post structalism and the sublime

does this relate to anything in particular anthony or is it angels dancing on pins: the return?

Sublime semiosis

Sublime hesitation

Sublime abyss of uncertainty

Sublime intensities

And from there: Poststructuralism is all fun and games until someone loses an I.

I don't follow Lukey's definition of structuralism/poststructuralism either. Poststructuralism was a set of diverse approaches to structuralism's biases. It didn't do away with binaries; rather it set them in infinite motion, questioning the notion of the transcendental signified, that which guarantees meaning, etc. See Spencer's comment above.

Sublime image

Sublime text-image

Sublime image-text

Sublime music

Sublime image-music-text

Poststructuralism was a set of diverse approaches to structuralism's biases. It didn't do away with binaries; rather it set them in infinite motion, questioning the notion of the transcendental signified, that which guarantees meaning, etc.

And "structuralism" was diverse as well, I assume, and I'm not actually understanding from gumauve's brief message what's "post" about poststructuralism.

I'm an ignoramous when it comes to continental philosophy, but here are some thoughts: If the summaries I've read of Saussure are correct (and such summaries rarely are), the idea of the "transcendental signified" ought to play no role one way or another in his thought: It should neither be absent nor present, since it's irrelevant. I don't know if indeed it's in his thought, but if it is, it's an unnecessary archaism. Lukey's description of the teapot and jug seems right: "Within that set of things which have an innate similarity, they are defined entirely by what makes them different from each other." So "meaning" is a matter of differential relations over a large number of objects, words, sentences, events, rather than a one-to-one relation between a stand-alone word and its stand-alone "signified." This is analogous to Darwin's natural selection, which doesn't treat species as stand-alone objects, but as evolving parts of a dynamic environment. So the notion of the transcendental signified isn't questioned, but discarded. It never guaranteed "meaning" any more than God did. I don't understand Derrida's obsession with the transcendental signified. Seems like a straw man, ultimately.

"It set them in infinite motion" doesn't make sense to me. It's the equivalent of saying "Everything is hot." Which is true, if you set absolute zero as your standard for nonheat and nonmotion, but has no relation to any questions involving meaning, heat, motion, or anything else that one is actually likely to have, since motion and nonmotion are not - ta da! - bipolar opposites, just mundane comparative terms.

Well, I have to go, and haven't done such a great job myself of communicating. E.g., "transcendental signified" is not a self-explanatory term.

Some other time.

Question for Anthony: What's at stake? What questions - in your life and/or elsewhere - are gripping you when you wonder about the sublime and poststructuralism? What was motivating you to start this thread?

Question for anyone: What's at stake in - for instance - adhering to the belief that a teapot will function somewhat differently in different circumstances? This belief seems correct to me, but not significant. Why do you care? E.g., I suppose there might be some circumstance where it makes sense to say "the concept 'teapot' is in infinite motion" - that circumstance would be when one is engaging in that strange and esoteric conversation called "Theory" - but in comparison to, say, masculinity and marriage, the concept "teapot" seems relatively immobile. Or you can tell your first-grade class that the Earth is in motion, and half a second later you can tell some kid to sit still, and you're not contradicting yourself, you're just switching frames of reference. Or when doing "Theory" I can say that nothing exists in isolation, and a minute later - no longer doing Theory - I can say that I grew up in an isolated village, and I wouldn't be contradicting myself, since the standards for "isolation" are different in the different statements. So my question is, what's actually at stake in "Theory," given that it seems to have no bearing on teapots or villages or marriage or masculinity, or on whether the concept "Author" deserves to live or die, etc. That Theory produces such sentences as "it set them in infinite motion" would seem to demonstrate the irrelevance and uselessness of Theory.

The german delegate sighed contentedly; 'at last we have a framework that works in practice' 'yes, yes, yes' screamed the french delegate suddenly 'but does it work in theory???'

like frank, chuck eddy and anthony - but unlike say t.eagelton [or amateur(ist)?] - i prefer to say TRUST THE WORK (not the promotional leaflet), but at least SOME of the work's embedment in the world springs out of a pre-stated manifesto-metaphysical POSITION (even if this is maximally deluded/confused/fraudulent)

[eg interpreting godard purely in terms of post 4th-internional marxism projects all kinds of material "into" his films which ain't there, given that JLG never read past page 3 of a book IN HIS LIFE - he makes films! - but this caveat is NOT NECESSARILY TRUE of his audience and/or collaborators]

[cf "nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is a science"]

(or on the opposite end--can i watch the amazing race/americas top model/nashville star/law and order svu/nick and jessica w/o constantly seeing underlying power dynamics--( the answer of course no but the question then is whhy does it matter)

who wrote the last qoute sinkah?

"The nothing nothings."

Stucturalism is believing that things have meaning hard-coded into them, no? A properly educated structuralist believes that he/she can decode or unlock the meaning of something (e.g. for a marxist it's all about the class struggle...)

Post-structuralism is believing that an infinite range of meanings can be arrived at through interpretation. In practice only certain meanings are generated because of learned codes of interpretation (discourses).

Probably wrong... just my two pence worth on this angels and pinheads debate.

post-structuralism is the people that didn't believe in structure, or in "things" but did believe in some sort of history (namely that of philosophy).

neither is v. useful except to refer to particular constellations of thinkers.

(p.s. a quick google reveals the quote v/v nonsense comes from Saul Lieberman)

Sorry for being so flip, but must keep in motion myself...

I would really, really recommend people to read Sir Ernest Gowers' The Complete Plain Words before they even think of starting on post-structuralism. You can't run before you can walk. Sorry if that sounds snippy, but you're letting yourself down and giving the discipline a bad image if you discuss this sloppily.

And isn't the mis-spelling almost the point. I would say "precisely the point," but, well, you know how the rest goes....

(that better be a poorly delivered joke, momus - even if it's not, anthony is worth ten of you as a critic, and pulling insider-snooty attitude re dyslexia is just the kind ofkneejerk tory stuff you often pull for real)

"at least SOME of the work's embedment in the world springs out of a pre-stated manifesto-metaphysical POSITION (even if this is maximally deluded/confused/fraudulent)"

Embedment, Mark? And why did you save up all those missing capitals for "position"? Go and see Sir Ernest at once.

thinking clearly and conventional orthography are not related

since yr idea of theory (and indeed clarity) is all suck-up coles-notes parroting anyway i don't think you have anything useful to contribute to this thread

stop smarming around trying to kid ppl you're not out of yr depth here, and SAY SOMETHING CONCRETE or fuck off

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1111/is_1811_302/ai_72732951

(I think the trend towards the Sublime in post-structuralism (eg Barthes' invocation of jouissance) is part of a larger post-68 post-Utopian inability to conceive of the Beautiful.)

if you weren't so terminally self-involved momus you might actually have picked up by now that anthony is dyslexic, he's been posting as long as you have

anthony's a better writer and critic than you, and a (much) worse speller

I always found the idea of jouissance as theorised by barthes and -say- cixous slightly nightmarish - all that indeterminate, subject dissolving shifting around. looking back, it reminds me of the failure of surrealist utopias - the liberation of the unconscious, rather than being the key to mental peace, often looks very nasty indeed on canvas/film

I think he's very wily in that he's always asking questions, like the Good Soldier Schweik, rather than pontificating. Very Brechtian! Very Lieutenant Columbo!

If only you could do anything other than pontificate!

You'll be telling me next that hiding behind mis-spelled pseudonymns is a "sign of character" next, Colonel! Or are you an "embedment" reporter from some rival board?

But do let's try and keep a grammatically straight bat, shall we Momus?

Felchwhimper's Law: as posters criticize each other's grammar on an internet thread, the probability of their there being grammatical errors in the posts pointing out the grammatical errors approaches 1:1.

you do have a book deal don't you momus--fotoblogging at thames and hudson?

i have to wonder about how common his misconstrual of Husserl (as being locked up in his head ala Descartes) is,

Isn't the transcendental signified antediluvian bulldozer, which we seem to be mapping here to the sublime megacycle, nothing more than Derrida's hors texte Jobbernowl, that which simultaneously guarantees the meaning of the text sluggard of a builder yet must always remain outside pyromaniac and unknowable pestilential parakeet?

Yes addle-pated lumps of anthracite!

Quite Impersonations of Abominable Snowmen!

That said, I do think Momus was being unnecessarily persnickety (sp?) and trivial, though I admire his good humor in not lashing back at Mark's bad mood.

But anyway, I posted, went away, assumed that the thread would fade out as per usual, am surprised to find out it bubbled onwards, but I retaim my initial perplexity and frustration (and continue to be intrigued nonetheless): What is going on in ILX threads such as this one, where there's an attempt to engage modern-day intellectual life, but where the participants in the thread make little or no attempt to communicate with each other - or at any rate to communicate with me? When people as certifiably smart as Mark, Sterling, and Clover refuse to state their ideas in a form I can understand, there must be a reason, somewhere, a smokescreen being set up, a wisp of a feeling or an idea that's being protected from the glare of our eyesight. What's all this about?

Oh and just my opinion again but no amount of intellectualism is going to be anyone close to "the sublime" =)

(And once again I'm aware that the phrase "slidin'n'slippin of signifiers and signifieds" is not self-explanatory. In fact, as far as I'm concerned, it's vacuous, but I will try to elaborate, when next I post.)

(X-post, obviously. Vichitravirya XI, I thing that Mark, Sterling, Tracer et al. are very good at communicating, usually, but they - especially the first two - have got a mental block, this simultaneous want-to-speak, don't-want-to-speak, when it comes to particular subjects, and I like to prod them.)

I agree, I think, though I like the fact that you capitalized your most problematic word; "position" here meaning something like "on any given 'day' one can find it somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy, or thereabouts, maybe, more or less." Yes, even a bad, vague, vacuous "idea" makes a difference when people feel that the idea amounts to an important principle that motivates, explains, and authorizes their art-related behavior. "Authorizes" is the key word in the previous sentence, since what is most at issue is the question "What are we allowed to do if we want to get shown in this gallery/published in this journal/achieve some cultural weight?" (or "what story do we tell ourselves to encourage our continuing on our path when we don't get shown/published?"). And this is why specificity is needed here. Say you're in an institutional environment of some sort (e.g., school), or you've internalized that environment. Something about the phrases "infinite motion" and "play of differences" excites you, seems to speak to your urge to MOVE! So who in particular is telling you not to move, to sit still (or to move according to their choreography, not your own)? How does or did such a person enforce his dictates? And what specifically is the motion, the art, the journey, the adventure you want to undertake now that "play of differences" has given you permission to break free? The word "play" is certainly more important than the word "differences" in the phrase "play of differences," even though the word "play" is actually irrelevant to Derrida's philosophical point. He could have said "the endless slog of differences" and made the same point, but it wouldn't have felt the same.

I don't know if what I just wrote speaks to why any of you might care about a philosopher's concept of sublimity. I'd think that such a concept would matter only insofar as it seemed to justify and inspire your art, your criticism, your loves, and so forth.

(This post obviously did not contain my threatened elaboration on the slippy sloppy sliding sigs.)

one of the things aesthetic philosophy is good at, i think, is drawing out and clarifying ways in which we can use words to describe all sorts of funny relations.

of course this often seems like mindless substitution of schmaltzier words for more plain ones, and sometimes it is.

play also does imply that the interplay is fun! and so good! (and also, i suppose, that fun is good, and etc.) the fact that it does this as well bothers me, because the line between making words more complex and useful and just following free-associations between various connotations is rather tricky and ppl. get very lazy and stupid about it.

Bert, this is a part of Derrida's work (like, most of it) that I know only secondhand - this particular bit through Mark's attempt to explain it to me, actually - but I'd assume that Derrida would say that meanings (if "meanings" is the right word: "understanding" or "readability" might be better) are only possible within learned codes of interpretation. The codes, therefore, are hardly limits. And this applies to understanding any phenomena, including events and objects, not just words and sentences. The word Derrida uses for this concept is "iterability," which I take to mean that for an event to be understandable it has to resemble some other event. So, e.g., for the irridium layer at the K-T boundary to be understood, it has to be related to something that we know is capable of causing an irridium layer, for instance volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts. So, though the actual meteor impact was a one-time event, it resembled other events, and that's why it's understandable. (That's one of the reasons it's understandable; another is that it differs from yet other events.)

I don't believe the word "infinite" is useful here. There can be an infinite number of points within a one-foot radius, but that still doesn't give you a lot of wiggle room. "Infinity" seems to enter the conversation from the sort of either/or thinking that I'd expect Derrida to eschew, as if there were only two numbers, 1 and infinity, and only two speeds, stock still and infinitely fast. Notice the word "resemblance" in the preceding paragraph. How exact does the resemblance have to be? The boring but correct answer is: As exact as suits your purposes. In other words, philosophy has nothing to say on the matter. There's nothing general to say about whether the meaning of events can be specified exactly, since "exactly" is a term that flexes from situation to situation (which is what makes "exactly" iterable, and therefore comprehensible). I'd expect Derrida - or Derrida when at his best, at any rate - to explain that, when he says something like "meaning cannot be specified exactly" (did he ever say such a thing? I have no idea), he's speaking strategically, to counter a philosophical tendency to demand that meaning be super-exact beyond any functional use of the word "exact."

But maybe this is an ideal Derrida I'm attributing these ideas to.

You'd already expect that the meaning of an event would be multiple and at least somewhat open-ended, since consequences are multiple and open-ended. So I don't see how this insight is more than a platitude, how it changes anything, except by giving the people who don't understand it the opportunity to claim that it frees them or authorizes them do something or other. But surely it would be more honest to come up with real reasons...

Anyway, the fact that the concepts "window," "elbow," and "traffic light" interact with their cultural environment doesn't seem to be a big deal, or to leave them a lot of room to play in. Just a daily slog of same old same old window, elbow, and traffic light. Therefore, the fact that other concepts - "punk rock," "sublime," "femininity" - are also in interaction with their cultural environment doesn't in itself explain anything about why they are actually in play, why they're jumping and slugging all over the place.

post-structuralism is the people that didn't believe in structure, or in "things" but did believe in some sort of history (namely that of philosophy)

Again, I wouldn't expect Derrida (or the ideal Derrida as I've imagined him, anyway) to say that he didn't believe in structure or "things" but rather that he didn't associate structure and thinghood with the eternal and immutable, with antecedent being. So, something could be a thing while still wavering around in its ongoing relations to other things. Derrida wouldn't have bought into the either/or that says you're either a real thing or contingent, would he? Wouldn't he say that thinghood is more-or-less contingent? This is a very different point from saying it doesn't exist.

Did Derrida ever call himself a "poststructuralist"? The one little bit of his I've read about Levi-Strauss took aim not at L-S's structuralism but at his sentimentalizing oral culture.

I'll talk through my hat even more than I've been already on this thread to say that one problem in comparing prominent structuralists to prominent so-called "poststructuralists" is that the latter tend to be philosophers and the former not. Is this true? Levi-Strauss read some philosophy, right, but wasn't in general concerned with combatting Platonism? Or was he? (It would help if I'd read some Levi-Strauss.) Anyway, if Levi-Strauss examined a whole lot of myths in order to make cross-cultural generalizations about all myths (did he?), I don't see why there'd be a philosophical objection to this. Either Levi-Strauss is convincing or not, but I don't see where there's some principle that says he can't be right. It seems to me that he and Derrida have different fish to fry, basically.

Think of Kuhn as being a lot like Darwin: Kuhn both described how particular scientific ideas did evolve and created a model for how scientific ideas evolve in general, using his own version of natural selection. Kuhn, by the way, considered himself a structuralist (notice the name of his most famous book), though he isn't usually called one. In doing what he did, he also took on - and helped to kill - positivism and maybe helped to kill philosophy as a whole, as well. But he wasn't hung up on endlessly killing and rekilling positivism. He was really concerned with how ideas change. He didn't usually go near questions about whether or not to believe in things, or whether or not scientific ideas are in infinite motion. (Question, if scientific distinctions are in infinite motion, how do you distinguish between revolutionary changes and cumulative changes? The phrase "infinite motion" would be useless here, since it can't differentiate between the two. This doesn't mean that "infinite motion" is wrong, exactly; just that it's a phrase with no real applicability beyond a polemic against Platonism, since the "infinite motion" is only in motion in relation to criteria for stability and nonmotion that are so dysfunctionally extreme as to be bizarre.)

Where there might be an analogy to Derrida is in Kuhn's idea of "paradigm" in the sense of "exemplar," meaning "concrete puzzle-solutions which, employed as models or examples, can replace explicit rules as a basis for the solution of the remaining puzzles in normal science." This isn't far from Wittgenstein's idea of family resemblance (which helped inspire the Kuhnian concept), but also is similar to Derrida's iterability. A paradigm only gets to be a paradigm if it can be repeated, after all.

German romantics to thread.

This thread provokes some fascinating notions, not least of which is that "poststructuralism" (however we end up defining it here), to the extent that its "neti... neti" pulls the cliff out from under our words, leaving them hanging, legs fully a-pump, like Wile E. Coyote yet again, (the effect is not unlike what we imagined in physics classes as it dawned on us intellectually but not physically that all matter really is composed primarily of empty space) is in fact a discourse of the sublime (e.g., the vertiginous/dizzying/beyond comprehension).

I'm-a have to post again once I've had a channce to do a little light reading...

speaking of which my quip about history is about the idea that ps is some sort of significant break with that before, which requires the idea of structures of thought that can embark on breaks and also that prior structures of thought condition which breaks are possible, and to a degree determine which breaks happen, which is, to be glib about it, the biggest metanarrative of them all.

in any case you should read some levi-strauss. the order of things is interesting except the ps critiques of it seem sorta right to me, whereas structural anthropology is interesting and seems more right.

speaking of which, if derrida or whoever helped ppl. to critique ls where he was wrong, then derrida was good to think with (which is a phrase i think ls coined) but if ls was required to be there so he could be critiqued then he's good to think with too, so i don't see the big deal with that either.

the problem in a way is that ppl. have all sorts of notions of how things really work in all sorts of fields, then you have these overarching agendas or theoretical frameworks that ppl. latch them on to, but one really doesn't determine the other as much as you'd think, so outside the specifics of any given discussion of any given issue, the terms aren't helpful in themselves.

however, it's worth noting that, say, the correspondence theory of grammer and language comes up in all sortsa irritating ways and having the e.g. derrida critique of such handy and deployable in a shorthand form isn't the worst thing out there.

in a way the thing is ppl. thought for a silly moment and silly reasons that they had the *way* when they just had a few interesting new sets of ideas that were sorta useful and sorta new, but then that happens all the time really.

o.k. one more way to approach this via an analogy you might like. retrospectively, why did newton's concept of motion replace the classic one? according to some, becuz that's the way the world "really works." except of course it's not, so you can say "that's more like the way the world really works" but assuming we still don't know how the world "really works" (and certainly didn't in newton's time) then that's not good enough either, so instead we can give a more complex and social explanation. now if anyone ever tries to explain scientific "progress" by virtue of discoveries of how the world "really works" we can generally argue that it's not a good explanation. this doesn't give us the good explanation, but at least it tells us we need one. so think of lots of these things you find obvious as useful as fancy ways some ppl. find useful of remembering what explanations aren't good and also discovering what explanations aren't good, becuz ppl. continue to come up with bad explanations all the time, and often v. similarly bad ones.

none of which matters unless you're looking to push other ppl. to come up with better explanations, as opposed just looking for whatever explanations feel satisfying enough to yr. lonesome.

i mean yr. not the only guy i know who thinks that kuhn & wittgenstein gave 'em a saner and clearer version of whatever ppl. seemed to be getting from the poststructuralists.

(re: ackerman, by the way [the book is Data, Instruments, and Theory: A Dialectical Approach to Understanding Science] his critique of kuhn rests, as i recall, on nice approachable stuff like kuhn sez that scientists operate in small groups like *this* but often there are large groups of scientists who operate like *that* and kuhn sez that change is generational but here are some stories where the change was really like something else, etc. the generational change issue is a common critique of kuhn, btw, especially as all sorts of cool things like studies of citation patterns show v. different processes at work.)

So you can be Kuhnian and think that an idea is right, you just shouldn't use its rightness as an explanation for how it came about or why it's right.

A cryptic comment before nodding off: Kuhn and (esp.) Wittgenstein are saner and clearer because they break much more fundamentally and radically with philosophy than the poststructuralists do (or at any rate than the poststructuralist biggies are perceived to have done by the average English professor, college student, ILX poster on this thread). That is, to think that binaries are in infinite motion, or that words run themselves off cliffs, or that there are no "things," you have to use the very criteria for stability, grounds, and thinghood that you say you're attacking. Whereas Kuhn and Wittgenstein really are antifoundationalist, and Wittgenstein's critique of positivism was that it was deeply irrelevant. And most people aren't getting the same thing from poststructuralists that they'd get from Wittgenstein, so they go to the poststructuralists rather than to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein doesn't run you off a cliff, or set things in motion, or put everything into play, hence doesn't speak to the needs and dreams of those who are ready to run but don't know how. Of course, what I'm saying is that the posties don't run you off the cliff or put you into play either, so you need to misread them or they need write contradictory thoughts that authorize you to put yourself into play, even if your real reasons for going into play have nothing to do with philosophy.

Frank I'm interested in how you distinguish between say "kettle" and "punk" - the point being (and correct me if I'm wrong) who cares if the former word's meaning is mutable if the latter word is where it's really it.

Thing is it's not like post-structuralists, having decided that the meaning of "kettle" does not inhere to the word, then proceed to talk about kettles and what they mean all day. If anything, post-structuralism is one way of getting to the superwords, BUT in order to do this it first says, "okay, by its very function of being part of language, any word can be a superword, even 'kettle'" - which is an important little reminder when you come across a 'clark kent word', a superword that the world or a significant portion of it does not recognise as such. For, of course, one of the chief strategies of any "side" in the contestation of a superword is to deny its "super-" status.

The argument isn't unique, but I don't think it's pointless either.

Oh SNAP! Though I think this applies more to my analogy re: the effects of poststructuralism than it does my definition of the sublime, which is pretty orthodox Kantian.

The trouble I have with it is that I don't think poststructuralism really does "pull the cliff out from under our words, leaving them hanging, legs fully a-pump," any more than the concept of evolution pulled the cliff out from under species.
-- Frank Kogan (edcasua...), June 6th, 2005 11:34 PM.

Excellent analogy, precisely because so many still find the (19th-century!) notion of evolution so threatening and confusing (Xtian Family Association AND Nation Of Gods And Earths to thread), while professionals tamed, questioned, and moved beyond Darwinian evolution long ago.

I respect your reading of Wittgenstein vs. "the posties" (though I don't necessarily know who I should include in that group, and I'm familiar with the critique of poststructuralist approaches as cryptopostivist trojan horses/xenomorph hosts. This argument has always struck me as founded on a fairly reductive misreading of the postructuralist argument, which precisely does not pose a counterelement against the notion: binary. (I don't contest the fellow-traveling in practice of poststructuralism with oppositional or liberationist discourses, but I would suggest that that be taken up in the "cultural studies and the sublime" thread.)

Hence my use of ye olde sanskrit "neti... neti...", which I hoped might head that critique off at the pass. The (quite likely limited and quaint) "postructuralism" I'm working with holds not that "words are not immutable and stand-alone in their meaning and effects" (which I agree would hardly be a novel observation) but that words derive whatever "meaning" they do have not through their (arbitrary) relationship with their platonic referents but through their (equally arbitrary) relationship with other words. All of this should be more or less review - free play of signifiers yadda yadda.

Derrida et. al. give that thread a tug (hence post-structuralist, not anti-structuralist), and I do believe that the vastness opened up in the act of thinking a chain of potentially limitless signification (vs. a highly-bounded binary) affords a workable approximation of Kant's mathematical sublime.

I'm also not convinced that Wittgenstein doesn't leave poor Wile E. just as precipitously suspended as Derrida. Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist... Eines kann der Fall sein oder nicht der Fall sein und alles übrige gleich bleiben seems like pretty heady stuff to me.

But I also agree that that experience of suspension is indeed a matter of perspective. Wherever the Derrida/Wittgenstein/name your Roadrunner leave us, it's only where we were all along, and does not require the dramatic rhetoric that the Jonathan Cullers and rogermexicos of the world have invoked previously. Sincere thanks for the tonic.