Po-mo vs Futurism vs Modernism

Anyway for better or worse there are certainly strains of art that people like to call postmodern in the sense that says "I have the vague impression that what's going on here has something in common or something to do with postmodern thought," and it's certainly fair to say that that sort of art tends to seize on the idea of creating meaning through playing with aesthetics and form. I think a lot of the time it's successful at that. But then a lot of the time it's not, and it winds up sacrificing the urgency or direction it might have without whatever qualities we're calling "postmodern" in it. But then: I'm not sure it's even fair to call most of it "postmodern" in the first place, as the term in the arts has taken on a life that rarely has anything to do with what it means in philosophy and criticism (which, in turn, isn't so easily to clarify its own damn self).

And Jurgen Habermas!

A-and Richard Rorty too!

My idealism is about the notion that most people are capable of the latter, even though I see pitifully little evidence of it...

But then again, I also believe in nothing absolutely, least of all the future. Society ultimately has no future; fortunately, that's not a problem for any of us.

I will stand up for modernism but it is past, it is gone. I want a forward looking aesthetic to call my own. Perhaps I will have to write the manifesto.

Christine seems to have got the argument down better, even if I am a great dela more optimistic about society.

And le differend or the Other!

I would argue that your problem is with "pop post-modernism," then, and not any thing that I think resembles postmodernist thought.

I mean -- warning, terms used loosely ahead -- granted, postmodernism is the last attack on a lot of positivist "certainties" about the human experience, and any time you open up such structural things into relativity you do give loads of people an excuse to be neutral and/or apathetic in roughly the way you're describing. But but but it's not as if modernism wasn't pretty much an attack on those same rationalist "certainties," just with slightly more pillars left standing for people to lean on. There's a definite "mission" to postmodernism, it just happens to be a mission of questioning and reorganization rather than a bold new path that's meant to take us somewhere specific. What needs to come beyond postmodernism is something that attempts to answer more of those questions than it asks.

I don't think futurism or modernism were necessarily about 'taking us somewhere specific' I just want a something that't going somewhere as opposed to round in circles. We're supposed to build on whats gone before, questioning and arguing with it sure but we should concentrate on the building and less on re-assessing. I'll discuss later, but I'm due somewhere for dinner.

Ideals are needed as a defense against other peoples ideals.

I accept that religious folk will slam this statement on principle. Objection noted.

My ideal is to throw away 'ideas' as movements and encourage people to figure it out (or not) for themselves. But, of course, to formalise that idea makes it *another* movement! More fascism!

No, really, there's no hope! The world's fucked sixteen ways come Sunday! Post-Modernism is just another symptom of its doom.

Some of the above might even be serious. I'm not really sure.

In France at least, Postmodernism = a sociological response to the apparent 'failure' of 60s Marxism/radicalism (see also, of course, Situationism), and esp. the association of Marxian metanarratives w/ Russian totalitarianism. 'Totalizing' systems of thought had already been theoretically undermined by the post-structuralist 'deconstruction' of language/subject/society by such intellectuals as Derrida, Lacan and Althusser; Lyotard and Baudrillard were both disaffected lefties who had grown to mistrust Marxism/modernism's empty romantic gestures, ideological rigidity, unthinking humanism, elitism, etc. Ed, you seem to be calling for an artistic movement that, through rhetoric/action/creation, unites society and the individual. Well, I guess that post-modernism tries to shatter into a thousand pieces the v. idea of this 'whole' individual, or society, and suggests that the best we can do is contemplate how beautiful/fascinating some of the shards are...

My head might hurt soon. I *am* stupid, ya know.

Post-Modernism
PostModernism
"PoMo" a NoNo?

1. PoMo didn't bring idealism to an end: it was brought about by people believing they were seeing or had seen the end of idealism. The people who have used PoMo as an excuse for proclaiming that death are not people who would have been strong idealists anyway, I think. There are still plenty of idealists around.

2. Ed says "Nothing new has ever come out of pomo." This is because Ed is only naming things as 'PoMo' if he doesn't like them. PoMo has been absolutely vital in the reasonably high visibility of feminism and anti-racism, in that the whole idea of feminist art or black literature, of these as valid and interesting alternative viewpoints (dodging the term 'metanarrative' for Ed's benefit), depend on PoMo. This has incidentally led to stronger bases and higher profiles for the related idealisms!

3. Also new kinds of all kinds of art, like nothing we had seen before. In lit alone, we have had Borges, Marquez, Calvino, Perec, Pynchon, Barth, Bathelme, Erickson, Coover, Auster, Gass, Gaddis and loads more. This is not 'nothing new'. Its literary products alone guarantee PoMo much love from me. Top PoMo music: hip hop of course, with it being based on the sample, of restructuring and reusing what was already there.

4. I'm all in favour of the breaking down of the High/Low art thing. Claiming that a Beach Boys single is as valuable as a Picasso painting, or a Krazy Kat strip as great as a Shelley poem is a worthwhile advance.

5. I accept that it has brought problems: irony as an excuse for being crap, and as something that willy-nilly undermines any attempt at emotional seriousness are much the most common ones, I think.

6. And the final key point: Do you hate fun?

True, but I think the first manifestations of pomo in music come out of Cage, maybe more so out of those influenced by him (Fluxus et al).

I hardly feel qualified to even comment on this topic, however I would argue that pomo is more a codificaton of nihilism than of apathy. Painting a picture, writing a poem, labeling a urinal as art, even sitting around and speaking in some smoke-filled cafe, are all positive actions. By definition one can never "express" apathy. Nihilism, on the other hand, is something different entirely. And it is something that (some would say) is actually good for society in that it challenges old ideals and spurs on the formation of others.

"Ja, we believe in NOTHING!"

This is exactly the sort of thing I was talking about above: Duchamp was a modernist, not a postmodernist.

the problem and sucess of pomo is that at its core it says nothing. it's not a manifesto, it's a chance for a manifesto. if modernism is trying to rearrange things to useful ends, pomo would be continuing to rearrange them for the sake of the rearranging. pomo is the opportunity to codify things one your own terms, on your own whims.

garard manley hopkins was a modernist for years, until people decided to have him back as a victorian. maverick, and a little visionary, but of its time.

a funny thing happened on the way to the "actually"

Is it pomo to repurpose Flea in this context?

I laughed anyway.

I thought Ed and Christine were being all depressing, and then jess comes along and smashes everything to the ground in one fell swoop.

It's not even worth BOTHERING anymore

looking in my notes i found these 2 quotes I got somewhere on the web.

I gave the bootleg treatment to the first one:
"My own view is that postmodernism was of great use to elaborate the idea that "human nature" is not fixed, reflecting a desire to actively participate in and augment human evolution, without apologies to any theologies, but with a careful eye on ethics."

this one is an integral anon. extropic quote:
"Math and science have already made extensive use of the theories of
language models that postmodern thinking have created/inspired."
then he went on about the "Uncertainty Principle" in quantum physics

The sort of postmodernism-in-art people are talking about here is just a really small segment of Jameson-style "postmodernism," one of a whole bunch of different ways of connecting postmodern thought to the arts. This is the sort of stuff people connect with, say, parody and formal experimentation and demolishing the difference between high and low culture in art -- stuff that's all present in, say, Ulysses but has more recently been taken as evidence of a postmodern condition in art. This is also the sort of stuff people to think of as overly conceptual and often dumb, like "ooh look see how I drew a mustache on this Matisse print, it recontextualizes, it's postmodern."

And yeah totally, a lot of that is crap, which is what sometimes happens when artists get too caught up in cultural theory -- the whole Jameson approach to this stuff tends to be all about the aesthetics of art and what they mean, as opposed to what we think of as art's actual "content," and when artists get all involved in that sort of thinking they're liable to start making art that's all aesthetic tricks and not much hard emotional content.

But postmodern thought is loads of things beyond that, so many things that it's often hard to even say what postmodernity is even supposed to mean. Martin's example of this is probably the best one: it's also postmodern ideas that have led to things like feminist literary criticism and a subset of "feminist literature," as well as a lot of ideas in postcolonial literature and studies, none of which have anything to do with the urinal-as-art or "David Foster Wallace, he's so postmodern" sense of the stuff.

And I too am resistant to the idea that nothing worthwhile has come from what most people think of as postmodernism in art and literature (which I still maintain isn't sufficiently distinct from modernism for the term to get used the way it does): John Barth's Chimera is built from a device that practically defines what postmodernism's considered to be in literature, and it's one of my favorite books on pretty much any level.

(In a drawer somewhere in this apartment is a copy of an essay Barth wrote on postmodernism in literature in I think the late-late 60s, and it's fantastic and addressing all of this and more: Ed, if I can find it I'll try to excerpt some bits here.)

What bothers me is that it essentially means *nothing*, does *nothing* and is *nothing*, except that it provides a convenient hook on which to hang preposterous terms like meta-narrative (a totally fucked-up, smug excuse to not use plain English if ever there was one), and can be made to encapsulate sundry things -- cultural or artistic or sexual or the goddamned kitchen sink -- that someone happens to like.

We don't *need* this fucking idiotic terminology. It's formalising things that only an imbecile would miss. It perpetuates what it seeks to dissemble. It's disappeared up its own arsehole and, you know, ideally there it would remain, forever lost...

Take me seriously! I may kill someone at any moment.

Okay, I’ve got the dates right now. What Barth did write in the late 60s was an essay, mostly about Borges, called “The Literature of Exhaustion.” The one I was thinking of, though, is from the late 70s, and it’s called “The Literature of Replenishment.” (Do you see what he did there?) The first one was meant to make the case that there are, you know, forms and structures and conventions to art, and that they just plain get tired and used up after a while—at which point they need to be put away, or tweaked around, or set up against one another if you want to accomplish anything new or exciting. Everyone here who follows music probably sees the point of that. Part of the second essay is a clarification, because Barth thought a lot of people—including Borges himself—were basically misinterpreting all of that, assuming he meant that fiction was somehow over: “that it had all been done already; that there is nothing left for contemporary writers but to parody and travesty our great predecessors in our exhausted medium—exactly what some critics deplore as postmodernism.”

Which is pretty much what Ed deplores as postmodernism, right? So in order to decide if that’s true or not we have to figure out what postmodernism in art actually is, and in order to do that we should probably figure out what modernism in art really is. Here’s a checklist of the stuff Barth points to, which is sort of a mashup of a contemporary critic’s reading T. S. Eliot writing about James Joyce (sorry)—the breakdown being that the basic thing in modernism was “criticism of the nineteenth-century bourgeois social order and its world view,” accomplished in art by:

- dropping bourgeois realism
- messing with the traditional linear flow of narrative
- messing with traditional ideas about unity and coherence of plot and character
- using irony and juxtaposition
- mocking rationality
- setting up inner consciousness as opposed to rational “objective” thought

All of these, incidentally, are things I think people tend now to think of as loosely “postmodern,” hence my harping on that before. If I wrote up vague descriptions of some classic pieces of modernist lit—say, “a man wakes up in the morning and realizes he’s turned into a giant bug”—I get the feeling plenty of people would say it sounded totally “postmodern.”

Okay but so what does postmodernism do? Well, the term implies that it has to be both a continuation and a rejection of modernism. Here’s what the literary critics of 1979 thought, and what plenty of people say now:

- that it plays up the self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of modernism
- that it’s “more and more about itself and its processes, less and less about objective reality and life in the world” (that’s Barth on that complaint, which is a completely true one)
- that it’s basically just the logical end-point of modernism’s “anti-rationalist, anti-realist, anti-bourgeois” program

And if this were it, then yeah: postmodernism would be pretty useless, exactly the kind of apathetic giving-up gesture Ed describes. The whole reason I bring Barth into this is that he makes my favorite case that that’s not all there is. I mean, he acknowledges all of these problems, which are totally real and have only gotten worse since 1979. But there’s the implication that the same was true of modernism and is probably true of anything. (Good quote from Paul Valery: “Many ape the postures of modernity, without understanding their necessity.”)

Without going on for too much longer: Barth basically claims that the postmodern artist is in a predicament, which is that he or she can’t simply go on with modernism (there are a few good reasons for this), but he or she can’t exactly go back and pretend that the entire first half of the twentieth century never happened, either; you can’t just bury modernism and go back to writing Dickens. Postmodernity, he says—at least in literature—is about finding a way to learn from both the work of high modernism and the history of the novel before it. Part of his idea is that the novel started off as a popular, middle-class, middle-brow form of literature, whereas modernism—being an assault on exactly that audience and its world view—became an intentionally inaccessible range of Finnegans Wakes and Cantos, “each with its staff of tenured professors to explain it to us.” Part of his idea is that those impulses need to be bridged.

And then, okay, the reason I love his whole approach to this is that his answers to this problem are exactly the answers I love best: he points to two novels that manage to accomplish this, and they’re Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. To which I say HOORAY, and judging from the authors Martin points to as having brought something valuable out of postmodernism he will also say HOORAY, and maybe on the other thread we can add Murakami to the canon of authors who accomplish this interesting and I think really valuable Barth conception of what postmodernism in at least one art can mean.

Point being, in Barth terms, it’s not just about “exhaustion,” which is the stick that gets used to beat it all the time—it can be about replenishment as well!

So yeah, that's not all but still...

Barth and Barthelme and Auster (not Calvino) I'll give you, again with maybe but not fersure Erikson who I think is rilly Noveau Roman meets LA.

So if you wanna define "postmodern" to cover that rubric yeah sure I guess but it hardly seems to make much fucking sense.

Related question: has anyone seriously tackled Lukacs' concept of reification and managed to dismantle it?

Coincidentally this falls under the rubric of rejecting modernism, actually -- or at least rejecting the modernist idea that art should be born of manifestoed concerns. Less coincidentally I think plenty of critics in the 70s would have grouped the Nouveau Roman in as a subset of postmodernism. (And I sometimes wonder why we try to be all specific about "postmodernism" but we're willing to let "modernism" encompass a whole multitude of different approaches, especially in visual art.)

Anyway this Barth approach is only meant to display one other slant on Ed's problems with postmodernism, and specifically its role in art and specifically literature -- and to only address it on that level is still to completely ignore that it's a component of philosophy and cultural theory and critical theory, something in the direction of judging Marxism by whether one does or does not enjoy "Marxist novels."

(Which is why even though I completely understand Christine's complaint about it I don't think it's a good one: in the end the complaint comes down to "I hate postmodernism because I don't know what it is," and while that really is partly postmodernism's fault -- because it's done a poorer job than it could have of making itself useful outside of the academy -- surely it's also partly Christine's? Just because someone wrote the manual in Swahili doesn't mean the thing in the box doesn't work.)

Isn't there a Borges story where a man writes the whole of 'Don Quixote' word for word, and it's a new work because it was written in a new time, a new context, and after the original 'Don Quixote'?

And aren't there things like Kathy Acker (self-consciously rewriting Dickens' 'Great Expectations' and cutting it up with punky stuff about being a runaway) and Oasis (rewriting the pop Dickens, the Beatles)?

Surely the point is that, in a period that, like it or not, has been labelled 'post-modern', every gesture an artist makes is, will-he nil-he, post-modern, even if it's the same gesture as artists made in previous periods. And I'd say that some of the things Nabisco / Barth list as overlapping with Modernism also overlap with Romanticism (radical subjectivity, psychologism, rejection of bourgeois modes, etc).

So if Ed were to incorporate in an artwork his frustration with postmodernism, the irony would be that it would still be a postmodern artwork. It would be 'self-reflexive'. All its twists and turns, its attempts to escape, would just tie his artwork in ever tighter pomo knots.

Now the thing is I 'd do like a lot of the products of 'post-modernism' in the arts, literature, music etc. Things don't become less valid in my eyes if they are or are claimed for post-modernism.

The problem for me comes is the vast swath of mediocrity it appears to promote. An easy escape for the post-modernist appears to be populism and nostalgia and not just a little personal or corporate egotism. I am against populism as well you know life, art, politics, democracy are not about conforming to the lowest common denominator they are about trying to persuade people to come over to you view. (Its worth noting that coming over to your view does not include provoking 'outrage' in the tabloids, apathy in the papers and 'ooh that's clever' in your social group).

Although I am interested in more ephemeral world of music, the arts and literature, I am much much more connected and concered with architecture, design and engineering. And this is where the sense of post modernism as naval gazing. Look at the new paternoster square in london, a more vile pice of architecture cannot be found, a hotch potch of re hashed dead styles mixed with some 80s vision of technology.

Retro fetishism is killing design or at least restricting innovation. This is the product of marketing lead commerce. giving people exactly what they want is great business sense but its stifles innovation which is about finding things that people didn't know they wanted liked or needed. Daring to be different and giving people something that they didn't think they needed drives society. Post-modernism has led companies to look at the meta-narrative of their who marketing-design-production-marketing. The post modernist consumer-industrial process looks at a innovation and breaks it down into a series of expedient marketing led upgrades, trickling the innovation to the consumer over time, tryin to stay just ahead of the game rather than flying out in front. Frequently even innovation is subsumed or cast out in favour of taking a 'classic' and providing endless minor iterations.

One of the great things about engineering is it is naturally not post modernist. It is about the real, the novel about pushing back the boudaries of human existence by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately no-one bothers to tell engineers this so they becomes tools of post-modernism.

The greatest achivement of pomo industry is to creat a 'classic' overnight. Giving people an instant nostaglia for something that never existed.

I am not likely to incorporate my frustrations with pomo. I may well creat in certain ways in a reaction against pomo. The things is though, if I wrote an artistic manifesto reaffirming some of the tenets of futurism, and adding some of my own. I'd be claimed by the post-modernists as one of their own.

(I'm trying to decide whether the iMac is retro or whether it was truly innovative, the original Mac probably was, I think maybe the iMac went and obscured its references).

Now I'm going to read Ed's intervening post. Morning, Ed!

hey I did read it and it has cleared up the point on how does a philosophical position turn into a novel, really. can you tell me abt. I'll try and get hold of that essay.

is there an actual difference between ed's nostalgia for idealisms past, and retro-chic? don't they spin out of the same widespread impulse: that to vivify the present we have to overrate to the past? (my kneejerk here has always been, if the past was so great, howcum it ended up in the present?)

Fredric Jameson would definitely be good for Ed to look into as he dealt wih arhcitecture and design. The Cultural Logic Of Late Capitalism is pretty much his best work as far as I know, certainly the one I used most.

I don't think we live in a postmodern age anymore than Keats' neighbours lived in a Romantic age or da Vinci's baker lived in a Rennaisance age; the 'name' (and thus 'character') of a time is gifted to it by an elite of people; previously this was always a post-event thing, but these days, given the media/internet/hyperfast communications etcetera, it gets titled now and not 10, 20, 50, 100 years down the line. The average person in the street doesn't know what pomo is or spend time considering it; and yet, unlike most of these other pleasant little terms we have for rubbery stages of human endeavour and activity, it's passed into common parlance almost completely in the semi-educated western world. All you need to do is pick up a style magazine; pomo as a theory itself (if you like) has lead to the appropriation of theorys/theorists/theoretical terms into mainstream everyday public use outside of academic circles. But it's use is like the use of the term 'vacuum' in vacuum cleaner; people know what it signifies to them, that is what it does, immediately and superficialy, but when people say 'vacuum cleaner' they're not really thinking as they say it of the concept of an actual 'vacuum' as a physicist would understand it. Same with pomo; people know it signifies irony, the triumph of the image over the substance, a certain detached knowingness, but they probably wouldn't be given to think of Rorty/Jameson/Baudrillard.

(Is the Iraqi information minister postmodern? Baudrillard wrote "the Gulf war does not exist" after the event, from a theoretical viewpoint, but this chap is doing it , with tanks behind him! Which is far, far braver and more radical than Baudrillard!)

Ed's problems seem to me not to be with postmodernism as a (non)school of thought, the anti-theory theory, an academic pursuit (although if he read Sokal he might posit himself as anti-pomo in that respect too!), but rather with pomo as a tool of capitalism; ie; the hyper-accelerated cannibalistic consumer culture in which ideas get eaten and re-eaten and eaten again in quick succession because that's what best suits the marketplace. For a century or more capitalism was best furthered by reaching out to new markets, via colonialism, marketing, interpolation of outsider cultures into the markeplace (the acquisition of rebellion as evidenced by the commodification of punk; much as I love mark s and his stuff about The Pistols, their lasting legacy, really, is the three-minute punk pop adolescent Green Day MTV2 video, not the possibility of the self-realisation of personal revolution and freedom). But acquiring new markets is a; a finite pursuit as their are only so many people/cultures in the world to buy stuff, and b; fuckign expensive, time consuming, and difficult - witness how much trend-setters/predictors get paid by companies like Levis and Nike to guess/predict future trends and styles, their relentless pursuit of the outsider rebel aesthetics in search of new styles, ideas, etcetera. Witness also that it costs $600,000 per Tomahawk Cruise Missile to fire at the Iraqis to finally secure the Middle East as a new marketplace for the advance of capitalism, and that if only those fucking awkward Muslims didn't have Allah then they could have cashmoney as their new Godhead and it'd be so much easier to buy their oil off them cheap and sell them cars back expensive! {over-simplified I know, but you get the gist]. And so why bother discovering new markets and creatign new products and seeking out new ideas and styles when you can entertain the proletariat so much with bread and circus games which they've already consumed at least once before! Food's so much easier and quicker to swallow if you've already chewed it up once beforehand, and it allows you to get onto the new food quicker and so eat more in the longrun! And that's why postmodernism as a capitalist tool/construct is typified by repetition, acceleration and apathy; if you don't care about anything you'll buy everything if it's pitched to you right.

Postmodernism is hideously hard to define and pin down because it seeks to destroy definitions in other things; thus to define it is to mark it out as something which needs to be destroyed itself. There are so many areas in which it operates too, so many disparate things to which it can be applied. In some senses it is not actually a theory in itself, but rather a way to approach other theories; that's certainly how I like to see it. It's like the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Hut as opposed to just buying a regular 9" pizza; you can pick a bit of everything if you want to try it, or you can just get lots of one or two things the know you definitely like. Most people just get on and eat loads of peperoni pizza and some potato salad cos that's what they like, but some people like to try Thousand Island dressing and radishes and humous for the first time just to see if they're any good. Postmodernism gives you that option to try everything and find value in anything, which was always kind of denied to us when we could only order a whole pizza. I see it as being quite holistic in a way, because it allows us to link things together which otherwise we might not have attempted. But you've got to be prepared to pick the radish and the humous and the Thousand Island and not just the potato salad, and a lot of people are simply not willing to do so. Or, if they are, they try one radish and it's a bad radish so they hate all radishes from then on (hence my adage of "try everything twice, in case you do it wrong first time"), or else they don't think about it as they try it and so don't appreciate how the radish is good, or else they expect the radish to taste like a strawberry and when it doesn't they are disappointed and again shy off radishes. Postmodernism should come with a caveat like that one about freedom and eternal vigilance, because that's what it offers; the freedom to try and to experience and to appreciate anything and everything, as long as you are willing to try it with an open but slightly skeptical mind (skeptical so you don't get fooled and taken advantage of!). If you are a modernist you have to adhere to all tenets of modernism, ditto futurism (obv. you don't, but that's the purpose of a meta-narrative - for people to follow all its strictures); pomo lets us each escape having to define ourselves on a personal level so that we can say we don't follow the strict rules of any one meta-narrative (be it modernism, Islam, Christianity, capitalism, Marxism, whatever), and yet be aware of each and take heed of the ideas we think are pertinant from any.

Right. I'm rapidly losing my train of though, and seeing as I've not really engaged with pomo academically for two years and haven't got my books and notes with me, this might well be wooly and not quite relevant. But there you go.

Its possible to say, of course that now we are in the era of post-modernism it is impossible not to see things through the optics of post-modernism because it is merely a description of the way people see things in our era.

The difficult question is: Where does referencing end and retro-fetishising begin?

We can't tear down and build anew but that doesn't mean that we have to endlessly circle over the past canibalising it for our current needs.

(I'm sorry I haven't really been answering people's points that well, but continuing my argument against what may come to be know as pop post modernism. I've read nitsuh's essay extracts and all the rest of this thread but as yet noone has come up with a primer or definition of Post-modernism. As yet I still don't know if it is indeed post-modernism I'm trying to free myself from or the general state of society or whether post-modernism is merely a description of the latter.)

This post comes before nick's which I am now reading.

(That was a daunting but fine post Nick!)

I'm reminded at this point of a story (possibly untrue!) about an A Level-level English lecture, in which the lecturer was describing how in English it was that two negatives make a positive, and how it didn't work in reverse; ie; two positives do not make a negative, when a student from the back of the lecture theatre exclaimed "Yeah, right."

I do dispute that the purpose of an idealism or a manifesto is to provide strictures. Its to be debated, argued, interpreted.

more later but I must get to university.

This is exactly my point about all struggling merely binding the ropes tighter. Post-modernism has built into its specification revulsion against the very present it defines. 'Modern life is rubbish' is, natch, a punning motto which is both anti and pro pomo (rubbish as in crap, and rubbish as in recyclable material ripe for recontextualisation.)

my kneejerk here has always been, if the past was so great, howcum it ended up in the present?)

Ha ha! If the past was so rubbish, how come it ended up recycled?

Yeah, right.

1; The insidious global homogenisation of sweet/chocolate names. That is Marathon becoming Snickers, Opal Fruits becoming Starburst. There seems to be no logic to these name changes other than global capitalist homogenisation (what's Snickers as a name got to do with chocolate and peanuts? At least the name Marathon implied that eating the disgusting things would require an effort equivalent to having to run a marathon).

2; The intertextuality of sweets/chocolates and icecream products; Ice Cream Mars/Twix/, Starburst lollies, etcetera.

3; The shrinkage of normal chocolate bars into smaller, Quality Street-type nugget things in Heroes and Celebrations.

Very interesting, I think you'll all agree.

I have read those Barth essays. And most of his others, probably - the two Fridays collections, anyway. I think the 'Replenishment' one is in Further Fridays, Julio. As ever, I am ready to be your librarian.

Momus, the Borges story you refer to is 'Pierre Menard, Author Of The Quixote' (title from memory), and is a masterpiece. The bit where he quotes the same sentences twice (once from Cervantes, once Menard) and explains how they are radically different is a wonderful demonstration of PoMo at work, or possibly at play.

Ed's interests are areas where I'm even less expert, but let's not dismiss PoMo architecture on the basis of one rubbish example - there has been rubbish architecture produced in all eras from all isms. Offhand, I'd cite Michael Graves as a wonderful PoMo architect, but I'll need to browse a bit in my architecture books at home to remind myself of some more examples that I am willing to stand behind - I know there are others. (I'm out tonight, so won't get back to this thread until tomorrow.)

I don't put a lot of stock in it myself. To me po-mo comes down to realizing at some point that everything is there to buy and sell and make images of--nothing is excluded, as in the olden days. No more pathos as in Faulkner's description of idiots in a potentially beautiful/historically charged landscape, no more Blooms as in Joyce's big book. Nothing real left to plunder--no more blues to discover. All images and received ideas.

As I say I don't put a lot of stock in it--it does describe the world of buying and selling culture pretty well but obviously I'm old-fashioned and therefore I don't think it really describes culture itself too well. I'm all for pastiche and referential shit but whether this is really what people need or whether it's really what art is supposed to be, I have my doubts. It's not now and never has been and never will be any brand new world detached from history or human nature or what art is really supposed to do. And obviously I feel that the whole project of "cultural studies" has been perverted from its origins in writers like E. P. Thompson.

I don't know that the whole desconstructionist project has been discredited at this point, but I am aware of many intelligent, not right-wing efforts, to show how the whole thing was an outgrowth of French colonialism, for example, and therefore historically grounded and perhaps just a tad, uh, bullshit. To say that economics determines culture is all right and it's something that people maybe didn't want to admit in the olden days. Now we admit it, revel in it, and are resigned to it, illusions shattered and all.

Well, it's kind of a Devil's Advocate complaint, really. Posties seem to be against elitism, yet are their own elitism! And so on and so on. I don't believe it can claim any relevance to anything in a real sense, and if it belongs to a cliquey Smug Club, it's just an armchair philosophy that 95% (conservatively) of society don't give a toss about.

My actual complaint with it? Let's say as a writer I produced something really great and maybe even revolutionary. (Not very likely, but we're in Fantasy Land atm, so go with it.) And maybe this great thing reflected the gestalt of the time, a time perhaps of great cultural/artistic evolution or whatever. So some know-all who never did anything useful in his life proclaims from his well-worn armchair that this gestalt is New Obsessionalism (hold on, surely someone already did!). Anyway... so my masterpiece is retroactively enveloped by this crud. I'm a New Obsessionalist writer all of a sudden.

How do I feel? Pissed off. I don't want no steenkin' label. I don't want someone raping my intellectual property because it fits in with their faddish fancies. Uh-uh.

My other complaint is really shallow. The term sounds horrible. It sounds like something a student comes up with under the influence of several spliffs and a dozen vodkas.

You know, it means everything, because everyone has their own nostrum to hang on it, and almost by definition it usually has to be 'valid.'

If I were an intellectual luminary, wouldn't it be tempting to proclaim, from my armchair, the beginning of a new movement -- The Sky is Blue movement, perhaps. How many intellectual imbeciles, in their insecure need for ground to stand upon, would hail this genius insight?

I don't hate Post-Modernism. I just don't believe it exists. It's a fantasy, and one I don't see as particularly interesting.

Jurgen Habermas is one of the people frightened of this, and he replaces the idea of extra-human rational Truth, with "ideal communicative reasonable agreement" or sociable reason - ie we agree to call "true" whatever the product of free discussion suggests, and we try to improve the conditions of free discussion as well as we can.

The appeal of Rorty to people like me is that he manages to find a place for both Nietzche and Habermas (ie you become a weekend nietzchean, as long as you dont harm anyone else). Quite a lot of people don't find this screwball marriage as convincing as I do, however.

In a way I am less worried about pomo culture, arts, lit, music etc. and much more worried about pomo design, architecture and above all pomo politics.

Christine has a good point to make about pomo and elitism. I would much rather people to be unashamedly elitist (I am). I hate the lowest common denominator aspect of pop pomo. I may be elitist but I want to haul people up to my level.

Perhaps I am just coming to the realisation that there is no philosophy or ideology that suits me and I will have to establish my own ideology and try and persuade people to follow me.

(I'll will expand on all these points later)

We also need to be careful of incredulity to things that aren't meta-narratives, like science, because then you get people like Kristeva appropriating scientific examples as interdisciplinary back-up for her more outlandish theories, and saying things like e=mc(squared) is a sexist equation because it priviliges the speed of light over more feminine speeds, when it doesn't work with any other speeds cos it's a necessary equation! That's not incredulity, that's idiocy; but a lot of postmodernist writers use a fog of linguistic tricks to obscure their wooly theories and baffle their peers/audiences into admiration.

You CAN be postmodern and high minded/pretentious though, Ed - it's just that the consensus as to WHAT is high-minded/elitist/of high quality has become so eroded that even the people who want to strive for it don't know what it is, because they're all guilty about listening to the Chemical Brothers and playing Playstation because they're not highbrow enough pursuits.

I keep seeing great old buildings, cathedrals, town halls, ornate and grand and beautiful and with that amazing thing that sends you into the perception of the sublime when you realise yourself and your insignificance in their glory, and I keep saying "why doesn't anyone build buildings liek that anymore?" and the reason is that we've stopped believing in God and thusly stopped ceklebraing him through art and architecture and so on, and we've also equally not quite got to the point of believing in ourselves and celebrating ourselves and our own glory and greatness and achievements, at least not widely and joyously and inspiredly (is that a word?) enough to be making great beautiful buildings for ourselves, cos we got caught up in convincing ourselves that the utilitarian is beautiful when it ain't it's just vast and awesome sometimes, but awe is not the same as sublime.

It is a curiosity of writing about angels that, very often, one turns outto be writing about men. The themes are twinned. Thus one finally learns that Lyons, for example, is really writing not about angels but about schizophrenics--thinking about men by invoking angels. And this holds true of much other writing on the subject-- a point, we may assume, that was not lost on the angels when they began considering their new relation to the cosmos, when the analogues (is an angel more like a quetzal or more like a man? or more like music?) were being handed about.

We may frther assume that some attempt was made at self-definition by function. An angel is what he does. Thus it was necessary to investigate possible new roles (you are reminded that this is impure speculation). After the lamentation had gone on for hundreds and hundreds of whatever the angels use for time, an angel proposed that lamentation be the function of angels eternally, as adoration was formerly. The mode of lamentation would be silence, in contrast to the unceasing chanting of Glorias that had been their former employment. But it is not in the nature of angels to be silent.
A counterproposal was that the angels affirm chaos. There were to be five great proofs of the existence of chaos, of which the first was the abscence of God. The other four could surely be located. The work of definition and explication could, if done nicely enough, occupy the angels forever, as the contrary work has occupied human theologians. But there is not much enthusiasm for chaos among the angels.

The most serious because most radical proposal considered by the angels was refusal --that they would remove themselves from being, not be. The tremendous dignity that would accrue to the angels by this act was felt to be a manifestation of spiritual pride. Refusal was refused.

There were other suggestions, more subptle and complicated, less so, none overwhelmingly attractive.

I saw a famous angel on television; his garments glistened as if with light. He talked about the situation of angels now. Angels, he said are like men in some ways. The problem of adoration is felt to be central. He said that for a time the angels had tried adoring each other, as we do, but had found it, finally, "not enough." He said they are continuing to search for a new principle.

[the whole story is here: http://www.online-library.org/fictions/angels.html]

This claim collapses, I think, when you jump out of short-cut Coles Notes summaries, and study the actual careers and paths (and achievements or non-achievements) of the several different writers/theorists being lumped together conveniently (and emptily) as "pomo". OK, perhaps a certain French feminist did play around with bad mathematical metaphors — yet we are again and again given this ONE example entirely stripped of the context, which I find suspicious in itself. Saying that one stupid thing (assuming revisited context continues to render it stupid) discredits everything else this feminist has ever written is convenient, but it's not good critical thinking. Saying that it discredits a whole *set* of thinkers who are ONLY GROUPED TOGETHER by virtue of some long-ago journalistic fashion, unrelated to the disparate content of said thinkers, rebounds on the accusers, I think.

Actually, shit, I've got Intellectual Impostures in my desk right now. Lyotard and chaos theory; Latour and Einstein's theory of relativity (and his application of semiotic analysis to it); Irigary and mathematical logic; Lacan and topography; Baudrillard and everything; Deleuze and Guittari and everything and then some. The Kristeva example is just the one I recall most clearly, cos it seemed to me to be the most ridiculous. Sure, a lot of what Sokal and Bricmont do is just point and laugh and it's not exactly constructive, but it does show that at least some of the time certain people held in high regard in some circles did not know what they were talking about, however much they think they did. I fully admit that I don't know a great deal about Kristeva's career and thoughts, or Virilio's, for example, and I'm not discrediting it because that woudl be madness. If it looked as if I did I'm sorry, it's a case of more haste less speed as far as this thread is concerned (and ilx generally I'm afraid, I simply don't have time to formulate things to a fully realised point at the moment before coming in). I'm more than aware that I'm a novice when it comes to this kind of thing; my citing of Kristeva/Baudrillard etcetera in this thread is as contrast to what I think postmodernism is good for, which is the freedom of the self/choice thing. And I've never read Coles Notes.

The sheer vastness of the academic world today, coupled with an ever-increasing requirement that it "pay" (that a field produces marketable information; that a graduate will get a decent job), is causing huge distortions within science and mathematics also: Sokal and Bricmont got their prank article into a journal which was — deliberately — not filtered through peer review in order to generate provocative cross-disciplinary discussion (which I guess you could say it did!)... but the system of peer review within science and mathematics (whereby papers and results are published in journals of note after study and comment by disinterested, anonymous, qualified parties) is increasingly being torn apart by costs and the corruption that comes with this (more nepotism and turf-wars than pay-offs, possibly, but the drift towards collapse is there). Unless they have corporate or state sponsorship (with all the potential dodginess this implies), the journals are hugely expensive and increasingly unread and overlooked: more and more ppl are inclined to publish "independently" (eg on the net), and forego the costs, the pain, the quality filter and the (tainted) prestige...

How responsible are university lecturers/academics for their students? How mcuh are they 'teachers' and how much are they 'academics'?

Nabisco: postmodernism is the last attack on a lot of positivist "certainties"

Andrew L: In France at least, Postmodernism = a sociological response to the apparent 'failure' of 60s Marxism/radicalism

Nabisco again: I think people should really look to those old threads for some good attempts at explaining what postmodernism actually is

and: - that it plays up the self-consciousness and self-reflexiveness of modernism
- that it’s “more and more about itself and its processes, less and less about objective reality and life in the world” (that’s Barth on that complaint, which is a completely true one)
- that it’s basically just the logical end-point of modernism’s “anti-rationalist, anti-realist, anti-bourgeois” program

Mark said: massive late 60s expansion of higher education in first world + significant contraction in world economy (end of the long boom) = need for expansion of possible topics covered + need for said to topics to have plausible cachet + need for said cachet to have convincing market value = tremendous turmoil in WestSoc's approach(es) to cultural evaluation = post-modernity?

Nick's monster post was all about what postmodernism is

I said: I would say, in a Rortean fashion, that a way of making "postmodernism" a useful word is to describe it as the "de- divinisation of the world" (the end of the theologicometaphysical tradition)

Jess said: To me po-mo comes down to realizing at some point that everything is there to buy and sell and make images of-- nothing is excluded, as in the olden days.

Jess come closest.

Pin it down someone.

(runs away screaming)

Saying you are against Pomo is saying (eg) to be against technology or mathematics.

postmodernism is reggae: no truth, only versions

postmodernism is Memphis design

postmodernism is Jameson

postmodernism is making music with other people's music

postmodernism IS

(I like reggae and music made with other people's music)

Conversely, the definition of postmodernism is eminently possible from a standpoint outside of its epistemology, but this precludes its validity from the start. I would suggest the foundations of postmodernism lie in an incorrect reading of Marx via Lukacs (in History and Class Consciousness) which -- whether accepted or rejected -- share certain premises about the nature of modern society which are ill-substantiated.

Momus demonstrates this in its most absurd, reduced form. Asserting that all acts are "postmodern" because we live in the "postmodern" era begins with exactly what is to be proven -- the basis of qualities which distinguish the "postmodern" era. These qualities are necessarily more than the distinguishment of this era by "postmodern" thought, but the very assertion that eras can be distinguished by more than their patterns of thought is anathema to the postmodern project. The Kantian antinomy is solved by lopping off half of it, ironically what Lukacs directed a good part of the thrust of HCC against.

Therefore Momus has to make the argument for what the postmodern condition is by virtue of the things which exist in this era, something which he cannot do because it the nature of his understanding of the postmodern condition is one which precludes making an absolute argument about the correctness of his reading of Pynchon, for example.

Haha all of which is not to say that there isn't much in the realm of postmodern theory and cultural production which is important/good/useful/true. Disputing the foundations of something brings about a critique of its results, not a dismissal.

Well, not "ILM" in the sense of a disparate collection of people who rarely agree with one another -- rather, let's say, the general animating spirit or critical approach of Freakytrigger, NYLPM, and a certain core of ILM posters: not the "party line" so much as the most noticeable line there, the one newcomers are forced to reckon with. Considered in a certain light, it's all a practically textbook postmodern approach to art.

The bit where all the holes come in is that in order to say this we have to assign modernism a place in music. Most people point to jazz and sixties rock as being the modernism of music, which has always struck me as being basically true, except that jazz and sixties rock were both popular and accessible, which modernism was defiantly not. So I'm going to ask that you ignore all that for a second for the purpose of this thought-experiment, and we're going to pretend that the 90s punk-influenced rock-crit rhetoric of GOOD REAL ROCK basically represented a sort of music-crit modernism. Check out how it hits that checklist from Eliot, James, Graff, and Barth, check out how utterly Alex in NYC modernism can be, so much so that we've given it a term, and the term is "rockist":

- "criticism of the ... bourgeois social order" = the idea, from 1960 to 2003, that music is meant to be a kick-ass punk-rock blow against the square and boring mindless complacency of the bourgeoisie; "pop is pap, feel the dangerous power of real, dangerous rock!"
- "dropping bourgeois realism" / "messing with traditional linear flow" = the idea that "serious" music somehow experiments with and kicks against the form of the pop song, with weird noises and tricky time signatures and such; whether Hendrix or Loveless, rock-crit has always ostensibly advocated collapsing everything; "screw your safe old Sinatra records and HONOR THE FIRE"
- "messing with traditional ideas about unity and coherence" = Dylan lyrics! Pavement lyrics (the Flann O'Brien of modernist rock)!
- "using irony and juxtaposition" = Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner!" Beck!
- "mocking rationality" / "setting up inner consciousness as opposed to rational 'objective' though" = the construction of the rocker as wild beast, as id, Jim Morrisson through paranoid-Eminem, the Dionysian howl of Real Rock Emotion from the Soul, rah rah rah FEEL THE ROCK FIRE
- "borrowing the Romantic conception of the artist as apart from society" -- of course the rocker is special, look at Kurt Cobain!

Modernism = "the rock!" And "the rock" = one major metanarrative of music criticism for years and years now. And what are some hallmarks of "ILM-style" thought? Deep skepticism toward any metanarratives about what creates value in music, especially the rock one. (And yet, like postmodernism, it nevertheless enjoys, studies, proceeds from a lot of those ideas, even as it rejects them.) Widening of the canon -- we've brought up twice the use that's been made of postmodernism in things like feminist and postcolonial studies and criticism: doesn't NYLTrigger push to open the critical sphere to include experiences of music that are similarly pushed out of the official version of reality? The collapsing of the distinctions between high and low culture: don't some of the FreakPM core -- including maybe Sterling -- argue for the demolition of our artificial distinctions between, say, "serious rock" and "mindless pop," implying that cultural-product pop can be every bit as meaningful and artistically valuable -- and, even when it's not, every bit as worthy of our thought and consideration -- as modernist Romantic-artist rock?

Isn't the whole thing the postmodern approach (to literature, anyway) almost perfectly reflected in a music-crit setting? I may not even believe this myself, but I think it's a fucking joy to think about.

The Tristram Shandy point is good, but Postmodernism was a reaction to (the perception of) the failure of Modernism's project to find new certainties, which TS wasn't, so that is a vital difference, I think. This is why claiming Ulysses for PoMo isn't so silly - those certainties are surely not what Ulysses seeks, and it has the playfulness and reflexivity too (haha I'm opining about this in reading range of The Pinefox!).

I am so happy to be in a place where I get to read things like Nabisco's "Pavement lyrics (the Flann O'Brien of modernist rock)!" Also, The Pinefox to thread some more.

Glad to oblige.

"Postmodernism" is an ethnocentric term in many of its usages, since (1) it implies that we all, every single one of us, were once modernists, or at least that our most important ancestors were modernists - yours, mine, everyone's - and that their modernism was by far the most important thing about them, and that our break from our previous modernism is the most important thing about us, all of us, every Hottentot and every Eskimo, and (2) it treats modernism as a precursor to postmodernism rather than trying to understand modernism in its own right, so it gives us a distorted version of modernism, one that suppresses the aspects that don't lead to "postmodernism" and that changes the meaning of those that (supposedly) do by failing to relate those aspects to their own time and social landscape, but instead relating them to ours, as a kind of photonegative of us.

So the word "postmodernism" is a barrier to thought, not because it's vague (lots of good words are vague; "rock," for instance) but because it's wrong.

As for philosophy, pragmatism and philosophy have been in a death struggle since before modernism, and the words "modernism" and "postmodernism" simply don't apply.

More and more about itself and its processes, and less and less about objective reality and life in the world.

This is just Descartes and Locke wearing dresses. Maybe it represents the average English prof's idea of what's going on in "theory" these days. Damned if I know. In any event, the Rorty to read is Chapters 3 and 4 of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, where he tells you why Descartes and Locke and the whole problematic they set up (mind and its processes vs. the world out there) are irrelevant, and why epistemology is, like, so over. Anyway, the trend in philosophy (or antiphilosophy) is to treat art, science, conversation, discourse, social life, etc. as events in the world rather than depictions of the world, so an interest in something and its processes would have to be an interest in the world, wouldn't it?

(By the way, I've never read Locke in the original language, so I don't necessarily know what I'm talking about here. I'm giving you Rorty's version.)

Nabsy, I think your posts on this thread are strong, but they just reinforce my feeling that the terms "modernism" and "postmodernism" are magnets for issues that don't matter. An assault on "positivist certainties" is of little import, since positivists never could agree on what the certainties were, and no one else gave a fuck. (Good post, Thom.) The "anti-rationalist, anti-realist, anti-bourgeois program" of modernism isn't very interesting; seems like a real tiny thing to look at, when you're trying to take in big things like stories or buildings or rock 'n' roll, so if we jettisoned the words "modernism" and "postmodernism" maybe we'd talk better about what is interesting in Faulkner, Mies van der Rohe, the Rolling Stones, or whomever else you're afflicting with the word "modernism."

Martin, don't you see that if you use "postmodernism" for the idea that the Beach Boys are as valuable as Picasso, then you've given the game away to Picasso and you've made "modernism" your frame of reference? You'd be better to use "post-doo-wop" or "post-4-Freshman" or (as Tracer says) "post-Ed-Sullivan." If your insight is that there are a multiplicity of discourses, and if you don't buy the idea that modernism once spoke for all of modernity, then don't use a term that posits only one discourse and tells only one tale.

To say that hip-hop is built on sampling gets the story ass-backwards. It's not built on sampling but on intervention. The original hip-hop DJ's weren't sampling records, they were playing records. That's what DJs do, play records in juxtaposition with other records, records from all over, interspersed with DJ patter. Rapping over a record wasn't new with hip-hop, since not only was this already standard practice in Jamaica, but the Jamaicans themselves got the idea from American r&b DJs of the forties, fifties, and sixties, who in turn were drawing on Cab Calloway's hepcat patter and the dozens and who-knows-what-else in Afro-American practice, though of course the hip-hop guys took it further. But remember, the DJs and their MCs in the South Bronx were trying to rock the house, and I don't get how an MC trying to engage an audience by yelling "Throw your hands in the air, and wave 'em like you just don't care" is somehow postmodern in comparison to, say, a gospel choir instructing the congregation to throw their hands up and shout, or the Isley Brothers and the Shangri-Las doing the same on a rock 'n' roll record. And if in the mid-'70s DJ Afrika Bambataa ran Monkees songs into funk songs, this might have something to do with the fact that Top 40 stations ten years earlier were playing Monkees and funky broadways and JBs back-to-back. What Bambataa, Herc, and Flash did that was new was to interject records into each other rather than just play them in succession. But in this they were just moving in on what had formerly been musicians' prerogatives, to be the ones to put Song A together with Beat B and so forth. I can't see the ontological difference between Bambataa funking up "Mary Mary" and the Jefferson Airplane putting a funk beat to a singer-songwriter "folk" song like Fred Neil's "The Other Side of this Life." And bluesmen had already made it standard to reshuffle lyrics from old songs in creating new ones (and some bluesmen had also made it standard to sing non-blues). So hip-hop is an extension of previous practice in pop and r&b, rather than a break from something called "modernism." The point isn't that hip-hop does nothing new, any more than that Coover et al. do nothing new, but that if you want to actually think about what they're doing, you need to use your own words, create your own metaphors, rather than relying on opaque buzz words like "modernism" and "postmodernism."

So far nothing in this conversation connects to why I might possibly want to hear or read any of the people who've been saddled with the terms "modernism" and "postmodernism," or hear or read anyone who's been mentioned here. Martin, I like a lot of what you like, and agree with your basic attitude, but it's vacuous to say that hip-hop restructures and reuses what's already there. What new music doesn't? If someone tells me that in "Takeover" Jay-Z restructures and reuses what's already there, I want to know what Jay-Z used and to what effect. Combining things isn't interesting in itself; neither is sampling them. The digital sampler is just another tool, with no import unless it's put to use, in particular situations with particular results. You got the numbers but I got the guns, and I'll kill you motherfuckin' ants with my sledgehammer, yes I will.

I can't tell if the Wittgenstein quote you paraphrased was supposed to be an example of the "ontology" or an example of what was wrong with it; the paragraph right before the quote goes:

When we say: "Every word in the language signifies something" we have so far said nothing whatever; unless we have explained exactly what distinction we wish to make. (It might be, of course, that we wanted to distinguis the words of language (8) from words 'without meaning' such as occur in Lewis Carroll's poems, or words like "Lilliburlero" in songs.)

In any event, maybe you could tell me what distinction your post is making (like, what's a decoupled signifier-signified pair, what's a connected one, and what's the difference between the two?).

The stuff about "decoupling" signifiers and signifieds sounds like Paul De Man being pseudosignificant, but I don't see why his incoherent babble (really, the guy's philosophical writing was impossible, he couldn't go half a sentence without putting forth grossly incompatible views, his driver's license ought to have had the restriction "Don't do philosophy") should be taken to rule the practice of the people called "postmodernists."

I wasn't really trying to use "postmodernism" for that idea, I was suggesting that it's been one of PoMo's effects. I think the eroding of the notion that some forms are High Art and some aren't, and that the good stuff in the High Art ones is obviously vastly superior to even the best of the Low Art ones has a lot to do with this bundle of things that have gone on that we are putting under the banner of PoMo. As for whether it's useful to put them under that banner, well maybe not. But they weren't put there by me, and the whole basis of this debate starts with these collections.

Also, complaining that a statement about what Postmodernism is uses Modernism as a frame of reference is hardly a criticism, since that is also true of the usual definitions and accounts of Postmodernism. Still, my point was supposed to be about High vs Low rather than PoMo vs Mo, so I should have chosen better examples. (Except I don't think the Beach Boys are PoMo anyway, really.)

I take your points about hip hop, and I know all that about its origins. I was not so much talking about block parties with added MCing and rewinding (to use a modern term) of the good bits of the 12s. I was more thinking of the kind of hip hop that is new music constructed entirely out of old music, in a way that records with people playing new tunes in new ways with their own distinct tone isn't. DJ Shadow rather than Kool Herc, you know? Anyway, yes of course there is an endless amount of more interesting things to say about this stuff than "it's Postmodernism in action" (your paragraph about Dylan makes this point very well), but if someone starts a thread saying he doesn't like PoMo and thinks it produces bad things, I am going to cite things I think are good and are in my view part of PoMo.

haha, I was already muttering about knowing I was flailing around out of my depth here, and along comes Frank to pour another couple of feet of water into the pool, if that's a good metaphor, and it isn't...

I was reading a book on the bus today which made me think of starting a thread called something like: 'what if we dispensed with and tried to come up with a whole new way of categorizing changes and waves in the C20?' I don't claim that the thought is new, or that no-one has done it. But it some circles it would be a useful way of breaking some ice, or stirring congealed porridge.

I am impressed by the seriousness of posts to this thread, though I haven't read them all properly. I liked Southall's para on the Information Minister.

I think that the claim that 'some M could be PM' may be a way of saying 'those M texts are still exciting to me'. (Perhaps someone has said this already.) If that keeps us reading things we like, good - but somehow, shuffling things between categories doesn't feel like the most valuable thing to be doing. (Whatever *that* is.)

Mark S: your line about the past not being so grate cos it became the present is a joke of magnificent goofiness. But I think your use of the word 'careerist' is unfair, a needless provocation.

Nabisco: that apostrophe, as I have now typed many times on these boards, hastened Mr Joyce's end.

Frank, I think you've shifted the discussion a bit (in a good direction, and in a direction where I think I'll wind up reading more than talking): I think most of this thread has been about defending the idea that postmodernism as a concept means something, whereas now we're charging on into whether what it means is particularly useful. But I have to admit that criticisms of theory which say "why can't we just talk about the thing itself" -- the art, the culture -- leave me a bit cold, because while I'd obviously agree that the theory should never eclipse looking clearly at the object, and that postmodernism has indeed had a tendency to overmediate the object (what hasn't, since 1950?), I can't say I have much of a problem with the attempt to organize greater themes out of the full run of objects. And while I may well be missing some of your point, I don't see how the idea of "postmodernism" is so much worse of a tool in this sense than the idea of "modernism" was.

Nevertheless the most edifying thing on postmodern thought I've read remains a Nation article on Foucault and the aftermath of the 2000 election, and that was mostly because it made Lynne Cheney look very silly.

The Pinefox, the 'some more' was because it was the second time I'd mentioned you on this thread.

So how does pomo deal with the decoupled signifier and signified? It only invokes this decoupling at whim since it clearly can't be invoked all the time. It sets, on occasion, the sociality of a discourse. But then it cannot answer what determines that sociality, it can point to the room for play but the boundaries of this room are left implicit, to the "common sense" of the author and reader.

The problem is that modernism said "this era has certain traits we agree on and our shared project is in constructing a humanist response." i.e. if you wanted to argue that people weren't alienated in modern society you were outside the project from the start. The problem with pomo as I see it (again in this limited critical subset sense) is it hasn't proven a shift in eras from the modern era, and it simultaneously accepts the premises that the modernists worked from about the qualities of that era, but nonetheless attempts to dispute the very basis for the modernist response. It cuts off its own feet.

Lukacs from his 1967 preface to "History and Class Consciousness" on immediacy:

"For objectification is indeed a phenomenon that cannot be eliminated from human life in society. If we bear in mind that every externalisation of an object in practice (and hence, too, in work) is an objectification, that every human expression including speech objectifies human thoughts and feelings, then it is clear that we are dealing with a universal mode of commerce between men. And in so far as this is the case, objectification is a neutral phenomenon; the true is as much an objectification as the false, liberation as much as enslavement. Only when the objectified forms in society acquire functions that bring the essence of man into conflict with his existence, only when man's nature is subjugated, deformed anc crippled can we speak of an objective societyal condition of alienation, and as an inexorable consequence, of all the subjective marks of an internal alienation."

We still define ourselves by positivities—like skin color, or accent, all the embarrassing physicality of the flesh—and others will latch onto these things too in defining us. Simply declaring, as Habermas does, a discursive space to be free from all status distinctions, where positivities can be bracketed and put to the side for the sake of rational discussion, is not enough to actually make it so. For people whose positive characteristics diverge from those that define whatever your local "ruling class" is, that space is harder-won. Not all utterances are created equal, there is no neutral exchange of ideas as commodities (i.e. the marketplace of ideas may exist but it is just as lopsided and unfair as the real marketplace of goods). AFAIK no Modernists ever got close to concepts like this, not sure why, and it's not that they were "too humanist", I mean half of that Mayakovsky mob wanted to turn themselves into cars for Christ's sake.

(anyway i think i wasn't clear in my last post -- i wasn't arguing for a postmodernist rejection of humanism, but rather a rejection of modernist ontology while still largely accepting the results of that ontology)

(also when we get into first/third world etc. we're really talking postcolonial more than postmodern -- you could argue that postmodern drove the wedge where postcolonial inserted itself, but even that's pretty weak. there's a positivist / anti-positivist argument about cultural commensurability, modernization etc. from the 1850s on from like Mexico to Indonesia to China to Brazil to Iraq, and the introduction of postmodernist terms really just provided a discursive twist, and perhaps more importantly became the mechanism by which that discourse was introduced back to the first world although its only real discernable impact here has been in better justifications for wearing cheap "ethnic" trinkets.)

Accumulation of images that you can turn into other images for fun and usually profit, that is the way I look at the whole thing. And lack of pathos since there ain't no real thing to compare all your covoluted efforts to wrench meaning out of inert bourgeois reality to...which I see as basically the great effort of modernist writers and musicians. Faulkner, my current black beast, is my best and perhaps pathetic example of this. I mean anyone trying to extract meaning from the red dirt hills of NE Mississippi has set hisself quite a task. I myself don't think Faulkner succeeded, since I find his writing incredibly dull, but that's his project. The Beatles are modernist, they were stlll excited about using all that readymade crap to their advantage, they toyed with it, they were elated to transform it using recording studios. But to me someone just a bit later--Big Star for example, the only group to ever improve on what the Beatles did (I say confidently!!) were po-mo. Not excited at all about the material, accepted it as given, were in fact a bit languid and concerned with surface...no real content, just "context" of "dissatisfaction" and "ennui" but no real addressing of those themes except in a very dessicated/disconnected way...I know, perhaps a lame example but I'm trying to keep it simple and down to earth, plus someone asked me the other day why I find John Lennon's solo work tedious but love Big Star's "Third," and the above is why...

meant to type "hisself," feeling rather down-home today...

Also, I feel like saying lots more about hip hop, but that might be just because I've been listening to Eminem's 'The Way I Am' - "I am whatever you say I am" - and you could write a thesis about PoMo based on that one tune, maybe even that one line I quote (haha Segar's Popeye as an example of High Modernism, anyone?). But I won't.

anyway, to finance this, de gaulle had to reverse a long-standing french position: the demand for the return to the gold standard!!

a lot too much of left nopomo agitation = cultural-political equiv of a demand for the return to the gold standard?

*(in giovanni arrighi's essay "tracking global turbulence", new left review march/april 2003, arrighi's critical response to robert brenner's recent book "the boom and the bubble", and also brenner's essay "economics of global turbulence: a special report on the world economy, 1950-98", new left review may-june 1998...)

>He's the most overrated writer ever...a real fuckin' drag. Hick Joyce, that's just what we need. Too much work for no payoff whatsoever. I say this having read 70% of his stuff and having gone back and tried to read it recently--I found it totally unreadable, which is saying something. As I said earlier about F. Jameson, it's writing for the sake of writing and that's it--awful, awful shit.

2. Nipper, as far as I can recall, 5 years ago, when it was 7, your 12-year-old 15,000 thesis was 10,000 words.

3. I woke up today with the thought that while other people are writing in vast and presumably variable quantities, I have contributed no new ideas to ilx for ages, only relatively minor qualifications to other people's. Admittedly I don't believe in 'new ideas', which is as good an excuse as I can think of. But I am still struck anew by my seeming limitations.

Also, I am thinking hardly at all about rapping, and instead much more about hip hop music. I know they are commonly yoked together, but they have separate existences too, and it is the music that I see as intrinsically PoMo - I don't think I could begin to construct any kind of case for rapping being any particular ism. The lineage of sampling seems to start with hip hop, but it's expanded beyond it, and there is hip hop music where rapping is either completely or almost absent, and obviously rapping appears on records with no sampling at all.

I think I messed up any chance of your understanding what I was trying to say when I brought Eminem into it, because what I thought could be read in an interesting PoMo way there was almost entirely just lyrical content, which is another matter.

"Postmodernist ontology which decouples the signifier from the signified" is not a phrase that makes sense to me. For one thing, I'm puzzled by your use of the word "ontology." Are you claiming that the Frenchies consider signifiers and signifieds to belong to different realms of being? I thought that was an idea Derrida was attacking, and that it would be equally attacked by Wittgenstein? (Not that I've understood the little I've read of Derrida.)

The Wittgenstein passage that you refer to isn't about a one-on-one connection between a signifier and a signified (which is an idea that Wittgenstein would find vacuous), but about the fact that there's no common function that applies to every tool; and he's drawing an analogy: there's no common function ("signifying") that applies to every word, and to say "every word in language signifies something" is just as vacuous as saying "all tools serve to modify something."

From Philosophical Investigations:

Now what do the words of this language signify? - What is supposed to show what they signify, if not the kind of use they have?...

Of course, one can reduce the description of the use of the word "slab" to the statement that this word signifies this object. This will be done when, for example, it is merely a matter of removing the mistaken idea that the word "slab" refers to the shape of building-stone that we call "block"...

One can say that the signs "a," "b," etc. signify numbers [Wittgenstein has previously described a language-game in which they do just that]; when, for example this removes the mistaken idea that "a," "b," "c," play the part actually played in language by "block," "slab," "pillar." And one can also say that "c" means this number and not that one; when for example this serves to explain that the letters are to be used in the orders a, b, c, d, etc. and not in the order a, b, d, c.

But assimilating the descriptions of the uses of words in this way cannot make the uses themselves any more like one another. For, as we see, they are absolutely unlike.

What gives a word meaning isn't its relation to some object (what object does the word "signify" stand for? What object does "five" stand for? "Of"? "Help!"? "Come here"?) but its social life, as it were, its role in social practices. And this social life can be summarized in this statement about meaning: An event (such as a statement) only has meaning if there's a difference between the event's occurring and its not occurring. The previous sentence is just a platitude, by the way, and barely meets its own criterion for being meaningful - it only exists to counteract previous philosophical ideas (e.g., the reductionism that Quine attacked in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism": that a statement is only meaningful if it is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience). Otherwise, my sentence has no interesting consequences. Wittgenstein realizes this; English dept. profs seem not to, seem to imagine that it's world-important. Furthermore, the sentence really needs to be "An event (such as a statement) only has meaning if there's a meaningful difference between the event's occurring and its not occurring," since obviously, if there were no difference you wouldn't be able to even notice that an event had occurred. But this just reduces to "An event only matters if it matters," which is not an earth-shattering point. And who decides what differences are significant? You understand, there are no useful generalizations to be made here, no general principles. Philosophy has nothing to say about "meaning."

I understand that hip-hop includes non-rapping as well as rapping. But it's as ethnocentric to call the sampling "postmodern" as to call the rapping "postmodern," since the sampling is an extension of previous DJ practice and is barely or not at all related to modernism, either as an outgrowth or a break with modernism. It has a different lineage. Sampling derives directly from DJs interjecting pieces of some records into others. This is what Herc and Bambataa and Flash did. Sampling's just a tool that facilitates this. It's not a response to modernism, hence it's not postmodernism. Again, I don't know how to be clearer.

I mentioned Barth because he has been described as the first American Postmodernist novelist (I'm not sure this is true) and we are more familiar with American PoMo lit than any other, I think. He seemed relevant to the discussion because one of his major interests and methods is in reusing and recontextualising pre-Modern stories. Something like Tidewater Tales acts as, in asides from its main story (if it has a main story at all), a sequel to the Odyssey, the 1001 Nights, Don Quixote and Huck Finn. There are also reflections on another, similar Barth novel, Sabbatical. This playful but purposeful (in these books Barth is mostly talking about storytelling) recycling of the past seems very similar to sampling. It's not easy that it's a reaction to anything in Modernism, but it is widely accepted as being a characteristic of PoMo art. You seem to be defining Postmodernism in a rather different way from the customary. I think if you use your definition then there is little good in PoMo - it's just a throwing up of hands and giving up on the humanist reconstruction of Modernism.

also: modernism wasn't a project (= the novelists and the painters and the composers and the architects never actually bothered txting one another to sort out what it was they were all agreeing they had embarked on... )

modernism is more like a grab-bag after-the-fact critical theory of how politics and aesthetics as a whole appeared to shift and why and what towards, between c.1890 and c.1955, except the "as a whole" bit is generally totally ignored

but does a recognition of this mean we would we have to eliminate 'postmodernist' as an adjective completely? if dj shadow wanted to call himself "trip hop" and i said "well, shadow, what i hear in your music is more an inversion of the rhythmic properties of doo-wop, if anything you should be called flip-wop", we wouldn't have to discount either of our interpretations, providing we didn't priviledge one of the other, right? (but isn't that something that needs to happen before any kind of ANYTHING happens?)

I know we can see all kinds of things that have loads in common with PoMo from before PoMo, but PoMo is trying to define an era, a condition where many have seen the failure of what Modernism tried, and all these new metanarratives are recognised side by side. I think this means that we can sensibly exclude Tristram Shandy, but maybe Duchamp's 'Fountain' is the first case of Postmodernist art in any artform.

The problem with the word 'Postmodernism' is that it makes it depend too much on Modernism, suggests too much "Oh no modernism has failed we are all doomed everyone give up" and less "Modernism was a dead end, there are countless interesting and incompatible, even incommensurable accounts of the world, and let's celebrate them and do lots of new and exciting things" if you see what I mean. We can't do anything much about that word now, but I would wish to emphasise the things I see as good and positive, and make less of the recognition-of-failure element.

Frank's comment above is the one that rings most true when reading through this thread. words like PoMo and mo seem to be brane cell killas rather than basis for useful discussion.

I hope Ed is working on his manifesto. And it better be good.

This is part of why I'm content to see people groping at what postmodernism entails over the past few decades: in some sense it's almost the opposite of what Ed's posited, a sense that something has happened. The problem is that unlike modernism, everyone's having a much much harder time working out what it is and how to react to it. (Hahaha except Barth and Calvino.)

See sinker I always thought (maybe wrongly) that modernism was trying to define itself as such as it went along -- i.e. a critical theory after and during the fact. I mean generally the understanding that "art needs new responses to the world since the old ones don't fit in with the massive shifts occuring around us" -- and in that reductive sense modernism was more an artistic project than a critical one -- every manifesto of the futurists the thisits thatists etc. tended to be one that set stakes for artistic production not simply critical reception. Insofar as pomo has "manifestos" they're critical tracts which tend to be more about critical than artisitic response, tracts which necissarly inform a small portion of the literary craft but not its bulk. [and hence my point about a grounded epistimology -- modernism also had the idea that changes in the world required changes in art and response. postmodernism disputes that as well -- but then it also disputes that we can say "changes in the world" or "art" or "response" which to be honest leaves me just sorta hanging.]

A better term for Barth/Borghes/some Barthelme I always thought was "metafiction". Novelistically it might be grouped as the abandonment (rather than destruction) of the narrative. But again that's real specific & pomo theory as such is just as happy to give readings to decisively premodern works as well.

& as for kogan I don't think I disagree with your stuff on Wittgenstein at all. I don't feel like digging out this that and the other to make a good argument about the French dudes coz that would require too much work on my part and I'm being lazy, however (also buried in Lukacs and Bakhtin -- cf. http://www.empty.org/review/ ). But maybe I could just put it that for them language came to define sociality rather than an interplay between the two (Barthes) but this really meant uprooting language from sociality. Cf in a sense the fanaticism/dillitantism debate on ILM -- there's always a metanarrative, but a suspicion of privileging any particular one simply means that yr. metanarrative becomes implicit. Or that you can put forward an absurd one (Baudrilliard's society of simulcra -- to which by the way Pynchon's Watts essay is the best implicit response I've ever read) that casts certain tendencies as having an internal motor force of their own which will drive them to their absurd conclusion -- and not be forced to justify it in relation to all the other things in the world standing in the way of yr. conclusion. Again this becomes a fairly specific problem -- D&G, Foucault, Derrida, etc. have all done plenty worthwhile in fairly specified realms, which I'm not as well versed in as I'd like to be -- and it's only in certain bits of some of there work which I can locate this problem, but this problem also tends to be the only thing I can find uniting them all as pomo.

Virilio, Baudrilliard on the other hand seem to make that "all is signifier" move their whole schtick. Honestly I saw Chicago last night and thought that a few of the dance numbers did it better than they ever have (nb however the numbers were k-brilliant).

I've read some Kristeva I really like, and some Butler which all I recall is how she got the sources she was drawing on wrong in my eyes and used them rather clumsily (i.e. it wasn't any good just because it wasn't). Lacan I know bullshit about.

"An event only matters if it matters," which is not an earth-shattering point. And who decides what differences are significant? You understand, there are no useful generalizations to be made here, no general principles. Philosophy has nothing to say about "meaning."

Isn't there a problem here? It seems like you've talked yrself into a corner unless I'm misreading coz you dissolve the entirety of yr. knowledge of philosophy into essentially a rejection of it. People do decide on "significance" in every aspect of their lives. So if we're saying something is siginificant to a person well that's almost an empirical observation -- the investigation of why it's significant is where things get interesting, and the possibility of generalizing why things are significant to whole groups of people still more so -- telling us something both about the person (better yet the group) and the thing in question.

So what we have is not the rejection of philosophy but its dissolution into the investigation of social life -- in part because people carry philosophical ideas with them anyway (nobody is free from ideas on what's "meaningful" or hell what "freedom" is or "beauty" or anything else -- these are all parts of our conception of the world) and so situating and dissolving those ideas is a constant task, not to mention the invention and dissolution of useful generalizations towards an, ahem, meaningful, purpose. Philosophy of Praxis to thread.

has art ceased trying to solve problems?

Wouldn't someone like Nabokov be early post-modernist..."Lolita" and "Pale Fire" seem on that track as much as Barth or Pynchon?

Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that Faulkner is a real good case of the limitations of modernism...that constant invoking of an (imaginary) useless past that just keeps getting in the way of any kind of progress? Isn't Faulkner's whole point that the present is inevitably a pale ghost of the glorious past? I guess Joyce did the same thing, but it seems to me that the past Joyce invokes/evokes is so much richer than Faulkner's.

Y'know, the truth is I quite like postmodernism's effects of the arts, but I have far less use for its effects on theory, criticism and philosophy.

I have noticed that, even here, when the discussions get involved (as they did a few weeks ago during a heated debate about the Works of Prince), most everyone involved turns into a close-reading formalist.

Frank is correct, I think, in nonetheless insisting that etymologically and conceptually postmodernism doesn't escape its own trap, because it nonetheless implies that we move from a moment (modernism) where e.g. critiques of ethnocentricity was unthinkable to a moment (postmodernism) where it's fashionable, and this historical movement is merely the univeralization of a certain elite Western cultural experience.

BUT this sort of historicist critique of postmodernism's own historical transcendentalism is not, I think, a silver bullet for postmodernism, because this is the very problem which basically all ways in which we attempt to think the world have - there is always some secret transcendental content, e.g. historicism (in the sense of a consideration of history as a set of contingent discursive practices with no transcendental meaning or cause) always silently presupposes a universalized, unchanging frame through which the historical flux is considered (does not the idea of "contingent discursive practices" elevate a certain historically specific notion regarding human behaviour into a universal a priori etc. etc. etc.?)...

This is a really fascinating area, and I wish that Frank would come back and talk more about it, even though the very subject seems to infuriate him a bit.

What always confused me about Frank's charge of "postmodernism" with "ethnocentricity" (for privileging "modernism" as the most important thing that was happening in the world, which it then follows) is that it sounds like a typically postmodernist thing to say i.e. it takes issue with the (ha ha) metanarrative of modernism-->postmodernism - but postmodernism already does this to some extent

Tim, it doesn't seem that you're confused at all, actually, except you don't see that my argument is not necessarily with everyone who gets the word "postmodernism" affixed to him or her, but rather with the word "postmodernism." That is, if you're going to challenge the narrative that says modernism was the most important thing in our world and that postmodernism then follows it (you don't need the "meta" in front of "narrative" here, by the way), then don't call yourself a "postmodernist," don't describe multiculturalism as part of the "postmodern" condition, and don't say that we're living in the "postmodern" age. But go ahead and challenge the narrative, please!

(I doubt that "modernism" was a cultural moment in which critiques of ethnocentricity were unthinkable. Not that you're saying that it was, but then I wouldn't bet that all "postmodernists" would say it was, either. Only the dumb ones. I remember being taught in 1960s grade school that the Crusades helped bring on the Renaissance by exposing Crusaders to a multiplicity of cultures and beliefs. And in high school (still the '60s) I learned that there was a 16th-century guy named Montaigne who was skeptical that one's own cultural values could be universally grounded, given that other cultures see their own (antithetical) values as equally well-grounded. This sort of questioning is not a new invention, and I can't imagine that, say, William Faulkner somehow was never exposed to it, or never noticed that different people in Mississippi had somewhat different mores and manners.)

this sort of historicist critique of postmodernism's own historical transcendentalism is not, I think, a silver bullet for postmodernism, because this is the very problem which basically all ways in which we attempt to think the world have - there is always some secret transcendental content, e.g. historicism (in the sense of a consideration of history as a set of contingent discursive practices with no transcendental meaning or cause) always silently presupposes a universalized, unchanging frame through which the historical flux is considered (does not the idea of "contingent discursive practices" elevate a certain historically specific notion regarding human behaviour into a universal a priori etc. etc. etc.?)...

I'm not sure I understand this, maybe because "transcendental content" is simply something I don't believe in (meaning I don't believe it exists, just as I don't believe God exists, or the supernatural); but then, I suppose that depends on what one means by "transcendental content." "Transcendental" and "universal" don't usually mean the same thing, nor do "universal" and "a priori." "SOS" is the universal signal for distress, but it's neither transcendent nor a priori. In any event, there's nothing inherently puzzling or self-defeating about statements such as, e.g., "All statements are contextual, including this one," and "All statements including this one are contingent upon the discourse they're part of." Unfortunately, such statements are so general as to be nearly useless, and don't have the provocative consequences that too many people like to project on them. (For example, to say that the truth of a statement is contingent on your accepting the discourse of which it is a part doesn't make the truth untrue; all it means is that your belief in it is contingent upon your believing a bunch of other stuff, which you might well believe and might well have reason for thinking that everyone else should believe too.)

As for "secret transcendental content," which I don't believe in, think of Darwin's concept "natural selection." It makes no claims to being transcendental in relation to its discourse, evolutionary biology. The idea can't be made sense of without that discourse, and if evolutionary biology were different, one might have to modify or abandon the idea of natural selection. Nonetheless, if you use the concept, you can apply it to the evolution of all species - every single one, across the board, throughout natural history, even throughout the natural history of those species (the vast majority of them!) that existed before the invention of the concept "natural selection." So the across-the-board applicability of the concept "natural selection" doesn't make it "transcendental" in any way that I can think of, secret or otherwise. The term "natural selection" is historically contingent - that is, its use is dependent on its place and time - but the people in this place and time can use it to understand all of natural history. Ditto for the phrase "historical contingency." Darwin's idea is that species are historically contingent rather than immutable, and a historicist's idea would be that terms such as "natural selection" and "historically contingent" themselves are historically contingent and can only be made sense of by understanding the discourses of which they are a part.

You'd have to be a complete and utter ignoramus to believe that everyone in the world was going through modernism in the early 20th century and that everyone now is postmodernist, but there's no principle that says such a thing can't be true. It happens not to be true (at least not unless you give "modernism" and "postmodernism" vague and ridiculous meanings that have nothing to do with why anyone cares about the terms), but there's no law that says that a particular term such as "postmodernism" (or "historical contingency") can't be used by some people in a particular intellectual context to help them understand many or all people in a lot of other contexts.

I still think that anyone who considers DJs like U. Roy and Herc and Grandmaster Flash and Bambaataa etc. postmodern is being ethnocentric.

Also, postmodernism as a movement can't really be defined and that is the whole point of it. There are certain identifiable pomo characteristics, but even critics who identify themselves as postmodernists disagree with each other on certain points.

In response to above, postcolonial writers/critics do actually appropriate many postmodern beliefs and strategies but make them 'different'.

I think there is a case for considering the start of sampling - so maybe even the moment when Herc started using two copies of the same track to repeat the break from old funk tunes - as a very major crossing point in music from Modernism to PoMo. However, I entirely agree with your early point that shoving that label on them and thinking you've done something interesting or useful or constructive is a mistake, and that if you don't realise you've just waved a particular flag, you often tend to stop thinking at that point because you imagine you've done the job.

--Harold Bloom

"Darwin's idea is that species are historically contingent rather than immutable, and a historicist's idea would be that terms such as "natural selection" and "historically contingent" themselves are historically contingent and can only be made sense of by understanding the discourses of which they are a part."

I see your point about even the use of a term like "historical contingency" being historically contingent", but doesn't even this rub against a core of unchanging solidity?

To use the Darwin example, can't you say that species change but the fact of natural selection being the vehicle of that change doesn't? The form of change is itself the constant (whether or not our use of the term changes)? Unless, that is, we can show an example of a form of evolutionary biology which doesn't follow natural selection.

Likewise, if all social practices and concepts are historically contingent, even the notion of historical contingency itself, then there must be some society somewhere which isn't subject to history, i.e. doesn't change. Otherwise (and as is more likely) historical contingency is itself that which doesn't change, the a priori constant. In this sense historical contingency itself becomes transcendental. The fact that specific uses of the term denoting this idea may be historically contingent doesn't get rid of this kernal of ahistoricity.

Nb. I think such kernels are actually referred to as "quasi-transcendentals". Caveat: I am not an expert on this stuff by any means.

A good answer to this question isn't necessarily one that justifies our discussing "historicity," or necessarily says what the good reasons are for discussing the issue, but rather says what the real reasons might be. There's a parallel here to the issue of "intelligent design": some of the people who discuss it associate the issue with the question of whether there should be religious instruction in public schools. This doesn't necessarily mean they should associate "intelligent design" with religious instruction; the fact is that they do. And I'm sure that at least some of the people who discuss historicity etc. are concerned with the question of whether or not there should be more cultural diversity in the curriculum. People like me who want more diversity tend to plump for historicity and against transcendence, just as I do. I, however, know that there's no good intellectual connection between my ideas on historicity/transcendence and my desire for diversity, whereas most of the rest of "people like me" don't.

The second thought is a request: Let's actually for real - here, on this thread - take the lead in such conversations ourselves, state our ideas rather than referring back to an imaginary People Who've Studied This And Know What They're Talking About. This means that when necessary we take baby steps, bring the conversation down to Oh oh oh, look look look, see Spot run. Don't assume that terms like "transcendent," "historicist," "contingency," and so forth can somehow speak for themselves without explanation. We don't all have to agree on how to use the terms, but we have to be willing to understand how the other person is using the terms, and we must be willing to explain to the other person how we're using them. And if the discussion is getting too deep for one or another of us, we can ask for someone to lend a hand - and when asked, we should lend one.

Obviously, this doesn't require us to explain everything; e.g., so far it isn't crucial to the discussion that I explain "natural selection," just that we posit that there's an idea there that biologists are using across the board. Actually, natural selection isn't hard to explain, should this become necessary.

I think I agree with what you're trying to say here, though I don't believe the word "form" tells us all that much in this instance, and I'd have you replace "the vehicle" with "a vehicle," so that genetic changes that have no adaptive significance one way or another can nonetheless add new characteristics to a species. I once read somewhere that this was the case, and that natural selection actually tends to conserve characteristics, makes change slower than if genetic change could run its course with no selective pressures. And I suppose that selective pressures on a species may be greater at some times in its history than at others (though I wouldn't say that I know what I mean by the word "greater" here). Anyway, let's assume that the fact, if not the amount, of natural selection is constant. So we agree on this (or both take it on faith or something). So where might we be disagreeing? Well, something about the words "historicist" and "transcendent": I'd say that if you call natural selection "ahistorical" you're making your standards for "historicist" too high, and if you call natural selection "transcendental" you're making your standards for "transcendence" too low. There's no rule that your standards have to match mine, but if we use too strong a standard for "historicist" then we haven't really said much by calling Darwin "ahistoricist," and if we use too weak a standard for transcendence, then it's no big deal if we call natural selection "transcendent."

Of course, standards flex depending on circumstances. (That's a good historicist statement, no?) Even though upthread I said I didn't believe in transcendence, I'd have no problem writing in a review, "Through the expressiveness of her phrasing, she transcended the hackneyed material she was often called upon to record." That's because this "transcendence" merely means that the singer can transform songs through her phrasing and so is not as dependent on the quality of her material as another good singer would be who tends to be more straightforward in her delivery of a song, hence more at the mercy of her material. Say, Billie Holiday vs. Miranda Lambert. But I'm not claiming that the singer's material has no effect whatsoever on her singing.

But for people who do philosophy or lit theory or theology, "transcendence" means that a transcendent thing is in no way dependent on the thing that it transcends. God creates the world; the world doesn't create God, not even a little bit. The world depends on God, but God doesn't depend on the world, not even a little bit. Facts confirm or disconfirm theories, but theories don't alter facts, not even a little bit. Language depicts reality but doesn't affect reality, not at all. Etc.

(By the way, an all-powerful God is too boring to have anything to do with any god that anyone actually believes in. I haven't read enough theology to know how theologians reconcile the need to make God transcendent and the need to make Him someone or something you might care about.)

Now in many instances I'd consider this version of the word "transcendence" to be dysfunctionally extreme, since it requires that a transcendent phenomenon be so independent of what it transcends that it would remain unchanged even if what it transcended ceased to exist. But I recognize that to really care about philosophy or theology or lit theory on its own terms - to really deal with the "fundamental" "problems" that philosophy "addresses" - you need to adopt this extreme definition. Philosophy has a problem with the concept of interdependence because interdependence has circularity built into it. E.g., if competing theories define differently what counts as a fact, then facts aren't an unequivocal test of competing theories, since a theory and its facts depend on each other, rather than the former exclusively depending on the latter. Now if this interdependence is a problem for you, then you need extreme "transcendence" as your only way to escape the circle. But is circularity necessarily a problem?

If you're profoundly disturbed or excited by the fact that, for instance, to know what "child" means you have to know what "parent" means, but to know what "parent" means you have to know what "child" means, you will either want to break out of this circle and into some sort of transcendence - "well, even if 'parent' and 'child' are interdependent, they both depend on something else that is not dependent on them" - or you'll want to deny such transcendence and start talking about "infinite play of differences" and whatnot. Whereas if you're not profoundly disturbed or excited by it, you'll just think that there's an interesting question for developmental or cognitive psych, how a toddler goes from preverbal social interaction to social interactions that contain a whole bunch of words in relationship to each other; or how one goes from understanding how words are used in one social activity to understanding how some of the same words are used differently in other social activities, etc. (e.g., how someone who knows baseball can somehow learn tennis and not get confused). That is, for epistemology it's a basic paradox that to know one thing you've got to know a lot of other things, since this doesn't tell you where knowledge starts. Whereas if your task is practical rather than epistemological, you can start anywhere that works for you and just modify what you think you know on the basis of new information. And please, don't claim that "You can start anywhere that works for you" is itself a transcendental statement. It's not. It's just a retort to the guy who claims either that you have to start with first principles or that there's no starting place, and a retort to the people who think that those are the only two choices. And "retort" is as nontranscendental a role as I can imagine. Once you take away the insistence that we start from first principles, the counterclaim that "you can start anywhere that works for you" has lost its purpose, its home, its own reason for being. It's like one hand trying to clap.

Another example: Say you want to know which movie earned more, Titanic or Gone With the Wind, but to make your comparison fair you want to adjust for inflation. So what standard can you use to compare the value of a dollar in 1998 versus its value in 1939, given that all monetary value shifts? You can't simply say "How many pounds of tomatoes did a dollar buy in '98 as opposed to in '39," since the value of tomatoes relative to, say, apples may not be the same now as then. (The tomato standard discredited!) But unless you're drawn in by philosophical questions, you can be satisfied simply to take enough goods and services into account so as to get numbers that attain all the exactitude you need, and this despite monetary value being unremittingly shifting and relative. The lack of a transcendent standard for monetary value doesn't even seem to be an issue one way or another.

Of course, what the numbers mean is a different question. Is "money earned" a good measure of a film's popularity? I'd think that number of repeat viewings would be more significant, but there's no way to get that number. Or how many liked the film in comparison to how many people saw it (how do you measure "like"?). And is the popularity of something like the Rocky Horror Picture Show due to the film itself or to the social scene that surrounds it? But what does "the film itself" mean here, and how can you not consider social surroundings to be part of the film experience, since without them you wouldn't have an experience?

I doubt that anyone is disquieted by the lack of a transcendent standard for monetary value, but people were disquieted by this in the past. And the difference may be that we're less likely than our puritan forebears to associate monetary value with any other kind of worth (moral, aesthetic, etc.). I consider "transcendence" a fake issue, since in most instances we can achieve common ground, accurate numbers, and mutual understanding without transcendent standards; so how to find common ground is unrelated to the issue of "transcendence." However, there are circumstances where we can't or, more importantly, don't want to create a common ground, and this is why people wish for transcendence or make a point of denying transcendence. The wish is a substitute for developing reasons that might convince people to share your ground, and the denial is a substitute for explaining why you think you've got a right to stay off the other guy's ground and remain on your own.

For Aristotle, motion was a change in quality, an asymmetric change from an initial state to a final state, so that motion not only included a rock's moving towards its place in the center of the universe, and fire reaching outwards to its place on the periphery, but also an acorn growing into a tree, a man returning from sickness to health, and so forth. Newton's idea of momentum - that an object in motion stays in motion unless acted on by an outside force - would have made no sense in an Aristotelian system, since it wouldn't have involved a change in quality and therefore wouldn't have been motion, and couldn't possibly explain how a rock gets from one place to another. (And Aristotle's conception of place and space were a lot different from ours, too.)

A point Kuhn made was that you could see motion as a change in quality, or you could see it as an object only changing its location (while changes in its quality, if any, are irrelevant), but that there was no third thing, "the datum" or "what is really there," for you to look at, to compare the ideas to, in order to see which was right. What would such a third thing be? Say you're an observer whose concept of motion is that it includes a man's returning from sickness to health. If this is your concept, how, by carefully observing a man as he actually returns to health, can you possibly decide that this is not motion? And conversely, if you think of motion as a change in location but not a change in state, how could your observing this man make you abandon your idea and decide that his return to health is an example of motion after all? You can compare the two ideas to each other, to see which is better, but not to an independent measure applicable to both.

For the purposes of this discussion, I'll point out that the circularity is that the two different concepts of motion give you different "facts," and the relevant facts tend to support the concept that relates to them; and transcendence here would be mean that there were a third thing, somehow, a superfact that had nothing to do with any concept of motion but was motion nonetheless. The circularity, by the way, doesn't mean that there are no good reasons to choose one concept over another, or that no concept can be right, or true, or false, or that there are no "real" facts, or that words have no referents, or anything of the sort. All it means, really, is that "fact," "true," "false," "concept," "right," "referent," and the like make no sense outside of conversation. And it doesn't mean that no conversation is better than any other, either, or that you can't explain why one is better than another. We discuss this more on the Kuhn thread, if you want to take a look, which I recommend that you do, though I can't say that what went on there would qualify as communication. Also, since this is a pomo thread, I'll add that there is no consistent "postmodernist" position on the issue of circularity and transcendence. This isn't merely because most people suck dog as theorists (though that is true), but also because some of the people who get called "postmodernists" link the ideas of "true," "fact," "referent," and the like to transcendence, so that the perpetual overcoming of transcendence can seem to have important consequences; whereas others simply do without the notion of "transcendence" altogether and assume that judgments of "true," "fact" etc. can get made down here in human conversation, without the aid of philosophy.

As for whether natural selection is historicist or whether it's ahistorical, this depends of course on what we mean by "historicist." I'd say that when we're being historicist about a phenomenon, we believe the phenomenon arose historically and needs to be understood in the context of its time and place. In one way, this makes natural selection very historicist, since it insists that we treat species in relation to their time and place and to other species that co-existed with them. And of course the term natural selection arose historically and needs to be understood in the context of the social practice - evolutionary biology - of which it's a part. Our modern-day notion probably doesn't quite match Darwin's. And certainly "evolution" hasn't always meant the same thing down the ages.

But the question you're raising here is whether we can call ourselves historicist yet insist that the mechanism of natural selection was at work throughout natural history. My answer would be "yes," but that's because to me being historicist doesn't mean that I think epochs have nothing in common, but rather just that they have significant differences and that we often have to take those differences into account. Notice that Kuhn's explication of Aristotle's very foreign concept of motion relies on our and Aristotle having fairly similar concepts of "sickness," "health," "asymmetric," "initial," "rock," "fire," "acorn," and "tree." In general, people who call themselves historicist are interested in studying how notions of "nature" and "gender" have changed over time, or are interested in pointing out that when Greek philosophers distinguished between mind and body, they didn't draw the distinction in the way that modern philosophers do. Stuff like that. Kuhn's discussion of the concept "motion" is historicist (which isn't surprising, given that he was a historian as well as a philosopher). I wouldn't call the concept natural selection ahistorical, but if you decided that its across the board applicability to all of natural history gives it an "ahistorical element," I still don't think that makes us any less historicist in using it, or if it does, that we lose anything by this "ahistoricity."

I don't understand this sentence. It's as if you'd said, "If commodities are always changing their value relative to one another, there must be some commodity whose value relative to everything else doesn't change." This is unintelligible. I will say that if we call all social practices and concepts historically contingent, then we've made the concept of "contingency" vacuous - and the bad theorists do just this: They make transcendence their standard and then deny transcendence, but retain it as their standard nonetheless. And once you do this - once you make transcendence the standard for being context-free, independent, etc. - then of course everything indeed is contextual, everything is interdependent, everything is contingent. But what this does is merely to make the words "contextual," "interdependent," and "contingent" worthless, since if everything is contingent then I haven't told you anything by labeling something contingent. In fact, the only use for the principle "everything is contingent" is to counter the idea of transcendence. Once transcendence disappears, the principle "everything is contingent" disappears with it. And with that principle gone, things can be necessary, independent, autonomous, just as things can be cold even while warmer than absolute zero, or hot even though colder than infinitely hot. So philosophy has nothing interesting to say about whether something is dependent or independent, contingent or necessary, contextual or autonomous.

Otherwise (and as is more likely) historical contingency is itself that which doesn't change, the a priori constant. In this sense historical contingency itself becomes transcendental. The fact that specific uses of the term denoting this idea may be historically contingent doesn't get rid of this kernel of ahistoricity.

Nb. I think such kernels are actually referred to as "quasi-transcendentals". Caveat: I am not an expert on this stuff by any means.

Well, in this context, "quasi-transcendental" is an odd term, like "somewhat pregnant." Or maybe it's meant to be humorous, like my once saying "Teena Marie is consistently inconsistent," or someone saying "the only constant is change." But you wouldn't seriously call "the only constant is change" transcendental, or even a constant, would you?

And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre. And the strength of the thread does not reside in the fact that some one fibre runs through its whole length, but in the overlapping of many fibres.

But if someone wished to say: "There is something common to all these constructions—namely the disjunction of their common properties"—I should reply: Now you are only playing with words. One might as well say: "Something runs through the whole thread—namely the continuous overlapping of those fibres."
—Wittgenstein

The statement "historical contingency is itself that which doesn't change" is a similar word game; as if I'd said, "They all have one thing in common, which is that they are different from each other."

There's Richard Rorty's retort to Geoffrey Bennington's assertion that "any attempt to explain transcendental effects by evoking history must presuppose the historicity of that same history as the very transcendental which this system will never be able to comprehend."

Rorty says:

I'm not sure what these presuppositions are. What exactly do you presuppose when you presuppose the historicity of a history? That people talk as they do because of the historical situation in which they are brought up? That seems a platitude rather than a tacit presupposition.

And to me, this disposes of the matter. I mean, if the concepts of "transcendence" and "tacit presupposition" and "deconstruction" have to resort to "the historicity of history" and "historical contingency is itself that which doesn't change" to keep themselves in business, then they've reduced themselves to negligibility and speak to no human interest worth caring about. It's as if someone had said "the idea that there is value in putting things in historical context transcends and precedes the activity of putting things in historical context." Whereas surely the former is inextricable from the latter, the activity over time revealing its value, which motivates the activity further, and around in that useful circle. Imagine someone who, upon watching a one-year-old child half walk and half crawl around a room, then analyzed this by saying "What's transcendental here is the child's tacit presupposition that there is value in exploring a room."

Except that this doesn't dispose of the question I asked at the beginning of these posts: What's at stake? For these principles, empty though they seem to me, shorn of the philosophy that supposedly gave birth to them, nonetheless live active lives within my peer group, as buzzwords, rallying cries, what have you. As I said over on the Ask Frank Kogan thread, they serve a whole bunch of social functions: as maxims, slogans, conversation pieces, provocations, affirmations, hairstyle, bogeymen, red herrings, camouflage, self-expression. And to me this is the real story, the real question: how do people use the these maxims etc. in their lives; what do they want them to achieve; what fears, hopes, and dreams are invested in them? But try and get someone here to answer such questions...

Transcendence (philosophy)

In philosophy, transcendental experiences are experiences of an exclusively human nature that are other-worldly or beyond the human realm of understanding.

Confusingly, the merely "transcendent" refers to what is commonly held to be the absolute physical world. In phenomenology, the transcendent is merely that which transcends our own consciousness - that which is objective rather than imagined.

Things sometimes considered transcendental are religion, parts of philosophy (especially metaphysics and ontology), humour, death and more.

“Tim, I have two preliminary thoughts, the first being a question: What is at stake here? How much does it matter whether we call something historicist, or contingent, or transcendent?…Why do you care?”

I think I care because I consider the choice between these terms to be prescriptive as much as descriptive. I’m probably one of those people who gets worked up over concepts like relativism (or at least finds them interesting), concepts which seek to justify their vision of what should be in a diagnosis of what is (i.e. “you cannot establish universal values among different cultures, and therefore you should not”). I think concepts like these have to be held up to scrutiny, not because they are necessarily wrong, but because they are inserted in all levels of public life, not just philosophy but also UN treaties, political debates, social policy, education curricula, newspaper opinion pages, music criticism etc. with, eventually, big effects on what we consider possible and impossible, desirable and undesirable.

(I note yr point about there being no necessary intellectual connection between e.g. historicity and curriculum diversity, but I’m not sure I understand. I think there is an intellectual link between the two, but if you’re point is that it’s not causal (i.e. it’s not for the sake of their belief in historicity that people advocate curriculum diversity) then I agree).

I also think what is at stake is my own conversation: I find concepts like history, contingency, relativism etc. interesting in their own right (in the same way that I might find a piece of music interesting to think about), but in talking about them I hope that I am using them with sufficient precision: what does it mean to say that something is “historically relative”? Can we use this term confidently if we don’t understand its limits (assuming it has them)? When we use it, what are we saying that we don’t realise we are saying?

One way to hold concepts up to scrutiny is to engage in forms of historicism/discourse analysis: how is this concept used by different groups in different historical situations, for what purposes and with what results?

Another is to look at the concept itself and ask “what does this concept address and on what does it remain silent, what are its blind spots, what does it take for granted?” So if, e.g. there is a component of historicism which itself evades historical contingency then we should work this out before we go on to say “everything is historically contingent!”

(It perhaps goes without saying that my usage of such terms will contain its own blindspots, so this is where you (or someone else in the conversation) have a role to play in pointing them out to me.)

Of course you may reject my justifications above as being self-deceiving, as not being “real reasons”, but of course I can’t see my own blindspots, and in the mean time the above feels fairly honest.

In terms of a choice b/w epistemological and practical thought… I’m not certain what to say here. I wouldn’t claim that every conversation has to start with first principles, but nor would I claim that this makes the first principles themselves irrelevant or not worth talking about (i.e. the fact that philosophy isn’t the only conversation worth having does not make it not worth having at all). Presumably it comes down to the type of conversation we want to have. I can’t think of many contexts in which the interdependence of the concepts “parent” and “child” would be particularly important to note, but then it seems fairly clear to me that deconstruction (or any other hoary postmodernist interpretative tool of note) was always going to be most interesting when applied to well-chosen targets: saying “all concepts are metaphors, and all metaphors are concepts (and, furthermore, this statement is at once metaphorical and conceptual)” may well be pedantry, but, if it is true, it also has some serious ramifications for any conceptual model which claims to capture reality accurately (i.e. without the distortive differential distance of a metaphor).

So I guess the purpose of these epistemological questions arrives when we begin to contemplate world building. In the same way that a writer making up a fictional country has to consider the geography of the land in a way that a writer setting a story in their home town may not have to, proposing alternative ways (which lie outside of positivism) in which society and/or certain components of it might work, or how we might relate to it, can make a lot of these questions much more relevant.

Judith Butler argues that societies can be considered historically as a succession of shifting social performative practices. If this is true then everything is up for grabs except for the fact that our social existence and our social relationships are “performative”. Zizek points out that this notion of existence-as-performance is a fairly contemporary concept which we are then elevating to the level of the ahistorical: ie. the notion of “performance” moves from being part of the content of history and becomes part of its frame: even though the concept of performing one’s identity is something that we have likely only been able to understand for a specific period of time, it can now be used to explain any society throughout history. To what extent does this diagnosis of the logic of history depend on the contingent historical emergence of a certain notion of performance in our own lifetimes? How does this particular content shape the idea it is employed to express? What possibilities (for world building) does it open up, and what does it foreclose?

And this is not something unique to historicism of course, because historicism is itself in part devoted to seeing how it is that many ideas we may have which we presume to be universal in fact carry within them some particular historical content. But the potential for historicism itself to do this is worth looking into because it shapes the way in which we might talk about any other concept as being historically contingent. So the “transcendent” content we are talking about is not what is “really there”, but rather what it is that a given conversation places beyond question, and pointing this out is not necessarily for the purpose of shoring up support for the transcendentalist brigade, but rather understanding what forms the border of any idea or group of ideas, what injects regularity into the field of differences it attempts to describe.

(w/r/t/ “transcendence”, I guess my definition (which may well be wrong by anyone else’s standards) is less extreme than the definition you posit, and it would be that while what is transcendental may not be entirely independent of what it explains, nor it is not affected or changed by what it explains)

The choice we make in accepting or rejecting Butler’s approach might end up being political more than anything else (e.g. “do we want our lives to be characterised as performative or not? Is there some other particular content we would prefer to see elevated to the level of the universal? What are the political consequences of considering identity to be performative?”). For Zizek, pointing out such problems in Butler’s historicism provides him with an opportunity to propose his own version which he argues escapes her pitfalls because (he says) the particular content he seeks to elevate is the permanent failure of the (Lacanian) Symbolic Order to fully constitute itself – the ahistorical kernel is a shortfalling, a deadlock rather than some particular positive content. The task of historicism should be (in his view) understanding what form this shortfalling takes in any given symbolically constituted epoch. This has the eventual result of him being able to argue for the centrality of class struggle as the skeleton key to understanding social phenomena, at least in our epoch (on the grounds that capitalism is the predominant force in social symbolisation). If you want I’ll go into more detail on this point but it may also bore you so I’ll leave it out for now.

The broader point I’m struggling towards is that the deciding on first principles is linked to the planning of concrete political action, not because one takes precedence over the other but because they are inevitably linked, in the same way that a musician’s lyrics and their vocals are inevitably linked, and talking about one will often lead to talking about the other. You could say, “well, why doesn’t Zizek ignore the issue of transcendentalism and proceed straight to talking about class struggle”, but then someone might say to him, “on what basis do you believe class struggle can explain seemingly disconnected social phenomenon [x]?”, and he might say “because capitalism opened up the space for social phenomenon [x] to exist.” And then someone might ask what he means by that and how he can justify it, and etc. until he ends up back at first principles. Whether he’s right or wrong is not at stake here so much as the process he has to go through in order to present his argument persuasively.

So, to conclude on this practical/epistemological split, I would say that the latter may well be irrelevant to the former as long as what you are arguing does not fatally oppose or contradict the episteme (or conversation) you are operating within. You can, of course, just switch conversations, or start a new one with different people, but if you want to convince the people in your current conversation to come with you it may require a more thorough explanation of your position from top to bottom – or from first principles to practicalities.

I sort of confused myself with our discussions of natural selection, and when I clarify this point in my head I start to suspect that we will ultimately agree with one another. I agree entirely with the following:

"And of course the term natural selection arose historically and needs to be understood in the context of the social practice - evolutionary biology - of which it's a part. Our modern-day notion probably doesn't quite match Darwin's. And certainly "evolution" hasn't always meant the same thing down the ages."

And my intention in referring to natural selection as something which persists despite historical change was not to say that it was transcendental-in-fact, but rather to say that, in the terms of natural selection's own discourse at any given moment, it is that which does not change. A certain historical notion of natural selection, at the moment of application, is treated as if it were ahistorical. The historicity of natural selection can only be seen from an angle, e.g. in the form of a historicist study, rather than internally to the moment of application. In that sense the historicity of natural selection is the discourse's blind spot, that part of itself which it cannot see while looking through it's own eyes.

My original motivation in pointing out that there is always something in a discourse which is transcendental was simply to note that problems like "postmodernism universalises a certain western experience" will always crop up, there will most likely always be a bit of particular historical content which ends up in the frame, even for variations of historicism (to return to my example above, Zizek claims to escape this trap but I'm not sure if he really does - this is Butler's own response to Zizek, that his notion of a deadlock is more historically specific than he is prepared to admit).

So I'm not really arguing for the existence of something transcendent in reality.

""And to me this is the real story, the real question: how do people use the these maxims etc. in their lives; what do they want them to achieve; what fears, hopes, and dreams are invested in them? But try and get someone here to answer such questions... "

I think they're very very hard questions to answer, Frank. I started writing a specific response to this and then deleted it because it made even less sense than everything else I've written today.

And where I think it all has resonance in the development of complexity theory -- even if I'm the only one who thinks so -- is in its emphasis on relativity, contingency and context. The emphasis, say, on the relationship between reader, author and text, on the mechanisms of the creation of meaning, has some echoes with complexity's emphasis on the properties that arise from the interplay of elements in a system. "Meaning" arising from text could almost be an example of a complex emergent property. I think in both cases, postmodernism and complexity, there's an urge to move beyond the reductionism of the first half of the 20th century -- in science, taking things apart down to particle level; in the arts, abstraction to the point of nullification -- and examine instead the relationships and overlapping effects and agendas within systems, whether those are systems of physical science, economics, or artistic expression.

I was about to bring up complexity theory in relation to natural selection, because it seems to me to be proposing almost inarguably powerful new models that are modifying scientists' conceptions (though not yet the public notion) of how evolution happens, mathematical formulations that are explaining a lot of the most plausible-sounding problems raised by, for instance, the proponents of intelligent design. I know this isn't the subject of the thread, but I like to point out that the way we posit natural selection to work has certainly changed not only since Darwin's time (ha, and I attended a lecture on astrobiology, in a lecture room located where his coal-cellar used to be (except I imagine the lecture hall is bigger) a few days ago) but in recent years, and it is still shifting. How we argue the culture contingency and historicism or otherwise of scientific theories takes us back across to another top Kogan thread, of course, so I'll leave this interruption there.

M.V., I can't see why a "postmodernist" (by which we might really mean "holist") would be against close reading of texts. In fact, in some circumstances, close reading is the way you get your first clue that the broader context works in a way that you hadn't expected. That is, if you don't read closely you're not going to notice when the writer isn't saying what you thought he was saying. I think the buzzword here is "hermeneutic circle": you have to look at the parts to understand the whole, but you have to look at the whole to understand the parts, so you get a feedback mechanism by which you use micro to adjust macro and macro to adjust micro. And the difficulty in communication on this thread, actually, is that so few of you are willing to go micro, so it's hard to know what your generalizations mean.

A good bit of advice on how to read closely in a way that helps your reading broadly, is in this old quotation from Thomas Kuhn:

When reading the works of an important thinker look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer..., when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning.

New Criticism was the dominant trend in English and American literary criticism of the early twentieth century, from the 1920s to the early 1960s. Its adherents were emphatic in their advocacy of close reading and attention to texts themselves, and their rejection of criticism based on extra-textual sources, especially biography.

Frank, that post I wrote awhile ago included the phrase "close-reading formalist," which I meant to be understood as more or less synonymous with "high modernist New Critic." As I understand it and have experienced it, postmodernist literary theory mostly regards formalism as a ruse, a chimera used to "valorize" or "privilege" certain texts.

Here's an easy test: Does one accept the premise that a meaningful critical reading could be made of a text about which one knew nothing extra-textual, neither who wrote it, nor when it was written, nor where it was written, nor under what circumstances it was written. A close-reading High Modernist formalist would presumably say yes. Pre-modernists and post-modernists would presumably say no.

And, yes, I understand that this analysis oversimplifies in several ways, but it's the best I can manage this morning.

And a problem I have with ILX is that we don't engage in enough close reading of each other's text.

Here's an easy test: Does one accept the premise that a meaningful critical reading could be made of a text about which one knew nothing extra-textual, neither who wrote it, nor when it was written, nor where it was written, nor under what circumstances it was written. A close-reading High Modernist formalist would presumably say yes. Pre-modernists and post-modernists would presumably say no.

Well, I assume that anyone who insists on making such classifications would call me a postie rather than a High Mod formalist, but nonetheless my answer to your easy test is an emphatic "yes" - except the test isn't easy, actually, since it depends on what you mean by "extra-textual." Basic to reading comprehension is the ability to infer from a text a lot about the assumptions and circumstances that underlie it, but to make such inferences you already have to know a lot that isn't in the text. To pick an obvious example, a poem doesn't come with a pronunciation guide, but for the most part you not only assume that its words are pronounced much as you pronounce them, but that you can also take cues from the poem itself (where the word would fall in rhyme and meter, for instance) to guess at which pronunciations might be different. However, your assumptions and guesses won't be a hundred percent right, and if you're a formalist you might be more interested than I would in going after such "extra-textual" info. Or, say a poem uses the word "king," I have to know something about kings and monarchs and hierarchical social organizations, and poems don't come with footnotes explaining such things. And, in fact, my reading of a poem might be distorted or thin if I don't find out specifics that I don't already have at hand, say, whether in the poet's time kings were powerful ruling monarchs of nation states such as England or France or whether they were clan leaders of nomadic subtribes. But I can't imagine that a new critic like Cleanth Brooks wouldn't welcome such "extra-textual" info. And conversely, I can't imagine a later non-new-critic like Harold Bloom claiming that you have to know which sort of "king" it is to do a meaningful critical reading. It might be an impoverished reading, but it wouldn't be meaningless. (And I think something that Brooks and Bloom would have in common is that neither would take "what 'king' meant in the poet's time" to be the final word on the subject, even if they did have access to this information.)

My problem with the Wikipedia def'n and your "easy" test isn't that they oversimplify but that they take what are basically styles, habits, preferences, and activities and portray them as if they were theoretical positions. And this isn't just oversimplified but wrong, and what's wrong isn't that the critics aren't taking the theoretical positions that are ascribed to them (mostly they're not, but sometimes they are), but that their actual behavior never comes close to matching any theoretical position anyway. So a story that says "modernism is followed by postmodernism" and presents this as "theoretical position A is succeeded by theoretical position B" is never right.

(And usually, a story that goes "constellation of styles, habits, preferences, and activities A is succeeded by constellation of styles, habits, preferences, and activities B" would be wrong too, since most discourses aren't dominated by a particular constellation of styles etc. but by conflicts between styles etc., so to understand a shift in the discourse you have to understand not just where styles etc. shift but how the conflicts shift as well.)

I haven't read the new critics much, but I don't interpret them as saying "Keep this biographical and social information OUT" (I recall that in one of the later editions of their textbook Brooks and Warren insisted that they'd never said any such thing) but rather "If you don't pay close attention to meter, rhyme, diction, symbols, irony, attitude, meaning and the like you're never going to get what's crucially going on here."

Er, I should have dropped the first "and":

I didn't (and don't) imagine that you're saying that when we turn into close-reading formalists that we reject extra-textual sources and are engaged in a ruse that validates privileged texts.

Mostly I'd say the problem with my "easy" test is that it attempts to inductively, empirically define what are deductive, theoretical positions. Yes, I do realize that tendencies aren't theories, and I may have ended up being, um, procrustean in my definition of the procrustean. On the other hand, styles, habits, preferences, and activities do tend to cluster historically around theories that define and impel them, so when a particular theory seems to me to be producing more than its share of silly or pernicious results, it seems both gentler and more accurate to take on the theory.

Note my scare quotes around "valorize" and "privilege." I don't consider criticism of the text qua text to be a ruse.

As for complexity vs. reductionism, the two are not opposites. "Reductionism" means that you speak of one thing in terms of something else that's presumably more basic, so that the second set of terms replaces the first. For instance, "reductionism" doesn't simply mean that you're searching for elementary particles, but rather that you believe that other stuff can be redescribed in terms of the interaction of such particles. So, let's take the sentence, "She decided to fly east for her sister's wedding." Reductionism here would mean trying to redescribe that decision in terms of the behavior of atomic and subatomic particles rather than in terms of sisters and weddings and decisions. No one's ever attempted such a redescription, and I doubt that anyone will, but if you were to try it you would need to replace a relatively simple sentence ("she decided to fly east for her sister's wedding") with a set of calculations that would be so extremely complex that it would have to draw on the power of all the computers in the world, I'd think. And presumably such calculations would utilize complexity theory. So in this instance, reductionism is what leads us to complexity theory. And the extreme complexity itself becomes a reason not to be physically reductionist when it comes to weddings and sisters.

If you're interested, an excellent book on the subject is Stuart Kauffmann's At Home In The Universe: The Search For Laws Of Complexity. Frontiers Of Complexity: The Search For Order In A Chaotic World by Peter Coveney and Roger Highfield is nearly as good, and has nicer pictures.

I agree with this Frank but I don't know if it's a knock out blow: if we accept that "actual behaviour" always falls short of the theoretical position it allegedly refers to, we can still conversely insist that this alleged referral is important... My table manners and my grammar may not conform precisely with certain written down guides on these subjects, but if I was taught by (or if I learnt by mimicry from) someone who had read those guides and strove to the best of their ability to match the behaviour described, then there may be a strong relationship between my actual behaviour and the '"theoretical position".

A lot of theoretical positions on literary interpretation are a matter of codifying habits anyway, as are the venerable books on table manners or grammar. The point of fashioning one's habits into a coherent theoretical position is to imbue them with persuasive power - to argue that you exhibit this habit not merely because you've picked it up over the years, but because it combines virtue and/or accuracy with broad applicability. The fact that people who read and are convinced by yr treatise are likely to only incorporate its insights in a haphazard, imperfect and above all habitual manner only serves to underscore what is actually at stake.

The difference between the habit of close reading and the theoretical position of new criticism is, I think, that habits can usually deal well with jostling amongst one another, whereas theoretical positions tend to define themselves by what they overcome and disprove. Close reading is pretty entrenched now for almost all forms of literary interpretation that have arisen post-Richards, Leavis etc. But some of the other tenants of New Criticism are a bit more questionable. I.R. Richards, for example, argued the reason biographical information was irrelevant was because a poem/play/novel was always autobiographical, and by reading it you were being allowed access to the creator's mind (only, this access was not granted via reference to extraneous biographical detail, but by close attention to rhyme and meter).

By combining this sense of the creator's mind with a disdain for biographical/historical detail, you end up with a writer as a universal rational man, giving us contemplative insights into reality which transcend time and space, surviving the journey from the writer's mind to ours perfectly intact. The pertinence of biographical detail here would actually be not as a skeleton key to unlock the work's meaning, but as a corrective, reminding us that the insights of the creator, and our own insights gleaned from a literary text, are always partial and situated. You don't need post-structuralism to do this of course: hermeneutics recognises this fact with its talk of horizons etc.

Of course many later approaches (including "post-structuralist" ones) to interpretation take issue with the desirability and even possibility of gaining access to the writer's mind, but this doesn't mean that they throw out close attention to rhyme and meter. Rather, close reading has been employed for different ends, one of which is to unravel a poem's point of incoherency as much as its point of coherency. And this is not always necessarily a self-defeating parlour trick: a lot of the time a piece of literature, like a song, can be more interesting because it doesn't provide a neat answer on a particular issue, but instead seems to create conflict or contradiction.

e.g. both Leavis and (feminist critic) Kate Millett have a reading of D.H. Lawrence's Women In Love which claims that Lawrence wants to set up comradely, brothers-in-arms deep friendship between men as being superior to romantic or sexual relationships between men and women (of course Leavis doesn't share Millett's disgust at this state of affairs). But when I read this book I was surprised by how it seemed that both interpretations fell short of capturing my own sense of the complexity of the relationships in the book (about which I remain ambivalent), in their separate quests to assign a necessary and obvious coherence to Lawrence's (autobiographical) "position" on the issue of relationships between the genders.

Neither position seemed to capture the sense of ambivalence which seemed to run through the text: the failure of either alternative to constitute itself successfully within the narrative, the fact that the final scene is an argument between the two main characters on this very issue which ends in intractable disagreement rather than the victory of one side over the other (Leavis actually came closer to getting this than Millett (who I otherwise love) but then I tend to find Leavis more subtle and thoughtful than a lot of his "proper" New Critical contemporaries).

I later read a self-consciously "post-structuralist" interpretation of the book, which opened somewhat ostentatiously with a discussion of Foucault and "silences", but which was actually more interesting precisely due to its close reading, which was open to the possibility of contradiction or two-mindedness in the text. In effect, what the writer did was precisely what Kuhn advocates:

"When reading the works of an important thinker look first for the apparent absurdities in the text and ask yourself how a sensible person could have written them. When you find an answer..., when those passages make sense, then you may find that more central passages, ones you previously thought you understood, have changed their meaning. "

The writer practices what is in some ways a closer reading than Millett or Leavis (although as to the latter this increased closeness is only in some areas; Leavis devoted entire books to Lawrence), maintaining greater fidelity to the fact of the apparent absurdities and, correspondingly, allowing that there are many ways in which Lawrence might have been a "sensible person".

One counter-argument to this is that the writer (whose name i forget) is as prejudical (i.e. has as loaded a sense of "sensibility") as Leavis and Millett in enforcing this notion of a divided writer who is conflicted over gender issues - which is a very contemporary kind of position. But if we accept this argument then we have to accept regardless that "close reading" is not itself enough - at the very least we have to accept the hermeneutic argument that insights are partial and situated.

But now back to your earlier posts.

I don't think anything you say is glib, but I'm still fuzzy about how you're using the terms "transcendental" and "ahistorical," and I'd now add to those the terms "first principles" and "epistemology." In fact, other than the term "ahistorical," I don't see why you don't drop the terms altogether, replacing "transcendental" and "first" with "very important," and "epistemology" with "sociology" (or maybe with "sociology that allows itself to be more self-consciously prescriptive than the academic departments that currently use the name"). And I have a lot of trouble with your use of the term "blind spot"; it's true that people are often blind to their own assumptions. It doesn't follow either that they must be blind, or that the assumptions that they're blind to are necessarily important, much less "transcendent." And might not "blind" be better stated as "not-brought-to-consciousness-all-that-much"? And wouldn't "[x] is transcendent within the terms of its discourse" be better written as "[x] is transcendent with respect to its discourse," since if [x] is one of the terms of the discourse, then no one in the discourse is blind to it (and the word "transcendent" may not be a term within a particular discourse; in fact, I'm recommending that we get rid of it except in praising Billie Holidays)?

First, to the "what's at stake" question. I still can't tell if you and I agree on how principles like natural selection and sentences such as "all ideas are historically contingent" work. Assuming that we do agree, what we seem to be disagreeing over is whether to call such things "transcendent" (or "quasi-transcendent" or "transcendent with respect to a particular discourse") or whether to drop "transcendence" from the discussion altogether. So again, if you say that natural selection and "all ideas are historically contingent" are transcendent within the terms of their particular discourses, I say that they're merely important to their respective discourses*, and some third person were to have no opinion, how would this affect the rest of your, my, and the third person's beliefs? How would it affect our relations with each other and with the rest of the world? How would it affect our behavior?

[*Actually I wouldn't say "all ideas are historically contingent" is important, even. It's true in the context of this discussion, but so vague as to be virtually worthless. All ideas are historically contingent if by "historically contingent" we mean "contingent upon a bunch of other things going on at the same time," but a lot of the things that go on are shared by every culture, and many more are shared by our culture and any given other culture, and you can often guess in advance what is shared. But you won't always guess right.]

Our semantic difference may be this (again, I'm not yet sure what you mean by "transcendent" or if your use is consistent): You seem to be using "transcendent" to mean "that which does not change within the current terms of the discourse" whereas I'm using it to mean "that which cannot change even if the rest of the discourse changes significantly." I'll say as an aside that there are plenty of things that don't seem to be changing within the current terms of evolutionary biology: the meaning of "animal," the meaning of "atmosphere," the chemical makeup of oxygen, the fact that Earth is the third planet from the Sun, the fact that Triceratops is extinct, and so on, but I wouldn't call any of these things transcendent, and I don't know if you would either.

When you use "transcendent" do you mean it as a compliment, like bestowing a blue ribbon on the principle and the statement? Or are you deriding the principle and the statement, accusing them of pretentiousness or dogmatism or something?

I don't see why you'd use the word "transcendent" here if it didn't connote for you at least one of those two: either the compliment or derision. And what's at stake for me is that when we bestow the compliment or engage in derision we're doing something essentially false: in the case of the compliment, putting forth fake reasons in support of the principle or statement when the real reasons fail to compel agreement; and in the case of derision, putting forth fake reasons for questioning the principle or statement when our real reasons don't raise genuine questions.

Take natural selection: For me, believing that it's right, and that I have good reasons for believing it right, which are _______________________ [puts forth the advantages of using the principle and cites many of the things we've learned while employing the principle], should be compliment enough. But what if someone doesn't buy my reasons? Calling the principle "transcendent" or "a necessary truth" makes natural selection seem not to be a mere principle but a superprinciple that no one can conceive of doubting; this would be my way of trying to bludgeon someone into agreeing (or at least of bolstering my own feeling that I can dismiss the doubter). As for derision, suppose it's the other guy who thinks that natural selection is right, and puts forth his good reasons for employing the principle. Now, I can choose to counter these reasons either by pointing out flaws and counterevidence or by offering an alternative explanation. But what if that's not enough, either to persuade the other fellow to doubt or to bolster my own feeling that I'm justified in doubting? Well, then I can call natural selection "transcendent," and here "transcendent" doesn't mean "a necessary truth" but rather "a dogmatic presupposition that I don't necessarily buy into." And certainly I'd be right in claiming that natural selection has progressed from hypothesis to axiom, but I don't see how "dogmatic presupposition" is justified, given that the other guy has taken the trouble to explain what he considers the advantages of engaging in evolutionary biology, of which natural selection is a crucial principle. ("Presupposition" is a problematic word; the "pre" implies something that isn't true: that you first commit yourself to natural selection and then engage in evolutionary biology. This is no more true than the reverse would be: that you first commit yourself to the rest of evolutionary biology and then employ the principle of natural selection. By analogy, imagine if someone said, "To play chess you first must presuppose that the queen can move diagonally as well as horizontally." You could retort that for the queen to move diagonally you first have to presuppose that you're playing chess.) Anyway, once I've accused natural selection of transcendence I can then say that I've demystified it and that this demystification allows us to develop alternative systems that don't rely on that particular "transcendent" principle, even if within the current system of evolutionary biology you can't imagine alternatives. That last clause is bullshit, by the way. Nothing's stopping you from imagining alternatives; it's just that no one has proposed an interesting alternative, and there are overwhelming reasons not even to bother searching for alternatives, though of course that could change (some fundamentalist Christians are sure there are alternatives, though they've yet to propose one that isn't vacuous).

Anyway, Tim, you'll probably object that you mean neither the compliment nor derision, and that you're neither trying to bludgeon someone into agreeing with you nor needing to give yourself philosophical permission to think up alternatives. But then, why are you using the word "transcendent"? What does it add? Why don't putting forth the advantages of natural selection and using it successfully in practice, on the one hand, and finding inconsistencies of logic or fact in it and proposing alternatives to it, on the other, exhaust our possibilities here? How does "transcendence" even name an issue? What is the issue? These are not rhetorical questions, but please don't call on the phrase "first principle," since it doesn't explain anything and is no more than a synonym for "transcendent principle."

I don't understand the phrase "what it is that a given conversation places beyond question." This can mean at least two different things: (1) that there's something (or many things) that the participants in the conversation are choosing not to question (including perhaps a slew of things that they don't even realize that they can question, and that they're not really thinking about); or (2) that there are some things that the conversation makes impossible for any member of the conversation to question. #2 doesn't make any sense to me; it treats the conversation as an all-powerful mystical agent that controls its participants' minds. Also, if something is "beyond question," how would anyone in the world know to question it? And don't say "Someone outside the conversation can question it," since if someone outside the conversation can question it, so can someone inside the conversation. And the person outside the conversation can join the conversation, right?

Also, since "border" and "injects regularity" are perfectly good words (as are "convention" and "rule" and "habit" and "assumption" etc.), if a bit vague, why not use those words where appropriate and abandon the misleading word "transcendent"? "Transcendent" implies something that simply isn't true, that the assumptions in the conversation are in no way dependent on the conversation. And people who talk about "transcendence" usually aren't talking about the rules of this or that particular conversation but about rules that must be adhered to in any conversation, rules that create the conditions of possibility of conversation itself. Again, if that's not what you mean by "transcendence," then why are you confusing matters by using the word at all, when there are other words available that you can use to say what you actually mean? (Also not a rhetorical question.)

OK, suppose we're playing chess. Does it make sense to say that "The rules of chess transcend the game of chess"? Just how do they transcend the game? And does the game of chess make the rules of chess beyond question?

The historicity of natural selection can only be seen from an angle, e.g. in the form of a historicist study, rather than internally to the moment of application. In that sense the historicity of natural selection is the discourse's blind spot, that part of itself which it cannot see while looking through its own eyes.

I don't understand. This would be like saying that the act of playing American football prevents you from knowing - while playing - that the forward pass wasn't always legal, and that the game derived from rugby. It's true that you can play without knowing such things, and that there isn't much of a way to apply this knowledge in the midst of a game, but still, there's nothing blinding you from this knowledge. Again, you've made the game a quasi-mystical entity that somehow pulls the shutters down on its participants' minds. (And, hey, the rules of football could be changed so that during half time starting players from each team would be quizzed on historical changes in the rules of football, and each team would be awarded points based on how it did on the quiz.) (Also, there have been a few times, usually during exhibition games, when coaches who disliked a particular rule kept taking advantage of the rule, pushing it to the point of absurdity, in the hopes of inspiring the league to change the rule. So challenging a rule can be part of the game. As, of course, is cheating.)

Is there some other issue we're not clear on that's gnawing us from underneath?

Suppose a historian or anthropologist pointed out that food gathering and food production by humans changes from culture to culture and epoch to epoch and that it's useful to see how differences in food gathering and production correlate to other features of the society. Are we doing anything useful by pointing out the obvious fact that he's assuming that food is important in any society? And is there any sense in claiming that the historian/anthropologist is somehow blind to his own assumption, and could not possibly question it, and could not possibly be aware that the asking of such a question belongs to our society and our historical epoch, not all societies and all historical epochs? By the way, I'm not sure why anyone would question that food is important, but you can certainly question how important it is, and whether it's more important in one circumstance as opposed to another, and you might wonder not just how methods of obtaining food affected the other features of a society, but also how other features affect methods of attaining food. For example, performative relations and class relations may affect food gathering and production, and the latter certainly affect the former. It may well be true that the historian's emphasis on food, just like Butler's emphasis on performance, and Zizek's on class conflict, tells us something about our own culture, but that doesn't mean any of the emphases are wrong. I don't see where there's an epistemological issue in sight; just the practical one of the relative importance of food, performance, and class, which are not mutually exclusive categories anyway. What do you mean by the word "epistemology"?

Epistemology poses the general question, when are we justified in saying that we know something is true? Relativists like me say that there are no universal criteria that pertain to all situations. This is basically a rejection of epistemology, but not one that has any interesting implications beyond the rejection. To elaborate on this in a way that I think addresses the issues that concern you: I wrote in the Kuhn thread, "You could see motion as a change in quality, or you could see it as an object only changing its location (while changes in its quality, if any, are irrelevant), but... there was no third thing, 'the datum' or 'what is really there,' for you to look at, to compare the ideas to, in order to see which was right. What would such a third thing be?" Now, it doesn't follow from this that there were no good reasons to abandon Aristotle's concept of motion for the later ones that Newton finally pulled together, or for abandoning Newton's in favor of Einstein's; nor does it follow in general that there are no good ways to pick between competing paradigms (or for that matter that there are no good ways to choose one discourse over another, should a choice be desirable or necessary). A lot of Kuhn's work was about the good reasons people had for changing paradigms. But the point is that they weren't always the same reasons. And if your reasons don't always have to be the same ones, then where is there an epistemology or a first principle? And please don't say that "Your reasons don't always have to be the same" is a first principle. What would it be a first principle of? The practice of not looking for first principles? How is that a practice?

But your point here I assume would be that when one goes looking for Aristotelian motion, that's the motion one will see, and when one goes looking for Newtonian motion, that's what one will see. And if we're looking for performance we'll find performance, if we're looking for class conflict we'll find class conflict, and so forth. So the question is, how do we test our most important assumptions, if those assumptions will define for us what we're seeing and if what we're seeing will reinforce those assumptions (that's the circle of interdependence I was talking about last week)? The answer is absurdly simple, actually: Make the assumption and see what happens. And then make a different assumption and see what happens ("what happens" means what interesting and convincing - or uninteresting or unconvincing - analyses we come up with based on our assumption).

Testing of assumptions happens all over the place; it's rarer in the hard sciences, except during periods when a science is undergoing a paradigm shift, whereas in the social sciences stuff like "performance" vs. "class conflict" are being argued all the time; and I don't see why such testing doesn't count as part of the conversation, or why one would assume that conversations can't ask questions about their assumptions. And to say that one must be blind to one's assumptions is simply dogmatic, even if one is usually blind to some of them.

(That one is blind to an assumption doesn't necessarily make the assumption relevant: E.g., one of the "preconditions" of my sitting here and typing this is my tacit assumption that the floor isn't about to collapse. Now, this assumption may not even be true, and until this moment I wasn't noticing it as an assumption, though I am now, obviously. But would you consider "the floor is not about to collapse" a basic assumption of this conversation, or of conversation in general? What about the assumption that the universe isn't about to get swallowed by a giant frog?)

"Basic assumption" is a relative term, since the "basic assumptions" are contingent upon what's going on in a lot of the discourse. One could say that our "basic assumptions" are those important assumptions that we're not willing to change, or that we expect to stick with no matter what, or something; these may include assumptions that we're taking for granted without even thinking about. (I don't know if before Einstein and Ehrenfest anyone was even considering whether the energy spectrum could be anything but continuous, or giving a thought to its supposed continuity.) But people can participate in a conversation without agreeing on which assumptions are basic to it. Kuhn showed that you could take one of Newton's laws as an axiom and derive the other from it, and conversely that you could take another of the laws as an axiom and derive the first one from it. So it's arbitrary which one you call "basic" and which one you call "derivative." You could say that one law defines the terms and the other one applies them, but this is just as arbitrary. And - so - you could call one law "transcendent" and the other "derivative," but again this is just as arbitrary. But here I have more of a problem using "transcendent" than using "basic," and so should you. Standard usage of "basic" and "important" carries with it the idea that these terms are relative and are value judgments. But "transcendent" carries no such connotation, and I don't see why you would want it to. If "transcendent" is just another value judgment, and for that matter a judgment that different participants can make differently without affecting the discourse, then how have you distinguished something by calling it "transcendent"?

Another point that Kuhn makes - it's crucial to his concept of "paradigm" and is why he used that word rather than some other - is that people don't make assumptions and learn definitions and scientific laws and then figure out how to apply them, but rather they learn laws, definitions, etc. by applying them. And according to Kuhn, it's these applications that are basic: the scientist doesn't simply apply the laws and definitions in situation A and then next day apply the laws and definitions in new situation B; rather, he models how he applied the laws and definitions in situation B on how he'd applied them in situation A. In fact, he may not have definitions at all, but simply is learning to use terms like, e.g., "force," "mass," "space," and "time" through his ongoing application of them. So the "basic assumption" here is "Situation B resembles situation A closely enough that my solution to problem B can resemble my solution to problem A, though neither is identical." And on through similar but not identical situations/solutions C, D, E, etc. Of course, you could claim that the scientist is actually using a rule that tells him how to apply A to B and so on, but Kuhn says that there is no evidence for this. (And anyway, you'd run into the infinite regress I talked about on the Ask Frank Kogan thread: What is the rule for how you apply the rule in each situation? And what is the third rule for how you apply the second rule, the one that tells you how to apply the first rule? And on to infinity.) And of course, the applications don't have to resemble each other in all aspects, just some; just as games don't have to resemble each other in all aspects, just some.

A question for you: Is the principle of natural selection the same in all its applications? I don't know how to answer the question, or even if it's worth answering, but the fact that I ask it points out another reason why I don't want to call natural selection "transcendent": There's no reason in principle why "natural selection" has to have the same features in all its applications, any more than all games have to have some feature in common. I guess if I knew more about evolutionary biology I'd be able to speak more intelligibly here. The crucial point (if you buy into Kuhn's model, that is, and I don't see any reason not to) is that in doing evolutionary biology you're not applying natural selection as a constant in all situations, but rather modeling Application B of the principle on Application A of the principle and so forth. Your starting point isn't "natural selection" but "Application A of natural selection." So here are a couple of more reasons not to call natural selection "transcendent": Natural selection is inextricable from (and inexplicable without) its applications, and the "basic assumption" here isn't "natural selection" but rather "solution to problem B can be based on solution to problem A," or more generally (and vaguely), "solutions to problems can resemble solutions to previous problems," which is pretty nontranscendent. And it doesn't work to call Application A "transcendent," since it's merely the application you first ran across; you could just as easily started at F, or M, or Z.

And don't say that "resemblance" is that which is transcendent, or constant, or that which does not change. Things resemble each other in different ways. (Otherwise, we'd have no need of the word "resemble.")

To sum up, in a social activity (e.g., evolutionary biology) different people can pick out different parts of the activity to call "basic" and "derivative," "important" and "less important," etc.; the "basic" parts are still contingent on a lot of the "less basic" parts; what seem to be the working, replicating parts of the activities aren't underlying assumptions or principles but specific applications of those assumptions and principles; and the assumptions/principles are inextricable from their application. Of course, you don't have to agree with what I just said, but I wouldn't be surprised if you do (if "you" are Tim). So now back to my initial question: Why does anybody think there's something to gain by using the term "transcendent" when "relatively important" would seem to be far more accurate?

Well, here's a speculative answer (which may not apply to you as much as it applies to Bennington or De Man or those types):

"Transcendent" sounds more theoretical or philosophical than "relatively important" does. If we're merely talking about relative importance here, there's no reason to assume that a philosopher or a lit theorist or a deconstructionist would be better than anyone else at making such a judgment or that the theorist would have available some special method for picking out what's important. Rather, you'd think that the people who engage in a particular social activity would be the ones with the most insight, and be the ones most likely to challenge and change assumptions, if necessary, because they'd be the ones with the reason to make or not make changes, and the ones with the strongest feeling for what would be lost or gained by changing. Of course, an outsider can sometimes see - and challenge - what has grown invisible to the insiders through their overfamiliarity with it. But this assumes that the outsider is willing to learn the insider's language. And again, there's no particular reason that such an outsider need know or care anything about "theory" or believe that he's got a method such as deconstruction at his disposal that helps him to identify the other guy's unstated, transcendent presuppositions. I'd think that deep familiarity with a lot of different social practices would be what's useful here, not knowledge of postmodern theory. So why wouldn't the anthropologist or historian or foreign correspondent or diplomat or immigrant or importer/exporter be the one we'd turn to? This person might also be a theorist, but I don't see why that would help. In fact, it might hurt, since searching for "blindness" in others is likely to be a bad way of going about uncovering someone else's assumptions. If some smart person's ideas seem to be full of blindness and contradiction, an explanation for this could be not that he's unaware of his assumptions but rather that you're unaware of his assumptions, have in fact been projecting assumptions onto him, which of course his work contradicts and is blind to. Seems to me that use of "transcendent" here is just the philosopher's or postmodern theorist's attempt to fool himself into thinking that this particular skill - the sussing out of other people's tacit, "transcendent" presuppositions - is in his own bailiwick.

I'm reposting that statement of yours because it seems like total sophistry, and I'd like to understand why you consider it a significant sentence. If this is an example of either "transcendence" or a "kernel of ahistoricity," why in the world would anyone care about transcendence or kernels of ahistoricity? (Again, not a rhetorical question.)

But in regard to "transcendence," a concept such as "chair" or "hat" is as much an assumption/definition as our concept of "motion" is.

So this is another advantage of using "basic" and "important" rather than "transcendent." The former allow us to distinguish between the relative significance of motions and hats, whereas "transcendent" doesn't.

And I agree that the connection to postmodern thought, if there is one, is circumstantial -- they have arisen somewhat concurrently, in different disciplines, and I tend to think that philosophy and science and art evolve together to some degree since they're all (within a given culture) responding to some of the same cultural influences. But where I guess I see some connection is in the development and reinforcement of fundamentally contingent and conditional ways of seeing the world. The most cartoonish complaints about postmodernism are to do with "relativism," which is of course the kind of thing only idiots complain about, but I think what both postmodernism and complexity in their own way are attempting is a framework for thinking about how relativistic systems function and how we function within them. There's more to say about that, but I haven't figured out how to say it yet.

Ok so the game of chess lets you change lots of things -- the positions of pieces, even the *types* of pieces (i.e. queening a pawn, etc.). However, the game does not let you change *how* you change the positions and types of pieces. If you change that, you are by definition, not playing chess. That's a fairly simple way to start looking at a statement like you put forward, maybe. But in another sense, we can say that they simply *are* the game, since everything else in the game is implicit in the rules -- except, maybe, the game of chess is also the myth of Bobby Fischer and associations witn Vanya? In which case, the game of chess transcends the rules of chess.

But it was chess before Bobby Fischer and Vanya, but a different *kind* of chess -- so maybe we can say that the game of chess and rules of chess neither transcend nor are subordinate to one another at all, but are elements at any moment of this thing we've temporarily agreed to call chess.

Which doesn't make the other two snap definitions handy, depnding on what type of conversation you're trying to have?

we can also say that because people wrote Genesis in accordance with their own visions, then the scientific method is a pile.

Fuck one narrative. I'm drunk, I've had exactly one too many coworker start passing around The Answers Book in the office, and as an ENTP + Aries I find the entire idea of focusing more than one inebriated whit of force to the debate of "post-modernism" vs "futurism" vs "modernism" (while they are all interesting in their own way, except futurism, fuck that shit) no really folks the vast majority of the failures in human endeavour in the past 100 years can most likely be attributed to one of two things:

1. human weakness
4. people trying to shit on kant even though at the end he's right
9. people trying to act like nietx even though at the end he's only right where he sounds like camus (he sounds like camus because camus did it better)
17u. Industry (oh fuck it)

People be dying in the streets! Why? Teleology.

Good night,

The first is chaos theory, and indeed the way some of its principles were discovered. Some weather scientists decided to double-check their calculations, so asked their computer people to do a quick rerun of the model. The results were spectacularly different, no resemblance at all. It took them a little while to realise that someone had decided that they could speed up the horribly long program if they shaved off the fourth (I might be misremembering that number) decimal point. This was how they discovered that the weather models they were using did not behave like everyone expected all models to work: that tiny incremental changes sometimes made more than small changes at the other end of the calculations. That original trick is a way to check what kind of state the weather is in - if the rounded-off run produces something more or less the same as the full run, we're in a reasonably stable state, whereas if the results are not similar, the state is chaotic, and because our measurements are necessarily imperfect and incomplete, our predictions aren't worth a damn. It's what is commonly termed the butterfly effect, of course, and it seems to me to raise a lot of questions about commonplace ideas of cause and effect.

Moving on to complexity theory: the autocatalytic set example I cited in that Freaky Trigger post talks about life emerging from a relatively simple set of chemical interactions. We can get from 'some chemicals' to something we'd arguably call life, something with the ability to adapt and change in a changing environment, without having to do anything - it's a new and astonishing property emerging naturally from the laws in ways we could never have anticipated. You put together lots of blocks of A and get phenomenon B that you couldn't have deduced from A.

I remember a book on modernism coming out in the late 90s or early 00s that started off with Seurat and went on to focus on individuals from other media (so it's probably not The Genesis of Modernism), does that ring any bells? If not, any suggestions on good critical and or historicist accounts of modernism, with particular emphasis on the teens and 20s?

The thread provides a reminder of much ILX has given up on providing complex exegesis upon difficult ideas and has moved almost entirely to the personal, the political and the quotidian. I don't mind, really. It was nice while it lasted. We'll always have Paris.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MEScGjsUCQ

I see xyzzzz__ has already had his Christmas fuck.

I remember a book on modernism coming out in the late 90s or early 00s that started off with Seurat and went on to focus on individuals from other media (so it's probably not The Genesis of Modernism)

Is it Everdell's The First Moderns?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Moderns

Elvis, that might be it, thanks!

i'm reading this annie dillard book *Living By Fiction* and man oh man everything she writes about is stuff i wouldn't go near with a ten foot pole! it's kinda funny. not because i don't think they are talented or good writers or "important" i just never got along with them i guess. the book came out in 1982 so i guess its just a byegone era in a lot of ways. does anyone under the age of 50 read coover or barth or grass or hawkes or barthelme or wurlitzer or robbe-grillet or calvino or canetti or fuentes or pynchon? outside of school?
i don't know why that stuff always rubbed me the wrong way. i don't like puzzles? i hate playing scrabble.

so many dudes. but i don't go out of my way to read woolf or stein either. i do like reading faulkner. his books read like Poe to me or something. dream horror books.

i like the poets better i guess. wc williams. yeats. you know. that crowd. rilke. stevens. bishop. H.D.

it's possible that i'm just a little too dim especially when things move post-mod. (i've been enjoying The Good Companions by J.B. Priestly and it is very long but also totally entertaining and this is when i realize that i am a fogey and i belong in the 19th century and if i really think about it my fave "modernist" writers are probably katherine anne porter (pre-ship of fools) and katherine mansfield. sometimes you just have to embrace your core trad dadness. but who knows maybe i'll get fancier like you guys in my old age.)

just needed to get that off my chest. make mine auden. (or wodehouse for that matter lol. DEFINITELY more my speed.)

(i mean a fella tries and tries over the years but i couldn't finish a beckett book if i lived to be a hundred. then again maybe this makes me more beckettian if i attempt to read one of his books for a hundred years...) (it could be that my arch-artiness is just

reserved for movies and music. but not dance or theatre. life is short. kinda.)

you ever read the skidmore/kogan/finney/etc stuff on here? those guys could go!

Nice to see Scott Seward again!

To judge from discussion on this board, a lot of people are still into Pynchon and Calvino, not sure about the rest. The "Wherein We Elect Our Favorite Novels of _____" (e.g., 1972) polls on ILB would probably be good indicators of what people here still read or at least value. I didn't contribute to these, but I really enjoyed reading them and have read a few things (Malina, The Hearing Trumpet, The Unfortunates) they discussed.

I tried with Gravity's Rainbow a couple years ago but found the ratio of frustration to pleasure high and gave up about a hundred pages in. Certain kinds of difficulty have more aspirational pull when you're younger, I think? At least that's my experience (I have no real desire to work through Ulysses again, but it felt like a privilege in college).

coover or barth or grass or hawkes or barthelme or wurlitzer or robbe-grillet or calvino or canetti or fuentes or pynchon?

I love Robbe-Grillet and Calvino, the others range from 'okay' to 'hate hate hate'.

Thing is, though, I love puzzles and you specifically state that you don't, so I kind of feel like trying to convince you to try any of these might be futile, as our brains are obv attracted to different things. I could sit in a giant pile of puzzles for weeks and that would be my happy place. While I do think there's merit to trying things outside of your wheelhouse, you also don't have to make yourself suffer spending loads of time on stuff you hate.

(I agree that it is very good to see Scott again - hey Scott!)

What redeemed Bartheleme was that he was funny af.

i like funny!

also: i do totally read woolf but i read her criticism. a lot of it over the years! i love reading her on other writers. i always learn something and she had a cool eye.

"While I do think there's merit to trying things outside of your wheelhouse, you also don't have to make yourself suffer spending loads of time on stuff you hate."

i think i'm coming to terms with some of these things at this point. i'm turning 55 this year and i used to feel dumb if i couldn't get into the people that people have been obsessed with for decades. at this point i have read more ABOUT joyce than i have read joyce. (i was definitely a fan of dubliners and portrait when i was a kid.) i look at musil and gass books and go ugggghhhhh no i can't. but i can read a page or three! which feels fine and good to do. just to see what's what. and they were really into words and i like words a lot.

the pandemic totally made it okay for me to put any book down if i wasn't into it. whereas when i was younger i felt like i had to be a good soldier and limp to the end of something. it has definitely freed me up in a big way.

i feel like poetry gets to the heart of the heart of my love for language more than the big novels of ideas. i read a lot of ashbery during the plague.

last weirdo attempted was a thomas bernhard book and he would not leave this room and i was like dude i have to leave this room get me out of here! so i left. that character is no doubt still in there getting all bummed out.

The day after this thread was revived I came across a cheap pb copy of that Dillard book (which was not really on my radar) and decided I was meant to buy it so thanks skot!

I (under 50) will always seek out this shit but I agree with you & emil.y that if it hasn’t clicked by now you’re ok to just give it a bye. Because I’m a bit of an omnivore in some aspects of my reading I’ve got a bit of an eyes-bigger-than-my-belly thing where I leave room for the possibility that one day I will get *really into* historical romance or whatever. Probably won’t happen cause I never ever pick up the fuckers

Do just want to note that on the one hand it’s worth remembering that it’s fairly likely more readers (even among lit nerds) rate “trad dad” conventional stuff than barthelme or robbe-grillet or whoever and this would also have been true back when they were more widely read, & on the other hand it’s kinda bollocks to frame an affinity for this stuff as a young person thing you grow out of, any more than liking free jazz or whatever

Out of all the big literay isms I admit modernism is the one where I have the most difficulty understanding what it's supposed to be; I actually find it easier to understand what post-modernism is. That being said, thanks to reading this thread ages ago I always remember that the Duchamp urinal is Modernism Not Post Modernism.

I know it when I see it

Unlike post modernism

some french guy said modernism was always already postmodern

french intellectuals say a lot of things

"The day after this thread was revived I came across a cheap pb copy of that Dillard book (which was not really on my radar) and decided I was meant to buy it so thanks skot!"

you are welcome. she's always worth reading. its funny that when her first novel came out it looked stodgy to me. like nu-willa cather. not that that's a bad thing. my wife was in her writing class at wesleyan. you had to write something to get in the class. (and i never tire of saying that my wife's music teacher was alvin lucier.)

in a way, getting older has just made me less FOMO over not getting into Ulysses or whatever. it's a relief. still want to finish proust though. i read the first two books in the 80s and loved them.

WB Scott, I always thought of you as a Barthelme fan at least, because of starting this thread (I'd never seen this list before you posted it):

Donald Barthelme's Syllabus

I think it's extraordinarily difficult to really know what people are or aren't reading in the 21st Century - but yeah, from surveying 'the discourse', the internet, social media, film and tv, academia, Goodreads, the readers on public transport, etc etc it does feel as if most of the white guy post-war American po-moists have largely had their day. It's hard to see John Barth making a big comeback. Although some of the 'newer' American writers - George Saunders, Ben Marcus, Ben Lerner, all the Bens - obviously owe a debt to ppl like Coover and Barthelme. But - as I'm sure was discussed somewhere on this thread - the kind of playfulness and intertextuality associated with the po-moists is as old as the hills, older than literary social realism, and acknowledgement of text-as-text (rather than text-as-mirror) I don't think can or will ever vanish entirely from post-war fiction. Just recently I've read a number of 'mainstream' crime novels that were stuffed full of self-referentiality and literary games - even if the game is sometimes 'let's all hide from the modern world'.

does anyone under the age of 50 read coover or barth or grass or hawkes or barthelme or wurlitzer or robbe-grillet or calvino or canetti or fuentes or pynchon?

Out of that list the one that jumps out to me as having been read by several acquaintances under 40 is Calvino. Both women, actually. But also both architecture students, which I'm sure has something to do with it. But also though Calvino is grouped with pomo he doesn't have the sort of clinical formalist qualities that might turn ppl off some of the others, he's pretty big on emotional content. Too much so maybe, I read Baron In The Trees and it was far too syrupy for me.

I find Scott Seward's initial post confusing because he lumps a lot of different things together.

The statement "people no longer read Hawkes or Barth" is quite convincing. I'm with Scott on this.

To extend that to "people under 50 don't read Pynchon" is plainly false. A great many do.

But then to extend that to Virginia Woolf is odder still because most people wouldn't think she had much in common with Hawkes, Barth or even Pynchon. You could very easily say that she has at least as much in common with Austen and G Eliot.

So, yes, as people have said, there lots of different tastes and angles that don't need to be reconciled; but the initial conflation creates a bolus of items and trends that are so different I wouldn't be able to comment on them all in one way.

Yeah Pynchon & Calvino kind of in a different conversation as far as continuing popularity (vonnegut & heller even more so surely, & are part of the same loose crowd?)

I’m not sure where the goalposts are now between “making a big comeback” and “not read anymore” but coover & barthelme have been reprinted as penguin modern classics within the last decade, Gass & Gaddis are in nyrb classics… again these were cult authors to begin with but I don’t think it’s quite accurate to say they’ve been memory holed.

My unsung guy of these guys is Stanley Elkin who never seems to get a shout out even when ppl are talking about that generation of US pomo whatevers

& Ishmael Reed! (Who again is in the penguin modern list)

"because he lumps a lot of different things together"

they were all talked about in the dillard book i was reading. that's the only reason that i lumped them together.

"My unsung guy of these guys is Stanley Elkin"

not unsung by me! i'm sure i mentioned him a bunch over the years on ILB. i still read him. and am still inspired by him.

bellow. elkin. the marx brothers. mad magazine. all my kinda mod/post-mod art.

(don't even know if people sing about bellow anymore...)

(i don't really read bellow anymore. but he had a big effect on me when i was young. i could see reading those books again someday though. except for henderson. my least fave.)

the dillard book just reminded me of the 80s. or brought back memories of the 80s anyway. i tried to do my due diligence back then. i ended up liking manuel puig and milan kundera. i still own some kathy acker books...

but mostly back then i was all omg raymond carver i luv yooo. and yooo tooo joy williams. i was reading bobbie ann mason last week! nice to see joy williams getting some late love. i definitely felt like i was the only one singing about her for years. it makes sense that she speaks to people now.

I tried with Gravity's Rainbow a couple years ago but found the ratio of frustration to pleasure high and gave up about a hundred pages in. Certain kinds of difficulty have more aspirational pull when you're younger, I think? At least that's my experience (I have no real desire to work through Ulysses again, but it felt like a privilege in college).

― eatandoph (Neue Jesse Schule)

i think of pynchon as being kind of like the George Carlin of pomo fic. like there were about a billion fucking mediocre white men doing comedy that these days is pretty fucking terrible and i'm always tempted to lump carlin in with them but then when i actually listen to what carlin's saying it's oh, no, no, he is clearly not like these other guys, he _understands_ things they don't. i think pynchon also gets... he gets pigeonholed because of Gravity's Rainbow, which is his Clever White Man book. and it's a fun book, but that kind of book... that sort of book hasn't held up terribly well for me at least. the other example of that would be something like _infinite jest_ - and david foster wallace absolutely _hasn't_ held up, i'd argue. as far as pynchon, it took him a while but he got over that kind of writing. i think he's a lot better as a writer these days, he doesn't feel the need to show off how clever he is.

I think it's extraordinarily difficult to really know what people are or aren't reading in the 21st Century - but yeah, from surveying 'the discourse', the internet, social media, film and tv, academia, Goodreads, the readers on public transport, etc etc it does feel as if most of the white guy post-war American po-moists have largely had their day.

― Ward Fowler

_moist_

alternately you could argue that the novel isn't really the best format for po-moist (i'm just going to start calling it that) writing, there's lots of internet stuff that kind of has that in its lineage

An intelligent and talented experimental novelist whose work I would tend to recommend is Percival Everett.

Have no plans to read this obvious tripe.

The terrible truth of the Ukraine war is that it is precisely its simulated character, its hyper-reality, that makes it so bloody, writes @thephilippics. https://t.co/lCu1AqwFgH

— The New Statesman (@NewStatesman) September 26, 2023

Here's a thought. The war in Ukraine is bloody because wars are bloody. Even the War of Jenkin's Ear was bloody.

it always feels so grotesque when people try to apply this sort of "theory" to real world crises, whether it's baudrillard or zizek or this person - keep it in the academy or stick to pop culture please