communism what's been discredited is bureaucracy,
repression, and apparatchik mentalitie. Ethnic strife and the
resurgance of powerful neo-fascist parties may be its legacy;
vide Lech Walensa in Poland. Marxist theory, per se, has applications
of value that I've already discussed; your arguments are a/historic.
Cheers!
CWS
Christopher Wade Skinner
>650...@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Christopher Wade Skinner) writes:
>> Sartre (secret follower of Stalin)=traitor to west=black hat;
>> while
>> Derrida=debunker of Marxian deconstruction=anti-lefist=white hat?
>Sure. Some things are more complex thant they seem, but some
>things are quite simple.
Come on, a little joke, nes pa?
>> I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it seems that you
>> bring Sartre and Stalin together in a very unstable and rather
>> shoddy fashion.
>I thought that was uncontroversial. All the books about Sartre
>reviewed in the _New York Review_ over the last ten years seem to
>have just assumed that everyone knows about his Stalinism, which
>was the analog of the Maoism of the mediocre French academics
>circa 1968.
Actually, its not the controversy aspect I objected to; you fail
completely to respond to my points in re: Heidegger or De Mann;
is Sartre mediocre because he was a Stalinist, or because all his
works were mediocre? Why make the same tired connection unless
you are attempting to demonize Sartre by association. That's my
point, which you have dodged.
>export of manufacturing jobs as manufacturers seek ever cheaper
>labor is certainly a problem our society will sooner or later need
>to confront. But note the context. Who's being "exploited?" Is
>it the Mexican and Taiwanese workers currently working long hours
>for low wages, or is it the American workers who are becoming part
>of a new _lumpenproletariat_?
Both the Americans and the laborers in other nations would be part
of the 'lp' you so accurately describe. In addition, the
whole theory of concentration of capital has essentially been
adopted by economists with various spins; for Marx to have raised
this point in the 1860's is pretty good. I've said before, I'll
say again; I am not a Marxist per se. I do think you might
want to learn a little about economies of scale and the development
of Marxist economic thought before levelling some of the accusations
about Marxists that you do. Since you admit to ignorance of econ.,
I hope you'll take this as simply a friendly suggestion.
Thomas VanNess Leavitt
Richard Carlson
> >> I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, but it seems that you
> >> bring Sartre and Stalin together in a very unstable and rather
> >> shoddy fashion.
> >I thought that was uncontroversial. All the books about Sartre
> >reviewed in the _New York Review_ over the last ten years seem to
> >have just assumed that everyone knows about his Stalinism, which
> >was the analog of the Maoism of the mediocre French academics
> >circa 1968.
> Actually, its not the controversy aspect I objected to; you fail
> completely to respond to my points in re: Heidegger or De Mann;
> is Sartre mediocre because he was a Stalinist, or because all his
> works were mediocre? Why make the same tired connection unless
> you are attempting to demonize Sartre by association. That's my
> point, which you have dodged.
Sartre certainly wasn't mediocre. He was flawed. He acted in the
same manner as the mediocre intellectuals -- in fact he created or
invented the reactions which they adopted for themselves. Why? I
don't know, unless it is that pervasive transvaluation that
Nietzsche discussed, whereby you justify your privileges somehow
in the name of some underdog whom you somehow "support."
As far as Heidegger and de Man are concerned, I find the
phenomenon very interesting, but I don't understand it. Neither
of them stayed with Nazism very long. Heidegger was calling his
brief party membership and _Rektoratsrede_ a "mistake" by 1934.
They didn't brag about their youthful "idealism" or their
"disillusion" the way ex-Communists have been inclined to do.
Moreover, it isn't clear how real Nazi's would regard an
existentialist who emphasizes the uncertainty of knowledge and the
historical and cultural involvement in what looks like knowledge.
I don't think the real Nazis thought of the values they believed
in as "posited" by value-makers, but as somehow ontologically
"real," if under attack by nonbelievers and (Satanic) enemies.
> [Richard Carlson writes:]
> >export of manufacturing jobs as manufacturers seek ever cheaper
> >labor is certainly a problem our society will sooner or later need
> >to confront. But note the context. Who's being "exploited?" Is
> >it the Mexican and Taiwanese workers currently working long hours
> >for low wages, or is it the American workers who are becoming part
> >of a new _lumpenproletariat_?
>
> Both the Americans and the laborers in other nations would be part
> of the 'lp' you so accurately describe. In addition, the
> whole theory of concentration of capital has essentially been
> adopted by economists with various spins; for Marx to have raised
> this point in the 1860's is pretty good. I've said before, I'll
> say again; I am not a Marxist per se. I do think you might
> want to learn a little about economies of scale and the development
> of Marxist economic thought before levelling some of the accusations
> about Marxists that you do. Since you admit to ignorance of econ.,
> I hope you'll take this as simply a friendly suggestion.
OK. Nobody can be an expert in everything. Wasn't John Stuart
Mill the last person who knew everything that was known in his
time?
But I'm not sure that Marx's theories have more than historical
value in trying to understand the commodification of labor which
has occurred. I do admit to a lack of understanding of economics,
but at the level of "common sense," the kind of thing that you
might find somebody like Louis Rukeyser explaining to the viewers
of his program on PBS, I think it could be teased out why
capitalism, after a horrendous start, generally led to a rise in
the standard of living of the relatively unskilled worker, but
starting some time in the sixties, has seen the market value of
labor decline as newer sources of cheap labor were found. I
sometimes think you can write the entire history of America in
terms of the search for cheap labor. First slavery -- that's as
cheap as labor gets -- then the massive immigration to fill the
new factories (after a brief period when women were used as
factory workers, in the 1830s), and finally the movement of the
factory to where the willing laborer lived in a distant foreign
location. And a lot of our "social problems" seem to stem from
the fact that the previous source of cheap labor now continues to
exist but without an economic function.
Richard Carlson
> r...@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:
>
> >As to feminism and Derrida, I think he is important because he is
> >the "front man" for poststructuralism, much as Sartre was the
> >front man for "existentialism" in the 40s and 50s. Even more
> >importantly, I think it was Derrida in his early writings who
> >_consciously_ and _deliberately_ decided to valorize _woman_,
> >which is clearly the marked term in the opposition "man vs.
> >_wo_man" and he did it as a rhetorical countermove to Marx's
> >valorization of the poor or unwashed in the "washed vs.
> >_un_washed" opposition. "One-upmanship."
>
>
> But this was a false analogy. How are the "proletariat" and
> woman alike? Certainly one cannot choose the class into which one is
> born, just as one cannot choose the sex that one is. But unlike class,
> sex, and the associated characteristics, is archetypal. If you are
> poor, but hard-working and smart, you can become rich. (If you don't
> believe this, then you have never been poor. It seems that only rich
> folks do not think this possible.) But your sex is one of the central
> facts of your identity. Unless it can be proved that sex
> characteristics are not archetypical, then Derrida was dead wrong. But
> he has a fine way of arguing in circles, doesn't he?
>
>
> Andrew Aiken
You're missing the point. Both _wo_man and _un_washed are, as I
said, the _marked_ terms in a bipolar opposition. Structuralists
since Saussure have seen "meaning" arising out of such contrasting
(actually more nearly "contrary") pairs -- as did the behaviorist
psychologist Charles Osgood when he constructed his interesting
but premature "semantic differential."
It doesn't make any difference what other characteristics these
oppositions share or don't share. Masculinity and femininity may,
and probably do, have archetypical aspects along with the
culturally determined ones. The point is that as the marked (here
marked morphemically as well as semantically, which was probably
the original case with all oppositions) AND THEREFORE "WEAKER" OR
"INFERIOR" term is the one valorized. Christianity, and,
according to Nietzsche, post-Socratic Greek philosophy, although
the case here seems less strong, has brought about a kind of
meta-valorization of the marked-term-in-general (i.e., the
universal underdog) which always makes the champion of a
downtrodden "minority" the good guy and the supporter of the
presumably exploitative status quo the bad guy.
I don't think you understand the structuralist concept of
markedness.
Mark Evenson
(Richard Carlson) writes:
As far as Heidegger and de Man are concerned, I find the
phenomenon very interesting, but I don't understand it. Neither
of them stayed with Nazism very long. Heidegger was calling his
brief party membership and _Rektoratsrede_ a "mistake" by 1934.
They didn't brag about their youthful "idealism" or their
"disillusion" the way ex-Communists have been inclined to do.
Uh, no way. Heidegger *never* fully repudiated his party membership--in
fact he was still a "card-carrying" member until _1945_ (after which it
didn't really matter did it?). He also never characterized his
directorship as 'a mistake'. Heidegger saw great potential in the National
Socialist party to make the entrance of a 'true' force into the tainted
history of the West. As far into the future as a 70s, in an interview with
_Spiegel_, he spoke cagily of his party affiliation but never repudiated
it.
I can cite sources to cover these assertments, but will take a bit of time
to do some digging.
All that being said, I personally hold Heidegger as one of the truly
significant thinkers of the twentieth century, very instrumental in his
analysis of _techne_ in relation to modern intellectual life. _Sein und
Seit_ is one of those 'desert island' texts for me. But analyzing the
dialogical relation between theory and practice, and its specific
influence upon the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany will never be simple and
clear-cut, and will never be able to be brushed off.
Mark Evenson
Andrew C. Aiken
>You're missing the point. Both _wo_man and _un_washed are, as I
>said, the _marked_ terms in a bipolar opposition. Structuralists
>since Saussure have seen "meaning" arising out of such contrasting
>(actually more nearly "contrary") pairs -- as did the behaviorist
>psychologist Charles Osgood when he constructed his interesting
>but premature "semantic differential."
>It doesn't make any difference what other characteristics these
>oppositions share or don't share. Masculinity and femininity may,
>and probably do, have archetypical aspects along with the
>culturally determined ones. The point is that as the marked (here
>marked morphemically as well as semantically, which was probably
>the original case with all oppositions) AND THEREFORE "WEAKER" OR
>"INFERIOR" term is the one valorized.
This is the crux of our disagreement. You maintain that
because "woman" and "unwashed" are words made from other words, the
things they denote are given a mark of inferiority. I say that whether
this is true is irrelevant. It does not matter what a thing is called,
it matters only what a thing is. The structuralists (and later,
Derrida) seemed to believe that people are too lazy and stupid to
think for themselves. Rather, we must follow the Great Minds in
seeing hidden structure and double entendre in everything. This is a
perfect way to take all joy out of communication. I, for one, would
rather growl and yawp than speak in a tongue that had been dried of
its mysterious poetry.
What sort of love-note would Dr. Osgood have written to
his mistress? Perhaps it would reveal his true beliefs about the
nature of language and meaning, not to mention the inarticulate.
> Christianity, and,
>according to Nietzsche, post-Socratic Greek philosophy, although
>the case here seems less strong, has brought about a kind of
>meta-valorization of the marked-term-in-general (i.e., the
>universal underdog) which always makes the champion of a
>downtrodden "minority" the good guy and the supporter of the
>presumably exploitative status quo the bad guy.
Not so much Christianity as the Victorian "Social Gospel"
interpretation of it. For 1500 years, the religion had been a
means of personal redemption, a way of finding God. But in the
hands of "progressives," it became a sanctimonious cult bent on
reshaping the world into a Utopia. The rise of this movement
was concurrent with Nietzche's florit.
>I don't think you understand the structuralist concept of
>markedness.
I understand it, but do not concur with it. Sausserre thought
that language is a system of signs; I conceive it as an orderly
precession of meanings.
After all, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
Andrew Aiken
"The world is neither wise nor just, but makes up for its folly and
injustice by being damnably sentimental."
-- T.H. Huxley
Curt Sampson
awer...@nmsu.edu (WERLING) writes:
I don't see why this is just "pure semantics." Could you explain your
comment further?
And yes, this applies to virtually all authors.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson | "Don't bother with Curt and Gordon, man! Can't you
cu...@cynic.uucp | see they're just a pair of flaming pomotextuals?"
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca | --Margaret Kritzer (marg...@igor.tamri.com)
John Tomas
I did my graduate work at the U of C and one of the interesting things
about Bloom is that while his rep was that he was a great teacher, the
reality was very different. Several of my undergraduate friends had
him and they hated him: it seems he was in the habit of pouring scorn
on any one who had the temerity to have any opinion at all which was
not an exact duplicate of his opinion.
Christopher Wade Skinner
> When the abnegation of values stops becoming new and disturbing,
>then Western Culture is finished. I am not sayinG that WFB, Perry, and
>Bloom are entirely correct in their theses, but has our culture not
>become far more permissive that it was, say, a century ago? For every
>action, there is a necessary reaction, thus the firebrand's demands for
>"progress" and "social justice" have made the conservative intellectual
>movement possible. Whether modern permissiveness is good, or not, it is
>not for me to say. Put into the context of human history, we are not as
>decadent as the late Roman Empire, but there has developed a sleazy
>perception that turpitude is entertainment -- take, for example, shows
>like Geraldo and A Current Affair.
Andrew, I think 'permissive' depends on where you stand (as does
whether or not I _distorted_ Bloom; he essentially wrote that
multicultrualism was going to undermine America; you think that's
too simplistic? Ok, but I am not creating the straw man)
and what you mean. In 1890, in San Francisco, anything went. It
was a Barbary boom town. This was true in the Big N.O. and in
Chicago as well. Men like J.P. Morgan wallowed in sin. America
(not to mention Europe) thrilled to lurid 'Penny Dreadfuls'.
You have a complete a-perception of popular culture because you've
been told that tis country is somehow 'permissive'.
What this country is, my friend, is Federalized and the Communication
Age has linked all up, so that it seems more immediate. As to the
reality? I just don't think you've got the best analogy going here
at all.
'Least yr. not a Straussian.
Cheers!
CWS
>Andrew Aiken
>
Christopher Wade Skinner
>As far as Heidegger and de Man are concerned, I find the
>phenomenon very interesting, but I don't understand it. Neither
>of them stayed with Nazism very long. Heidegger was calling his
>brief party membership and _Rektoratsrede_ a "mistake" by 1934.
>They didn't brag about their youthful "idealism" or their
>"disillusion" the way ex-Communists have been inclined to do.
>Moreover, it isn't clear how real Nazi's would regard an
>existentialist who emphasizes the uncertainty of knowledge and the
>historical and cultural involvement in what looks like knowledge.
>I don't think the real Nazis thought of the values they believed
>in as "posited" by value-makers, but as somehow ontologically
>"real," if under attack by nonbelievers and (Satanic) enemies.
Ok, Richard, someone took you to task on Heidegger, my turn on
De Mann; he was a collaborationist for some considerable time.
He has been implicated in the deportation of Jews. He lied
repeatedly about all of this until documentation was produced
that proved his complicity. That's all beside the point; if you
think Sartre was flawed, state said fact and say why. Don't
simply allude to his Stalinist phase, and then
forgo an explaination.
You finally understand my defense of Marxist theory; it has historical
value and valid application to _some_ economic models; have you been
trying to get me to say that I believe in a withering away of the
state? Really now!
This thread is threadworn!
CWS
Richard Carlson
> In article <RassaB...@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> r...@depsych.Gwinnett.COM
> (Richard Carlson) writes:
>
> As far as Heidegger and de Man are concerned, I find the
> phenomenon very interesting, but I don't understand it. Neither
> of them stayed with Nazism very long. Heidegger was calling his
> brief party membership and _Rektoratsrede_ a "mistake" by 1934.
> They didn't brag about their youthful "idealism" or their
> "disillusion" the way ex-Communists have been inclined to do.
>
> Uh, no way. Heidegger *never* fully repudiated his party membership--in
> fact he was still a "card-carrying" member until _1945_ (after which it
> didn't really matter did it?). He also never characterized his
> directorship as 'a mistake'. Heidegger saw great potential in the National
> Socialist party to make the entrance of a 'true' force into the tainted
> history of the West. As far into the future as a 70s, in an interview with
> _Spiegel_, he spoke cagily of his party affiliation but never repudiated
> it.
>
> I can cite sources to cover these assertments, but will take a bit of time
> to do some digging.
I could probably dig into my issues of _Critical Inquiry_ and
_Telos_ and a few other journals where the de Man and Heidegger
affairs have been being hotly discussed, but a lot of the specific
details have not stuck in my mind -- probably because I'm not
planning to write anything on it. I know that Heidegger used the
term "mistake" -- I got it from a biography of Marcuse and the
actual German word wasn't given -- to Marcuse in 1945 (and Marcuse
found that term unacceptable, saying something like, "a mistake is
what you make adding up a column of figures.") It was from
somewhere else, I can't recall where, that I came across that same
word, "mistake," again in translation, which he was said to have
used less than a year after making his speech, the
_Rektoratsrede_.
One reason I haven't consciously or unconsciously accumulated
exact facts is that I have heard that the post-structuralists,
conscious of themselves as a "movement" or "school of thought"
somewhat dependent on Heidegger's reputation, are working on a
book or series of books teasing out "what really happened." I
think Lyotard already has one out in France with a title like,
"Heidegger and the Jews." Since the work, which is really just
"ordinary" scholarship, is already being done, why not just wait
for the results?
> All that being said, I personally hold Heidegger as one of the truly
> significant thinkers of the twentieth century, very instrumental in his
> analysis of _techne_ in relation to modern intellectual life. _Sein und
> Seit_ is one of those 'desert island' texts for me. But analyzing the
> dialogical relation between theory and practice, and its specific
> influence upon the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany will never be simple and
> clear-cut, and will never be able to be brushed off.
I used to think that the question: when a nation resolves some
severe national crisis by going totalitarian, is there a way to
predict whether or not it will be a "right" totalitarianism or a
"left" totalitarianism? was an important question. Now, with the
collapse of Marxist legitimacy, I'm not sure that the notions of
"left" and "right" have as much meaning as they once did.
Everything looks like a discourse of power and the actual content
of the discourse -- whose interests are allegedly championed --
seems to be primarily tactical, or at best strategic. However,
people who once enjoyed a high standard of comfort and opportunity
and who lose that, as did the German middle class during the
super-inflation of the Weimar period, seem more likely to opt for
some kind of rightist totalitarianism. Observations like this may
be relevant to future political developments here in America as
our standard of living continues to decline. "Objective" forces
like these may be more important than the kinds of personality or
cognitive style variables that Adorno and the critical theorists
foregrounded ("authoritarianism").
Btw, why is it that Sartre's Communist party membership and the
way he conformed his "philosophy" to the party line doesn't seem
to tarnish his reputation to the extent that Heidegger's Nazi
party membership tarnishes his? And how do you explain the fact
that a much more dedicated Nazi, Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, has
hardly suffered at all, either personally after the war when he
continued to be hailed as a genius and, along with Freud, a
founder of psychoanalysis, or in terms of the attention give to
his psychological theories?
Also, what did the Nazis make of existentialists like Heidegger
and de Man? A lot of intellectual historians seem to see the
Nazis themselves as existentialists of a certain type. This seems
to follow from the notion that Nietzsche was an intellectual
ancestor of Nazi thought. But others have suggested that the
Nazis didn't see themselves as choosing something arbitrary and
defining themselves thereby. Most of them seem to have really
believed in some real racial superiority of the Nordic peoples.
It seems confusing until somebody like Gibbon or Hannah Arendt
comes along to clear it up. That hasn't been fully done yet.
Richard Carlson
> then Western Culture is finished. I am not sayinG that WFB, Perry, and
> Bloom are entirely correct in their theses, but has our culture not
> become far more permissive that it was, say, a century ago? For every
> action, there is a necessary reaction, thus the firebrand's demands for
> "progress" and "social justice" have made the conservative intellectual
> movement possible. Whether modern permissiveness is good, or not, it is
> not for me to say. Put into the context of human history, we are not as
> decadent as the late Roman Empire, but there has developed a sleazy
> perception that turpitude is entertainment -- take, for example, shows
> like Geraldo and A Current Affair.
>
> In the end, what's life without a little moral indignation?
>
> Andrew Aiken
If you'll reread your own post "closely" -- I don't really know in
any technical sense how to distinguish between an "ordinary" close
reading (in the Leavis sense) of a text and a deconstruction of a
text -- you'll see that what both you and the Buckley, Perry, and
Bloom-type critics are objecting to is really a conflation of two
distinct but somehow related phenomena. On the one hand there
seems to be a collapse of values -- that's why I left your last
single-sentence paragraph in this post, which, along with the
topic sentence of your paragraph, foregrounds some kind of
dissolution ("abnegation") of values.
Your own text then goes on to discuss some opponent's (mildly
trivialized, although not demonized, as a "firebrand") demands for
"progress" and "social justice." This suggests an _alternative_
ethics or values, rather than the dissolution of values and the
movement into some anomic state of affairs.
It's this _default_ value system that intrigues me. Whenever you
knock down a "traditional" value system what is left is not
nothing but some kind of system which seems to valorize concrete
atomic individuals. This seems to have begun as far back as the
"first enlightenment" in pre-Socratic Greece, especially with the
Sophists, who created the first deconstruction machine to
delegitimate the "traditional" values of the Gods and the
aristocrats. Their motive seems to have been the traditional one
of talented outsiders, namely to delegitimate the current old-boy
network as "an artificial aristocracy of birth and privilege"
(which are Thomas Jefferson's words from the height of the "second
enlightenment" during the 18th century) and legitimate the new
class as "the real aristocracy of talent and virtue" (to stay with
Jefferson's rhetoric -- the current term is "merit").
Since all this began with the pre-Socratics, the "all this"
referring to the dialectical logic machine which can effectively
deconstruct any point of view, Nietzsche located the main impetus
for the "transvaluation" he was trying to understand in Greece
rather than in Palestine, although the specific "rule" which
renders the underdog (in the sense of actual power) the "moral"
superior seems to stem from christianity and its precursors in
"the Holy Land."
Michael Sean Rooney
>
>I used to think that the question: when a nation resolves some
>severe national crisis by going totalitarian, is there a way to
>predict whether or not it will be a "right" totalitarianism or a
>"left" totalitarianism? was an important question. Now, with the
>collapse of Marxist legitimacy, I'm not sure that the notions of
>"left" and "right" have as much meaning as they once did.
>Everything looks like a discourse of power and the actual content
>of the discourse -- whose interests are allegedly championed --
>seems to be primarily tactical, or at best strategic. However,
>people who once enjoyed a high standard of comfort and opportunity
>and who lose that, as did the German middle class during the
>super-inflation of the Weimar period, seem more likely to opt for
>some kind of rightist totalitarianism. Observations like this may
>be relevant to future political developments here in America as
>our standard of living continues to decline. "Objective" forces
>like these may be more important than the kinds of personality or
>cognitive style variables that Adorno and the critical theorists
>foregrounded ("authoritarianism").
The roots of totalitarianism are very complex, but I think
a few common denominators can be teased out: (1) significant, bourgeois-
affecting economic disruption; (2) weak or fragmented mainstream
conservative/liberal political bodies; (3) an efficiently organized
totalitarian fringe party; and (4) a body of national, ethnic, or
ideological mythic discourses. These are arranged in a rough order
of importance, at least as I understand the problem. I would agree
that the theories of authoritarian psychology prevalent among some
of the Frankfurt school were avoiding the essentially economic
nature of the problem.
>Btw, why is it that Sartre's Communist party membership and the
>way he conformed his "philosophy" to the party line doesn't seem
>to tarnish his reputation to the extent that Heidegger's Nazi
>party membership tarnishes his? And how do you explain the fact
>that a much more dedicated Nazi, Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, has
>hardly suffered at all, either personally after the war when he
>continued to be hailed as a genius and, along with Freud, a
>founder of psychoanalysis, or in terms of the attention give to
>his psychological theories?
This probably is because of the anti-Leftist, anti-humanist
tendencies of Heidegger and his contemporary intellectual descendants
(Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida, just to name the three most famous).
Thus, whereas Sartre is chiefly condemned by the Right for his political
affliations (assuming that some Marxists or neo-Marxists are still
reluctant to criticize Sovietism), Heidegger receives scorn from
both Left and Right. It might also be that the esoteric and difficult
nature of Heidegger's ideas elicits disfavor, as opposed to the easily
popularized ideas of a psychoanalyst like Jung.
>Also, what did the Nazis make of existentialists like Heidegger
>and de Man? A lot of intellectual historians seem to see the
>Nazis themselves as existentialists of a certain type. This seems
>to follow from the notion that Nietzsche was an intellectual
>ancestor of Nazi thought. But others have suggested that the
>Nazis didn't see themselves as choosing something arbitrary and
>defining themselves thereby. Most of them seem to have really
>believed in some real racial superiority of the Nordic peoples.
Well, Nietzsche's celebration of the naked will to power
came of a nihilistic rejection of traditional moralities and the
nihilism which they carry within binary evaluations and the like.
But the Nazis were no moral relativists--their Wille zur Macht
was philosophically based on ethno-national mythological narratives,
as Ricoeur has emphasized. In characterizing people by nationality,
Nietzsche certainly didn't help matters much. Totalitarianism
has origins in the relativism and nihilism of a materialist,
technologist outlook, but its appeal and success are based on
providing a utopian foundationalism.
As far as Heidegger goes, the Nazis sought him out as part
of their general effort to gather intellectual support to their
regime: I really doubt if any of the NASDP inner circles had read
anything more than the expurgated version of DIE WILLE ZUR MACHT,
let alone SEIN UND ZEIT. There is a very thorough book, HEIDEGGER
AND NAZISM by V. Farias, which covers MH's involvement and later
relationship to the Hitler regime. It is true both that Heidegger
called his membership a "mistake" and that he never fully
repudiated the Nazi party--the exchange of letters with Hebert
Marcuse mentioned by Richard is very illuminating in this respect.
His idealization of the fixed, present world of the pre-technological
peasantry has supported loathsome political ends--and I think his
philosophy may very well support such a view--but one would hope
that his thoughts can be radicalized towards other directions.
Cordially,
M.S. Rooney
Curt Sampson
> Somebody else writes:
>
> > When I read Plato do I cooperate with Plato who has been dead for 2,000
> > years?
>
> Yes, and yes.
In article <c19DaB...@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>
r...@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson) writes:
> But can a dead person have intentions in quite the same sense that
> a living one can?
> ...
> Suppose, however, that instead of a sudden intellectual revolution
> led by one influential thinker who sees the light, all this happens
> fairly gradually over the course of a century, with British
> philosophy becoming essentially poststructuralist while retaining
> the label "analytic?" Finally, long after his death, Derrida is
> recognized as the most seminal thinker of his century. Can you
> really say that his intentions have been realized in quite the
> same way as if it happened in his lifetime? Aren't the
> "intentions" of dead people an artifact of the communications
> media, beginning with a written language, which allows their
> strings of words to survive after their death?
Woah! You've sped far beyond where I was going.
My basic claim is quite simple and no doubt quite obvious to those
who know about deconstructionism. I get the feeling you think I
was saying something much more important than I really was.
When I say that a certain amount of cooperation is required when
reading a text, I'm just referring to that simple aspect of
communications theory that says that communication is not one-way;
the content of the message is determined by both the sender and
the receiver.
Basically, if you place any interpretation at all on a text, if
you get any meaning out of it, you are cooperating to some degree
with the sender. You may not cooperate very well; you might say
that these ideas you are looking at are trash. But by acknowledging
that they are ideas at all, you are participating in a cooperative
communication process.
And yes, those intentions that exist still after death are an
artifact of the media.
cjs
--
| "The clever and astute among the population had
Curt Sampson | already anticipated the current lunacy, and had
cu...@cynic.uucp | already taken appropriate measures, laughing
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca | cynically, like reprieved mass murderers..."
Richard Carlson
> >I don't think you understand the structuralist concept of
> >markedness.
> I understand it, but do not concur with it. Sausserre thought
> that language is a system of signs; I conceive it as an orderly
> precession of meanings.
Good. I did assume you were conversant with Saussure's
fundamental assumptions and notions. The point of view you seem
to have is the standard Anglo-American "analytic" one, which,
ultimately, in spite of all caveats and ad hoc additions and
subtractions, seems to associate meaning with reference. (I'm
also reading the sci.philosophy.tech newsgroup and most of the
articles there are written as if the continent of Europe never
exited and serious thinking about language and logic takes place
only in the environs of Oxford and the two Cambridges -- UK and
MA.)
Certainly a kind of fist order logic can ride on top of the
meanings or signifieds in a "proposition," and we can think of the
terms "man" or "woman" as equally referring to classes or sets of
human beings, but the structuralist analysis sheds additional
light on meanings that are present somewhat outside of full
consciousness.
> This is the crux of our disagreement. You maintain that
> because "woman" and "unwashed" are words made from other words, the
> things they denote are given a mark of inferiority. I say that whether
> this is true is irrelevant. It does not matter what a thing is called,
> it matters only what a thing is.
Not just the _word_, but the "signified" or "meaning" or "mental
representation" or whatever you want to call it, is made in terms
of the other, opposite term. They arise together and you can't
have the "meaning" without the contrast between the thing meant
and some other thing. The _wo_ in woman or the _fe_ in female
tells us that a woman is "sorta like a man but not quite as good."
That seems to be the "semantic meaning" of the morphemic markers
"wo" and "fe". Of course it gets a little more complicate when we
try to tease out just what is really going on. Freud pointed out
that it is actually the male that is anatomically marked (with a
penis) and it is the _lack_ of this anatomical marker which
signals the "inferiority" of the woman. Never mind that at the
chromosomal level it is also the male that is marked -- by a Y
chromosome -- since people couldn't see that with the naked eye
they way they could see a penis.
Also in the opposition rich vs. poor it is the rich term which is
marked in the sense that it is characterized by the presence of
something, namely wealth. (I suspect that both "rich" and "poor"
are marked terms in an opposition which has as the "normal" or
unmarked terminus a condition rather like "middle class" or of
"ordinary" wealth.)
I don't, however, think these complications should discourage the
use of structuralist notions in trying to understand the hidden
wellsprings of human meaning.
--
Richard Carlson | pmc-...@depsych.gwinnett.com
Midtown Medical Center |
(404) 881-6877 |
Richard Carlson
> whether or not I _distorted_ Bloom; he essentially wrote that
> multicultrualism was going to undermine America; you think that's
> too simplistic? Ok, but I am not creating the straw man)
Here we have yet another deconstruction of Andrew Aiken's little
text, very similar to Michael Sean Rooney's and mine. As I said
to Mr. Rooney, don't you think Mr. Aiken's text is valuable as a
as a recapitulation of all the ambiguities and confusions in
Bloom's text? I also think you are right in focusing on the word
"permissive" as a "code word" which carries or encapsulates the
bulk of the meaning of the conservative defense of "western
culture." I think it would be very valuable to understand how
this word came to carry so much significance.
> and what you mean. In 1890, in San Francisco, anything went. It
> was a Barbary boom town. This was true in the Big N.O. and in
> Chicago as well. Men like J.P. Morgan wallowed in sin. America
> (not to mention Europe) thrilled to lurid 'Penny Dreadfuls'.
> You have a complete a-perception of popular culture because you've
> been told that tis country is somehow 'permissive'.
I think we get most of our "concepts" as images -- in the case of
Americans from Hollywood movies. The image of "decadence" and
"permissiveness" is a bunch of fat Romans drinking wine from
goblets and reaching out to pinch dancing slave girls.
A difficulty with this image is that it is almost identical to the
image of barbaric vitality and splendor. Here we also have a
bunch of heavy males, only heavy with muscles rather than fat, and
they are also drinking wine from goblets and laughing as they
reach out to pinch dancing slave girls, only they are dressed in
furs and wearing iron chains rather than dressed in togas and
wearing gold chains. Almost the same image. I think that's why
we get confused as to what is "decadence" and what is "vigor." You
could see a man like J.P. Morgan or Jim Fiske as either vigorous
or decadent, as you could a man like Michael Milken or Charles
Keating.
Mark Evenson
(Richard Carlson) writes:
I could probably dig into my issues of _Critical Inquiry_ and
_Telos_ and a few other journals where the de Man and Heidegger
affairs have been being hotly discussed, but a lot of the specific
details have not stuck in my mind -- probably because I'm not
planning to write anything on it. I know that Heidegger used the
term "mistake" -- I got it from a biography of Marcuse and the
actual German word wasn't given -- to Marcuse in 1945 (and Marcuse
found that term unacceptable, saying something like, "a mistake is
what you make adding up a column of figures.") It was from
somewhere else, I can't recall where, that I came across that same
word, "mistake," again in translation, which he was said to have
used less than a year after making his speech, the
_Rektoratsrede_.
One reason I haven't consciously or unconsciously accumulated
exact facts is that I have heard that the post-structuralists,
conscious of themselves as a "movement" or "school of thought"
somewhat dependent on Heidegger's reputation, are working on a
book or series of books teasing out "what really happened." I
think Lyotard already has one out in France with a title like,
"Heidegger and the Jews." Since the work, which is really just
"ordinary" scholarship, is already being done, why not just wait
for the results?
[...]
Well, the results will come in an long, long review of available
material, varigated interpretations, and so on--kind of like what is
occuring here in alt.postmodern. In a sense, we are engaging in that
process of scholarship (actually something like 'e-scholarship' which would
be played for less stakes, more informally than traditional academic
journal scholarship) and producing 'results' for the community. "Exact
facts" are not really what this whole thing rests on for as you point out a
tremendous amount of scholarship rests on the 'results', which will involve
the community's views, rather than some empirical weighting game of fact a
versus fact b.
As such, one has to consider the position of the authors, and their
affiliations, playing the whole "voicing" game. Consider Derrida's defense
of de Man (close personal friends) which is shamelessly (nay scandalously)
inadequate for me de Man's compicity with Nazi fascism.
I'd be interesting in the Marcuse refernce if you could dig it up.
I read Lytoards _Heidegger and 'the jews'_, finding it very
readable but very slippery in exactly what Lyotard wants to do with
Heidegger. From what I can remember, the argument weighs in on the side of
caution (which as I understand it was in response to the firestorm that was
arising in Paris over allegations and counter-allegations). More
interesting is the essay "'the jews'" tracing the construction of 'jew' as
a scapegoat category.
Mark Evenson
Mark Evenson
I used to think that the question: when a nation resolves some
severe national crisis by going totalitarian, is there a way to
predict whether or not it will be a "right" totalitarianism or a
"left" totalitarianism? was an important question. Now, with the
collapse of Marxist legitimacy, I'm not sure that the notions of
"left" and "right" have as much meaning as they once did.
Again, to repeat a previous thread, I don't think the opening up of
the Soviet Union can be equated with a collapse of legitmacy (if this is
indeed what you are inferring here). I find your notion of "right" and
"left" totalitarianism problematic as well: what would be the difference?
Is it only in propagand purposes or what? I would tend to delinate a
totaltarian government via its demand for "total", "centralized" power. Is
there a better way of looking at it?
[immediately following the previous quotation]
Everything looks like a discourse of power and the actual content
of the discourse -- whose interests are allegedly championed --
seems to be primarily tactical, or at best strategic. However,
people who once enjoyed a high standard of comfort and opportunity
and who lose that, as did the German middle class during the
super-inflation of the Weimar period, seem more likely to opt for
some kind of rightist totalitarianism. Observations like this may
be relevant to future political developments here in America as
our standard of living continues to decline. "Objective" forces
like these may be more important than the kinds of personality or
cognitive style variables that Adorno and the critical theorists
foregrounded ("authoritarianism").
[...]
And this seems to reinforce my notion "totalitarianism" as being
neither intrinsically "left" or "right".
Mark Evenson
Robert Hooker
In article <aaiken.689189818@silver> aai...@silver.ucs.indiana.edu (Andrew
C. Aiken) writes:
> You maintain that
> because "woman" and "unwashed" are words made from other words, the
> things they denote are given a mark of inferiority.
Well like nonagression, ultralight, superman, unharmed, etc.
Composite can be better or worse or a million other things but to say a
composite is always worse is alittle strange.
> It does not matter what a thing is called,
> it matters only what a thing is
I admire your idealism but I can not except your argument. It seems to
matter if one say "fuck a bitch" or "make love to a woman". It clear
matter if one says "Afro-American" or "Nigger"
Robert Hooker
In article <1991Nov3.1...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca>
cu...@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
> > > You read his books. The goals he was trying to achieve don't
mysteriously
> > > vanish just because he is no longer alive. One of his goals was to
> > > disemminate his views. By reading and attempting to understand his
> > > book, you are helping to achieve that goal.
> >
Okay, heres a question. Kafka wrote books that he seemed to not want
published, his last request was, if I am write, were that his work never
be published.
Whether this is true or not, imagine there is a poet who went into
isolation and wrote poetry that he intended no one to read. Now say he
dies before he carried out his intention to destroy his poems.
Okay, also say that except for this desire to destroy his poems nothing
except the poems themselves survive. THat is we have no notion about why
the poet did what he did.
Okay, can we "understand" his work.
Andrew C. Aiken
>Not just the _word_, but the "signified" or "meaning" or "mental
>representation" or whatever you want to call it, is made in terms
>of the other, opposite term. They arise together and you can't
>have the "meaning" without the contrast between the thing meant
>and some other thing. The _wo_ in woman or the _fe_ in female
>tells us that a woman is "sorta like a man but not quite as good."
>That seems to be the "semantic meaning" of the morphemic markers
>"wo" and "fe". Of course it gets a little more complicate when we
>try to tease out just what is really going on. Freud pointed out
>that it is actually the male that is anatomically marked (with a
>penis) and it is the _lack_ of this anatomical marker which
>signals the "inferiority" of the woman. Never mind that at the
>chromosomal level it is also the male that is marked -- by a Y
>chromosome -- since people couldn't see that with the naked eye
>they way they could see a penis.
>Also in the opposition rich vs. poor it is the rich term which is
>marked in the sense that it is characterized by the presence of
>something, namely wealth. (I suspect that both "rich" and "poor"
>are marked terms in an opposition which has as the "normal" or
>unmarked terminus a condition rather like "middle class" or of
>"ordinary" wealth.)
I now see your point. However, could not the presence of
something like a humpback or a goiter imply inferiority? And could not
a prefixed word denote an improvement to the root word? Though I
admittedly have a traditional view on language, I'm willing to consider
exceptions to it.
Andrew Aiken
Andrew C. Aiken
>> How about the first sentence, wherein the "abnegation of values"
>> is correlated with the "new and disturbing" and the finish of WC.
RC:
>Don't you think that his brief text is valuable in that it
>reproduces in one paragraph all of the ambiguities and confusions
>in Bloom's text?
>Here we have yet another deconstruction of Andrew Aiken's little
>text, very similar to Michael Sean Rooney's and mine. As I said
>to Mr. Rooney, don't you think Mr. Aiken's text is valuable as a
>as a recapitulation of all the ambiguities and confusions in
>Bloom's text? I also think you are right in focusing on the word
>"permissive" as a "code word" which carries or encapsulates the
>bulk of the meaning of the conservative defense of "western
>culture." I think it would be very valuable to understand how
>this word came to carry so much significance.
I first started reading this newsgroup about six months ago,
hoping, perhaps, to hear some interesting arguments regarding popular
culture. After discerning the nature of the discussion on this board, I
started posting now and then. Most of the comments on my postings have
been polite and well-reasoned, although occasionally someone will
respond with apopleptic, Pecksniffian scorn. These people I simply
ignore. The net is an impersonal means of discussion, and I have
learned not to trust it. I wouldn't like to speak in front of a group that
would dissect my speech for errors in pronunciation and syntax.
Similarly, if the net is like any other written medium, then why the
hell is a correction of someone's spelling errors considered to be a
refutation of his arguments? I see that sort of thing too often on
UseNet.
What I have learned from the net, however, is that it is no
place for a superfluous man such as myself. For example, if I mock
postmodernism, then critics take my mockery with annoyingly earnest
seriousness. I can't debate those sorts of people, because they are no
fun, and they will never admit their own mistakes. Perhaps they are too
busy finding bees in other people's bonnets.
Yet I take the diminutive references to what I previously wrote,
such as "little text," "curious creature," etc. with humor, for I assume
that Messrs. Carlson and Rooney (not to mention others) are gentlemen,
and mean nothing personal by their remarks.
I suppose, though, that I really see no point in continuing to
debate on this group. If, in my premodern way of thinking, I am
confused, then I would so remain, rather than be not-confused and
complacently certain of the "power structures," or what-not, that drive
my psyche.
Old Lyotard said something about the "distrust of
metanarratives." What about the metanarrative that insists that
metanarratives exist?
I have learned to distrust everything that is modern. So why
should I be enthusiastic about the postmodern? The postmodern is
something which I simply do not want to be a part of. For a school of
thought which values self-reference so highly, it has yet failed to
produce a deconstruction of Derrida. But perhaps his proponents are too
clever to indulge the obvious.
So allow me to move out of the way. I wouldn't want to
hinder you. Utopia is calling. The problem is, you must be naked to
get in.
Cheers,
Andrew Aiken
eric andrew wolfe
[interesting stuff about the nature of discourse on the net deleted]
>
> I have learned to distrust everything that is modern. So why
>should I be enthusiastic about the postmodern? The postmodern is
>something which I simply do not want to be a part of. For a school of
>thought which values self-reference so highly, it has yet failed to
>produce a deconstruction of Derrida. But perhaps his proponents are too
>clever to indulge the obvious.
Actually, there have been a number of "deconstructions" of various
texts of Derrida, done by other critics. The first that I know of is
Paul de Man's essay "The Rhetoric of Blindness: Jacques Derrida's
Reading of Rousseau," which explores parts of Derrida's arguments in
_Of Grammatology_. Then there is also Barbara Johnson's essay "The
Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, and Derrida," which deconstructs
Derrida's deconstruction of Lacan's reading of "The Purloined Letter."
This latter essay has also encouraged several others, including John T
Irwin ("Mysteries We Reread, Mysteries of Rereading: Poe, Borges, and
the Analytic Detective Story; Also Lacan, Derrida, and Johnson")
and--I think--Norman Holland (though I don't recall the citation), to
join the mounting pile of analyses in this interchange. There are no
doubt other essays as well--that I am forgetting, or of which I am
unaware--that "deconstruct" Derrida in some way.
> So allow me to move out of the way. I wouldn't want to
>hinder you. Utopia is calling. The problem is, you must be naked to
>get in.
Well I, for one, would rather see you continue to contribute to the
newsgroup. It seems to me that discussion is fostered by a variety of
viewpoints, including that of a "premodernist." As for the reference
to "Utopia," I hope that you haven't gathered the impression that all
postmodern theorists are McLuhanesquely reveling in the glories of the
postmodern age. Many are, I think, concerned with bettering the
world, and in finding the possibilities for social and political
change present in contemporary culture, but this is merely what
concerned critics have been attempting throughout history.
>Cheers,
>
>Andrew Aiken
Eric Wolfe
hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu
writes:
I was a U of C when the _Closing_ bullshit all started. The man is a
poor teacher from reputation and a total hypocratic ass.
I saw him once on campus, I remeber seeing this guy from a distance with
a white rain coat floating gentilly behind him as he walked like some kind
of bride at her alter. Walking through the Gothic corriders he gracefully tucked a copy of -La Monde_ under his arm, in his eyes I could see the faint
resemblence of the eternal forms. I started laughing as soon as I passed
him.
On Bloom these are the facts;
1. Hes a good translator of Greek and French.
2. All but a few students avoid his class like the plague.
3. He spends a great deal of money on clothing
4. He is a homosexual (nothing wrong with that) but speaks of the
importance of family values and the sickness of our sexual popular culture.
It's funny that Bloom is nothing more then a U of C stereotype, the guy
who thinks that Greek culture will bring order to our declining
civilization. At the time I was fortunate to just laught the whole thing
off.
Chris Lovell
> > Somebody else writes:
> >
> > > When I read Plato do I cooperate with Plato who has been dead for
> > >2,000 years?
> >
> > Yes, and yes.
But my answer would be no. When you're reading the Republic, it's the
Republic that you're cooperating with; if you're reading the Crito then
you're cooperating with the Crito.
> When I say that a certain amount of cooperation is required when
> reading a text, I'm just referring to that simple aspect of
> communications theory that says that communication is not one-way;
> the content of the message is determined by both the sender and
> the receiver.
>
> Basically, if you place any interpretation at all on a text, if
> you get any meaning out of it, you are cooperating to some degree
> with the sender. You may not cooperate very well; you might say
> that these ideas you are looking at are trash. But by acknowledging
> that they are ideas at all, you are participating in a cooperative
> communication process.
The sender of the ideas communicated by a text is the text itself, not its
writer. The writer does attempt to encode her intentions into the text,
but once the text is in your hands, it does all the intending. Even while
the writer is alive, it's his texts that communicate 'his' intentions,
unless you're having direct communication (conversation), or maybe if
you're watching them on TV (I'm not so sure about this one though. Is an
interview with a person a text? Would that text then be the sender, or
the person being interviewed? Hm . . .). That's a pretty strange idea,
and I think it's why we still talk about Derrida's intentions (aside from
convenience) rather than the intentions of his texts.
> And yes, those intentions that exist still after death are an
> artifact of the media.
But they always were.
BTW, this is my first post. Flame kindly.
Chris Lovell
clo...@reed.edu
Curt Sampson
hoo...@aristotle.ils.nwu.edu (Robert Hooker) writes:
> Okay, heres a question. Kafka wrote books that he seemed to not want
> published, his last request was, if I am write, were that his work never
> be published.
I thought this might come up, actually.
Kafka asked a close friend of his, Max Brod, to burn all of his
papers and manuscripts after his death. Max Brod, under the excuse
that Kafka knew he could never do such a thing, arranged for them
to be published instead.
So what was Kafka's real intention? If his intention was really to
have his manuscripts burned, why did he not instruct a lawyer to do
it, or better yet, do it himself? It's easy enough to argue that the
fact that he even showed his manuscripts to other people, or told
anyone of their existence, shows that he was, in part at least,
writing for others.
> Whether this is true or not, imagine there is a poet who went into
> isolation and wrote poetry that he intended no one to read. Now say he
> dies before he carried out his intention to destroy his poems.
>
> Okay, also say that except for this desire to destroy his poems nothing
> except the poems themselves survive. THat is we have no notion about why
> the poet did what he did.
>
> Okay, can we "understand" his work.
It depends on what you mean by "understand." We can certainly read it
and extract meaning, yes. If you want to argue that we can't extract
the exact meaning this poet put into it, go ahead. I will agree with
you and, further, claim that we cannot do this for *any* text.
This whole argument is getting derailed, however. I clarified my
original premise in a recent message discussing communications
theory, and I think I'll leave it at that.
Richard Carlson
> It is true both that Heidegger
> called his membership a "mistake" and that he never fully
> repudiated the Nazi party--the exchange of letters with Hebert
> Marcuse mentioned by Richard is very illuminating in this respect.
> His idealization of the fixed, present world of the pre-technological
> peasantry has supported loathsome political ends--and I think his
> philosophy may very well support such a view--but one would hope
> that his thoughts can be radicalized towards other directions.
The idealization of that happy peasant society is also found in
Marx and "true communism" was supposed to have all of the positive
communal, aspects of shared belief systems and Heidegger's
"caring" (_Sorge_). As Habermas has pointed out, the
counter-enlightenment in Germany has always taken a nationalistic
or "tribal" or _gemeinschaftlich_ direction to a greater extent
than the counter-enlightenment elsewhere.
I think Americans especially have been suspicious of the
"we-feeling," and seen it as pernicious, because America had a
heterogeneous ("diverse") population before most of the European
countries. The tension between the "center" or "community" and
the individual has been more evident here.
One deficit in Heidegger is his relative unfamiliarity with
intellectual currents flowing around him. I don't think he was
familiar with Weber's attempt to give a scientific, sociological
account of the forces moving society away from a peasant
_gemeinschaft_ to a "modern," bureaucratic _gesellschaft_. Indeed
the very "essence" of modernity seems to revolve about the notion
of the impersonal rule of law and contractual relations.
As far back as I can remember most of my friends seem to have
assumed that the appeal of Nazism was its cozy tribalism. When I
was a boy scout I remember talking with other boy scouts about the
Nazis -- I think twelve-year-old kids then were fascinated by
Nazism, with its occult symbols and valorization of force -- and
they all thought the appeal was being part of something tribal and
family-like. We saw pictures of the Hitler _Jugend_ sitting
around campfires in their uniforms, which looked a lot like our
uniforms, but we knew that instead of the ghost stories that our
scout leaders told around _our_ campfires, they were hearing Norse
myths of ancient heroism that they were presumed to have inherited
and which they owned in a way that no American can own anything
cultural. (It seems to me that even when I was eleven and twelve,
I knew that America was a "great book" culture and that American
writers did not write great novels and American musicians did not
write great music -- and all my friends knew it too. In those
days there hadn't even ever been a native-born conductor of a
major symphony orchestra, and we assumed that anything cultural
would have to be imported --both in terms of high culture and folk
culture.)
Isn't postmodernism -- this is, after all, the alt.postmodern
newsgroup -- an attempt to recuperate, in a non-fascistic,
non-totalitarian way, some of the communal, -gemeinschaftlich_
aspects of social life by valorizing everybody's _difference_,
which would include, of course, any _difference_ that might
characterize the subject h/erself? (Bloom foregrounds the
potential exclusiveness of people who are _inside_ some difference
looking out at other folks who are allowed (or forced) to be
_different_ in "their" way.
Curt Sampson
clo...@envy.Reed.Edu (Chris Lovell) writes:
> When you're reading the Republic, it's the
> Republic that you're cooperating with; if you're reading the Crito then
> you're cooperating with the Crito.
>
> The sender of the ideas communicated by a text is the text itself, not its
> writer. The writer does attempt to encode her intentions into the text,
> but once the text is in your hands, it does all the intending. Even while
> the writer is alive, it's his texts that communicate 'his' intentions,
> unless you're having direct communication (conversation), or maybe if
> you're watching them on TV (I'm not so sure about this one though. Is an
> interview with a person a text? Would that text then be the sender, or
> the person being interviewed? Hm . . .).
Is an interview on TV a text? What if it's a videotaped interview?
What if you are watching it live in the studio, instead of on TV.
What if you are talking to someone over a videophone? Taking the
idea that a text has intentions a little further, when you talk to
someone, are you dealing with that person's intentions, or the
intentions of their utterances?
I don't think that texts can have intentions. That seems to imply
that meaning is inherent in the text, rather than being generated
by the reader as she reads the text. If meaning where inherent in
the text, rather than being generated by agreement between the
writer and the reader, anybody would be able to deduce the meaning
from the text, even if they didn't speak the language.
I just don't see any way you can read a text without cooperating
with the author. There are many things that you and the author
have to agree on before any meaning can be generated. You and the
author must first agree that it is possible for you to generate
meaning from marks on paper. You will probably want to be cooperative
enough to agree that it is possible for the meaning you generate
to have some correspondence with the meaning he intended people to
generate when he created the text. You then have to agree that
certain marks (signifiers) will correspond to certain things in
the rest of the world (signifieds) (or you have to find a translator
who can agree with both of you and translate the authors signifiers
to your signifiers--now we have a third person to cooperate with).
Christopher Wade Skinner
>In <1gBuaB...@depsych.Gwinnett.COM>, r...@depsych.Gwinnett.COM (Richard Carlson):
>>
>>people who once enjoyed a high standard of comfort and opportunity
>. . .
>some kind of rightist totalitarianism. Observations like this may
>>be relevant to future political developments here in America as
>>our standard of living continues to decline. "Objective" forces
>>like these may be more important than the kinds of personality or
>>cognitive style variables that Adorno and the critical theorists
>>foregrounded ("authoritarianism").
In Germany, remember, ther was a period of precarious stabilty that
followed the hyper-inflation. What would have happened had
Stresemann lived past 1928, or the depression not intervened, is an
interesting question. Certainly there was no mass rising against
autocracy in Germany in 1933, as there had been in Russia in 1917.
I am, of course, speaking of the February Revolution here, not October.
The NSDAP came to power through a variety of means, but as has been
pointed out again and again, at the height of their electoral power,
they were still forced into coalition to control the _Reichstag_.
They NSDAP seizure of control bears a good deal of resemblence to
the so-called 'October Revolution', which wasn't really a revolution
at all, rather an a-statist seizure of power by the Bolshevisk party.
> The roots of totalitarianism are very complex, but I think
>a few common denominators can be teased out: (1) significant, bourgeois-
>affecting economic disruption; (2) weak or fragmented mainstream
>conservative/liberal political bodies; (3) an efficiently organized
>totalitarian fringe party; and (4) a body of national, ethnic, or
>ideological mythic discourses. These are arranged in a rough order
>of importance, at least as I understand the problem. I would agree
>that the theories of authoritarian psychology prevalent among some
>of the Frankfurt school were avoiding the essentially economic
>nature of the problem.
I rather think this is a tired model, historically. Indeed, there
was economic distress, but the KPD was going very rapidly in Germany
in 1933, the SDP was holding ground against the NSDAP, and the Centre
Party still had strong support in the south. The so-called 'seizure
of power' was an a-constitutional mandate passed from an aging and
senile Hindenburg to Hitler. The NSDAP was losing ground electorally
and was becoming as ineffective as the Nationalist at holding together
a coalition in a constitutional framework. Article 48 of the Weimar
constitution, that gave the president dictatorial powers, allowed
Hitler to create the Enabling Act that essentially ended constitution-
alism and brought the Weimar republic to it end. The books _Who
Voted For Hitler_ and studies by professor LeRoi Jones, etal, show
clearly that support for the NSDAP was declining. The supposition
that the NSDAP was well-organized, had universal appeal, and that the
political centre was fragmented are rapidly coming under searching
criticism.
> As far as Heidegger goes, the Nazis sought him out as part
>of their general effort to gather intellectual support to their
>regime: I really doubt if any of the NASDP inner circles had read
>anything more than the expurgated version of DIE WILLE ZUR MACHT,
>let alone SEIN UND ZEIT. There is a very thorough book, HEIDEGGER
>AND NAZISM by V. Farias, which covers MH's involvement and later
>relationship to the Hitler regime. It is true both that Heidegger
>called his membership a "mistake" and that he never fully
>repudiated the Nazi party--the exchange of letters with Hebert
>Marcuse mentioned by Richard is very illuminating in this respect.
>His idealization of the fixed, present world of the pre-technological
>peasantry has supported loathsome political ends--and I think his
>philosophy may very well support such a view--but one would hope
>that his thoughts can be radicalized towards other directions.
Yes, much as they did Carl Schmidt, who was the Kronjurist of the
Weimar period. I believe MC has shown us the light here. Word up!
CWS
>Cordially,
>M.S. Rooney
Chris Lovell
> I don't think that texts can have intentions. That seems to imply
> that meaning is inherent in the text, rather than being generated
> by the reader as she reads the text. If meaning where inherent in
> the text, rather than being generated by agreement between the
> writer and the reader, anybody would be able to deduce the meaning
> from the text, even if they didn't speak the language.
Well, if writers have intentions, does that mean that meaning is inherent
in the writer? Can I deduce the meaning from the writer?
Meaning is generated. You imply this in your post, and I agree. But it's
generated by the dialogue between a reader and the TEXT. (BTW,
'agreement' isn't the proper word, since the meaning is generated by
disagrement also. Your previous posting made this point. But it's
important to stress it.) I don't think 'meaning' is inherent in anything,
which is exactly why I don't think reading a text is a process of
cooperation with its author. You say that the author is the sender and
the reader is the receiver, and the text is some sort of intermediary in
this process of communication. This model transforms the text into an
intentional archive, and the reader's purpose into drawing the meaning
from the text, rather than generating it.
> You will probably want to be cooperative
> enough to agree that it is possible for the meaning you generate
> to have some correspondence with the meaning he intended people to
> generate when he created the text.
It seems like this statement is saying that the ideal reading would be the
one that divined exactly what the author intended in such-and-such a work.
That there is a meaning inherent in the text, the one that the author
intended to put there. And I don't think there's any way of saying that
reading is an interaction between writer and reader without running into
this problem.
Personally, I don't think the notion that texts have intentions imply that
there is a set meaning in the text, anymore than the fact that people have
intentions implies there's an inherent meaning in a person.
As for the agreements you say the reader needs to make before any meaning
can be generated, I'd just say the text is who/what the reader needs to
agree with, and the text needs to agree with the reader.
Post-structuralist criticism seems to require us to allow texts some
degree of 'life', having intentions, textual goals, and self-awareness.
My basic point here is that my reading of a text is a reading of that text
and not of its author. Once the author is done composing the text, and
attempting to encode their intentions into that text, the author and the
text are separate entities, and it is the text that the reader interacts
with.
Chris Lovell
clo...@reed.edu
Christopher Wade Skinner
>I think we get most of our "concepts" as images -- in the case of
>Americans from Hollywood movies. The image of "decadence" and
>"permissiveness" is a bunch of fat Romans drinking wine from
>goblets and reaching out to pinch dancing slave girls.
Absolutely! Indeed, think of the impressions of English visitors
to the Muscovite Court at the time of Ivan the Terrible, at the
apex of Muscovite civilization; splendour, ritual, pomp, a sense
of granduer and _vigor_ as you call it. Just what does 'permissive'
mean to Mr. Aiken? My point is that 'permissivness' stems from
the lexicon of individual like George Will and Charles Krautheimer,
who deplore what they call 'liberal permissiveness'. This then,
is distinguished in the minds of some authors from 'reward', ie,
the behavior of J.P.Morgan, I.Boesky, Milken, et. al., for being
'good capitalists', and hence inheriting the 'right' to behave
differently; remember what Fitzgerald said to Hemingway; 'the rich
are not like you and I'. Hemingway's response, typical of the
man, was 'no, they have more money'. One man's impermissable
behavior is another's reward (see the post here re: Bloom's
sexual hypocracy, dandyism, etc.)
>A difficulty with this image is that it is almost identical to the
>image of barbaric vitality and splendor. Here we also have a
>bunch of heavy males, only heavy with muscles rather than fat, and
>they are also drinking wine from goblets and laughing as they
>reach out to pinch dancing slave girls, only they are dressed in
>furs and wearing iron chains rather than dressed in togas and
>wearing gold chains. Almost the same image. I think that's why
>we get confused as to what is "decadence" and what is "vigor." You
>could see a man like J.P. Morgan or Jim Fiske as either vigorous
>or decadent, as you could a man like Michael Milken or Charles
>Keating.
The question I ask: 'What does it become when I (as a member, let
us argue, of a marginalized group) assert my self-determination?'
The act of assertion, unlike the act of conspicous consumption,
I believe is that which Andrew referrs to as 'permissiveness';
ie. the assertiveness of women, homosexuals, minorities, etc.
In the 1950's it was acceptable to respond to this kind of assertion
with fire-hoses and lynchings. Now the gound and moral tone
has changed; hence assertion is 'permitted' and those who disagree
with the asserted claim that society is 'permissive'.
>--
>Richard Carlson | pmc-...@depsych.gwinnett.com
>Midtown Medical Center |
>(404) 881-6877 |
cws
Andrew C. Aiken
>Absolutely! Indeed, think of the impressions of English visitors
>to the Muscovite Court at the time of Ivan the Terrible, at the
>apex of Muscovite civilization; splendour, ritual, pomp, a sense
>of granduer and _vigor_ as you call it. Just what does 'permissive'
>mean to Mr. Aiken?
Will you let me answer this question, instead of pompously doing
it for me?
> My point is that 'permissivness' stems from
>the lexicon of individual like George Will and Charles Krautheimer,
The word 'permissive' was invented by George Will and Charles
"Krautheimer [sic]"?
>who deplore what they call 'liberal permissiveness'. This then,
>is distinguished in the minds of some authors from 'reward', ie,
>the behavior of J.P.Morgan, I.Boesky, Milken, et. al., for being
>'good capitalists', and hence inheriting the 'right' to behave
>differently; remember what Fitzgerald said to Hemingway; 'the rich
>are not like you and I'. Hemingway's response, typical of the
>man, was 'no, they have more money'. One man's impermissable
>behavior is another's reward (see the post here re: Bloom's
>sexual hypocracy, dandyism, etc.)
I used the term permissive as an alternative to such terms
as "licentious," and, you will note, I did not say that this "modern
permissiveness" is bad. But, then, who ever said that a post-modernist
could read?
>The question I ask: 'What does it become when I (as a member, let
>us argue, of a marginalized group) assert my self-determination?'
>The act of assertion, unlike the act of conspicous consumption,
>I believe is that which Andrew referrs to as 'permissiveness';
>ie. the assertiveness of women, homosexuals, minorities, etc.
>In the 1950's it was acceptable to respond to this kind of assertion
>with fire-hoses and lynchings. Now the gound and moral tone
>has changed; hence assertion is 'permitted' and those who disagree
>with the asserted claim that society is 'permissive'.
Yes, and now they just lynch you with wires if
you dare to criticize the welfare state, as Justice Thomas
has pointed out. Also, if you dare to even breathe such
a term as permissive, then you can count on ACT-UP
to follow you around, slashing your tires.
I retract my implication that modern society is permissive.
It is its opposite. It is becoming socially unacceptable to
smoke, drink alcohol, etc., and everyone must speak in counter-intuitive
euphemisms (known collectively as PC :political control) which are
the enemy of true manners, and if you are a white male, well, then,
why have you not crucified yourself yet?
Before you go on with your linkage of my short paragraph to lynching,
I suggest you re-read it. Nowhere in its interstices is mentioned
a moral prescription. But you write as if I am not entitled to
believe that our culture is bad and getting worse.
Yet you have the right to disagree.
I am a marginalized group. So I am right, and you are wrong.
Have you never used that term invented by liberal racists?
"Redneck" ??
I only agree with Bloom on a few points, yet you are associating
everything I write with him. My sentiments lie with H.L. Mencken,
Jacques Barzun, etc.
So back off. Anything less is, well, impermissible.
Andrew Aiken
Christopher Wade Skinner
>In article <1gBuaB...@depsych.Gwinnett.COM> r...@depsych.Gwinnett.COM
>(Richard Carlson) writes:
>[..]
> I used to think that the question: when a nation resolves some
> severe national crisis by going totalitarian, is there a way to
> predict whether or not it will be a "right" totalitarianism or a
> "left" totalitarianism? was an important question. Now, with the
> collapse of Marxist legitimacy, I'm not sure that the notions of
> "left" and "right" have as much meaning as they once did.
> Again, to repeat a previous thread, I don't think the opening up of
>the Soviet Union can be equated with a collapse of legitmacy (if this is
>indeed what you are inferring here). I find your notion of "right" and
>"left" totalitarianism problematic as well: what would be the difference?
>Is it only in propagand purposes or what? I would tend to delinate a
>totaltarian government via its demand for "total", "centralized" power. Is
>there a better way of looking at it?
Yes and no. In the current ideation of what goes on in methodolgy
with which I'm familiar, the nature of 'isms' themselves are under
study. The correct assessment of how 'isms' function and what is
expected of them seems very problimatic.
> And this seems to reinforce my notion "totalitarianism" as being
>neither intrinsically "left" or "right".
Now, here's a good example of the 'ism schism' (sorry, couldn't resist!)
Fascism used to be differentiated from Communism by the construct of the
'Will to Myth'; ie Communism is a-statist, international, etc. This
model has long outlived its usefulness. To whit: Stalanism certainly
was Russain, reactionary, and National in character; in 1946 he had
himself proclaimed 'leader of all the world' by the Orthodox Church!
He had made himself a _Volk_ leader in every bit as explicit a fashion
as ol' Adolph. For a fascinating description of the historiography and
methodological understanding of Stalin, see B.Wolfe _Three Who Made
a Revolution_, and I.Deutscher, _The Prophet Unarmed_.
So, clearly 'Communism' by the time it is 'Stalisim' is really closer
to a traditional definition of 'Fascism'! These 'isms' fail in there
descriptive tasks, so we search for more. Note however, that simple
totalitarianism is _insufficient_ as well. Under the Reich, the
participation of the _Volk_ was encouraged in a _specifically_
Myth-based fashion. This was not so in Stalin's Russia. So again,
rather than make the issue less complicated, we make it more complicated
than ever! I think that's fine; make us all think harder.
> Mark Evenson
CWS
Thomas VanNess Leavitt
intellectual barrenness of most critiques of multi-culturalism from the
right... hysterical, panic-stricken, full of cliches, loaded words,
denigrations and deliberate misunderstandings...
Of course, there is a countervailing distortion of reality, assumption of
universialities of experience, and non-experience, and denigration of any
p.o.v. that sees a hope for optomism as a result of the debate, on the
pro side, but...
It seems in general, that this little "aha!" definition of liberal/
conservative I read somewhere earlier this year seems to apply...
liberals speak about social justice, conservatives about moral purity...
Specifically, the conservatives seem to be truly frustrated, and angry...
they speak harshly, and derisively, and denigratingly, of their opponents,
without really addressing the specifics of their issues, while the
liberals pound the issues home, and ignore the proponents as individuals,
critiquing them as representatives of cultural phenomena.
Red Representative
-bi is best
Paul Boutin
|> And could not a prefixed word denote an improvement to the root word?
e.g. "postmodern"? :-)
Christopher Wade Skinner
>650...@ucsbuxa.ucsb.edu (Christopher Wade Skinner) writes:
>>Absolutely! Indeed, think of the impressions of English visitors
>>to the Muscovite Court at the time of Ivan the Terrible, at the
>>apex of Muscovite civilization; splendour, ritual, pomp, a sense
>>of granduer and _vigor_ as you call it. Just what does 'permissive'
>>mean to Mr. Aiken?
> Will you let me answer this question, instead of pompously doing
>it for me?
I don't see that I've 'pompously' answered the question. I went on
to indicate from whence the commonly used phrase 'permissive liberal'
came from.
>> My point is that 'permissivness' stems from
>>the lexicon of individual like George Will and Charles Krautheimer,
>The word 'permissive' was invented by George Will and Charles
>"Krautheimer [sic]"?
Ok, Andrew, play net.cop and assault my spelling. You know
very well what I ment. Pompous, indeed! Will & Chucky (as I
don't have a copy of TNS here I won't offend you by misspelling
his last name) use the term to refer to discourse they don't
want to hear. I never ascribed their p.o.v. to you, Andrew, and it
is you who first posted an insulting response to my criticism
of Bloom. If you are offended that I extend my discussion to
ask 'what is permissiveness, and how does the term have meaning'
and give what I see to be relevant examples, than don't respond
to my posts. Put me in your kill file.
>>who deplore what they call 'liberal permissiveness'. This then,
>>is distinguished in the minds of some authors from 'reward', ie,
>>the behavior of J.P.Morgan, I.Boesky, Milken, et. al., for being
>>'good capitalists', and hence inheriting the 'right' to behave
>>differently; remember what Fitzgerald said to Hemingway; 'the rich
>>are not like you and I'. Hemingway's response, typical of the
>>man, was 'no, they have more money'. One man's impermissable
>>behavior is another's reward (see the post here re: Bloom's
>>sexual hypocracy, dandyism, etc.)
> I used the term permissive as an alternative to such terms
>as "licentious," and, you will note, I did not say that this "modern
>permissiveness" is bad. But, then, who ever said that a post-modernist
>could read?
Andrew, you used the term 'permissive' in defence of Bloom. Please
don't invent a loophole. Further, I have mentioned nothing in my
posts about the good-ness or bad-ness of modern society. As you
have not responded to my post, but rather have stooped to ad
hominem, all I can respond with, 'well, I guess Pre-Modernist's
can't look past the mirror of their own regard'.
>>The question I ask: 'What does it become when I (as a member, let
>>In the 1950's it was acceptable to respond to this kind of assertion
>>with fire-hoses and lynchings. Now the gound and moral tone
>>has changed; hence assertion is 'permitted' and those who disagree
>>with the asserted claim that society is 'permissive'.
Notice that first sentence, Andrew, the 'question I ask'?. Your
name shows up _once_ in my whole post concerning a further discussion
of permissivness, and you respond as though I had personally attacked
you. I must have hit a raw nerve someplace. It was not intentional,
Andrew, but I refuse to apologize when faced with such 'Pecksniffian'
rancor.
>I retract my implication that modern society is permissive.
>It is its opposite. It is becoming socially unacceptable to
>smoke, drink alcohol, etc., and everyone must speak in counter-intuitive
>euphemisms (known collectively as PC :political control) which are
>the enemy of true manners, and if you are a white male, well, then,
>why have you not crucified yourself yet?
Actually, Andrew, all my post said (in re: R. Carlson's post)
was that permissiveness means many things. As I've already
stated, my inclusion of your name was an invitation to you
to clarify. I then went on to discuss the word and its misuse
as I perceived it. Since you've now catagoized me as:
1) illiterate
2)ill-mannered
3)self-scourging
4)pompous
5)and shallow
I'll simply conclude by noting I think you:
1) an hypocrite
2) self-important
3) nit-picking
4) pompous
5) in short, a stuffed shirt (possibly with straw, but I won't
go into that)
>Before you go on with your linkage of my short paragraph to lynching,
>I suggest you re-read it. Nowhere in its interstices is mentioned
>a moral prescription. But you write as if I am not entitled to
>believe that our culture is bad and getting worse.
As a matter of order, and a matter of fact, I agree entirely that
our society 'is bad and getting worse', but not by dint of
Multiculturalism.
I am, in fact, not that much of a post-modernist (perhaps this
is why I can read?) and simply enjoy a discussion. Andrew, my
world doesn't revolve around associating you with Alan Bloom.
>I am a marginalized group. So I am right, and you are wrong.
> I only agree with Bloom on a few points, yet you are associating
>everything I write with him. My sentiments lie with H.L. Mencken,
>Jacques Barzun, etc.
H.L. Mencken?! That dreadful anti-semite?! (JOKE, ANDREW)
>So back off. Anything less is, well, impermissible.
Why don't you? Back off I mean?
>Andrew Aiken
CWS
Andrew C. Aiken
>Actually, Andrew, all my post said (in re: R. Carlson's post)
>was that permissiveness means many things. As I've already
>stated, my inclusion of your name was an invitation to you
>to clarify. I then went on to discuss the word and its misuse
>as I perceived it. Since you've now catagoized me as:
>1) illiterate
>2)ill-mannered
>3)self-scourging
>4)pompous
>5)and shallow
>I'll simply conclude by noting I think you:
>1) an hypocrite
>2) self-important
>3) nit-picking
>4) pompous
>5) in short, a stuffed shirt (possibly with straw, but I won't
> go into that)
Ok, ok. I will admit that I got out of hand with my responses.
If I used the wrong word, then I admit my mistake. I don't, however,
particularly like my words associated with lynchings and such. I really
don't see any point in descending into flames, though, so allow me to
apologize. I admit that I was wrong in nitpicking and implying that you
were pompous.
>>Before you go on with your linkage of my short paragraph to lynching,
>>I suggest you re-read it. Nowhere in its interstices is mentioned
>>a moral prescription. But you write as if I am not entitled to
>>believe that our culture is bad and getting worse.
>As a matter of order, and a matter of fact, I agree entirely that
>our society 'is bad and getting worse', but not by dint of
>Multiculturalism.
I agree here, but what type of multiculturalism should we
prefer ( I assume here that our society would rather not fragment more
than it already has.)? Perhaps now that I have calmed the waters, we
may discuss this point.
Sincerely,
Andrew Aiken
Richard Carlson
> Basically, if you place any interpretation at all on a text, if
> you get any meaning out of it, you are cooperating to some degree
> with the sender. You may not cooperate very well; you might say
> that these ideas you are looking at are trash. But by acknowledging
> that they are ideas at all, you are participating in a cooperative
> communication process.
Deconstruction downplays if not actually "brackets" the author and
emphasizes ("foregrounds" -- I just love postmodern words because
they actually call your attention to what is really going on) the
text itself. I wonder if the motive for that isn't the attempt to
deny the reality and therefore the mortality of the author.
> And yes,those intentions that exist still after death are an
> artifact ofthe media.
I think the term "trace" refers to archaic features in freshly
created texts. What I had in mind was something almost exactly
the opposite, finding "live" or "modern" or "contemporary"
features in old -- even _very_ old -- texts.
Suppose Jack writes a love letter to Jill, declaring his undying
love and offering his hand in marriage. Jill is won over by the
letter and runs to Jack's abode, only to discover that since
writing the letter Jack has suddenly died. Even as she was
reading the letter and responding to the arguments and sentiments
in it, possibly hearing Jack's voice in her mind uttering the
words in the letter, Jack himself was dead.
How different is this from the situation with Plato, who, as a
member of the conservative, patrician party of his day, created a
discourse -- which happened to place the interests of his party on
a solid ontological foundation, which also happened to be
universal? The two cases may seem different in that Jack's
arguments are irrelevant after his death while Plato's may be
relevant if we are currently engaged in a dialectic which
reproduces much of the content that was relevant in Plato's day.
Actually the same may be true of Jack's letter -- suppose, for
example, that Jill was the widow of a man who was so wonderful
that she was convinced that she would never love another. Some of
Jack's arguments would be non-specific, then, and argue for some
new man-in-general in addition to arguing for
himself-in-particualr, so that even after Jack's death his
thoughts are still relevant to Jill and she recalls them as she
considers her new suitor, Mack.
Human beings, as mortal creatures, create something which has an
immediate purpose, but because it is engraved in a medium, it
lasts beyond its immediate, original purpose. Because human
beings have consciousness, particularly a consciousness of time,
they know that they will one day die. This knowledge is
problematic, so it has to be dealt with or rationalized or
"constrained." Emphasis on texts one has created seems to promise
a kind of immorality, but it isn't really any different from
writing "Kilroy was here" on a rock half way up a mountain or even
"F**k you" on the wall of a stall in a public toilet.