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.

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