Postmodernism

[munnki]

Lawks... it turns out (according to Lacan) that women don't actually exist.

In fact, both parts of the title of the novel mark non-existence. The utter symbolization of French Lieutenant excludes the possibility of his existence in reality, nevertheless, according to Lacan, existence is obtained through symbolization only. On the other hand, the word woman is a marker of non-existence as well, for, first, woman as such doesn’t exist in the Lacanian dimension.
(If the French lieutenant never existed, he should have been invented - Olga Kirillova)

How the hell am I going to tell my wife?

[DMB]

Munnki, I wondered if you worshipped anyone. Do you worship Lacan and other such indescribables? If not, why do you read him? And I note that your quote is in English. How can you be sure that it is an accurate translation?

Re: sheep and goats. Plenty of men might object to the sexual attentions of the desperate. The poor beasts are more vulnerable.

[munnki]

Well... accurate or not... how can I abolish something which doesn't exist? Why 'tis a conundrum... However, if things that don't exist can be abolished this opens up a huge array of possibilities for my (up until now also non-existent) practise of worship. This means I can build a butsudan shrine to my imaginary Japanese ancestors and give them the respect that imaginary forebears deserve.
:)
Seriously, I've read Lacan and his ecrits... I don't know who you would lump him with in terms of a group... his ideas are nothing like those of Derrida, for example... In both cases I wouldn't recommend reading either although I do like some of the more outrageous things they have to say. Foucault, on the other hand, who has nothing in common with either of those two (except his being French...which is a fairly tenuous link) I do like.... and can recommend some of his texts if you'd like to check him out...

Worship, however, I reserve for more serious folks like Paris Hilton, David Icke and L Ron Hubbard...
;)

[munnki]

I should note that I like Lacan, Derrida etc.. in the same way, perhaps, as people like Samuel Beckett and sim... I find them amusing and controversial but they certainly lack the seriousness of some of their contemporaries... Foucault, in my opinion, produced a serious body of work which merits attention and review...

[Jobar]

Uh-oh.

Gamera? Is that you?

[munnki]

http://roberthood.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/gamera1999.jpg

Aye... this is me doing some christmas shopping in NY this year...

[Jobar]

Ah. I thought you were the postmodernist gamera.

Whew, that's a relief!

:D

(This (http://www.talkrational.org/showthread.php?t=11810) is the gamera I was worried about.)

[Ray Moscow]

I was worried that he had moved to London.

(Well, not that worried. We always got along OK, even if we usually disagreed about most things.)

[munnki]

Gamera gags aside... I have a HUGE distrust of the word post-modernism... as it collates together a series of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists etc... who have very different interests and ideas and whose bodies of work range from ridiculous and pointless to those whom, IMHO, made very important contributions to the history of ideas/thought...
in fact, that very umbrella term prevents people whom have very good exposure to other ideas and schools reading work which they would very much enjoy...

I encounter a very knee-jerk reaction to post-modernism from many people in the academy [or who have passed through it] in Britain
For the most part, I quite like Richard Dawkins, for example...but he also seems to blame what he calls post-modernist cultural relativism on allowing societies to adopt models where unacceptable modes of behaviour/tradition are being tolerated and incorporated... but this kind of multi-culturalism [which I loathe] springs from an absolute lack of true cultural relativism as it shows no discretion at all as to whether the other persons 'way' or 'belief' is actually any good or not... relativism does not intrinsically imply 'without discretion' it has been made to largely because of a cowed and enfeebled people...heh

In fact, I really like what Chomsky had to say about the people he described as the post-modernists. Though you may not like Chomsky either..it's a really funny slagging off of Derrida, Lacan et al
It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I'm perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made -- but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it's all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I'm perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).

Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out.

The whole article is here...
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html
Sigh...

[Jobar]

If you follow that link, you'll see I quote that same article, trying to get gamera to explain what postmodernism teaches us that is new and important.

He never did, though, just made excuses and denigrated the intelligence of those questioning him.

[munnki]

Heh... well I'll have a read through it. I won't try to defend Lacan or Derrida except to say that I read them as you might read somebody like Joyce or Beckett rather than as you might read Hume, Leibniz, Rousseau, Kant or..etc....
But I can take up Chomsky's challenge against Foucault and I will disagree with him on that account. I'll mention a key work, explain what it is about (and it can be done simply and the language is straightforward and uncomplicated for in it) and why I think it is important.
Discipline and Punish
This books tries to account for how the modern prison system arose and how the modes of and reasons for punishment changed. What was the purpose of punishment in the 17th and 18th centuries - as opposed to the purpose of punishment in the 20th century? - was a given system simply punitive or coercive? - what was the role of knowledge of the individual in the choice of punishment assigned? etc.... Using a wealth of information from the French archives Foucault asks these questions in a straightforward and evidenced way. Along the way there are discussions of early executions (the amende honourable), Bentham's panopticon, the incorporation of psychology and psychiatry into dealing with the inmate and etc...

Now, to me, that is an interesting discussion and one worth having. As a teacher it's quite trivial that I would notice how different definitions of the child and the mind of the child effect different methodolgies, strategies and policies for teachers. Furthermore, in this (and in others of Foucault's works) there is nothing of the rambling and overconcern with the symbolic and representative in language that you'd find in the Grammatology of Derrida or the Ecrits of Lacan....

So... I'll accept in a certain mode these types of criticisms of Lacan and Derrida..but, I think what Foucault did, before he died of AIDS in the 80s was important and challenging.

[Christina]

This is an interesting derail - would you like me to split it off?

[Jobar]

I look forward to discussing this topic more with you, then. (Probably in Philosophy.) My only criticism of postmodernism is that I can't see anything its proponents teach, that (for example) Korzybski's semantics, or even the Tao te Ching, doesn't do better. There's nothing new in it.

[Jobar]

Yes, please, Christina.

[munnki]

Jobar with the deepest respect what you haven't done is told me why the subject I outlined i.e. Foucault's Discipline and Punish is uninteresting and pointless as a history..etc...
I want to be very careful to not be labelled as a 'defender of post-modernism', as such, but I have outlined a text and why, IMHO, it is important so what should be attacked is that argument ...i.e. that text rather than post-modernism, as such, which neither of us is really qualified to talk about [for the simple reason that nobody really is - see above topic about collation of disparate authors 'under one roof']

[Christina]

It just means that I'll move the posts about postmodernism to a new thread in Philosophy. It's not a punishment, just an acknowledgment that it's interesting enough to stand on its own. I'll do it now.

[Christina]

Discussion split from here (http://www.secularcafe.org/showthread.php?p=57141#post57141).

[Jobar]

Munnki, I had asked gamera to *explain* postmodernism, as to a new student with no previous acquaintance with the subject. I didn't ask that he defend it (though others did, and he took that task on.)

Can't stay and discuss it more right now, as work calls, with a hoarse and heckling voice. But I'll come back to this at a later time.

[munnki]

Oh well... I can't explain the term 'post-modernist'... except as a lumping together for chronologial ease of some very different authors and ideas... and I'd find it impossible to explain what it is composed of for the reasons cited above in other postings...but I'll happily defend Foucault whose writings and sharp intellect I have a great respect for. I'm also reasonably capable of summarizing and paraphrasing his ideas as I believe they are straightforward. I think of much of his work as history rather than as philosophy and it's probably for that reason that I enjoy him so much.
I'll read through the Gamera posts but if they are as you describe then, yes, I probably would disagree with him. Certainly denigrating the intelligence of others in an ad hominem when they disagree with you is pretty weak and belongs more in a parliament or business meeting than in a genuine forum for ideas. So, I hope he wasn't doing that...

[DMB]

Munnki, have you read Impostures intellectuelles later translated into English and published as Fashionable Nonsense or Intellectual Impostures

I read it when it came out n French, having been fascinated by Alan Sokal's hoax on Social Text, (See Sokal affair if you don't know about this.)

[Ray Moscow]

Sokal demonstrated that even the experts cannot distinguish postmodern writing from gibberish. IOW, the emperor had been naked all along.

[munnki]

nay... although see above comment about not wanting to be seen to be defending post-modernism...

I'm not surprised that this sort of book has emerged... I've read many so-called post-modernist thinkers who use scientific ideas as metaphors for other things... and they have often been somewhat silly... although again I'm prepared to have a debate over Foucault whom while I don't have an exhaustive knowledge of him - I have read some texts of his which I regard as serious and well-written books... he is quite literally nothing like Lacan, Derrida, Kristeva and others...

So, point being, I've read a lot of crappy texts which fall under that erroneous umbrella of post-modernist and, in some cases, sheep texts in wolves clothing - literary/philosophical speculations dressed as scientific discourse - but then, haven't we all...

But I'll have this debate happily about Foucault based on his texts and defend what I believe to be the merit in some of his works...

I'm being careful to not be set up as a strawman for others' rants against post-modernism here - I ain't that cat ...

I'll pick up that text though... saying that, I'm not sure that Lacan would have denied being an imposter if asked... he was like Joyce in that sense...
:D

[munnki]

Sokal demonstrated that even the experts cannot distinguish postmodern writing from gibberish. IOW, the emperor had been naked all along.

This is really quite funny...it's a postmodernist essay generator...

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

to understand it refresh once when you've gone to it....

Summary of point above is... when you talk about 'postmodernist' writers...you end up with similar generalisations as if you talk about 'the black', 'the Jew' or 'the Irish'... and while that's not to defend some of the writers in that 'genre' - it is to say that the genre label itself is pretty shaky...

Methinks my opinion is clear...

:rolleyes:

[munnki]

imho, what the Sokal affair demonstrated was that there are a lot of people out there who wish to seem to know and seem to be part of than who actually want to go to the trouble of real investigation and real speculation... and that happens in all fields and should be no surprise to anyone...
however, the Sokal affair, and again I'm not not not defending postmodernism in saying this does not demonstrate the falseness of a group of people put under a rather riduculous umbrella term. And it doesn't simply because it doesn't generalize to those same people...
What do I mean?
Well, if I link Sam, Dave and George together as creationists (say) and I print an obviously false paper which uses pseudodata to create the standard dinosaurs walked among us nonsense the creationists love in Sam's journal. Sam has no peer review system but reads the article and accepts it as truth and Dave reads the article and quotes it in his own writing. George remains George doing George things but doesn't encounter this wonderful ecrit. Well, I can haply call Sam and Dave morons on the basis that they read and didn't analyse or read and quoted as canonical this article. But even though I don't like George on the basis of his creationism - I can't say that this false article is an example of his foolishness. I would have to attack his own creationism.

Easy 'nuff, if 'twere creationism...

[dug_down_deep]

Re: the OP...

The term 'woman' in the phrase 'the French lieutenant's woman' is a euphemism that replaces the word 'whore', or something comparable. So the writer of that passage is saying something other than that women don't exist.

Just keeping it real.

[munnki]

aye... well this whole thing started as a section in a thread called 'Society for the abolition of women' and I googled for quote that said women didn't exist... I'm not sure I'm glad if I did that now...
:(
and I have no idea who Olga Kirillova is

[dug_down_deep]

I figured it was something like that. I was just being OCDish about the details. ;)

[Jobar]

Munnki, I'm not asking you to defend postmodernism, but ever since my interactions with gamera, every time I see the names Derrida, Lacan and Foucault together, I break out in hives. ;)

Like Chomsky, I'm quite interested in learning what, if anything, the postmodernists have to teach; but I run into the same trouble he does, and it appears that the experts of postmodernist thought cannot 'unpack' their ideas into simpler, more familiar terms and paradigms, so that I can get a beginner's understanding of the subject to work from. That link to the discussion on TalkRational was precisely that- a plea for gamera to explain to me his own understanding of postmodernism. As far as I could tell, no one learned anything from him- save that he *thought* he knew something we didn't.

I know that postmodernism originated as a form of literary criticism, and was only later applied to wider fields such as scientific theories. I freely admit that I haven't actually read the works of any of the famous postmodernists, though I have read extracts and glosses from them; so far it's all clear as mud to me. If you can help me understand the topic better, I'm positive that there's plenty here who would also be most grateful!

[munnki]

Munnki, I'm not asking you to defend postmodernism, but ever since my interactions with gamera, every time I see the names Derrida, Lacan and Foucault together, I break out in hives. ;)

That's natural but I'll claim it's based on writings about them rather than on their writings. However, it's natural, life being a finite commodity that we would read about authors before reading them...

Like Chomsky, I'm quite interested in learning what, if anything, the postmodernists have to teach; but I run into the same trouble he does, and it appears that the experts of postmodernist thought cannot 'unpack' their ideas into simpler, more familiar terms and paradigms, so that I can get a beginner's understanding of the subject to work from. That link to the discussion on TalkRational was precisely that- a plea for gamera to explain to me his own understanding of postmodernism. As far as I could tell, no one learned anything from him- save that he *thought* he knew something we didn't.

We're going to end up going around in circles here very quickly ... I believe that Foucault was an interesting writer of history and an interesting philosopher. Now, I can't make other people like him but I also won't waste too much of my time on those who are prepared to denigrate him as a writer but are not prepared to read him. Now, I don't mean to give you a hard time... why not head to amazon, pick up a copy of Discipline and Punish - which, IMHO, is a v.straightforward, lucid and clever history of the prison/discipline system containing facts, dates and references and reading like a history not like spaghetti - read it, and then come back here and pwn me....

I know that postmodernism originated as a form of literary criticism, and was only later applied to wider fields such as scientific theories. I freely admit that I haven't actually read the works of any of the famous postmodernists, though I have read extracts and glosses from them; so far it's all clear as mud to me. If you can help me understand the topic better, I'm positive that there's plenty here who would also be most grateful!

Lacan and Derrida are dense, difficult and annoying authors... no contest there. Re 'postmodernism originated as a form of...' cf my above comments on umbrella term....

[munnki]

Okay, I've read some of that discussion between Gamera and others which you pointed out to me. You'll have to forgive the lack of formatting in this reply as my fricken return key seems to be broken. I think some of what Gamera is saying has some validity to it and some of what he says is plain wrong - he asserts that Foucault's third history of sexuality was never published - this is just incorrect. In the main though the argument centres, IMHO, around something which doesn't exist in any coherent sense. I simply don't think that the ideas (or lack thereof) of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault can be grouped together into any category. To provide a counterpoint, I do, for example think that the ideas of say, Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin can be grouped together and that it's possible to talk about the Frankfurt School as opposed to talking about a Frankfurt school philosopher. Now, one might say that's because when people are writing utter bollocks or fashionable nonsense then it's reasonable to expect that what they will be writing will differ from those also trying to do the same...perhaps for solid Darwinian competitive reasons. And the only counterpoint I can make to that, is that I believe one of those within that category to be an outstanding and important thinker whose work deserves merit and review. The others I believe are on much shakier ground - if only, for the reasons Chomsky outlines namely - I rarely have a sodding clue what they're talking about. Although as noted above I am occasionally amused by some of their more outrageous claims - 'woman, as such, does not exist' - Lacan - is one of the more funny ones. However, I think it's a sad shame that Foucault gets grouped with that nutter if only because he was a frog who had a shaved head and was deemed trendy by his students and the academarazzi. I think it's possible to be both trendy and of merit simultaneously - although for the love of christ - I'd not look to the celebrity world to provide an example.

[Celsus]

Lyotard, The Post-modern Condition: "Simplifying to the extreme, I define post-modern as incredulity towards metanarratives."

Incredulity: skepticism
Metanarrative: theories that make knowledge claims on a foundational epistemology

It's not that hard to fathom, Chomsky would do well to read a basic textbook to find his answer, before attempting to tackle Derrida or Barthes.

There are many things that emerge out of postmodern analysis, much of which disagrees with each other. In general, they began to tackle scientific theory through the attack on positivism and rationality. But while they quite ably tackled positivism, they foundered on rationality because they needed the same tools in order to deconstruct it. Those who attempted to dispense with that ended in a quandary of nihilism, which I reject.

This leads of course to an infinite regress problem, and in some ways has been misunderstood by populist useage to conclude '...therefore everything is valid' when it clearly is not. But if you want to find out its applicability, you can.

Postmodernism is not anti-science. It is anti-metanarrative, of which some scientific theories claimed this status. Marxian critique is postmodern in many ways, yet Marx's syntheses were metanarratives themselves. It's a deliciously ironic situation in many cases.

Personally, I would accept that I have a postmodern mentality: a skeptical approach to any claim that's made, whether or not it agrees or disagrees with my preconceptions. It doesn't mean I'm an absolute relativist, it means I strive towards a deeper understanding of the theories within which claims exist.

Some problems go hopelessly deeply, and if I were to try to explain them, I would have to use postmodern language that some people might not be able to understand. That's no different from a scientific theory that requires you have some theoretical knowledge of its jargon, and the theories within which other 'facts' rest.

Historically, I take an anti-realist stance. That means I do not believe history can be reconstructed according to how it 'really' happened. Scientifically, I'm still a realist - that is scientific theories can describe reality. But to explain why or how I came to hold each of those positions, you're going to get a shovelful of postmodern lingo ;)

[munnki]

Celsus... I've got a woodie... I think you may have read some of the actual texts of the authors being disparaged here. I'm not entirely sure if I agree with Lyotard's quote as I really do think the works of the three authors mentioned predominantly in this thread i.e. Foucault, Derrida and Lacan differ in far more respects than they coincide.

I'll give an example and try not to use lingo in my example. My example will also be based on my readings of their texts and not on language used by critics describing their texts. As such it will contain my own interpretations of what I think they were trying to do and will, in that sense, be incomplete/imperfect etc...

Ecrits - Lacan
Insofar as I could understand this text (and I would say my understanding of it is pretty loose) it seems to be a re-interpretation and expansion of Freudian ideas with an emphasis on how the world is understood and the problems that lie behind our interpretations of symbols..etc... Here's an example paragraph.... I struggled with this text and disliked the experience of much of it as I felt like I was working hard for little reward. That may be a criticism of myself...

But no contrived example can be as telling as the actual experience of truth. So I am happy to have invented the above, since it awoke in the person whose word I most trust a memory of childhood, which having thus happily come to my attention is best placed here.
A train arrives at a station. A little boy and a little girl, brother and sister, are seated in a compartment face to face next to the window through which the buildings along the station platform can be seen passing as the train pulls to a stop. 'Look', says the brother, 'we're at Ladies!'; 'Idiot!' replies his sister, 'Can't you see we're at Gentlemen'.
...the signifier sends forth its light into the shadow of incomplete significations.
(Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: a selection, pp167-168, Routledge, ed 2006)

Now fine... I know that he's referring to Saussure's work on linguistics etc... and he's talking about the problem of interpretation/meaning... and sometimes I quite enjoy the poetic way he does it... but am I learning anything new? I'm not sure...

Derrida - Of Grammatology

Now again, I had a problem with Derrida which might again throw up some of the limitations of my own capacity to understand. Below represents a rather typical pattern of the writing found in this very large text. Now, I can say things like, "I think he's discussing the problems of rendering language into text?" or "I think he's critiquing the modes of thinking that influenced Rousseau's writing (and it's clear he is doing this in part)" but his writing is so enigmatic, difficult or plain obscure that I can never be sure exactly what he's said. Now... that far from means Derrida is a bad writer/philosopher etc... but it does have implications for how far I can take my own jouissance of his work... In his defense, I believe Immanuel Kant to be an equally bad writer...but given time and patience I could understand Kant's philosophy in a way I have never been able to understand Derrida's...

"The enigmatic model of the line is thus the very thing that philosophy could not see when it had its eyes open on the interior of its own history. This night began to lighten a little at the moment when linearity-which is not loss or absence but the repression of pluri-dimensional symbolic thought-relaxes its oppression because it begins to sterilize the technical and scientific economy that it has long favored. In fact for a long time its possibility has been structurally bound up with that of economy, of technics, and of ideology. This solidarity appears in the process of thesaurization, capitalization, sedentarization, hierarchization, of the formation of ideology by the class that writes or rather commands the scribes. Not that the massive reappearance of nonlinear writing interrupts this structural solidity; quite the contrary. But it transforms its nature profoundly.
The end of linear writing is indeed the end of the book, even if, even today, it is within the form of a book that new writings-literary or theoretical-allow themselves to be, for better or for worse, encased. It is less a question of confiding new writings to the envelope of a book than of finally reading what wrote itself between the lines in the volumes. That is why, beginning to write without the line, one begins also to reread past writing according to a different organization of space. If today the problem of reading occupies the forefront of science, it is because of this suspense between the two ages of writing. Because we are beginning to write, to write differently, we must reread differently.
For over a century, this uneasiness has been evident in philosophy, in science, in literature. All the revolutions in these fields can be interpreted as shocks that are gradually destroying the linear model. Which is to say the epic model. What is thought today cannot be written according to the line and the book, excepting by imitating the operation implicit in teaching modern mathmatics with an abacus. This inadequation is not modern, but it is exposed today better than ever before. The access to pluri-dimensionality and to a delinearized temporality is not a simple regression toward the "mythogram;" on the contrary, it makes all the rationality subjected to the linear model appear as another form and another age of mythography. The meta-rationality or the meta-scientificity which are thus announced within the meditation upon writing can therefore be no more shut up within a science of man than conform to the traditional idea of science. In one and the same gesture, they leave man, science, and the line behind."

(Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, pp86-87, ed 1997, Johns Hopkins University Press)

The History of Sexuality - Michel Foucault

Now, I believe we're in a totally different playground with Foucault. Below I have quoted a passage (and it's typical) from this text which I believe is relatively representative of the book as a whole. He's discussing the Dietectics and how relationships between people were ordered at that time. In addition to being able to read it, I'm also capable of understanding it and following it in a reasonably logical and progressive way. Now, this far from means it is better in any objective sense. It simply means that I can derive pleasure and I believe learn from the process of reading it.

"A concern about progeny...In the Laws, Plato solemnly underscores the importance of the precautions that had to be taken for this purpose that concerned parents and the city as a whole. There were measures to be taken at the time of the first sexual act between the two partners on the occasion of marriage: all the values and all the dangers traditionally associated with inaugural acts were present here: on that day and night, it was necessary to refrain from any misdeed with respect to the matter at hand, "for the beginning, which among human beings is established as a god, is the saviour of all things-if She receives the proper honor from each of those who make use of Her." But it was also necessary to be cautious each day during the whole life of the marriage: indeed, no one knew "what day or night" the deity would assist in a conception; hence "throughout the whole year and all one's life," especially during the period of procreation, one must "be careful and avoid doing anything that voluntarily brings on sickness or avoids insolence or injustice. Otherwise, one will necessarily stamp these effects on the souls and bodies of the embryos"; one ran the risk of "begetting offspring who are irregular, untrustworthy, and not at all straight in character or body."

(Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure - A History of Sexuality Volume 2, Vintage, ed 1990, pp120-121)

I'm extremely glad we are now moving towards discussing texts rather than ;) meta-texts at this stage. Perhaps it's because I am a classicist I always prefer discussing the actual texts rather than texts about them... that or it's because I'm a nonce... I'm never sure....

[Celsus]

Bah I lost my post to a BSOD crash.

Anyway, here it is as briefly as I dare: I haven't read nearly enough of the classical (ha!) pomo thinkers for my own liking because I'm more interested, as a pragmatist, in the way postmodern thinking can illuminate the problems of understanding the human condition - in applied fields, particularly history, science and communication.

And I'm always wary about writing down my interpretation of their texts, it's begging to be hammered by someone else who has a different reading.

Lacan's quote is a just-so story, a fable if you like. It's making the basic point that where we see ourselves (or what is signified) can differ based on the referent. It may seem obvious (atop 50 years of postmodern critique), but the point of painting that story in an everyday situation is to demonstrate that even in everyday things, which we often overlook, we can still see things differently depending on who's doing the interpretation.

Derrida is a joy to read. Partly it's because his French style comes through very strongly and perhaps isn't as rhythmic in English translations. His play on words are very intentional, deep, and invites the reader to draw what they can of the text. That's why (in my opinion) while he's less easy to understand, his writing is a joy for the attuned reader.

In your quoted text, he's playing on a multi-layered metaphor through the 'line' or the 'linear'. In mathematics, a linear equation, of course, forms a straight line and it requires external information in order to be solved. That was the problem with modernist philosophy, that could not look within itself, as he states in the first sentence. It needed external referents in order to understand itself.

But the main metaphoric comparison, of course, refers to how stories have a linear plot driven through them that take us from the beginning to the end, the conclusion. And we wrote our histories, even our theories and the history of our theories in such fashion. But the appeal to pluri-dimensionality (which we could just call multi-dimensionality if it helps) is that theories are not necessarily linear and we have to explore the different branches in which we're led, axes away from the straight line. This enriches our knowledge, though it may at first reduce the seeming importance of the main 'line'. It needn't "interrupt" the "structural solidarity" of that which already exists, as he writes. But the realisation (ironic wordplay alert!) of this epistemological implication has far-reaching consequences, and it will make things more difficult to condense into simplifying models.

As we see in our world, the implications of science reach into areas about the environment, about bioethics, about our responsibilities, about our values. These are the implications that had not been well thought out or well considered by earlier generations of thinkers. Knowledge has implications, and no responsible scientist today can act without considering what might be the implications of that knowledge on other fields of human activity.

Within science itself, we've got strands of thought that have explored new areas that were rarely considered before under older social orders - homosexuality, sexual selection - for example have become more closely observed thanks to awareness of gender bias. Scientific 'revolutions' have been unravelled to see how they gain acceptance within a scientific community. A lot of the questioning within the philosophy and history of science stems out of the postmodern questioning of narratives, even if not directly influenced by Derrida looking over a student's shoulders.

Could all of this have been achieved without the postmodernists to spell it out? Perhaps, but their influence on culture through the 1960s (which was deeply positivist), and the results on latter generations of society, and the scientists within that society, who viewed the world through multifaceted lenses and plurality was a norm, are difficult to deny.

Now as for Foucault, you say you've got it, so I shall not try :)

[munnki]

(Wanted to make a public post)
Sounds like you got a lot out of reading those authors. While I don't disagree with your interpretations I think I simply didn't get the same enjoyment out of reading Lacan and Derrida as you obviously have. On reflection it may be because my French simply isn't good enough to read them in the original. I did hear a joke about Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason - that it was worse when read in the original... heh

As mentioned, I'm being rather subjective rather than objective here. And perhaps I should have started there. I'm deeply interested in the subjects that Foucault raises and I really enjoy the points-of-view he introduces me to. I think I often felt that there was little that was of interest to me in Derrida or Lacan's writing.

S'all

[Celsus]

Like Chomsky, I'm quite interested in learning what, if anything, the postmodernists have to teach; but I run into the same trouble he does, and it appears that the experts of postmodernist thought cannot 'unpack' their ideas into simpler, more familiar terms and paradigms, so that I can get a beginner's understanding of the subject to work from. That link to the discussion on TalkRational was precisely that- a plea for gamera to explain to me his own understanding of postmodernism. As far as I could tell, no one learned anything from him- save that he *thought* he knew something we didn't.
So how did you find my first post? What would you like to see?