Re: Dr. Frab Timov redefining postmodern political philosophy
Immortalist
jsc...@gmail.com wrote:
> Dr. Frab Timov [ http://timov.artshost.com/ ] is redefining postmodern
> political philosophy almost on a daily basis. His theoretical
> underpinnings are based firmly in the postmodernism of Foucault, Lacan,
> and Derrida, yet his application is based upon an approach of constant,
> disciplined flux.
>
> Is theory a constantly moving target? Or is it a development based
> upon the sturdy foundation of philosophical thought from the last
> several millennia? Dr. Frab Timov clearly believes in a plurality, an
> academia that is simultaneously both structurally rigid and
> intellectually ductile. It is like a subatomic particle that can exist
> in multiple states simultaneously for it cannot be measured directly
> but only as a series of mathematical probabilities.
>
> To read more of Dr. Frab Timov's hilariously serious and outrageous
> philsophical postmodernist ramblings, check out his website:
> http://timov.artshost.com/
- Post/Modernism is Based on False Theory of Human Psychology, Beauty
is Dirty Word
ONCE WE RECOGNIZE what modernism and postmodernism have done to the
elite arts and humanities, the reasons for their decline and fall
become all too obvious. The movements are based on a false theory of
human psychology, the Blank Slate. They fail to apply their most
vaunted ability-stripping away pretense-to themselves. And they take
all the fun out of art!
Modernism and postmodernism cling to a theory of perception that was
rejected long ago: that the sense organs present the brain with a
tableau of raw colors and sounds and that everything else in perceptual
experience is a learned social construction. As we saw in preceding
chapters, the visual system of the brain comprises some fifty regions
that take raw pixels and effortlessly organize them into surfaces,
colors, motions, and three-dimensional objects. We can no more turn the
system off and get immediate access to pure sensory experience than we
can override our stomachs and tell them when to release their digestive
enzymes. The visual system, moreover, does not drug us into a
hallucinatory fantasy disconnected from the real world. It evolved to
feed us information about the consequential things out there, like
rocks, cliffs, animals, and other people and their intentions.
Nor does innate organization stop at apprehending the physical
structure of the world. It also colors our visual experience with
universal emotions and aesthetic pleasures. Young children prefer
calendar landscapes to pictures of deserts and forests, and babies as
young as three months old gaze longer at a pretty face than at a plain
one. Babies prefer consonant musical intervals over dissonant ones, and
two-year-olds embark on a lifetime of composing and appreciating
narrative fiction when they engage in pretend play.
When we perceive the products of other people's behavior, we evaluate
them through our intuitive psychology, our theory of mind. We do not
take a stretch of language or an artifact like a product or work of art
at face value, but try to guess why the producers came out with them
and what effect they hope to have on us (as we saw in Chapter 12). Of
course, people can be taken in by a clever liar, but they are not
trapped in a false world of words and images and in need of rescue by
postmodernist artists.
Modernist and postmodernist artists and critics fail to acknowledge
another feature of human nature that drives the arts: the hunger for
status, especially their own hunger for status. As we saw, the
psychology of art is entangled with the psychology of esteem, with its
appreciation of the rare, the sumptuous, the virtuosic, and the
dazzling. The problem is that whenever people seek rare things,
entrepreneurs make them less rare, and whenever a dazzling performance
is imitated, it can become commonplace. The result is the perennial
turnover of styles in the arts. The psychologist Colin Martindale has
documented that every art form increases in complexity, ornamentation,
and emotional charge until the evocative potential of the style is
fully exploited. Attention then turns to the style itself, at which
point the style gives way to a new one. Martindale attributes this
cycle to habituation on the part of the audience, but it also comes
from the desire for attention on the part of the artists.
In twentieth-century art, the search for the new new thing became
desperate because of the economies of mass production and the affluence
of the middle class. As cameras, art reproductions, radios, records,
magazines, movies, and paperbacks became affordable, ordinary people
could buy art by the carload. It is hard to distinguish oneself as a
good artist or discerning connoisseur if people are up to their ears in
the stuff, much of it of reasonable artistic merit. The problem for
artists is not that popular culture is so bad but that it is so good,
at least some of the time. Art could no longer confer prestige by the
rarity or excellence of the works themselves, so it had to confer it by
the rarity of the powers of appreciation. As Bourdieu points out, only
a special elite of initiates could get the point of the new works of
art. And with beautiful things spewing out of printing presses and
record plants, distinctive works need not be beautiful. Indeed, they
had better not be, because now any schmo could have beautiful things.
One result is that modernist art stopped trying to appeal to the
senses. On the contrary, it disdained beauty as saccharine and
lightweight. In his 1913 book Art, the critic Clive Bell (Virginia
Woolf's brother-in-law and Quentin's father) argued that beauty had no
place in good art because it was rooted in crass experiences. People
use beautiful in phrases like "beautiful huntin' and shootin'," he
wrote, or worse, to refer to beautiful women. Bell assimilated the
behaviorist psychology of his day and argued that ordinary people come
to enjoy art by a process of Pavlovian conditioning. They appreciate a
painting only if it depicts a beautiful woman, music only if it evokes
"emotions similar to those provoked by young ladies in musical farces,"
and poetry only if it arouses feelings like the ones once felt for the
vicar's daughter. Thirty-five years later, the abstract painter Barnett
Newman approvingly declared that the impulse of modern art was "the
desire to destroy beauty." Postmodernists were even more dismissive.
Beauty, they said, consists of arbitrary standards dictated by an
elite. It enslaves women by forcing them to conform to unrealistic
ideals, and it panders to market-oriented art collectors.
To be fair, modernism comprises many styles and artists, and not all of
them rejected beauty and other human sensibilities. At its best,
modernist design perfected a visual elegance and an aesthetic of
form-following-function that were welcome alternatives to Victorian
bric-a-brac and ostentatious displays of wealth. The art movements
opened up new stylistic possibilities, including motifs from Africa and
Oceania. The fiction and poetry offered invigorating intellectual
workouts, and countered a sentimental romanticism that saw art as a
spontaneous overflow of the artist's personality and emotion. The
problem with modernism was that its philosophy did not acknowledge the
ways in which it was appealing to human pleasure. As its denial of
beauty became an orthodoxy, and as its aesthetic successes were
appropriated into commercial culture (such as minimalism in graphic
design), modernism left nowhere for artists to go.
Quentin Bell suggested that when the variations within a genre are
exhausted, people avail themselves of a different canon of status,
which he added to Veblen's list. In "conspicuous outrage," bad boys
(and girls) flaunt their ability to get away with shocking the
bourgeoisie. The never-ending campaign by postmodernist artists to
attract the attention of a jaded public progressed from puzzling
audiences to doing everything they could to offend them. Everyone has
heard of the notorious cases: Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs of
sadomasochistic acts, Andres Serrano's Piss Christ (a crucifix in a jar
of the artist's urine), Chris Ofili's painting of the Virgin Mary
smeared in elephant dung, and the nine-hour performance piece "Flag
Fuck (w/Beef) #17B," in which Ivan Hubiak danced on stage wearing an
American flag as a diaper while draping himself with raw meat.
Actually, this last one never happened; it was invented by writers for
the satirical newspaper The Onion in an article entitled "Performance
Artist Shocks U.S. Out of Apathetic Slumber." But I bet I had you
fooled.
Another result is that elite art could no longer be appreciated without
a support team of critics and theoreticians. They did not simply
evaluate and interpret art, like movie critics or book reviewers, but
supplied the art with its rationale. Tom Wolfe wrote The Painted Word
after reading an art review in the New York Times that criticized
realist painting because it lacked "something crucial," namely, "a
persuasive theory." Wolfe explains:
Then and there I experienced a flash known as the Aha! phenomenon, and
the buried life of contemporary art was revealed to me for the first
time.... All these years I, like so many others, had stood in front of
a thousand, two thousand, God-knows-how-many thousand Pollocks, de
Koonings, Newmans, Nolands, Rothkos, Rauschenbergs, Judds, Johnses,
Olitskis, Louises, Stills, Franz Klines, Frankenthalers, Kellys, and
Frank Stellas, now squinting, now popping the eye sockets open, now
drawing back, now moving closer-waiting, waiting, forever waiting
for... it... for it to come into focus, namely, the visual reward (for
so much effort) which must be there, which everyone (tout le monde)
knew to be there-waiting for something to radiate directly from the
paintings on these invariably pure white walls, in this room, in this
moment, into my own optic chiasma. All these years, in short, I had
assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well-how
very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28,1974, I could see. I had
gotten it backward all along. Not "seeing is believing," you ninny, but
"believing is seeing," for Modern Art has become completely literary:
the paintings and other works exist only to illustrate the text.
Once again, postmodernism took this extreme to an even greater extreme
in which the theory upstaged the subject matter and became a genre of
performance art in itself. Postmodernist scholars, taking off from the
critical theorists Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault, distrust the
demand for "linguistic transparency" because it hobbles the ability "to
think the world more radically" and puts a text in danger of being
turned into a mass-market commodity. This attitude has made them
regular winners of the annual Bad Writing Contest, which "celebrates
the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and
articles." In 1998, first prize went to the lauded professor of
rhetoric at Berkeley, Judith Butler, for the following sentence:
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to
structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of
hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition,
convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality
into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of
Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical
objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of
structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with
the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Dutton, whose journal Philosophy and Literature sponsors the contest,
assures us that this is not a satire. The rules of the contest forbid
it: "Deliberate parody cannot be allowed in a field where unintended
self-parody is so widespread."
A final blind spot to human nature is the failure of contemporary
artists and theorists to deconstruct their own moral pretensions.
Artists and critics have long believed that an appreciation of elite
art is ennobling and have spoken of cultural philistines in tones
ordinarily reserved for child molesters (as we see in the two meanings
of the word barbarian). The affectation of social reform that surrounds
modernism and postmodernism is part of this tradition.
Though moral sophistication requires an appreciation of history and
cultural diversity, there is no reason to think that the elite arts are
a particularly good way to instill it compared with middlebrow
realistic fiction or traditional education. The plain fact is that
there are no obvious moral consequences to how people entertain
themselves in their leisure time. The conviction that artists and
connoisseurs are morally advanced is a cognitive illusion, arising from
the fact that our circuitry for morality is cross-wired with our
circuitry for status (see Chapter 15). As the critic George Steiner has
pointed out, "We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the
evening, that he can play Bach and Schubert, and go to his day's work
at Auschwitz in the morning." Conversely there must be many unlettered
people who give blood, risk their lives as volunteer firefighters, or
adopt handicapped children, but whose opinion of modern art is "My four
year-old daughter could have done that."
The moral and political track record of modernist artists is nothing to
be proud of. Some were despicable in the conduct of their personal
lives, and many embraced fascism or Stalinism. The modernist composer
Kariheinz Stockhausen described the September 11,2001, terrorist
attacks as "the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos"
and added, enviously, that "artists, too, sometimes go beyond the
limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that
we open ourselves to another world." Nor is the theory of postmodernism
especially progressive. A denial of objective reality is no friend to
moral progress, because it prevents one from saying, for example, that
slavery or the Holocaust really took place. And as Adam Gopnik has
pointed out, the political messages of most postmodernist pieces are
utterly banal, like "racism is bad." But they are stated so obliquely
that viewers are made to feel morally superior for being able to figure
them out.
As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status
with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values
of the middle class-personal responsibility, devotion to family and
neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal
democracy-are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to
join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who
adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth
century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass Utopian
uprisings can hardly be held against them. And if they want to hang a
painting of a red barn or a weeping clown above their couch, it's none
of our damn business.
The dominant theories of elite art and criticism in the twentieth
century grew out of a militant denial of human nature. One legacy is
ugly, baffling, and insulting art. The other is pretentious and
unintelligible scholarship. And they're surprised that people are
staying away in droves?
The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
Steven Pinker
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
http://alumweb.mit.edu/opendoor/200205/pinker.shtml
bearing the bad news sucks!
jsc...@gmail.com
have declined, is intrinsically false. Actually, both are alive and
well in the liberal arts, humanities, social sciences, and even hard
sciences.
The main theme of Dr. Frab Timov's critique of the precapitalist
paradigm of reality is the role of the observer as postmodernist. In a
sense, the subconstructivist paradigm of consensus suggests that
consciousness is part of the defining characteristic of the
postmodernist. The subject is contextualised into a postcapitalist
deappropriation that includes reality as a whole.
But the primary theme of the works of Dr. Theodore Mangrove is the
dialectic of textual class. Any number of narratives concerning a
self-fulfilling reality exist.
Therefore, Dr. Theodore Mangrove uses the term 'postdialectic
materialism' to denote the bridge between sexual identity and culture.
Dr. Timov suggests the use of the subconstructivist paradigm of
consensus to read society. But Dr. Mangrove's analysis of postdialectic
materialism holds that context must come from the collective
unconscious, given that the premise that postcapitalist deappropriation
is invalid. Dr. Timov uses the term 'the subconstructivist paradigm of
consensus' to denote not, in fact, postmodernism, but neopostmodernism.
=\=\=\=\=\=\=\=
http://timov.artshost.com/
Tim
"Immortalist" <reanima...@yahoo.com> wrote in message
news:1130344872....@g14g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
While completely missing the point is just embarrassing! Same old, same old
eh smokee.
Immortalist
fti...@gmail.com wrote:
> If one examines rubber-chicken constructivism, one is faced with a
> choice: either reject capitalist discourse or conclude that the State
> is incapable of truth. Cultural nihilism suggests that society has
> intrinsic rubber-chickenness.
>
In the mean time the world wakes to another day of reality. A reality
of a delusional primate that believes he is out of the jungle and
safely in a civilized world.
Watch Darwinian truth bust that down again this day.
Why can't are reflect this ruthless struggle with a smiley face?
> In a sense, an abundance of materialisms concerning the defining
> characteristic, and subsequent rubicon, of subtextual rubber-chicken
> identity may be discovered. Lacan uses the term 'constructivism' to
> denote a rubber-chickenist reality.
>
> But Baudrillard suggests the use of the neodialectic paradigm of
> narrative to deconstruct archaic, elitist perceptions of rubber-chicken
> culture. The premise of constructivism implies that the raison d'etre
> of the participant is social comment. Thus, Lacan promotes the use of
> Lyotardist narrative to read rubber-chicken identity. The subject is
> interpolated into a capitalist discourse that includes narrativity as a
> paradox.
>
> -Dr. Frab Timov
> http://timov.artshost.com/
Tim
>
> fti...@gmail.com wrote:
>> If one examines rubber-chicken constructivism, one is faced with a
>> choice: either reject capitalist discourse or conclude that the State
>> is incapable of truth. Cultural nihilism suggests that society has
>> intrinsic rubber-chickenness.
>>
>
> In the mean time the world wakes to another day of reality. A reality
> of a delusional primate that believes he is out of the jungle and
> safely in a civilized world.
>
> Watch Darwinian truth bust that down again this day.
>
> Why can't are reflect this ruthless struggle with a smiley face?
Why can't you write a literate sentence?
Immortalist
jsc...@gmail.com wrote:
> Your assumption that modernism and postmodernism are in decline, or
> have declined, is intrinsically false. Actually, both are alive and
> well in the liberal arts, humanities, social sciences, and even hard
> sciences.
>
If Pinker's reference to decline and fall referes to a theory of
perception and that this theory of perception has been shown to be
flawed then this is what he means. But if;
Postmodernism is a complicated term, or set of ideas, one that has only
emerged as an area of academic study since the mid-1980s. Postmodernism
is hard to define, because it is a concept that appears in a wide
variety of disciplines or areas of study, including art, architecture,
music, film, literature, sociology, communications, fashion, and
technology. It's hard to locate it temporally or historically, because
it's not clear exactly when postmodernism begins.
http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html
The term 'postmodernism' has become so over-used during the past 50
years that it is now difficult to take seriously as a respectable
philosophical or sociological concept. However, despite the difficulty
many people seem to have in making sense of it, this very ubiquity can
be taken as an indication that postmodernism fulfils a useful role in
the way people think about the changes that society has undergone
during this period.
In order to understand it we need briefly to examine the modernism that
postmodernism is supposed to be replacing. Generally, history is too
messy to be divided into neat periods but a classification in which...
The Ancient World ended with the fall of the Roman Empire
The Middle Ages lasted until the Renaissance, and
The Modern World developed through the Reformation and the
Enlightenment
...is not too controversial for our purposes.
What, then, was different about the modern world from that which
existed before? One way of looking at the difference is through
individual identity. People no longer identified themselves by their
place in a rigid social structure; nor did they judge the success of
their lives on how closely they had conformed to the course
pre-determined by their place within that framework. The way of
defining the individual began to change1, and it became necessary to
find criteria that could define a good or successful life, other than
those of established authority.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A5140829
...please explain which postmodernism you be talkin' about.
>> Modernism and postmodernism cling to
>> a theory of perception that was
>> rejected long ago: that the sense
>> organs present the brain with a
>> tableau of raw colors and sounds
>> and that everything else in perceptual
>> experience is a learned social construction.
George Dance
Immortalist wrote:
> - Post/Modernism is Based on False Theory of Human Psychology, Beauty
> is Dirty Word
snip
>
> The Blank Slate - The Modern Denial of Human Nature
> Steven Pinker
> http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0670031518/qid=1086630363/
> http://alumweb.mit.edu/opendoor/200205/pinker.shtml
I don't often read the long pieces you quote here, and this one looked
like it was going to be just another anti-postmodernist rant. So I was
quite pleasantly surprised: Pinker is quite a good writer, and he made
his points clearly, reasonably, and effectively. A good piece.
drman...@gmail.com
colleague of mine) is the distinction between masculine and feminine in
what Baudrillard called 'postdialectic desemanticism' to denote not
situationism as such, but neosituationism.
If one examines postsemantic deappropriation, one is faced with a
choice: either accept postdialectic desemanticism or conclude that
academe is part of the collapse of sexuality, given that Lyotard's
essay on dialectic feminism is invalid. However, in A Portrait of the
Artist As a Young Man, Joyce deconstructs the modernist paradigm of
reality; in Finnegan's Wake, however, he reiterates pretextual
capitalist theory. The subject is interpolated into a dialectic
feminism that includes language as a whole.
But Dr. Frab Timov suggests the use of subconstructive discourse to
attack the status quo. Several deconstructivisms concerning the role of
the artist as observer may be revealed.
In a sense, the main theme of Hamburger's critique of postdialectic
desemanticism is the genre of cultural class. Pretextual capitalist
theory states that narrative comes from communication. It could be said
that the characteristic theme of the works of Joyce is the difference
between society and truth. Lacan promotes the use of dialectic feminism
to modify sexual identity.
Therefore, the primary theme of Dr. Frab Timov's analysis of pretextual
capitalist theory is a self-sufficient paradox. If dialectic feminism
holds, we have to choose between neocapitalist narrative and
Batailleist `powerful communication'.