The Litcrit papers...
Myron Veeblefester
Some semi-random articles on the true meaningless of Neo-Bozo-LitCrit:
>From: bob...@Autodesk.COM (Robert Murphy)
>Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
>Subject: Re: Core Wars (& Viruses?)
>Message-ID: <52...@autodesk.COM>
>Date: 31 May 91 01:45:38 GMT
>Organization: Autodesk, Inc., Sausalito, CA
In article <1991May24....@csc.wcc.govt.nz> we...@csc.wcc.govt.nz writes:
>The reason I ask is that a lecturer friend was interested
>in making an analogy (a lighthearted one) between the
>(biblical) Fall in Milton's Paradise Lost, and the
>`Fall' of the computer world (and related worlds)
>through the creation of viruses. Corny enuf for ya???
Apparently, there's some kind of movement in the literary criticism field
to draw parallels, no matter how ridiculous, between literature and science.
Here's the algorithm:
1. Go out and read Hawking's "A Brief History of Time" and "The Tao of
Physics" without any background in science. If you understand 1% of them,
you're doing pretty well.
2. Write a 60-page deconstructionist (note 1) analysis of feminist (note 2)
existential (note 3) semiotics (note 4) in the works of George Eliot, drawing
parallels between it and indeterminacy as found in the "New Physics".
3. Submit it to an appropriate journal of literary criticism. Don't worry,
there are lots of them.
4. Sit back and wait for your tenured position and National Endowment for
the Humanities grant.
My girlfriend, who has a decent background in science and mathematics,
bailed out of a Ph.D. program in English with only a year to go because
she couldn't stomach this kind of crap any more. She herself didn't do
this kind of thing since she was a medievalist (an expert on Anglo-Saxon
sermons, and hell on wheels at a Renaissance Faire), but there were a lot
of faculty members and grad students in her department who were.
The Fall in Milton and the "Fall" of the computer world sound like
perfect grist for this mill. I would think that this guy's pal might even
make a very successful academic career for himself with just this one
topic.
Bob Murphy
bob...@autodesk.com
Note 1: Deconstructionism has to do with figuring things out from what
an author doesn't say. There's value in this, up to a point. However,
it gets kind of silly these days. The name of the game these days is
to pick a topic you'd like to sermonize about, find an author who doesn't
say anything about it, and have at it.
Note 2: As in, if you're a woman, you should be a lesbian. If you like
men, you shouldn't, and even if you can't help liking them, you should
still be a lesbian to show your solidarity with your sisters. If you're
a man, you'd better be gay or else if you have any conscience, you should
just kill yourself. Read lots of Andrea Dworkin's works. I'm not kidding.
There were three women in my girlfriend's department who were lesbians
purely for ideological reasons, and snuck around with men when they thought
nobody was watching.
Note 3: "Why is my life a mess? Why am I so bored with everything? Why
can't I get answers to any of my questions? Is there meaning in anything
I do, or in the world at all? Hmmm... Maybe if I could somehow *feel*
something, instead of just being so bored and numb... That's it, if I can
truly FEEL something, maybe somehow I can have faith that my existence
has some validity. But how can I feel anything when I'm so bored and numb?
Maybe if I step in front of this speeding Mack Tr..." <splat>
Note 4: Semiotics is one of the Great Words of the Twentieth Century (TM).
It means analyzing signs and symbols in human existence. Of course, people
have been doing that for a long time, both literally ("If that sign says
STOP, maybe I shouldn't drive out into that intersection") and figuratively
("Why did he say I should go piss up a rope? Does the rope need wetting?
Maybe there was something else behind that remark..."). However, it didn't
have any intellectual validity until some postwar French philosophers
tagged it with this Great Word (TM). It's kinda like "heuristic" and
"paradigm" - if you sprinkle "semiotic" around liberally in term papers,
everybody will think you're a genius rather than just someone who knows
what to do at a stop sign.
>From: Brian Redman @ 914/207
>Echo: Words_Words
>Date: 30-Oct-91 08:46pm
>Subject: The Operating room
The Operating Room
Oh, so we're going to wheel in great works of art
And we're going to dissect them and put them in jars
Until the bell rings and we put away our tools
And all of us satisfied that the thing is pigeonholed.
Oh, so we're going to read some Borges so that that
Son of a Borges can haul out his tools and hack
Away at the thing. And we're going to file on out
And attack that ever-blooming mushrooming ring-a-ding-ding
That the state has installed to measure our time.
And I suppose that then we will read for Wednesday, or
Prepare for tomorrow, or review for next class, or chop
Chop, chop away at the thing until it is dead.
--- Msgtoss 1.3p
# Origin: The Skeptic's Board -- Exploring the Fringe - 1:125/27 (8:914/207)
* Origin: Gateway System to/from RBBS-NET (RBBS-PC 1:10/8)
>From: M...@cac.washington.edu (Mark Crispin)
>Newsgroups: rec.humor.funny
>Subject: Say What? or: Why Johnny Still Can't Read or: I bet he has tenure
>Keywords: true, smirk, science
>Message-ID: <S3c0...@looking.on.ca>
>Date: 3 Apr 92 09:30:05 GMT
The following is an excerpt from `Producing American Selves: The form of
American Biography" by Rob Wilson, in `boundary 2' (Summer 1991) as reported
in the Winter 1992 `Wilson Quarterly.' Wilson is an English professor (!) at
the University of Hawaii.
As postmodern ethnography de-familiarizes the genre of life-writing into
a voracious apparatus of textualized selfhood, the underlying cultural
function of biography, at least as a Western genre, can be seen to insinuate
and extend what James Clifford has called "the myth of coherent personality."
That is, by means of a massive life-writing consuming and producing selves
from George Washington to Cary Grant and Alice James, the primary function of
biography is to disseminate a plethora of *selves* who might instantiate this
integrity of selfhood as achieved against a more or less recessive social
background, what Le'vi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser have theorized (less
blithely) as the overdeterminations of mythic structures, libidinal codes, and
economic base. Hence, in contracting to document and amass the thematics of
such a particularized self, the biographer enters the terms of a genre in
which he or she contracts to deliver the individual as a tormented journey
toward coherent unity, striking personality, and expressive selfhood ...
>From: jz...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Joann Zimmerman)
>Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
>Subject: Re: Thomas Covenant (LONG)
>Message-ID: <57...@ut-emx.uucp>
>Date: 23 Sep 91 16:36:10 GMT
>Organization: The University of Texas at Austin
In article <10...@vela.acs.oakland.edu> rjoh...@vela.acs.oakland.edu (R o d Johnson) writes:
>I think "problematic" in the sense you use it is different from
>either "difficult" or "interesting"--it means something that
>constitutes a difficulty for a particular way of understanding
>things. If you had a theory that depended on rigidly dividing all
>people by gender, for instance, transvestites or transexuals might be
>problematic.
Perhaps the word, as I am hearing it, is sometimes used in the sense
which you have just described, but by no means always. How about the
following semester assignment for a graduate course in art history
methodology? "Choose an object in the university collections that is
problematic, and write a publishable paper about it." How do I know
whether the piece causes difficulties for accepted theory until I've
already investigated it? So here, I am quite sure, it means:
"interesting/difficult-looking". And it was with this particular
instantiation that I finally hit the wall on this word.
--
"Et semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum." -- Horace
...!cs.utexas.edu!ccwf!jzimm
Wednesday THE DAILY TEXAN From Page 12
February 12, 1992
Symposium on modernism investigates aesthetics
Jack Nixon
Daily Texan Staff
On Friday and Saturday, a group of distinguished artists, scholars and
critics presented lectures, showed artistic works and debated "What-
ever Happened To Beauty: Aesthetics In A Culture of Signs." The
symposium was organized by the Center for the Study of Modernism, the
Department of Art, the Huntington Art Gallery and the College of Fine
Arts.
The central issue of the symposium was to question if the concept of
beauty is universal, or whether it merely represents a particular
social environment or political situation. Like secularized clerics,
regretfully yet rapturously debating the outmoded need for belief in a
Divine Creator, the program participants unanimously bid farewell to
the beautiful as it has traditionally been perceived. As Peter
Schjeldahl, art critic for The Village Voice remarked, "The whole
symposium is predicated on the fear that something in our culture is
broken."
Participants included Arthur Danto, professor of philosophy at
Columbia and art critic for The Nation, and Susan Suleiman, Harvard
professor of literature and author of the recently published
Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant Garde. The
featured artists, all from New York, included Robert Zakanitch,
acclaimed post-formalist decorative painter; Lorna Simpson,
avant-garde photographer specializing in gallery assemblies called
game pieces; and widely exhibited post-formalist painter and teacher
Sylvia Mangold.
A generalized consensus emerged from the proceedings despite the
highly elusive nature of the subject. Today, beauty is often internal
to a work, that is, cognitive rather than aesthetic. The traditional
notions of the aesthetics of beauty -- cosmic order, harmony,
appropriateness, symmetry, proportion, rhythm, form, color, justice,
pleasure -- all those qualities which produce a melting in the
viewer's heart, so to speak, are simply inessential to satisfying
today's social agendas. Beauty just "doesn't say much anymore."
Since the chief concern of art is the expression of the artist's
vision of truth, and since the truth is a sense of "damage felt" for
the manipulative evils of mass culture, there is a mistrust of
classical aesthetics. Beauty has been linked to the intrinsically
false, competing, gender-dominated discourses of the past -- as well
as class, sex and racial oppression -- towards which art now feels the
obligation, if not to subvert, then at least not to further by
complicity.
Feminism and Marxism especially have embraced a deconstruction of the
cultural myth as a necessary healing process. Today's art is merely
expressing an alternative to the business of beauty. And yet, irony,
wit, aggression, irreverence, irritation, stimulation, pain and rage
-- in short, the whole catalog of double-take elicited by the
unsettling experience of viewing contemporary art -- although not
obviously beautiful, can, in Gertrude Stein's paradoxical explanation,
often become tomorrow's classically beautiful art.
Whether there is a psychological basis and a need for producing and
perceiving the beautiful in its traditional manifestations was never
addressed by the symposium. Seeing the Western artistic heritage as
representing certain collectively subconscious archetypal structures,
which order the formal expression in which beauty is projected into
the world, was never mentioned.
The historical reference for beauty in art was naturally the world
itself. Today, society, culture, and, most important, art itself are
the references for artistic creations. The problem with beauty may
very well lie in the problem of art theory and its powerful effect on
the contemporary art world. A cynic might even have proposed an
alternative title to the symposium: "Whatever happened to art outside
of Manhattan."
Since the appearance in 1961 of Art and Culture, Clement Greenburg's
eminently successful codification of the need for purity in modernist
art, urging that art be purged of all references outside of the work
itself, criticism has enjoyed and exerted a huge, somewhat
overbearing, influence on artistic trends of production. Because New
York (especially the supporting apparatus of socialites, collectors,
exhibitors, agents and artists of Lower Manhattan) is the capital of
the art world, the so-called fugitive status of beauty may well be
linked to the internal dialogues and battles being fought in that art
market.
Whether beauty of and for itself is in the process of being reborn --
for its healing, nurturing, anti-destructive effects -- or whether
many leading artists will continue to set their anti-beautiful works
against traditional notions of the beautiful in the hope of soliciting
viewer reaction/re-education, no one can say.
>From: cate...@pirates.armstrong.edu
>Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
>Subject: Re: Core Wars (& Viruses?)
>Message-ID: <1991Jun3.0...@pirates.armstrong.edu>
>Date: 3 Jun 91 09:37:43 GMT
>Organization: Armstrong State College, Savannah, GA
I recall the horror of semiotics from a scriptwriting class I once took.
One Roland Barthes put it into fairly simple terms. We can call it
"Signification".
Signification
1st. order (denotative) [the more simple essence of a "thing"]
2nd. order (connotative) [the more complex, alluded meaning of same "thing"]
An example we used was a sneaker. Seen from the 1st. order a Nike sneaker
is simply a sneaker, a foot covering, an athletic shoe. However, when
Seen from the second it becomes a symbol of status in some odd way.
The there are Fiske and Hartley who delve deeper yet into these murky
waters. ;)
|---------------------------|
| Stan Malyshev | The rule is simple: Suspect, only suspect.
| st...@soda.berkeley.edu | You can read subtexts even in a traffic sign
| | that says 'No Littering.'
| | - Of course. Catharist moralism. The horror
| | of fornication.
|---------------------------| Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"
>From: ora...@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU (Jonah H Cohen)
>Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf-lovers
>Subject: Re: Ray Bradbury
>Message-ID: <85...@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU>
>Date: 31 May 91 19:25:15 GMT
>Organization: The Johns Hopkins University - HCF
Ray Bradbury spoke at Johns Hopkins last year, and he was great!
At one point he said "The most important thing in storytelling is imagination
... all this New York-angst-intellectual stuff is a big bore." The writing
seminars majors who wear all black and think that Less Than Zero is the
greatest novel ever written shivered. Yay.
I like Bradbury's stuff too. The Veldt gave me bad dreams as a kid.
JonaH
--
--Myron Veeblefester chu...@emx.cc.utexas.edu
C Mealy
In article <71...@ut-emx.uucp> chu...@emx.utexas.edu (Myron Veeblefester) writes:
>
>>From: bob...@Autodesk.COM (Robert Murphy)
>>Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
>>Subject: Re: Core Wars (& Viruses?)
>>Message-ID: <52...@autodesk.COM>
>>Date: 31 May 91 01:45:38 GMT
>>Organization: Autodesk, Inc., Sausalito, CA
>
>2. Write a 60-page deconstructionist (note 1) analysis of feminist (note 2)
>existential (note 3) semiotics (note 4) in the works of George Eliot, drawing
>parallels between it and indeterminacy as found in the "New Physics".
>Note 2: As in, if you're a woman, you should be a lesbian. If you like
>men, you shouldn't, and even if you can't help liking them, you should
>still be a lesbian to show your solidarity with your sisters. If you're
>a man, you'd better be gay or else if you have any conscience, you should
>just kill yourself. Read lots of Andrea Dworkin's works. I'm not kidding.
>There were three women in my girlfriend's department who were lesbians
>purely for ideological reasons, and snuck around with men when they thought
>nobody was watching.
umm ... look, I don't want to sound like a real jerk ... and I'm not sure
what you're really saying about feminism here ... well, this is how I feel.
I'm a feminist. I enjoy sex. Heterosexual relationships are cool. Having
babies is cool. Using words like "waiter" or "manhole" or "wife" are no
big deal. As far as all my feminist friends and acquaintances and myself are
concerned feminism has little to do with stuff like that. That's not what
they write about in the newspapers, I know. To us feminism is about moving
toward a less unequal society. It's about preventing harrassment and rape and
abuse and assault. It's about helping men and women realize that they
aren't so different. It's hard for many people to see the violence
inflicted on women. Go to a "take back the night" rally sometime and
you'll see what motivates feminists.
I see people disparage feminists all the time. Yeah, there are some wackos
who call themselves feminists, and yes, they make feminism look pretty
stupid. I'm sorry if I being a pretentious or a jerk. Thanks for reading.
Mark-Jason Dominus
> purely for ideological reasons, and snuck around with men when they thought
> nobody was watching.
Peculiar, isn't it?
Someone mentioned that the local Married Gay Men's Support Group was
meeting soon. I liked the idea and I asked if there were other such
groups outside of Philadelphia. He said that there were. Apparently
they are common.
There are, so far as I can tell, no support groups for married
lesbians, and I think a big reason for that is that a large part of the
lesbian community is not interested in supporting such people, or even
in admitting that they exist.
Similarly, if you read the same-sex personals ads, you will see that
many of the ads will say `no bisexuals', and that these ads are all
placed by women. Gay men, apparently, do not care whether their
sweeties are bisexual.
--
And for to see, and eke for to be seye
Mark-Jason Dominus m...@central.cis.upenn.edu
Gordon Fitch
"postmodern" writings. As one example, the excerpt below is
apparently supposed to be ludicrously incomprehensible as-is.
| Some semi-random articles on the true meaningless of Neo-Bozo-LitCrit:
| ...
| The following is an excerpt from `Producing American Selves: The form of
| American Biography" by Rob Wilson, in `boundary 2' (Summer 1991) as reported
| in the Winter 1992 `Wilson Quarterly.' Wilson is an English professor (!) at
| the University of Hawaii.
|
| As postmodern ethnography de-familiarizes the genre of life-writing into
| a voracious apparatus of textualized selfhood, the underlying cultural
| function of biography, at least as a Western genre, can be seen to insinuate
| and extend what James Clifford has called "the myth of coherent personality."
| That is, by means of a massive life-writing consuming and producing selves
| from George Washington to Cary Grant and Alice James, the primary function of
| biography is to disseminate a plethora of *selves* who might instantiate this
| integrity of selfhood as achieved against a more or less recessive social
| background, what Le'vi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser have theorized (less
| blithely) as the overdeterminations of mythic structures, libidinal codes, and
| economic base. Hence, in contracting to document and amass the thematics of
| such a particularized self, the biographer enters the terms of a genre in
| which he or she contracts to deliver the individual as a tormented journey
| toward coherent unity, striking personality, and expressive selfhood ...
Just out of curiosity, do people really have trouble with this
stuff? I don't mean the style, which is, shall we say, less
than felicitous, but the meaning? I had no problem decoding
this at about normal reading speed, and my only objection to
it would be that it's sort of obvious. Or is that what's
being derided? An infelicitous style, and a tendency to state
the obvious, are so widespread -- especially on Usenet -- that
I would think it would be more boring, than funny. Can someone
clarify? I realize I'm out of touch compared to all you anti-
intellectuals whose site names just happen to end with the
three little letters "edu".
The other thing in this list was the usual objection to
criticizing art because art is more fun than criticism. This
line is so trite it should be given a number, like the jokes
in rec.humor, and it's also irrelevant, since the supposedly
ludicrous material was about political relationships, not
about giving artistic works grades. Ray Bradbury, indeed.
--
* Gordon Fitch | g...@panix.com
Mike Godwin
>chu...@emx.utexas.edu (Myron Veeblefester) made fun of some
>"postmodern" writings. As one example, the excerpt below is
>apparently supposed to be ludicrously incomprehensible as-is.
Like you, I don't find the passage incomprehensible. I do, however, find
it badly written.
>Just out of curiosity, do people really have trouble with this
>stuff?
Yes, but perhaps not the trouble you're assuming they claim to have.
> I don't mean the style, which is, shall we say, less
>than felicitous, but the meaning?
Doesn't the style affect how the reader is to take the meaning?
Doesn't the style have meaning in itself? It seems to me that it
does, and that part of the "trouble" one might have with the passage
is that one might object to the meaning inherent in such a style.
Consider: the author of the passage is literate and has an above-average
facility with words. His choice, then, to write in a fairly obfuscatory
style can be inferred to be a conscious one. What does this tell us about
him? What does it tell us about what he wants to communicate?
(I recognize that one can argue that even the so-called Plain Style
is deceptive, and I recognize even that there is sometimes merit in this
argument. But the kind of critical-language game-playing seen in the
quoted passage strikes me--a reader who of course can be said to determine
the meaning of the texts he reads--as particularly deceptive, since it
tries to imply that there's more meaning, more weight, to the passage
than there really is.)
>Or is that what's
>being derided? An infelicitous style, and a tendency to state
>the obvious, are so widespread -- especially on Usenet -- that
>I would think it would be more boring, than funny.
First of all, boringness is itself an offense, especially when one is
capable of not being boring. Secondly, this style is infelicitous in way
that distinguishes it from that of the Usenetters you allude to--lots of
folks haven't learned to write clearly, whereas this writer has chosen to
say the obvious unclearly. It's a less innocent infelicity.
>Can someone
>clarify? I realize I'm out of touch compared to all you anti-
>intellectuals whose site names just happen to end with the
>three little letters "edu".
The leap to the conclusion that those who object to the passage are
"anti-intellectual" is, of course, unsupported by anything you've posted
so far. Perhaps it was just a handy insult?
>The other thing in this list was the usual objection to
>criticizing art because art is more fun than criticism.
I think criticism--and even the postmodern criticism that an earlier
poster apparently derides here--is just fine. At its best, it's an art
itself, and it may surpass in artistic merit the objects of the
criticism.
>This
>line is so trite it should be given a number, like the jokes
>in rec.humor, and it's also irrelevant, since the supposedly
>ludicrous material was about political relationships, not
>about giving artistic works grades.
Do you honestly suppose that there is an easy dividing line between
literary criticism and "material ... about political relationships"?
I'd have thought that it was well established, in this century at least,
that the distinction was blurry at best. The "ludicrous material" relies
on literary theory--calling it "criticism" is no real misrepresentation.
--Mike
--
Mike Godwin, |"If the bubble reputation can be obtained only at the
mnem...@eff.org | cannon's mouth, I am willing to go there for it,
(617) 864-0665 | provided the cannon is empty."
EFF, Cambridge | --Mark Twain
Nigel Ling
I think boring is the word.
I am of the opinion that this kind of portentous and obscure writing
often disguises woolly thinking behind it. Even if one can extract some
meaning from the text it may well prove to have no great weight.
I have read academic criticism which is easy to read as well as having
substance. If the above example does have any merit then the author
should have made it his business to express the ideas clearly.
Nigel
sheila
>"postmodern" writings. As one example, the excerpt below is
>apparently supposed to be ludicrously incomprehensible as-is.
>
actually, the following excerpt is interesting:
>| As postmodern ethnography de-familiarizes the genre of life-writing into
>| a voracious apparatus of textualized selfhood, the underlying cultural
>| function of biography, at least as a Western genre, can be seen to insinuate
>| and extend what James Clifford has called "the myth of coherent personality."
>| That is, by means of a massive life-writing consuming and producing selves
>| from George Washington to Cary Grant and Alice James, the primary function of
>| biography is to disseminate a plethora of *selves* who might instantiate this
>| integrity of selfhood as achieved against a more or less recessive social
>| background, what Le'vi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser have theorized (less
>| blithely) as the overdeterminations of mythic structures, libidinal codes, and
>| economic base. Hence, in contracting to document and amass the thematics of
>| such a particularized self, the biographer enters the terms of a genre in
>| which he or she contracts to deliver the individual as a tormented journey
>| toward coherent unity, striking personality, and expressive selfhood ...
>
>Just out of curiosity, do people really have trouble with this
>stuff?
my opinion is that they refuse to read it.
and when they do read it they read it only so that they
can tell someone how much they hated it when they read it.
if you really bother to read it it should make sense,
at least as much sense as one can expect to gain from their
context.
i do agree with you about the style. it seems ridiculous to me
and it seems as though the person writing this should state everything
much clearer and more direct.
however, if you think about it, the person who wrote this is probably
not unskilled in writing and therefore i assume that they choose to
write this way for a reason.
i find some of the words used ugly and clumsy and silly
and i would have the author use elegant flowing wonderful words...
the author probalble wants to draw attention to the fact that he
is using words so he uses them like rocks.
only my opinion however, keep in mind that i'm an ignoramous.edu
grin
also keep in mind that i'm worlds away from actually studying
literature or litcrit.
>--
>* Gordon Fitch | g...@panix.com
interesting discussion though.
truly,
sheila
--
stark raving sane! she...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu
Ron Newman
|> chu...@emx.utexas.edu (Myron Veeblefester) made fun of some
|> "postmodern" writings. As one example, the excerpt below is
|> apparently supposed to be ludicrously incomprehensible as-is.
[example omitted]
|> Just out of curiosity, do people really have trouble with this
|> stuff? I don't mean the style, which is, shall we say, less
|> than felicitous, but the meaning? I had no problem decoding
|> this at about normal reading speed, and my only objection to
|> it would be that it's sort of obvious.
Frankly, I couldn't make head or tail of this passage.
I haven't the faintest idea what the writer is trying to say,
and I gave up trying about 3/4 of the way through.
You, Gordon, are one of the clearest writers I've seen on
Usenet. Care to try translating it into plain English
for us?
--
Ron Newman rne...@bbn.com
Steve Taylor
>chu...@emx.utexas.edu (Myron Veeblefester) made fun of some
>"postmodern" writings. As one example, the excerpt below is
>apparently supposed to be ludicrously incomprehensible as-is.
[... stuff deleted ...]
>| As postmodern ethnography de-familiarizes the genre of life-writing into
>| a voracious apparatus of textualized selfhood, the underlying cultural
>| function of biography, at least as a Western genre, can be seen to insinuate
[... stuff deleted ...]
>Just out of curiosity, do people really have trouble with this
>stuff? I don't mean the style, which is, shall we say, less
>than felicitous, but the meaning? I had no problem decoding
>this at about normal reading speed,
Well, I have no trouble understanding it, but the style is more than a
cosmetic problem for me. When we listen to someones ideas, we make our
own assesments of their credibility. Nothing beats listening intently to
their every word, thinking hard about them, and crosschecking facts as
required - but life is too short to do this with everyone. When I see
writing this bad, I make the assumption (which may sometimes be wrong) that
they have nothing to offer me.
I grew up reading a lot of nonfiction by Orwell and Mencken, and soaked up
a strong appreciation of very plain English writing. A lot of postmodern
criticism is an abomination by these standards, needing to be carefully
decoded before it can be judged. Neologisms, and common words redefined,
are a particular warning sign for me. Every technical field needs its own
vocabulary - that's ok. What's not ok is the use of a technical vocabulary
to increase the apparent intellectual content of your work, or to protect
it from the preying eyes of the uninitiated. To see this at its worst, have
a look at some Scientology literature.
>and my only objection to
>it would be that it's sort of obvious. Or is that what's
>being derided?
Maybe yes. I get resentful when I find that someone has turned the bloody
obvious into an academic field, because I see in that the implication that
"the bloody obvious" is no longer something I'm qualified to have opinions
about.
>* Gordon Fitch | g...@panix.com
Steve Taylor
st...@fulcrum.oz.au
Christopher J. Henrich
>chu...@emx.utexas.edu (Myron Veeblefester) made fun of some
>"postmodern" writings. As one example, the excerpt below is
>apparently supposed to be ludicrously incomprehensible as-is.
>
>| Some semi-random articles on the true meaningless of Neo-Bozo-LitCrit:
>| ...
>| The following is an excerpt from `Producing American Selves: The form of
>| American Biography" by Rob Wilson, in `boundary 2' (Summer 1991) as reported
>| in the Winter 1992 `Wilson Quarterly.' Wilson is an English professor (!) at
>| the University of Hawaii.
>|
>| As postmodern ethnography de-familiarizes the genre of life-writing into
>| a voracious apparatus of textualized selfhood, the underlying cultural
>| function of biography, at least as a Western genre, can be seen to insinuate
>| and extend what James Clifford has called "the myth of coherent personality."
>| That is, by means of a massive life-writing consuming and producing selves
>| from George Washington to Cary Grant and Alice James, the primary function of
>| biography is to disseminate a plethora of *selves* who might instantiate this
>| integrity of selfhood as achieved against a more or less recessive social
>| background, what Le'vi-Strauss, Lacan, and Althusser have theorized (less
>| blithely) as the overdeterminations of mythic structures, libidinal codes, and
>| economic base.
>
>Just out of curiosity, do people really have trouble with this
>stuff? I don't mean the style, which is, shall we say, less
>than felicitous, but the meaning? I had no problem decoding
>this at about normal reading speed, and my only objection to
>it would be that it's sort of obvious.
I fully agree about the style. As to the meaning, I think we can
distinguish between a level of meaning that is
asserted and another level that is suggested. The overt assertion
is sufficiently trite: biographies exist to portray selves.
The suggested meaning seems to me to be this: selves, all of them,
exist only as artifacts created by written culture. This is,
or should be, disputable to say the least. The paragraph quoted
does not attempt to dispute it, but rather to convince by repeated
and ponderous assertion. Its "infelicity" is , I think,
deliberate. We are intended to be impressed.
Perhaps my favorite quotation from _Pogo_ is this scrap of
dialog:
"Isn't that marvelous?"
"Yeah ... so brainy and incomprehensibobble."
Regards,
Chris Henrich
Joe Green
>
>I fully agree about the style. As to the meaning, I think we can
>distinguish between a level of meaning that is
>asserted and another level that is suggested. The overt assertion
>is sufficiently trite: biographies exist to portray selves.
>The suggested meaning seems to me to be this: selves, all of them,
>exist only as artifacts created by written culture. This is,
>or should be, disputable to say the least. The paragraph quoted
>does not attempt to dispute it, but rather to convince by repeated
>and ponderous assertion. Its "infelicity" is , I think,
>deliberate. We are intended to be impressed.
>
>Perhaps my favorite quotation from _Pogo_ is this scrap of
>dialog:
>
>"Isn't that marvelous?"
>"Yeah ... so brainy and incomprehensibobble."
>
stories in the West all tell the same old story.
The story that is told is a story of multiple selves all
finally coerced into one coherent self that looks back -- with
satisfaction or dismay -- at its struggles to achieve unity.
Why is this same story told again and again?
The more or less covert assertion is that these stories are told
because a "cultural apparatus" insists that they be told --
that biographers are unknowingly constrained by this apparatus
and, even when they think they are telling of a unique life
acting in freedom, they are actually telling the story that
the "apparatus" demands to satisfy the culture.
Lacan and so on have a theory about what this apparatus is and how
it acts. I will show you how this works in a few texts.
-----
And then, maybe the fellow who wrote the original piece will
show what the same old story is, attempt to prove that it is
repeated again and again, and provide some plausible reasons
for this.
If he doesn't do this then maybe he IS simply attempting to
convince by assertion, but remember that this is only an
excerpt from an essay.
--
Mike Godwin
>The conclusion I draw is that the kind of language people
>object to in "postmodern" critics is not an autochthonous
>invention of the critics but a requirement of their
>environments.
Isn't it both?
Your statement here invites us to tolerate (or perhaps even to pity)
these critics who are compelled by their environment to write this way.
But who created that environment?
Gordon Fitch
responded to my "Do people really have a problem with this?"
with variously qualified "Well, yes"-es. I've even been
asked for a translation, which I think I'll pass. Let's
agree that the style is bad, and ask why.
There are a lot of, uh, levels -- possible levels -- to this
piece of writing, and one would have to know things the
passage itself doesn't tell us to do a translation or assess
its effectiveness. Only one level is the explicit meaning
of the passage. A second level is its textual context, that
is, the stuff the author may be warming up to tell us. That
may excuse some of the obviousness: "Here's stuff I know and
you know, but I'm reminding you of it as a background to
what I'm going to say later." However, I don't think either
of these levels requires the excess and turgidity we observe.
So I assume there's yet another level: the way the article
functioned in its social context. It is noted that the
author is an English professor at the University of Hawaii,
a place I have been told by a former inmate is highly
"political", even for Academia, which is saying something.
In such an environment, it may be necessary for the author
to show that he is smart, with-it, and is one who has Done
the Reading, and he may have to show it constantly. Thus,
the useless aside to a less-than-blithe Althusser, and so
on.
A similar motivation may drive the tendency to neologism. It
is not that one needs new words, but needs to show that one
knows how to form new words.
Now, I may write clearly, but my writing puts no bread on
the table, and if I had to depend on it for an income, I
would be in deep trouble. The author of "Producing
American Selves", however, is a full professor, and I
would bet dollars to dogbiscuits his writing has a lot to
do with his full-professorhood. _His_ writing functions in
its context very well: it gets printed and reprinted and
even turns over a dollar; mine gets me the occasional
compliment before it falls into the unresisting void.
The conclusion I draw is that the kind of language people
object to in "postmodern" critics is not an autochthonous
invention of the critics but a requirement of their
environments. Otherwise, we would have the purveyors of
pomocrit starving in garages, as neophyte van painters do,
to perfect their art for its own sake. But I have never
heard of a starving critic. I think, to pursue the
question any further, we would have to ask ourselves why
the system in which Professor Wilson functions _demands_
turgid excess. Naturally, I suspect that the answer is
political; but as my postmodern nemesis-wannabe Robert
reminds me, I do tend to go on, and will let somebody
else theorize now. Anyhow, after I use a word like
"autochthonous" I have to go lie down for awhile.
Vijay Samalam
> question any further, we would have to ask ourselves why
> the system in which Professor Wilson functions _demands_
> turgid excess. Naturally, I suspect that the answer is
> political;
Maybe Bernard Shaw was right. He explained the phenomena
most succintly in, I think, The Doctor's Dilemma :
"All professions are a conspiracy against the laity"
Regards,
-Vijay
************************************
Vijay K. Samalam fiat experimentum in
GTE Laboratories corpore vili
Waltham , MA 02254
e-mail vk...@gte.com INTERNET
************************************
dave liebman
theory is a function of the demands of academia:
yes, but it seems to me that this can be -- and is -- justified by the
deconstructionist philosophy itself, not simply the xenopolitics of the
university. derrida's _sign, structure and play_ is more or less about that:
that an idea is -- i'm glossing this -- bound by language. that the language
of any utterance _actively_ participates in constructing meaning; in
effect, there are no 'synonyms'. thus any series of words inevitably 'fixes'
meaning (logocentrically); any alternate translation will 'fix' meaning in a
somewhat different way. the repetition and bloatedness of critical prose is an
effort to 'loosen' meaning. what the consequences of loosening meaning are is
well, not going to be discussed here. :)
also, i think that critical prose is actually intending to be poetic. whether
or not this works is (are you listening richard?) a matter of taste. the
techniques are, like any other genre of poetry, somewhat cannonized (!), and i
find it sort of wearying myself. helen cixous, on the other hand, at least in
_laugh of/at [?] the medusa_, the once piece of hers i've read, constructs from
this style one of the most wonderful pieces of _anything_ i've read. this
attempt at poetry is, of course, concerned with arbitrary boundaries of genre,
etc etc
peace,
dave liebman
l...@vax5.cit.cornell.edu
Gordon Fitch
| [ why gross prose ]...
| yes, but it seems to me that this can be -- and is -- justified by the
| deconstructionist philosophy itself, not simply the xenopolitics of the
| university. derrida's _sign, structure and play_ is more or less about that:
| that an idea is -- i'm glossing this -- bound by language. that the language
| of any utterance _actively_ participates in constructing meaning; in
| effect, there are no 'synonyms'. thus any series of words inevitably 'fixes'
| meaning (logocentrically); any alternate translation will 'fix' meaning in a
| somewhat different way. the repetition and bloatedness of critical prose is an
|
| also, i think that critical prose is actually intending to be poetic. ...
I'd like to suggest something a little bit different. Let's
consider some points already made:
1. The excerpt could have been written much more clearly,
as Joe Green demonstrated. Besides being written in turgid
style, the excerpt contained apparently unhelpful
excrescences -- the less-blithe Althusser, and so on.
2. I write clearly, but it does me no good.
3. Professor Wilson writes turgidly, and it does him a lot
of good.
In my previous article, I deduced that the Professor's
environment desires turgidity, because it pays for it.
Otherwise, I would be a professor, and Wilson would be
writing on Usenet for fun. (Mike Godwin suggests that I
may think this makes the professor a victim, but I
suspect he is a willing participant.) Thus, I think
a lot of postmodern criticism is badly written (bad
from my point of view) because those who pay for it
and support it in other ways want it to be that way.
Does this make sense? I think so. Here's my
hypothesis:
Academia, from which most pomocrit emanates, and where
the professor works, is part of the bourgeois pyramid
of authority, intimately related to the government,
especially the military, and to the interlocking
structure of the major corporations. It is inherently
an authoritarian system, but its special functions
require a special kind of authoritarianism in which
the operatives can wear jeans instead of uniforms.
One of the functions of Academia is to process
intellectual matters for the benefit of the rest of
the system. When the intellectual matters are research
into nuclear energy or mass social manipulation, the
application is clear. But what about literature and
philosophy? Doesn't Auden assure us that "poetry makes
nothing happen"? I suggest that Academia isn't taking
any chances. The Sermon on the Mount and the _Communist_
_Manifesto_ are mostly poetry, and they made plenty of
things happen -- things that were extremely inconvenient
for the authorities of their day.
Now, some of the ideas that we assign to "postmodernism"
are pretty simple and at the same time fairly disturbing
to a lot of people. One of these ideas is that there is
no fixed frame of reference in the Universe -- an idea
which leads to General Relativity in physics, and to
multiculturalism down at the school board. Both have
incinerated cities; they are not to be taken lightly.
And while the idea is simple, the ramifications and
implications are complex and far-reaching. Look at how
long this article is already.
Academia, like all authority systems, is threatened by the
idea of a multipolar or apolar Universe, because what's an
authority in one schema may be nothing in another, and if
authority isn't assured, it isn't really authority; we are
let loose in an anarchic, or at least (classical) liberal
world. Paychecks and tickets to conferences in Nice may
be threatened. At the same time, experience has taught all
of us that simple repression usually doesn't work with
dangerous ideas. The preferred process has been to take in
the ideas and deaden them by scripturalizing them.
Thus, what might have been the prologomenon of an
troublesome line of thought becomes instead its ball and
chain. Jesus said, Marx said, Freud said, God said.
"'Shut up,' he explained." The system isolates the ideas
by enshrining them, like an oyster building a pearl around
a grain of irritating sand.
In the case of postmodern thought, then, official writers
serve the system well when they make it appear obscure and
difficult -- even to the point of working out a theory by
which its obfuscatory qualities are essential. They get
paid, and they applaud each other. The snickering in the
gallery is all part of it; hearing it, the fellows on the
stage knowingly exchange smirks -- it's all in the family.
How's that?
Mike Godwin
>also, i think that critical prose is actually intending to be poetic.
Hey! Good save!
Mike Godwin
>In my previous article, I deduced that the Professor's
>environment desires turgidity, because it pays for it.
>Otherwise, I would be a professor, and Wilson would be
>writing on Usenet for fun. (Mike Godwin suggests that I
>may think this makes the professor a victim, but I
>suspect he is a willing participant.)
I suspect so, too. That's why I can't forgive him.
Allen Smith
> In article <1992May11....@panix.com> g...@panix.com (Gordon Fitch) writes:
>
>>chu...@emx.utexas.edu (Myron Veeblefester) made fun of some
>>"postmodern" writings. As one example, the excerpt below is
>>apparently supposed to be ludicrously incomprehensible as-is.
>
> Like you, I don't find the passage incomprehensible. I do, however, find
> it badly written.
>
>>Just out of curiosity, do people really have trouble with this
>>stuff?
>
> Yes, but perhaps not the trouble you're assuming they claim to have.
>
>> I don't mean the style, which is, shall we say, less
>>than felicitous, but the meaning?
>
> Doesn't the style affect how the reader is to take the meaning?
> Doesn't the style have meaning in itself? It seems to me that it
> does, and that part of the "trouble" one might have with the passage
> is that one might object to the meaning inherent in such a style.
> Consider: the author of the passage is literate and has an above-average
> facility with words. His choice, then, to write in a fairly obfuscatory
> style can be inferred to be a conscious one. What does this tell us about
> him? What does it tell us about what he wants to communicate?
How do you reach the conclusion that the writer consciously chose
to write in an obscure manner? I'm literate and have been told that I've
got an above-average facility with words (750 SAT Verbal, for instance).
But I am most definitely not the clearest writer in the world. I try to be
clear, but I don't succeed. Even if you wouldn't say that I've got an
above-average facility with words, how do you justify saying that the
writer in question does?
-Allen
Mike Godwin
> How do you reach the conclusion that the writer consciously chose
>to write in an obscure manner?
The particular kind of obscurity in that article takes positive work to
achieve. It's not accidental or unwitting.
>I'm literate and have been told that I've
>got an above-average facility with words (750 SAT Verbal, for instance).
>But I am most definitely not the clearest writer in the world.
I distinguish between the unwittingly unclear and the intentionally
unclear by looking at whether the lack of clarity is consistent. If it is,
you can be reasonably certain that it was intentionally so--even the most
infelicitous of the unwittingly unclear writers frequently say things
clearly.
>I try to be
>clear, but I don't succeed. Even if you wouldn't say that I've got an
>above-average facility with words, how do you justify saying that the
>writer in question does?
Because he has mastered a particular academic style with which I became
familiar in a former life as a graduate student.
Joe Green
Ah, you are missing the little grace notes that are there --
for example the kind of astonishment at his own ability to
consummate all things merely by pulling a few phrases from
the shiny portmanteau under his arms shown by the sentences
periodic that are rather like revenants of the ghosts of
the sentences Sir Thomas Browne loved to disport with in, for
example, "Hydrotaphia, Urn Burial." These sentences gesture
a collegial irony that is recognized by the friendly reader --
mostly those who toil in the same place for the burial of urns.
This will certainly be felt by those who achieved an 800 on
their GRE (only 800 tho every answer correct!) and have
demonstrated both the mastery of the trivial required by this
examination and the mind-reading skills necessary to fathom the
mediocrity required for a perfect score even though they were up
half the night before imbibing daiqueris and the rest of the night
kept awake by the snoring of their beloved.
--
kevin brooks
i think differences should be *made* between "postmodernist" and
"poststructuralist" criticism. in the case of the so-called
poststructuralist stance, i don't remember derrida, de man, et al.
discussing or privileging a "postmodernist" perspective. Where
Derrida, in his essays, often uses language that appears to posit
epistemological breaks, we must remember that he also dicusses
deconstruction "before the letter" -- thus his dicussions of
"deconstructionist" moments *within* *the* *texts* (not necessarily
the author) of rousseau, plato, and so forth.
the poststructuralism that has come to be known as deconstruction
*is* a critique made *through* language of ontological as well as
epistemological claims. thus recognizing that both these categories
are linguistically constructed *independent* of their (as is
popularly chanted today) social construction. in this way one may
choose to see deconstruction as a very ahistorical enterprise.
however, it is deconstruction's stance with regard to the "difference"
*of* language that makes its position the most "historical" today.
the willingness of deconstructionists to "unread" and "decontextualize"
texts as an index of an historical, and more radical, epistemological
difference presents an argument for history *as* difference. in other
words, historical, temporal, or critical difference is a necessary
effect of reading a text. thus theorized, logocentrism, and all those
other "centrisms" are authorial acts against the act of reading, which
entails paying attention to the construction of the text -- the
rhetorical effects produced by the reading process -- what a different
set of critics might have rarefied as "form".
the postmodernist stance, i believe, is a very ahistorical understanding
of the linguistic problems with which poststructuralists work. for
instance, postmodernism is often posited as a periodization denoting
a time after modernism. postmodernist critics often argue *against*
"modernist" stances; these post arguments often seem to me to be too
classicist to be critical. furthermore, postmodernist critics
(for example, R. Rorty and Craig Owens), often privelege certain
artists and art based on "postmodernist" criteria. the latter is often
unexamined with regard to its "postmodernist" pedigree. what i am trying
to point out in an all too elliptical manner is that "classicism",
"modernism", and "postmodernism" are categories that we should treat
rhetorically, as we can treat Hegel's "symbolic", "classic", and
"romantic". deconstruction, i think, examines these types of problems.
kevin brooks
center for the study of modernism
kbr...@emx.utexas.edu
Vance Maverick
This will certainly be felt by those who achieved an 800 on
their GRE (only 800 tho every answer correct!) and have
demonstrated both the mastery of the trivial required by this
examination and the mind-reading skills necessary to fathom the
mediocrity required for a perfect score even though they were up
half the night before imbibing daiqueris and the rest of the night
^^^^^^^^^
kept awake by the snoring of their beloved.
That's "daiquIris", Joe.
Vance (who didn't get to see his beloved until just after the
exam, but definitely knows from trivial)
Nichael Cramer
> "poststructuralist stance"
Lovely phrase, that.
N