----- Original Message ----- From: "Marvin Long, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "BRIN-L Mailing list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2002 12:58 AM Subject: PoMo Re: Evolution Question
> > After reading Trent's message on the subject I may have to recant. :-) > He knows a lot more about the history and downside of PoMo than I do. (I > had no idea Foucoult and Derrida were so wicked.) But most of what Trent > describes strikes me as being part of the PoMo "pose." If it is inherent in the writings of the founders of PoMo, it has to be more than just posing. Given their history, constructing a system in which everyone is just like them, using their writings to justify their own desires, makes sense. Sure, they're guilty of things that are called evil. But, in their system, evil, right and wrong are just arbitrary definitions. Trent's argument that the only point of writing or deconstructing writing is "what's in it for me" shows both the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of full fledged PoMo. Since you and Trent wrote your last posts, I've been reading a variety of stuff on PoMo. It ranged from totally stupid and outrageous to somewhat sensible. I have arranged my understand into three tiers: 1) Full True Po-Mo. This is the theory that all writing is political and the purpose of deconstruction is deciding "what's in it for me." Trent described it better than I can, and I consider this worse than nonsense. 2) Po-Mo Lite: This drops the idea that everything is political. However, it includes the idea that there is no best reading of any piece of literature. So, for example, I could read Our Town and write a scholarly paper that describes baseball player #3 who has the line "Hi George" as the centerpiece of the play. Or, David Koresh's interpretation of scripture is equally valid with Raymond Brown's. One of the advantages of this is that it allows for the writing of a lot of scholarly papers on new ground that cannot be dismissed. In this version of PoMo, there is no authors intent, everything is an interpretation. Taken to history, there is no historical truth, just narratives about the past. Personally, I think that the humanities suffer from being too little constrained instead of too constrained. IMHO, true creativity comes when there is just the right amount of room for possibilities. An example of this is games. tic-tac-toe is a meaningless game because it is too highly constrained. Chess and Go are great games because they are optimally constrained. Other games of pure chance have no constraints. One move is as good as another. (Poker doesn't count here, its a game based on the buying and selling of information..and is thereby constrained.) With regards to history, I think that this is basically false. While history is not physics, it is constrained by facts. Thus, the Southern apologists argument that the South seceded because of states rights issues that had nothing to do with slavery is just wrong, not a narrative with equal validity as the narrative that states it was due to slavery. Although we are not clairvoyant, we can see tremendous evidence for the initial intent of those that formed the Confederacy in their writings. One final point, PoMo light shares one other aspect with PoMo. The understanding that Truth doesn't exist. Finally, there is Po-Mo ultralight. It holds that it is impossible to be totally objective. That every reading of text is an interaction between the author and the reader. That the original intent of the author cannot be understood outside of basis of the understanding of the reader. That there are valid understandings of text that later interpreters can bring to the text. An example of this might be the use of an understanding of human psychology to interpret the plays of Shakespeare. However, this ultralight view does not hold that all interpretations are equal. It does not claim political motivations for everything. It asks questions besides "what's in it for me." It acknowledges that Truth may exist and that facts certainly are important, just that it is too much for any individual or any school of thought, or any culture to claim that they have it in their hot little hands. This last view, ultralight, seems worthwhile to me. It seems to be a caution against hubris, not a claim of hopelessness. It acknowledges that better and lesser understandings exist, and while we cannot be totally unbiased, that there are some better and some worse interpretations. Some versions of history are so unsupported by documents that the word wrong is a very good first or even second order approximation to what they are. Given that understanding, let me finally respond to Marvin: > It seems to me that a fair assessment of > responsible PoMo thought obliges us to realize that PoMo is about > understanding human events and institutions and the language we use to > describe them. History and literature and art and ethics and statecraft > are not amenable to purely scientific analysis the way physics is. Those are true statements. I think that describes PoMo ultralight. However, I think that it would be better to say that some of the techniques of analysis They > are subject to evidence, yes, but they do not represent physical laws > that can be tested under controlled circumstances. Not yet, anyway. > > However, because the creation of histories and art and literature and > policy and propaganda are all happening all the time, there's a rich field > for observation and seeing how language is used to shape "the real world" > (that thing people talk about when they say, "In the *real* world, you > must accept that yada yada is true.") But, why not use historical analysis instead. Say, in the real world slavery always existed as of 150 years ago, now we don't have it. In the real word, democratic type governments didn't exist 250 years ago. Thus, we can know that social structures are not always immutable. > But there's no reason a PoMo couldn't analyze the facet of science > that exists as a social institution. >I'm under the impression that one of the reasons PoMo is *post*-modern is because >one of its big concerns is to question the "scientific" view of infinite technical and moral >progress made possible by reason which characterizes what often is called the >"modern period" stretching roughly from Descartes to WW2 (or to Nietzsche, >perhaps). I did not get that in any of my readings. I think that, from what Trent and others write, full fledged PoMo is an attempt to break down all rules, including moral and logical rules, in order to make room for the goals of the writers. From what Trent writes, the goals of the founders of PoMo are pretty despicable. It appears that the goals of many English professors is to be able to write, to put it bluntly, nonsense, without anyone being able to say the Emperor has no clothes. I'm guessing for them, that would be a tired old narrative, tied to the feudal past. In alternate narratives, the small boy is really the villain and represents the corruption of the youth by the false consciousness of the Enlightenment. It's false consciousness, not because it is wrong, but because there is nothing in it for English professors. What they need is to have a circle of people who call each other brilliant without having to justify themselves to the masses, who are just too pedestrian to understand brilliance. (I don't think that the correlation between the disconnect between the elite in the humanities and culture that has been seen over the last 50 years or so and postmodernism is purely a coincidence.) > The point is not to criticize laws of gravity or genetics as such, but the > ways in which these laws are presented to society and then used to justify > one policy or another. That's been argued against, by scientists, for years. Its the difference between science and scientism. What has that to do with postmodernism? > > Besides the fact that PoMo people don't like fundamentalists, why aren't > > evolution creationism equally valid narratives from a PoMo point of view? > > A responsible PoMo would be able to separate "evolution, the > falsifiable scientific theory" from "evolution, the linguistic shorthand > used to describe and support a wide variety of beliefs and events." It > seems to me that a PoMo could reasonably assert that creationism fails on > scientific grounds and then observe that the battle between creationism > and evolution in society is not just a battle for scientific truth but > also a battle for control of morality, culture, and the state. In the > latter arena, evolution and creationism may take on characteristics that > have nothing to do with their scientific merits. IMHO, this is sociology, not postmodernism. > Some laypersons would say the same about trying to get a clear and simple > explanation of QM, say. But, people have written many books detailing QM for beginners. Associated with the sci.physics newsgroup, there have been tutorials written for the educated layman detailing not only QM, but field theory and general relativity by people who contribute to those newsgroups. I was at the pomo newsgroup back when the Skokie hoax was being discussed about 5 years ago. I, and several others, asked for a description of PoMo. We were told to read Derrida and then after years we might understand it. Remember, I've done graduate work in philosophy, and spent some time in grad. school around people going for their Phd in philosophy. I obtained two impressions from that experience, and from talking to these folks: how hard it was to come up with a really good innovation, and how easy it was to get by with BS. I'm thinking that the PoMo folks are >The problem is that there isn't a clear and simple explanation for a laymanly definition of clear and >simple, and neither is there a clear and simple description of how language is used in human > society. But, I'm not a layman. :-) I've done graduate work in the humanities. Further, I've written explanations for the EPR paradox that at least some of ya'll who are not physicists have told me that you understood. Trent's explanation is the first attempt I've seen to explain PoMo in my conversations with folks who claim to be associated with it. > > It seems to me that the basic tools of PoMo, deconstruction and analysis > of language, need not be tied to the kind of shifty nihilism Trent > described. It seems to me that the PoMo has a point when he says that our > access to history and society is through language, through competing > narratives, without access to an immediate reality (the way physics has > access to phenomena but not noumena). The problem is that society and > history and language are all fluid and interdependent, always inventing > narratives about themselves even in the process of being made, and you > can't repeat an event to test it, so you build up inferences by analyzing > repetitions of similar situations in art, literature, policy, language, > and so on. I'll agree that it is quite possible that some techniques might survive. But, it seems to me that the thesis that core of PoMo is university politics explains a great deal of PoMo. > > The problem for PoMos, it seems to me, is that they often want to take > this difficult feature of humanity and leap from it to some very > problematic metaphysical and ethical conclusions -- that nihilism Trent > mentioned -- which themselves should be undermined by the skepticism > created by the slipperiness of language and truth. But people rarely > question the things that make them smug. > > Anyway, there's my third-hand unacademic view. I suspect that we find > ourselves dipping into the postmodernist toolbag on list frequently > without even thinking about it; some habits of looking for the unspoken > motives and assumptions behind speech -- beyond just questioning the overt > logic -- have become almost unconscious. I can't imagine that questioning peoples motives started in the 1940s. It seems from what I've seen from Trent and others leads me to believe that hard core PoMo claims that all history and literature is nothing more than political propaganda. That the purpose of all reading and writing is "what's in it for me." The only valid concept that I can see being rescued from PoMo is the view that it is impossible to totally remove observer bias. (Techniques will, in all likelihood will also survive.) Anyways, those are my thoughts: better late than never. Dan M.
