POSTMODERNISM DOES NOT EXIST
borris...@my-deja.com
of academicians meant to justify their own
existences, to lend credance to their otherwise
inutile careers. What more can be said about Kant
or Joyce that hasn't already been said? This
being the case they have moved on to manufacture
their own interpretations of interpretations:
watch out for that word, hermeneutic! Fear of
not being au currant fuels much of the hysteria.
The dead give-away is its language, which is, er,
dead, lifeless, a self-created, insular, baroque
jargon, only an elaborate mimick of the utile
jargon of science and technology. It is a fake
specialization contrived to mimick other
specializations in an age of specialization.
(Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
historicity, historiography, historicism,
semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
valorization.)
Another indication of its decadence is that it is
a derivative of derivatives, a loveless, dessicate
terrain incapable of generation of creativity,
recalling the words of E.E. Cummings: "Knowledge
is ... dead but not buried imagination." It
consists of reinterpretation of essays which
reinterpret essay which reinterpret what others
have created or are creating. In and of itself it
creates nothing, is impotent and sterile. It
inadvertantly fulfills the visions of a bankrupt,
spent Western civilization described by, among
others, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
Knowledge is understandable, even foregivable, if
useful in dealing with chaos, natural phenomena,
social problems, etc., i.e., in furthering the
goals of the Enlightenment. It is to be ignored if
existing for its own sake, as it does in this
effite debate.
The creations of all ages live and breath and are
useful for our lives, as they will be for our
grandchildrens' lives, whether they be ancient
English and Scottish popular ballads or Kafka. The
elegance of Newtonian physics remains as
aesthetically pleasing today as it was 400 years
ago, regardless of all the babble about
"paradigmatic shifts."
The self-consciousness necessary to come up with
such babble paralyzes the creation of anything
new. It is only those incapable of creating, those
afraid of the courage it takes to brave chaos, who
fall back into the endless prattle about Kant,
Heidegger, Hegel, Neitzsche etc. They in no way
partake of these men's impetus of imagination, but
rather retreat from it like cowards, dry, old men
who write to essays to further their careers to
pay their mortgages to please their mothers.
My advice to all postmodernism experts: go out and
get a real job (at least till your corner of The
Garden as advised by Voltair in Candide).
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
Grachman Olajuwon
life by the law or the government.
What could it apply or add to our knowledge anyways? That there is no meaning,
and never has been? Thanks, that really helps.
George Will, a columnist for Newsweek, wrote:
******
A tenet of fashionable philosophy is that humanity has progressed far enough
intellectually to know that intellectual progress has never been possible. That
is, truth is unattainable--a chimera, in fact--because all truths are "social
constructs," culturally conditioned, etc. Pope John Paul II summons the
faithful to the barricades against postmodernism's belief that all truths are
merely "perspectival"--matters of points of view.
It may seem that the times are indeed out of joint when it falls to the Bishop
of Rome to issue a ringing defense of belief in reason's capacity to encompass
the most important truths. But, then, do the world's religions contain tenets
more difficult to believe than what science is suggesting about the origin and
trajectory of the cosmos?
One of the most impressive results of the "meaningless accident," the "chemical
fluke" that produced life was the man who wrote: Take but degree away, untune
that string, And, hark! what discord follows. Shakespeare was writing about
society. What he wrote is even more true of the universe. Take but degree away
(see above, the one quadrillionth of 1 percent margin for error), untune that
string, and what follows is not just discord but eternal entropy and ice. So,
what--who?--was the great Tuner?
Science increasingly validates a heartfelt--and rational--"Eureka!" in response
to the (literally) cosmic surprise of life. As playwright Tom Stoppard puts it,
"The idea of God is slightly more plausible than the alternative proposition
that, given enough time, some green slime could write Shakespeare's sonnets."
To say no more (but this is saying a lot), what is is staggeringly implausible,
and that is theologically suggestive.
****
***************************************************
Grachman, The
Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
>
> Postmodernism does not exist. It is a fabrication
> of academicians meant to justify their own
> existences, to lend credance to their otherwise
> inutile careers. What more can be said about Kant
> or Joyce that hasn't already been said? This
> being the case they have moved on to manufacture
> their own interpretations of interpretations:
> watch out for that word, hermeneutic! Fear of
> not being au currant fuels much of the hysteria.
Actually, I believe the word was coined by Peter
Drucker, around 1955 (can anyone confirm/disconfirm this?).
Drucker was certainly no "pomo"!
But "postmodernism" is not just confined to
academe (and don't forget about the "art"
and "advertising" worlds!!!). It also
has a more substantial existence in
*architecture*. Robert Venturi's Guild House
(1960-63), e.g., is not just a word-game!
Anent "hermeneutics": This word has a
lineage in the works of such
persons as Hans-Georg Gadamer (_Truth and Method_,
etc.), who is a quite serious (and in ways
"conservative") humanist.
>
> The dead give-away is its language, which is, er,
> dead, lifeless, a self-created, insular, baroque
> jargon, only an elaborate mimick of the utile
> jargon of science and technology. It is a fake
> specialization contrived to mimick other
> specializations in an age of specialization.
> (Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
> historicity, historiography, historicism,
> semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
> teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
> valorization.)
Praxis? Why I thought that was, among other
things, a *Marxist* word. Monad? Leibnitz.
Doxa? Plato. ???
Bad examples do not, however, render the thesis
they are adduced to exemplify wrong....
>
> Another indication of its decadence is that it is
> a derivative of derivatives, a loveless, dessicate
> terrain incapable of generation of creativity,
> recalling the words of E.E. Cummings: "Knowledge
> is ... dead but not buried imagination." It
> consists of reinterpretation of essays which
> reinterpret essay which reinterpret what others
> have created or are creating. In and of itself it
> creates nothing, is impotent and sterile. It
> inadvertantly fulfills the visions of a bankrupt,
> spent Western civilization described by, among
> others, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
Don't forget Hermann Broch's critique of a
"so-called community, devoid of [ethical] force,
but filled with evil-will,
which drowns in blood and chokes on its own
poison gases"....
And George Steiner, who surely is no "pomo",
wrote: "Most books are about other books" --
including that ur-text to which r/Romantics
like to refer: "[the book of] Nature", which
cannot be "read" without a lot of book-learning.
Imagination does not create new "things"
(more of the same) so
much as it creates new interpretations
(re-newing the world). If postmodernism
does not create anything really new and
worthwile, it is not because it reinterprets
things, but rather because it continues
to apply stale interpretive frames
(like genderism, etc.) instead of
coming up with revelatory *new* interpretive
frames. Perhaps postmodernism has managed to
turn Heraclitus on his head, and shown
how "you can never step into the same river
twice" can become a kind of eternal recurrence
of the same....
[snip]
> The creations of all ages live and breath and are
> useful for our lives, as they will be for our
> grandchildrens' lives, whether they be ancient
> English and Scottish popular ballads or Kafka. The
> elegance of Newtonian physics remains as
> aesthetically pleasing today as it was 400 years
> ago, regardless of all the babble about
> "paradigmatic shifts."
Isn't this hermeneutics? The reappropriation of
inherited symbols? Of course, Newton's
physics *was* a paradigm shift....
>
> The self-consciousness necessary to come up with
> such babble paralyzes the creation of anything
> new. It is only those incapable of creating, those
> afraid of the courage it takes to brave chaos, who
> fall back into the endless prattle about Kant,
> Heidegger, Hegel, Neitzsche etc. They in no way
> partake of these men's impetus of imagination, but
> rather retreat from it like cowards, dry, old men
> who write to essays to further their careers to
> pay their mortgages to please their mothers.
Self-consciousness need not be "paralyzing" --
Abraham Maslow and his followers have explored
this in their study of "flow state" experiences.
As for the activities of postmodernists, let's not
forget that they also drive
around in undeconstructed Jaguar automobiles paid for
by their undeconstructed Professors' salaries,
undeconstructed lecture fees, etc.
>
> My advice to all postmodernism experts: go out and
> get a real job (at least till your corner of The
> Garden as advised by Voltair in Candide).
[snip]
Yes, I wonder how many postmodernists there are
in "real jobs". I work as a computer programmer,
and, while I've see a lot of appalling
doctorally-credentialled-amentia -- Sci-fi
fandom, and such... --, I don't think I've ever
seen a postmodernist computer programmer. (On
the other hand, there aren't many Husserl/
Gadamer phenomenologically/hermeneutically
oriented computer programmers, either....)
> Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
How do postmodernists relate to that dictum?
Here's another similar exhortation:
http://www.packardclub.org/graphics/servltr2.gif
\brad mccormick
--
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / bra...@cloud9.net
914.238.0788 / 27 Poillon Rd, Chappaqua, NY 10514-3403 USA
-------------------------------------------------------
<![%THINK;[XML]]> Visit my website: http://www.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
wrob
postmodernist DOES exist!
It is self-defined construct that exists outside
modernist discourse and cannot really be supported
by or refuted by modernist discourse.
Since we are still using modernist discourse, it
is my feeling that we need to get over modernism
if we are to challenge postmodernism on its own
terms and prove that it is internally inconsistent.
After all, postmodernists do not care that postmodernism
is inconsistent with the goals of progress, art etc.
-BER
borris...@my-deja.com wrote:
> Postmodernism does not exist. It is a fabrication
> of academicians meant to justify their own
> existences, to lend credance to their otherwise
> inutile careers. What more can be said about Kant
> or Joyce that hasn't already been said? This
> being the case they have moved on to manufacture
> their own interpretations of interpretations:
> watch out for that word, hermeneutic! Fear of
> not being au currant fuels much of the hysteria.
>
> The dead give-away is its language, which is, er,
> dead, lifeless, a self-created, insular, baroque
> jargon, only an elaborate mimick of the utile
> jargon of science and technology. It is a fake
> specialization contrived to mimick other
> specializations in an age of specialization.
> (Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
> historicity, historiography, historicism,
> semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
> teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
> valorization.)
>
> Another indication of its decadence is that it is
> a derivative of derivatives, a loveless, dessicate
> terrain incapable of generation of creativity,
> recalling the words of E.E. Cummings: "Knowledge
> is ... dead but not buried imagination." It
> consists of reinterpretation of essays which
> reinterpret essay which reinterpret what others
> have created or are creating. In and of itself it
> creates nothing, is impotent and sterile. It
> inadvertantly fulfills the visions of a bankrupt,
> spent Western civilization described by, among
> others, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot
>
> Knowledge is understandable, even foregivable, if
> useful in dealing with chaos, natural phenomena,
> social problems, etc., i.e., in furthering the
> goals of the Enlightenment. It is to be ignored if
> existing for its own sake, as it does in this
> effite debate.
>
> The creations of all ages live and breath and are
> useful for our lives, as they will be for our
> grandchildrens' lives, whether they be ancient
> English and Scottish popular ballads or Kafka. The
> elegance of Newtonian physics remains as
> aesthetically pleasing today as it was 400 years
> ago, regardless of all the babble about
> "paradigmatic shifts."
>
> The self-consciousness necessary to come up with
> such babble paralyzes the creation of anything
> new. It is only those incapable of creating, those
> afraid of the courage it takes to brave chaos, who
> fall back into the endless prattle about Kant,
> Heidegger, Hegel, Neitzsche etc. They in no way
> partake of these men's impetus of imagination, but
> rather retreat from it like cowards, dry, old men
> who write to essays to further their careers to
> pay their mortgages to please their mothers.
>
> My advice to all postmodernism experts: go out and
> get a real job (at least till your corner of The
> Garden as advised by Voltair in Candide).
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
wrob
-BER
Lewis Mammel
> Isn't this hermeneutics? The reappropriation of
> inherited symbols? Of course, Newton's
> physics *was* a paradigm shift....
Since the ancients ( as we are told by Pappus ) esteemed the science of
mechanics of greatest importance in the investigation of natural things,
and the moderns, rejecting substantial forms and occult qualities, have
endeavored to subject the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics,
I have in this treatise cultivated mathemeatics as far as it relates to
philosophy.
( first words of ) Newton's preface to the first edition of the Principia.
So there you are, "Since the ancients ...", not a clean break, really. He does
go on to point out that mechanics traditionally referred to artifices, and he
wants to apply it universally, but this means he's extending the ancient
paradigm of mechanics - he has not come up with a brand new paradigm.
Also look at the opening of Aristotle's PHYSICS ( second paragraph )
The natural way of doing this [ discovering principles ] is to start from
the things which are more knowable and clear to us and proceed towards
those which are clearer and more knowable by nature; for the same things
are not knowable relatively to us and knowable without qualification.
So we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by
nature, but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and knowable by nature.
Can it be denied that physics has adhered to this Aristotelian paradigm?
It's commonly observed that the familiar and everyday phenomena are physically
complex, and the "simple" phenomena of physics seem arcane to lay sensibilities.
This is the reductionist program - a "metanarrative" perhaps, which the postmodernist
famously distrusts. To do so, however, is to distrust the whole scientific tradition
ancient and modern, for indeed the Greeks had their "postmodernists" too.
Kuhn's characterization of scientific revolutions as paradigm shifts is a rhetorical
expression of this distrust which obscures the coherence and continuity of the
scientific enterprise.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
wrob
> If postmodernism
> does not create anything really new and
> worthwile, it is not because it reinterprets
> things, but rather because it continues
> to apply stale interpretive frames
> (like genderism, etc.) instead of
> coming up with revelatory *new* interpretive
> frames.
Part of the problem is that postmodernists believe
they have solved what they see as the trap of
endless innovation by declaring that interpretive
frames have no direction. What they value in art
is therefore mainly consists of variety and surprise.
> As for the activities of postmodernists, let's not
> forget that they also drive
> around in undeconstructed Jaguar automobiles paid for
> by their undeconstructed Professors' salaries,
> undeconstructed lecture fees, etc.
>
> Yes, I wonder how many postmodernists there are
> in "real jobs". I work as a computer programmer,
> and, while I've see a lot of appalling
> doctorally-credentialled-amentia -- Sci-fi
> fandom, and such... --, I don't think I've ever
> seen a postmodernist computer programmer.
A postmodernist would say: what makes computer
programming a "real job"? After all, much of the
computer programming boom is in the fields of
service industry, entertainment, advertising,
engineering, and consulting. These are the traditional
hotbeds of postmodernism.
(I say engineering because engineering, like economics,
has gone over entirely into task-oriented work that
avoids any discussion of purpose that does not
self-consciously attempt to self-identify modernism
with the almighty bottom line. An engineer who does
not think about politics tends to be a modernist; otherwise,
just look at Scott Adams.)
> > Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
>
> How do postmodernists relate to that dictum?
They relate to it because it is, in the mouth of deja.com,
a mindless parroting of a popularly disillusioned shard
of the modernist paradigm that nobody in America is
really moved to understand anymore. :- /
A modernist firm would never use such an exhortative
phrase as hype. In the mouth of a web designer,
it becomes a mere text advertisment
for an entertainment service. It's "hip" and "knowing".
-BER
Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
>
> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
>
> > Isn't this hermeneutics? The reappropriation of
> > inherited symbols? Of course, Newton's
> > physics *was* a paradigm shift....
>
> mechanics of greatest importance in the investigation of natural things,
> and the moderns, rejecting substantial forms and occult qualities, have
> endeavored to subject the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics,
> I have in this treatise cultivated mathemeatics as far as it relates to
> philosophy.
>
> ( first words of ) Newton's preface to the first edition of the Principia.
>
> So there you are, "Since the ancients ...", not a clean break, really. He does
> go on to point out that mechanics traditionally referred to artifices, and he
> wants to apply it universally, but this means he's extending the ancient
> paradigm of mechanics - he has not come up with a brand new paradigm.
These are, of course, complicated topics. One can say, e.g.,
that the Pythagoreans anticipated the mathematical understanding
of nature in Galileo and after. And yet there was a "leap",
e.g., in Galileo's correlating motion with uniform interval
time sequence, which I understand had never been done before,
etc.
There was a leap between the astronomical model of
planetary motion as compounded circles and Kepler's
elliptical orbits....
But every leap is a leap *from* somewhere, *to*
somewhere, which latter point may in turn
become a new jumping off point.... As Hegel
wrote in the Introduction to his _Phenomenology_,
the object of knowledge changes synergistically
as our knowledge of it changes....
I think it is important to recognize (even if Kuhn does not
emphasize the point...) that all paradigm shifts are
*partial*, and some are "smaller" and some "larger" in
extension (what they apply to...) and/or novelty (how
radical a Gestalt shift they effect...). All such
"leaps" take place within the horizon of what Kant
called "the synthetic unity of apperception", or
Husserl's "Lifeworld" ("horizon of lived experience").
> It's commonly observed that the familiar and everyday phenomena are physically
> complex, and the "simple" phenomena of physics seem arcane to lay sensibilities.
> This is the reductionist program - a "metanarrative" perhaps, which the postmodernist
> famously distrusts. To do so, however, is to distrust the whole scientific tradition
> ancient and modern, for indeed the Greeks had their "postmodernists" too.
>
> Kuhn's characterization of scientific revolutions as paradigm shifts is a rhetorical
> expression of this distrust which obscures the coherence and continuity of the
> scientific enterprise.
The notion of "discontinuity" was not invented
by Kuhn and other such. Henry Adams, for one, in his
Autobiography, spoke of "phase changes" in history,
similar to how continuous changes in the temperature
of water result in discontinuous state changes from
liquid to solid, etc.
One might ask about some persons' distrust of
discontinuity, as easily as about others distrust of
continuity....
Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
>
> "Brad McCormick, Ed.D." wrote:
>
> > does not create anything really new and
>
> > worthwile, it is not because it reinterprets
> > things, but rather because it continues
> > to apply stale interpretive frames
> > (like genderism, etc.) instead of
> > coming up with revelatory *new* interpretive
> > frames.
>
> they have solved what they see as the trap of
> endless innovation by declaring that interpretive
> frames have no direction.
Sophocles wrote: Everywhere journeying, inexcperienced and
without issue, man comes to mothing in the end. ca. 400 BCE
> What they value in art
> is therefore mainly consists of variety and surprise.
There is the surprise of finding a dead fly in one's
CocaCola, and the surprise of finding out that
there are other things to drink than CocaCola
(e.g., Domain de la Romanee-Conti wines).... Two
surprises -- same no direction?
>
> > As for the activities of postmodernists, let's not
> > forget that they also drive
> > around in undeconstructed Jaguar automobiles paid for
> > by their undeconstructed Professors' salaries,
> > undeconstructed lecture fees, etc.
> >
> > Yes, I wonder how many postmodernists there are
> > in "real jobs". I work as a computer programmer,
> > and, while I've see a lot of appalling
> > doctorally-credentialled-amentia -- Sci-fi
> > fandom, and such... --, I don't think I've ever
> > seen a postmodernist computer programmer.
[snip]
> After all, much of the
> computer programming boom is in the fields of
> service industry, entertainment, advertising,
> engineering, and consulting. These are the traditional
> hotbeds of postmodernism.
>
> (I say engineering because engineering, like economics,
> has gone over entirely into task-oriented work that
> avoids any discussion of purpose that does not
> self-consciously attempt to self-identify modernism
> with the almighty bottom line. An engineer who does
> not think about politics tends to be a modernist; otherwise,
> just look at Scott Adams.)
NOT ALL ENGINEERS "ONLY FOLLOW ORDERS". See, e.g.,
http://www.cwru.edu/affil/wwwethics/
Samuel Florman, Mario Salvadori, Roger Boisjoly,
William LeMessurier are some examples.
>
> > > Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
> >
> > How do postmodernists relate to that dictum?
>
> They relate to it because it is, in the mouth of deja.com,
> a mindless parroting of a popularly disillusioned shard
> of the modernist paradigm that nobody in America is
> really moved to understand anymore. :- /
I was "foolish" enough to take the dictum seriously.
>
> A modernist firm would never use such an exhortative
> phrase as hype.
The Packard Automobile Service Bulletin URL I
included in my message was similar in meaning, and not at all
mindless parroting....
(Boycott Jenny Holzer!)
> In the mouth of a web designer,
> it becomes a mere text advertisment
> for an entertainment service. It's "hip" and "knowing".
>
> -BER
(Scott Adams is no Henry Adams!)
Brrrh!
As Peter Drucker said:
Cleverness carries the day,
But wisdom endureth.
wrob
> There is the surprise of finding a dead fly in one's
> CocaCola, and the surprise of finding out that
> there are other things to drink than CocaCola
> (e.g., Domain de la Romanee-Conti wines).... Two
> surprises -- same no direction?
You tell me. I don't think either object in itself constitutes
art. Manufactured symbiosis with human tastebuds perhaps.
> NOT ALL ENGINEERS "ONLY FOLLOW ORDERS". See, e.g.,
>
> http://www.cwru.edu/affil/wwwethics/
>
> Samuel Florman, Mario Salvadori, Roger Boisjoly,
> William LeMessurier are some examples.
I know that. My point was that the applied sciences in general
are less "modernistic" than the pure sciences in the professional
viewpoint encouraged of its practitioners.
Also, not all architects follow orders, but most architecture today,
including the woggishly futuristic stuff, looks alike.
My point is, to be precise, the more avant garde one
or individualistic one hopes to be, the more one is encouraged
to participate in the postmodern "Disconnect" when barred from
direct creativity by the nature of ones profession.
> > > > Share what you know. Learn what you don't.
> > >
> > > How do postmodernists relate to that dictum?
> >
> > They relate to it because it is, in the mouth of deja.com,
> > a mindless parroting of a popularly disillusioned shard
> > of the modernist paradigm that nobody in America is
> > really moved to understand anymore. :- /
>
> I was "foolish" enough to take the dictum seriously.
It is the postmodern theorist who would encourage you
not to take the dictum seriously, not me.
My concern is that when many people take pop culture
"seriously" (i.e. in a canonical, modern fashion) they find
the meaning of either the original or the appropriated intent
to be altered. Because the postmodernist appropriator often
does not incorporate the orginal levels of modernist-discourse
meaning into the appropriated phrase, preferring to imply
new or recycled "levels of meaning".
Hence, in order to take "Share what you know,
learn what you don't" seriously one must start out with
knowledge of both Modernism and Postmodernism in
order to reconstruct the progressive viewpoint of the idea
from which this phrase was cribbed.
> > A modernist firm would never use such an exhortative
> > phrase as hype.
>
> The Packard Automobile Service Bulletin URL I
> included in my message was similar in meaning, and not at all
> mindless parroting....
Not all advertising is alike... but what was this again?
ROBBIE
I think your absolutely right. Nothing kills art quicker than the
academizing of it. People say that western art and culture is all played
out, but that is wrong. The potential, the impetus is still out there.
What's killing it is the ever thicker membrane of money and marketing that
surrounds modern life. The academics hide in their colleges and construct
theories as to why everything's been done instead of, as you say, getting
out there and doing it. Half the trouble is lazyness: writing a book is like
digging a hole, it requires persistant grim effort. How much easier to sit
around on campus, smoking a bit of draw, collecting your pay, and say well,
fuck it, it's all been done so, if you don't mind i'll just rationalize my
bone idle disposition into a philosophy..................
borris...@my-deja.com wrote in message <7po3md$oqt$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
borris...@my-deja.com
wrob <wr...@erols.com> wrote:
> Excellent. Except that your thesis proves that
> postmodernist DOES exist!
>
> It is self-defined construct that exists outside
> modernist discourse and cannot really be supported
> by or refuted by modernist discourse.
>
> Since we are still using modernist discourse, it
> is my feeling that we need to get over modernism
> if we are to challenge postmodernism on its own
> terms and prove that it is internally inconsistent.
>
> After all, postmodernists do not care that postmodernism
> is inconsistent with the goals of progress, art etc.
>
>
Lewis Mammel
>
> Lewis Mammel wrote:
> >
> > Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
> >
> > > inherited symbols? Of course, Newton's
> > > physics *was* a paradigm shift....
> >
> > mechanics of greatest importance in the investigation of natural things,
> > and the moderns, rejecting substantial forms and occult qualities, have
> > endeavored to subject the phenomena of nature to the laws of mathematics,
> > I have in this treatise cultivated mathemeatics as far as it relates to
> > philosophy.
> >
> > ( first words of ) Newton's preface to the first edition of the Principia.
> >
> > So there you are, "Since the ancients ...", not a clean break, really. He does
> > go on to point out that mechanics traditionally referred to artifices, and he
> > wants to apply it universally, but this means he's extending the ancient
> > paradigm of mechanics - he has not come up with a brand new paradigm.
> [snip]
>
> These are, of course, complicated topics. One can say, e.g.,
> that the Pythagoreans anticipated the mathematical understanding
> of nature in Galileo and after. And yet there was a "leap",
> e.g., in Galileo's correlating motion with uniform interval
> time sequence, which I understand had never been done before,
> etc.
If you compare Book VI of Aristotle's Physics with Day 3 of Galileo's
Dialogues on Two New Sciences, you will see that Galileo follows the
Aristotelian paradigm of motion very closely. In fact, this seems such
a basic notion to us that we don't recognize the effort required to
establish it, but if you read Aristotle ( even desultorily, as I have )
you can't fail to notice the pains he takes to do so.
> I think it is important to recognize (even if Kuhn does not
> emphasize the point...) that all paradigm shifts are
> *partial*, and some are "smaller" and some "larger" in
> extension (what they apply to...) and/or novelty (how
> radical a Gestalt shift they effect...). All such
> "leaps" take place within the horizon of what Kant
> called "the synthetic unity of apperception", or
> Husserl's "Lifeworld" ("horizon of lived experience").
I don't think this can be allowed. It's like the football
commentator's remarking how fickle "Big Mo'" is - the metaphor
is completely vitiated thereby. The whole idea of a paradigm shift
is that the discourse is shifted into a new realm conceptually
incommensurate with the old one. This has occurred in limited ways.
I read a little history of the theory of light, and saw it remarked
that adherents of rival accounts of polarization "talked past each other"
because of the disparate nature of their assumed models. This was all
swept away by the correct theory, and all these rival paradigms were
forgotten, as none were really successful.
Scholars have criticized Kuhn severely, starting with the lack of
coherence and clarity to the whole "paradigm shift" concept. Yet
somehow this idea holds enough sway so that you, for example, feel
no compunction about emphatically tagging Newtonian Physics with this
characterization - yet it's an empty one and the insight it confers is
illusory.
That's my complaint.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
borris...@my-deja.com
"ROBBIE" <NI...@NICKBOOTH.FREESERVE.CO.UK> wrote:
>
>
> I think your absolutely right. Nothing kills art quicker than the
> academizing of it. People say that western art and culture is all
played
> out, but that is wrong. The potential, the impetus is still out there.
> What's killing it is the ever thicker membrane of money and marketing
that
> surrounds modern life. The academics hide in their colleges and
construct
> theories as to why everything's been done instead of, as you say,
getting
> out there and doing it. Half the trouble is lazyness: writing a book
is like
> digging a hole, it requires persistant grim effort. How much easier to
sit
> around on campus, smoking a bit of draw, collecting your pay, and say
well,
> fuck it, it's all been done so, if you don't mind i'll just
rationalize my
> bone idle disposition into a philosophy..................
And, of course, this is nothing new. Philistines are as old as the
bible. Innovation exists in oppostion. Anarchy is necessary for
creativity. Anarchy is anathma to institutions.
What is parrotted in the media is 99.9% parochial mush, and only getting
more so as all media conglomerate more and more. Intellectual activity
in the universities is becoming increasingly directed by: a) corporate
control (e.g., direct funding of research, e.g., the recent bailout of
the Univ of Calif, Berkeley by corporate grants); and b) the fractional
politics of self-interest, euphemistically termed "multiculturalism."
Freedom of thought is as much under seige today in American as it has
been anywhere at anytime. Open a book, turn on a TV, go to a movie, and
chances are overwhelming in favor of your encountering half-truths and
outright lies. Truth is dangerous. It threatens the status quo.
And isn't it a lark that this thing called "postmodernism" has come
around and now says there is no such thing as "truth," claiming that
there is no such thing as the knowable, that objects are relative to
subjects, the perceived to the perceiver, and so on and so on, all in
the interests in defending the status quo, in explaining the mediocre,
justifying the third-rate.
Lost in this debate is what for me is the central problem of human
society in this century: the irresolved conflict between the rational
and irrational. This postmodernism is nothing but a distraction from
this conflict, a temporary and deceptive icing on it.
Gerry Quinn
>(Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
>historicity, historiography, historicism,
>semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
>teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
>valorization.)
>
I have become fond of 'reify' - I suggest you delete it and substitute
'transgress'.
- Gerry Quinn
wrob
total, or they do not exist as separately defined phenomena?
But I could well be talking past you right now.
When I learned what was (for me) wrong with Postmodernism,
I directly experienced a paradigm shift. Now I am struggling
to reconstruct my thoughts to arrive at a way of appreciating
my own heritage.
This is a BIG problem, because I've come to see the
postmodern influence on everything I held dear... Before, of
course, I tended to worship some things and dismiss others
as too indicative of some disturbing trend in society
Proof by experience. :-)
-BER
Lewis Mammel wrote:
> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
> >
> > Lewis Mammel wrote:
> > >
> > > Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
> > >
> > > > Isn't this hermeneutics? The reappropriation of
> > > > inherited symbols? Of course, Newton's
> > > > physics *was* a paradigm shift....
> > >
Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
[snip]
> coherence and clarity to the whole "paradigm shift" concept. Yet
> somehow this idea holds enough sway so that you, for example, feel
> no compunction about emphatically tagging Newtonian Physics with this
> characterization - yet it's an empty one and the insight it confers is
> illusory.
>
> That's my complaint.
Alas, this is not a subject for email, but for disciplined
research which might consume [more than] a lifetime.
I agree that to talk of "paradigm shifts" is glib -->
just like to talk about *continuity*!
What is needed are detailed exegeses of all the
available documentation. It does seem that Kepler's
elliptical orbit hypothesis is probably one of the
cases with the smallest domain of material requiring
analysis (and thus requiring the smallest grant
funding to carry out).
I am not particularly wedded to the phrase "paradigm shift".
Whatever one wishes to do, if one wishes to deal with
these issues, one must somehow deal with such
cognitive transitions as the change from an
eschatological cosmos to a universe constituted
in terms of mathematical formulae. To live
in the one is simply not the same as to live in the other.
Abraham did not live in a universe, esp. one in
which his life could be wrecked by the intersection
-- calculated years in advance -- of some
asteroid's and the earth's orbital positions.
Similarly, contemporary physicists (and even
politicians) do not have to answer directly to
Y-w-h whether they will kill their only child for Him.
Y-w-h does not (in general) speak to us, and
there were no asteriods (galaxies, etc.) for
Abraham. Same sky. Same air. Same soil.
You tell me: continuity or paradigm shift?
Here is my personal position: I was born into and
"grew" (but hardly "up") in a social milieu of
origin which was suffocatingly wedded to a kind of
metaphysical realism epitomized by the fact that the
teachers knew the right answers, and, if I could
not figure out what those right answers were,
without their help (as opposed to their "instruction"),
my prospects for the rest of my life would not
be good. All truth was already known. If I could
parrot enough of it back to my teachers, I would
be allowed to have a reasonably decent life,
in which nothing would change except that I would become
one of them and thus become a testor rather than a
testee (Big difference!!!).
When I read in Kuhn that scientific
theories die off, not because the persons who
believe in them are converted to the new
theories, but rather because they are unable to
enlist members of the next generation to cary on
their work, I saw something: that one day,
all my tor-mentors would be *dead*, and their
"world" (the totality of their impositions on me)
along with them. At that point, the notion
of the sun rising on a new day finally meant
something to me. One day would dawn, if I lived
long enough, with them and what was theirs
(to use a lovely German word: Vorbeigegangen) --
gone!).
That is what Kuhn means to me.
wrob
that Postmodernism also exists as a thought process
that has internal *cultural* consistency sufficient to
attain widespread popularity, esp. in connection with
the new entertainment-oriented liesure class.
The problem here is that from a Postmodern perspective,
it doesn't matter if it is *internally* inconsistent, i.e. a "lie"
... they believe it, therefore it is true for them.
Therefore it is only a lie for the people whose knowledge
"refutes" it, therefore these people need to "loosen up and
appreciate things."
Taken an ethics class? I'm sure there
was an especially annoying argument along these lines
at some point.
-BER
borris...@my-deja.com wrote:
> In article <37C0224F...@erols.com>,
> wrob <wr...@erols.com> wrote:
> > Excellent. Except that your thesis proves that
> > postmodernist DOES exist!
> >
> > It is self-defined construct that exists outside
> > modernist discourse and cannot really be supported
> > by or refuted by modernist discourse.
> >
> > Since we are still using modernist discourse, it
> > is my feeling that we need to get over modernism
> > if we are to challenge postmodernism on its own
> > terms and prove that it is internally inconsistent.
> >
> > After all, postmodernists do not care that postmodernism
> > is inconsistent with the goals of progress, art etc.
> >
> >
> This is semantics. I said it exists as a fabrication, as a lie.
>
wrob
Also "paradigm". Like the other words, it seems to me
that the original messenger's beef was not with the original
meening of the words but by how they have been sapped
of meaning in order to construct a sort of subcultural
pattern-language that reinforces postmodern views.
Sadly enough, because Postmodernism IS the
dominant paradigm, which implies that -yep- it exists!!
-BER
wrob
For me, the problem of the century is postmodernism vs. modernism
itself. The tragedy is that I never was a modernist.
-BER
borris...@my-deja.com wrote:
> And, of course, this is nothing new. Philistines are as old as the
> bible. Innovation exists in oppostion. Anarchy is necessary for
> creativity. Anarchy is anathma to institutions.
>
> What is parrotted in the media is 99.9% parochial mush, and only getting
> more so as all media conglomerate more and more. Intellectual activity
> in the universities is becoming increasingly directed by: a) corporate
> control (e.g., direct funding of research, e.g., the recent bailout of
> the Univ of Calif, Berkeley by corporate grants); and b) the fractional
> politics of self-interest, euphemistically termed "multiculturalism."
> Freedom of thought is as much under seige today in American as it has
> been anywhere at anytime. Open a book, turn on a TV, go to a movie, and
> chances are overwhelming in favor of your encountering half-truths and
> outright lies. Truth is dangerous. It threatens the status quo.
>
> And isn't it a lark that this thing called "postmodernism" has come
> around and now says there is no such thing as "truth," claiming that
> there is no such thing as the knowable, that objects are relative to
> subjects, the perceived to the perceiver, and so on and so on, all in
> the interests in defending the status quo, in explaining the mediocre,
> justifying the third-rate.
>
> Lost in this debate is what for me is the central problem of human
> society in this century: the irresolved conflict between the rational
> and irrational. This postmodernism is nothing but a distraction from
> this conflict, a temporary and deceptive icing on it.
>
wrob
just the opposite circumstance from yours.
I grew up in a family of Kennedy liberals that regarded
us and our family friends pessimistically, as the rearguard of
the sort of enlightened modernity that you describe (for them
it was embodied in liberalism in the progressive sense, and
in pure science as I noted of my mother.)
Yet one day, I came to realise that it was the very
incursion of postmodern types of thought into the dialogue
of the people I grew up around that was causing problems
in society. I had actually resorted to religious understanding
to understand what I had been brought up to regard as the
rather sad state of the world today, and I wanted to apply
that to philosophy.
But while doing so I came to better understand pomo
as a theory, and went back to architecture, which I have
always loved because I understood it better in "art terms".
It was then that I had a paradigm shift in terms of my
rational philosophical understanding of the very nature of,
say, the purpose of all these ticky tacky *buildings* that
I had been brought up to believe were vaguely tasteful
in their evocation of the lost world of pre-modern architecture.
I was actually better able to understand this paradigm shift
when I went back and *re-applied it* to what I had learned of
philosophy (still not much formally im afraid, so far).
So you can't say I rejected postmodernism out of a comforting
disdain for Venturi-style architecture - although that is a tempting
trap that tends to send one down the road taken by Prince Charles.
-BER
"Brad McCormick, Ed.D." wrote:
wrob
> "'Pomo'"? Is that some sort of new gender catagory?
Correct. From my personal "Devil's Dictionary":
pomo - (n)
the gender of individuals who believe gender categories are a construct.
> Thomas Docherty in his introduction to _Postmodernism, A Reader_ states
> that the term "probably" originated in 1939 with Arnold Toynbee.
>
> The fact that folks have to argue not only about what it means but when
> and how it originated is more proof that it does not exist.
But Postmodernists would argue that they understand this
better than you yourself, and that the experience of postmodernity
is dependent on this vagueness in what constitutes "bounded"
discourse!
> Architecture, like TV and mainstream cinema, is an impure, commericial
> form. Calling it 'art' is arguable, at the very least. I personally
> never considered it as such, and I once lived in Oak Park, IL where I
> was daily exposed to the products of Frank Lloyd Wright. I hold that his
> buildings are not art in the sense that a Beethoven Trio or a poem by
> Wallace Stevens is. It is a form corrupted by exigencies.
Wow! Modernism is not dead! You my friend are either George Will
or the reincarnation of Le Corbusier! :-)
> > Don't forget Hermann Broch's critique of
> There can be no more modernist novelist than Broch. [...]
> Broch belongs firmly in the avante-guard, which postmodernism eschews,
> along with any concept of linear progression of history.
Alas, this is the way the world ends - with a modernist avant garde
prophesying a postmodern society, and never the two realizing it.
> I fear you are confusing self-consciousness with self-awareness. The
> former is closed- while the latter open-ended, the former inhibitory,
> the latter potentially liberating.
In my own views of consciousness, I have to reject the whole
idea of mind-body materialism. Has any modernist YET done *that*?
As a result, it's difficult to discuss self-reflexion with any confidence
with either modernist-materialists or with postmodernists (who reject
the study of metaphysics outright in order to replace them with mere
semantic definitions of consciousness.)
> Precisely my point. Postmodernism is an intellectual fettish, a pet of
> the intellectuals who merely adorn a consumer society. They use it to
> justify the status quo from which they derive their income and social
> identities. (There is no louder voice touting the internet as a
> revolution than that of one who has vested his/her interests in it.) It
> is no accident that postmodernism dispenses with inspiration as just a
> subjective, transient experience; its proponents are uninspired,
> incapable of that difficult leap of the imagination necessary to extend
> progress on more step into the previously unknown.
Exactly. But since it takes imagination to transcend the very idea
of progress, then obviously one step forward from the modern tradition
itself might constitute progress. Unfortunately postmodernism is
not that step, it's much *less* true than Modernism itself.
-BER
Lewis Mammel
> Let me understand - are you saying that paradigm shifts must be
> total, or they do not exist as separately defined phenomena?
I'm saying it's not clear what is meant, and to the extent that it
is clear, it does imply the complete abandonment of one realm of
discourse for another. The abandonment of phlogiston theory is my
paradigm for a paradigm shift. ( The original use of "paradigm" was
in Latin instruction, where e.g. "amo amas amat" is a paradigm or model
for the conjugation. )
If there's a paradigm of Newtonian physics, it's central force motion,
and it won out over the competing paradigm of Cartesian vortices.
But this paradigm was retained in QM, so where's the shift? QM is more
of an elaboration of this paradigm than a shift away from it.
I don't think there are many examples of paradigms or models being
abandoned the way phlogiston was. Usually scientific breakthroughs
correspond to access to a new realm of phenomena, and the new round of
"normal science" is the exploration of that realm. The paradigm shift
paradigm suggests an orgy of reinterpretation under new terms of discourse,
which I don't think is what happens.
I think science pedagogy brought this on itself with its obsession with
being up-to-date and its scorn for anything more than a few years old.
Science historians began investigating old controversies and finding that
the losers had some interesting and cogent arguments on their side, and
I think they went a little overboard in rehabilitating them.
Plate tectonics was certainly revolutionary, but was it a paradigm shift?
What paradigm did it displace? Before 1960 there were synclines and antisynclines
but there was no developed theory of causes for these. My observation is that
new theories have illuminated "blind spots" where everyone avoided asking
the questions for which there were only embarrassingly vague answers.
The usual story is that some new discovery doesn't fit the old paradigm, but
look at Dalton's illustrations of atoms. What held them together? It was simply
assumed that they combined somehow. Heisenberg wrote of being shocked to see
illustrations of hooks on atoms. Before quantum mechanics there was no theory
of molecular bonding even though molecules were a staple concept of chemistry.
Lew Mammel, Jr.
wrob
How many synonyms of "teleology" would you be willing to trade for? (G!)
-BER
RMJon23 wrote:
> I'm keen on "semiotic" and can't do without it at the moment. Can you drop it
> and add in its place, oh, I don't know..."hegemonic"?
>
> Thinking of us,
>
> PS: I agree wholeheartedly on "teleology". I say we all put an end to that one.
> Eschatology too, while we're at it.
>
> rmjon23
>
> "Many social situations are effectively controlled by the definitions of
> imbeciles."
> -Peter Berger, _Invitation To Sociology_ (1963)
Lewis Mammel
> Whatever one wishes to do, if one wishes to deal with
> these issues, one must somehow deal with such
> cognitive transitions as the change from an
> eschatological cosmos to a universe constituted
> in terms of mathematical formulae.
No, a universe constituted of matter and radiation. We
discovered that Mars is planet and the Sun is a star. The
math is not the main thing here.
> To live
> in the one is simply not the same as to live in the other.
> Abraham did not live in a universe, esp. one in
> which his life could be wrecked by the intersection
> -- calculated years in advance -- of some
> asteroid's and the earth's orbital positions.
> Similarly, contemporary physicists (and even
> politicians) do not have to answer directly to
> Y-w-h whether they will kill their only child for Him.
Yeah, and just try to get Hephestaeus to make a shield for you.
> Y-w-h does not (in general) speak to us, and
> there were no asteriods (galaxies, etc.) for
> Abraham. Same sky. Same air. Same soil.
> You tell me: continuity or paradigm shift?
Abraham knew nothing of the arctic or the tropics, either.
Did it require a paradigm shift to learn of these things?
Herodotus touches on the subject, and he's contemporaneous
with what? The captivity in Babylon ? Socrates on his death
bed in the Phaedo speculates ( rather wildly ) on global geography.
I certainly think the exploration of the earth and the solar system
is continuous with Socrates. So my answer is that exploration of
the world has been a continuous human development. Have you
read any of the Enoch literature? I think there's a semblance
of scientific curiosity discernible there, albeit in a somewhat
tortured form, but all the more charming for that.
> Here is my personal position: I was born into and
> "grew" (but hardly "up") in a social milieu of
> origin which was suffocatingly wedded to a kind of
> metaphysical realism epitomized by the fact that the
> teachers knew the right answers, and, if I could
> not figure out what those right answers were,
> without their help (as opposed to their "instruction"),
> my prospects for the rest of my life would not
> be good. All truth was already known. If I could
> parrot enough of it back to my teachers, I would
> be allowed to have a reasonably decent life,
> in which nothing would change except that I would become
> one of them and thus become a testor rather than a
> testee (Big difference!!!).
Boy that's pretty sad, and I'm hard put to make excuses
for you. I was a crybaby as a kid, but I was very firm in my
own opinions about things. I remember the teacher telling us
that the stars were actually bigger than the moon, which I thought
was ridiculous, so I asked my Dad. Only when he responded, "Oh yes
much bigger!" did I decide that I should reserve final judgement.
> When I read in Kuhn that scientific
> theories die off, not because the persons who
> believe in them are converted to the new
> theories, but rather because they are unable to
> enlist members of the next generation to cary on
> their work,
I believe this was a witticism of Planck's.
> I saw something: that one day,
> all my tor-mentors would be *dead*, and their
> "world" (the totality of their impositions on me)
> along with them. At that point, the notion
> of the sun rising on a new day finally meant
> something to me. One day would dawn, if I lived
> long enough, with them and what was theirs
> (to use a lovely German word: Vorbeigegangen) --
> gone!).
>
> That is what Kuhn means to me.
Ah! Postmodernism as Chandala hatred. But what does that
mean to we hyperboreans? I've always identified with my
scientific heroes, so that puts the shoe on the other foot,
Kuhn-wise.
Heaven for height, and the earth for depth,
and the heart of kings is unsearchable.
Proverbs 25:3
Lew Mammel, Jr.
Lewis Mammel
> I'm keen on "semiotic" and can't do without it at the moment.
Really? Let me relate a little semiotic meditation I'm on.
A long time ago I memorized an adage of the White Duchess:
'be what you would seem to be' or if you'd like to put
it more simply, 'never imagine youself not to be otherwise
than what it might appear to others that what you were or
might have been was not otherwise than what you had been
would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'
Just recently I had reason to peruse Euclid's proposition 6 of book II:
If a straight line be bisected and a straight line be added
to it in a straight line, the rectangle contained by the whole
with the added straight line and the added straight line together
with the square on the half is equal to the square on the straight
line made up of the half and the added straight line.
... and this reminded me right away of the White Duchess's adage.
Now this proposition is just the algebraic identity (2a+b)b + a^2 = (a+b)^2
but that's the fancy way to put it, you see? The simple way is in words.
I think it not unlikely that the Rev. Dodgson might have had something like
this in mind.
"In fact, every algebraical equation is an icon, in so far as it
EXHIBITS, by means of the algebraical signs ( which are not themselves
icons), the relations of the quantities concerned" - Peirce
Lew Mammel, Jr.
borris...@my-deja.com
see it appear.
In article <37BFF8...@cloud9.net>,
bra...@cloud9.net wrote:
>
> Actually, I believe the word was coined by Peter
> Drucker, around 1955 (can anyone confirm/disconfirm this?).
> Drucker was certainly no "pomo"!
"'Pomo'"? Is that some sort of new gender catagory?
Thomas Docherty in his introduction to _Postmodernism, A Reader_ states
that the term "probably" originated in 1939 with Arnold Toynbee.
The fact that folks have to argue not only about what it means but when
and how it originated is more proof that it does not exist.
>
> But "postmodernism" is not just confined to
> academe (and don't forget about the "art"
> and "advertising" worlds!!!). It also
> has a more substantial existence in
> *architecture*. Robert Venturi's Guild House
> (1960-63), e.g., is not just a word-game!
Architecture, like TV and mainstream cinema, is an impure, commericial
form. Calling it 'art' is arguable, at the very least. I personally
never considered it as such, and I once lived in Oak Park, IL where I
was daily exposed to the products of Frank Lloyd Wright. I hold that his
buildings are not art in the sense that a Beethoven Trio or a poem by
Wallace Stevens is. It is a form corrupted by exigencies.
>
>
>
> Don't forget Hermann Broch's critique of a
> "so-called community, devoid of [ethical] force,
> but filled with evil-will,
> which drowns in blood and chokes on its own
> poison gases"....
There can be no more modernist novelist than Broch. Ironically, he
stated in _The Sleepwalkers_ in clearer, more inspired terms many of the
ideas reworked by postmodernist hacks, e.g., atomization of knowledge,
fractionization of experience, and the asceticism of a modern society
based on logic, on "symbols of symbols." Indeed, the poet is the
legislator of the world, a modernist 19th century statement.
Broch belongs firmly in the avante-guard, which postmodernism eschews,
along with any concept of linear progression of history.
>
> > The self-consciousness necessary to come up with
> > such babble paralyzes the creation of anything
> > new. It is only those incapable of creating, those
> > afraid of the courage it takes to brave chaos, who
> > fall back into the endless prattle about Kant,
> > Heidegger, Hegel, Neitzsche etc. They in no way
> > partake of these men's impetus of imagination, but
> > rather retreat from it like cowards, dry, old men
> > who write to essays to further their careers to
> > pay their mortgages to please their mothers.
>
> Self-consciousness need not be "paralyzing" --
> Abraham Maslow and his followers have explored
> this in their study of "flow state" experiences.
I fear you are confusing self-consciousness with self-awareness. The
former is closed- while the latter open-ended, the former inhibitory,
the latter potentially liberating.
>
> As for the activities of postmodernists, let's not
> forget that they also drive
> around in undeconstructed Jaguar automobiles paid for
> by their undeconstructed Professors' salaries,
> undeconstructed lecture fees, etc.
Precisely my point. Postmodernism is an intellectual fettish, a pet of
the intellectuals who merely adorn a consumer society. They use it to
justify the status quo from which they derive their income and social
identities. (There is no louder voice touting the internet as a
revolution than that of one who has vested his/her interests in it.) It
is no accident that postmodernism dispenses with inspiration as just a
subjective, transient experience; its proponents are uninspired,
incapable of that difficult leap of the imagination necessary to extend
progress on more step into the previously unknown.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
borris...@my-deja.com
ger...@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn) wrote:
> In article <7po3md$oqt$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, borris...@my-deja.com
wrote:
>
> >(Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
> >historicity, historiography, historicism,
> >semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
> >teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
> >valorization.)
> >
>
> I have become fond of 'reify' - I suggest you delete it and substitute
> 'transgress'.
>
> - Gerry Quinn
>
substituted one for the other.
Interestingly, the SOED in defining 'reify' quotes Marxism as a source,
further proof that all things in postmodernism are borrowed, that it is
unoriginal and stale to the core. Postmodernism is inherently a
substitute, the Wonder Bread of thought. In similar fashion its
architecture freely borrows cliches from past styles, tosses them
together without integrating or juxtaposing them in any new manner,
without adding anything new of substance, and walks away, its pockets
fattened, its back slapped by crowds of duped dopes, a self-satisfied
smile on its doughy face. Meanwhile, another street has been defiled by
throw-away architecture, obsolete as soon as conceived.
RMJon23
>(Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
>historicity, historiography, historicism,
>semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
>teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
>valorization.)
I'm keen on "semiotic" and can't do without it at the moment. Can you drop it
G*rd*n
| ...
| This is semantics. I said it exists as a fabrication, as a lie.
Certainly it begins as a fabrication, or at least a vague
reference to a disparate category of entities -- and anti-
category. But as people earnestly labor to fill it -- here
speaking of its self-styled enemies and antagonists as well
as its supposed adherents -- it becomes something, even
something more than a vocabulary item over which people
with that kind of time on their hands argue about.
Too bad -- but there it is.
--
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 8/14 }
G*rd*n
| >(Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
| >historicity, historiography, historicism,
| >semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
| >teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
| >valorization.)
ger...@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn):
| I have become fond of 'reify' - I suggest you delete it and substitute
| 'transgress'.
What would you substitute for these terms? Or any of the
others? Or are they supposed to be empty as well as
opaque? How does one know if an opaque thing is empty or
not? And is a term like "teleology" really opaque these
days? When I was a boy, back in the Dark Ages, it was
not opaque at all. I wonder what happened to it.
Lee Rudolph
>How does one know if an opaque thing is empty or
>not?
Shake it and see if you can detect rattling or sloshing.
>And is a term like "teleology" really opaque these
>days? When I was a boy, back in the Dark Ages, it was
>not opaque at all. I wonder what happened to it.
It was found (like the original lightbulbs of that arch-teleologist
Thomas Alva Edison) to become more pleasant after a brief infusion
with fluorine, perhaps.
Lee Rudolph
G*rd*n
lrud...@panix.com (Lee Rudolph):
| Shake it and see if you can detect rattling or sloshing.
But what if it is so round, so firm, so fully packed, so
free and easy on the draw?
Maybe, like Archimedes, one should take a bath with it, and
then pop out shrieking Eureka! and run naked through the
town. People would have fun guessing what sort of opacity
one had been bathing with.
| >And is a term like "teleology" really opaque these
| >days? When I was a boy, back in the Dark Ages, it was
| >not opaque at all. I wonder what happened to it.
| It was found (like the original lightbulbs of that arch-teleologist
| Thomas Alva Edison) to become more pleasant after a brief infusion
| with fluorine, perhaps.
Good for the teeth -- the lightbulb _dentata_. That is
indeed postmodern, and as fluoridation was a Communist mind
control plot, it puts all the bads and their _telos_
together. Why didn't we think of this before?
Vandelay
borris...@my-deja.com wrote in message <7pq22v$gd$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>
>
>And isn't it a lark that this thing called "postmodernism" has come
>around and now says there is no such thing as "truth," claiming that
>there is no such thing as the knowable, that objects are relative to
>subjects, the perceived to the perceiver, and so on and so on, all in
>the interests in defending the status quo, in explaining the mediocre,
>justifying the third-rate.
>
>Lost in this debate is what for me is the central problem of human
>society in this century: the irresolved conflict between the rational
>and irrational. This postmodernism is nothing but a distraction from
>this conflict, a temporary and deceptive icing on it.
>
>
>
Hope I'm not interrupting the exchange here, but along these lines I would
offer that "Postmoderism" kind of integrates a great "excuse" or "escape
clause" for those who wish to justify their very existence in what they
perceive as an oppressive or unjust system. A hypothetical example ... A
group of graduate students calling themselves Marxists within a university
Eng/Lit/Comp department. They formally protest the practices of the
department, alleging that funding guidelines and that the awarding of
assistanships is an inherently unfair practice -- citing various Marxist
rhetoric ... yet each and every one of them accepts any funding that they
are given.
No judgement being passed here (I used Marxism only to point out that the
hypothetical group was citing a specific ideology), but Postmodernism seems
to offer a hopelesness of an inescapable "system" (one that usually is
ominously capitalist), that -- via it's self-referentiality -- can be
critiqued from within without the bother of having to justify one's own
position and/or participation within that system.
Granted, the above hypothetical is really applying the global to the local,
but, in the end, isn't that another aspect of postmodernism? Kind of
Mandelbrot set of the larger picture recursively repeated in the smaller.
It seems too convenient at times.
All thoughts welcome ... tangental or otherwise.
-- vandelay
RMJon23
>(Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
>historicity, historiography, historicism,
>semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
>teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
>valorization.)
Upon further review, I hereby submit "floccinaucinihilipipification" as worthy
of defenestration - even though it was used in the Renasissance - along with
the mundane and Hegelian "historicism".
[Above-mentioned 29 letter word (disesquipedalian?) was found irksome when
first encountered in text, as caused reader to spray it not say it. A pox on
the phoney baloney who penned it!]
Screw "multiculturalism" too, because I tried both sag aloo and the Master
Musicians of Joujouka and they just weren't like Mom made.
In other words, if you don't use these words I promise I won't. It's nada but
meat and potatoes words from here on out for me.
[Preliminary definition of meat and potato words: Those words and those words
only which might be found emanating from the pen of William F. Buckley (Ayn
Rand?), but only when he's not raging against "postmodernists". I'm sure we can
all agree on this.]
Now let's get off our pomo duffs and improve Mankind.
Dead seriously yours,
Brad McCormick, Ed.D.
>
> In article <7po3md$oqt$1...@nnrp1.deja.com>, borris...@my-deja.com wrote:
>
> >(Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
> >historicity, historiography, historicism,
> >semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
> >teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
> >valorization.)
>
> and add in its place, oh, I don't know..."hegemonic"?
>
> Thinking of us,
>
>
> PS: I agree wholeheartedly on "teleology". I say we all put an end to that one.
> Eschatology too, while we're at it.
>
> rmjon23
Ever since the "right to lifers", I've been keen on
rescuing good words from right-wingers. Perhans the
same can be said for the bad aspects of postmodernism.
"Deconstruction", for instance, is a perfectly
wonderful word. All sorts of things need to be
deconstructed, e.g., The Defeat of Communism, "Appropriate
business attire", winning [anything], and, not
least of all, Deconstructionists' sources
of funding....
My favorite deconstructionists, however, are:
http://www.controlled-demolition.com/
Gerry Quinn
>borris...@my-deja.com wrote:
>| >(Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
>| >historicity, historiography, historicism,
>| >semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
>| >teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
>| >valorization.)
>
>| I have become fond of 'reify' - I suggest you delete it and substitute
>| 'transgress'.
>
>What would you substitute for these terms? Or any of the
>others? Or are they supposed to be empty as well as
>not? And is a term like "teleology" really opaque these
>days? When I was a boy, back in the Dark Ages, it was
>not opaque at all. I wonder what happened to it.
>
I didn't notice 'teleology' in the list. I agree, lets pull it from the
fire.
- Gerry Quinn
G*rd*n
| >| >(Examples of opaque words: reify, monad,
| >| >historicity, historiography, historicism,
| >| >semiotic, anamnesis, diremption, diachronic,
| >| >teleology, philology, meta-anything, praxis, doxa,
| >| >valorization.)
ger...@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn):
| >| I have become fond of 'reify' - I suggest you delete it and substitute
| >| 'transgress'.
g...@panix.com (G*rd*n) wrote:
| >What would you substitute for these terms? Or any of the
| >others? Or are they supposed to be empty as well as
| >opaque? How does one know if an opaque thing is empty or
| >not? And is a term like "teleology" really opaque these
| >days? When I was a boy, back in the Dark Ages, it was
| >not opaque at all. I wonder what happened to it.
ger...@indigo.ie (Gerry Quinn):
| I didn't notice 'teleology' in the list. I agree, lets pull it from the
| fire.
It was just one example of several. Most of the items on
the list have been around quite awhile and have fairly
well-known meanings. Anyone who thinks all of the words
are obscure and paid for his education got cheated, I think
-- unless of course he went to one of those school they
advertise on matchbook covers.