I enjoyed it Keith, even for the selfish reason I confess below. But allow me a little disagreement.
If only it were so simple as cats on mats, but reality is no more a set of isolated tableaus than language is a collection of words.
Billy Kirby, Judge Temple, and Natty Bumppo in J.F. Cooper's the Pioneers all see sap-making maple trees as sap-making maple trees. And yet Billy speaks of them as a resource to be exploited until dried up, after which he picks up stakes and moves on to the nest stand. Judge Temple, our protagonist, speaks a recognizable religio-moral discourse of the trees as resource to be stewarded. He's the Sierra Club to Billy's Exxon. Garrulous Natty speaks what in the novel's terms is a dying red-face myth of the tree as, like all of nature, a rights-bearing creature -- a person, as our legal discourse would have it. Temple thinks that he and Natty agree and that Billy is the odd man out, but Natty insists that he lives beyond where Temple is capable of traveling because Temple, like Billy, within a world of possessive individualism in which trees' lives matter, but not for themselves. Today, Natty represents an old but new again theory of nature lost in the disenchantments of enlightenment that birthed instrumental reason. Are they all the same maple tree? (This works for most anything including history, which isn't the events themselves but, as Hayden White said, their emplotment into a meaning.)
And Speaking of Trees, Richard Powers, The Overstory.
That's not to say that I sign on to everything "woke," largely because, I suppose, I'm more postmodern than they are, certainly more resistant to bad totalities (all of them so far; progress made possible Clinton Tankersley's recent essay on environmental depredation) and metanarratives. I find negation no more leads to nihilistic despair than a lack of faith in God does. That negativity is an important part of activism simply because good intentions left unchecked tend unerringly to the other place. What your recital od Pluckrose and Lindsay does for me, and it is no small thing, is reassure me that I needn't look closer. So thanks very much for that.
I look forward to your treatment of Mounck. From shorter excerpts laying out his genealogical theory, he seems to have a better handle. What a respondent in the Chronicle of Higher Ed missed in suggesting that the work Mounck critiques was of a piece with the processes described by Perry Anderson in Imagined Communities is that the nation-state *in theory* embraced difference under the identity of citizen, this work tends to divide citizens by ascribed or elected identities. Of course, in practice, the normative citizen was and, in many ways, still is, a white, cis-gendered, property-owning male, but while that is the impetus for much of "woke" counter-discourse, my utmost concern is for erosion of what small amount of civic unity still exists, since the nation-state, that social and textual construct, is the ultimate guarantor of rights. Yes, the courts remain (in theory) a venue of recourse, but would that be a democratic solution if the court were some third force distant from all parties rather than an office of a government of, by, and for the people?
Indeed I have seen Glimmerglass. Went to a summer seminar for department chairs hosted at the Otesaga Hotel, at the foot of the lake.. Lovely long weekend in early June. Wow!
The affirmation of objectivity does not preclude interpretive or perceptual diversity. If postmodernism only affirmed, for instance that the nude body is perceived differently by the anatomist, the artist, and the lover, who would object? Such platitudes would hardly have provoked the furor elicited by postmodernist critique. No, the true postmodernist spirit is shown in such works as Donna Haraway's Primate Visions, which is an attempt to erase the distinction between fiction and scientific fact. Then there is W.J.T. Mitchell's The Last Dinosaur Book, which attempts to deconstruct the distinction between dinosaurs as cultural icons and as objects of scientific inquiry. The quality of argument in these works is so poor as to descend into the merely fatuous. The most remarkable thing about them is that they were published by two highly respectable academic publishers, Routledge and The University of Chicago Press. Scientific objects, like primates or dinosaurs, certainly may be and should be stimuli to imagination and interpretation. But there are limits. If imagination contradicts fact--like the fundamentalists who imagine dinosaurs on the Ark with Noah--then it is wrong. Full stop.
Negativity is not bad per se. Bad things should be negated. However, consistent negativity is close to the definition of nihilism. Negation that is not in the name of something better leaves us with nothing but spite, like Dostoevsky's Underground Man. Living for spite makes you miserable, and if someone wants to be miserable, it is their perfect right. I would just ask that they go be miserable somewhere else.
Yes, I recall our disagreement about Mitchell's book, which I quite enjoyed. I don't see the boundary between icon and object of scientific inquiry as so impermeable; I found Thomas Laquer's Making Sex quite convincing in its history of medicine. And all of the medical theories were propounded by people who would have said they were looking objectively. I'm afraid I've never been a Haraway fan. Again, as so often, we'll disagree.
Something can certainly be both a scientific object and a cultural icon, just as a piece of colored cloth can be a flag symbolizing national identity. Mitchell so conflates the icon and the object that he seems to lose track of the fact that a dinosaur was an animal.
Sorry, folks., I am a terrible proofreader. I say that Pluckrose and Lindsay identify six theses of postmodernism and give four. Sorry. It was four. Sheesh.
I enjoyed it Keith, even for the selfish reason I confess below. But allow me a little disagreement.
If only it were so simple as cats on mats, but reality is no more a set of isolated tableaus than language is a collection of words.
Billy Kirby, Judge Temple, and Natty Bumppo in J.F. Cooper's the Pioneers all see sap-making maple trees as sap-making maple trees. And yet Billy speaks of them as a resource to be exploited until dried up, after which he picks up stakes and moves on to the nest stand. Judge Temple, our protagonist, speaks a recognizable religio-moral discourse of the trees as resource to be stewarded. He's the Sierra Club to Billy's Exxon. Garrulous Natty speaks what in the novel's terms is a dying red-face myth of the tree as, like all of nature, a rights-bearing creature -- a person, as our legal discourse would have it. Temple thinks that he and Natty agree and that Billy is the odd man out, but Natty insists that he lives beyond where Temple is capable of traveling because Temple, like Billy, within a world of possessive individualism in which trees' lives matter, but not for themselves. Today, Natty represents an old but new again theory of nature lost in the disenchantments of enlightenment that birthed instrumental reason. Are they all the same maple tree? (This works for most anything including history, which isn't the events themselves but, as Hayden White said, their emplotment into a meaning.)
And Speaking of Trees, Richard Powers, The Overstory.
That's not to say that I sign on to everything "woke," largely because, I suppose, I'm more postmodern than they are, certainly more resistant to bad totalities (all of them so far; progress made possible Clinton Tankersley's recent essay on environmental depredation) and metanarratives. I find negation no more leads to nihilistic despair than a lack of faith in God does. That negativity is an important part of activism simply because good intentions left unchecked tend unerringly to the other place. What your recital od Pluckrose and Lindsay does for me, and it is no small thing, is reassure me that I needn't look closer. So thanks very much for that.
I look forward to your treatment of Mounck. From shorter excerpts laying out his genealogical theory, he seems to have a better handle. What a respondent in the Chronicle of Higher Ed missed in suggesting that the work Mounck critiques was of a piece with the processes described by Perry Anderson in Imagined Communities is that the nation-state *in theory* embraced difference under the identity of citizen, this work tends to divide citizens by ascribed or elected identities. Of course, in practice, the normative citizen was and, in many ways, still is, a white, cis-gendered, property-owning male, but while that is the impetus for much of "woke" counter-discourse, my utmost concern is for erosion of what small amount of civic unity still exists, since the nation-state, that social and textual construct, is the ultimate guarantor of rights. Yes, the courts remain (in theory) a venue of recourse, but would that be a democratic solution if the court were some third force distant from all parties rather than an office of a government of, by, and for the people?
But have you been to Cooperstown and seen Glimmer Lake?
Indeed I have seen Glimmerglass. Went to a summer seminar for department chairs hosted at the Otesaga Hotel, at the foot of the lake.. Lovely long weekend in early June. Wow!
We’ve seen it, too. Beautiful. Cardiff Giant not as impressive
In that case, I'm glad I went to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum to see the NY and San Francisco Giants.
We visited baseball hall of fame, too. Much more interesting and impressive than Mr Cardiff
Thanks, Kevin.
The affirmation of objectivity does not preclude interpretive or perceptual diversity. If postmodernism only affirmed, for instance that the nude body is perceived differently by the anatomist, the artist, and the lover, who would object? Such platitudes would hardly have provoked the furor elicited by postmodernist critique. No, the true postmodernist spirit is shown in such works as Donna Haraway's Primate Visions, which is an attempt to erase the distinction between fiction and scientific fact. Then there is W.J.T. Mitchell's The Last Dinosaur Book, which attempts to deconstruct the distinction between dinosaurs as cultural icons and as objects of scientific inquiry. The quality of argument in these works is so poor as to descend into the merely fatuous. The most remarkable thing about them is that they were published by two highly respectable academic publishers, Routledge and The University of Chicago Press. Scientific objects, like primates or dinosaurs, certainly may be and should be stimuli to imagination and interpretation. But there are limits. If imagination contradicts fact--like the fundamentalists who imagine dinosaurs on the Ark with Noah--then it is wrong. Full stop.
Negativity is not bad per se. Bad things should be negated. However, consistent negativity is close to the definition of nihilism. Negation that is not in the name of something better leaves us with nothing but spite, like Dostoevsky's Underground Man. Living for spite makes you miserable, and if someone wants to be miserable, it is their perfect right. I would just ask that they go be miserable somewhere else.
Yes, I recall our disagreement about Mitchell's book, which I quite enjoyed. I don't see the boundary between icon and object of scientific inquiry as so impermeable; I found Thomas Laquer's Making Sex quite convincing in its history of medicine. And all of the medical theories were propounded by people who would have said they were looking objectively. I'm afraid I've never been a Haraway fan. Again, as so often, we'll disagree.
Something can certainly be both a scientific object and a cultural icon, just as a piece of colored cloth can be a flag symbolizing national identity. Mitchell so conflates the icon and the object that he seems to lose track of the fact that a dinosaur was an animal.
Sorry, folks., I am a terrible proofreader. I say that Pluckrose and Lindsay identify six theses of postmodernism and give four. Sorry. It was four. Sheesh.
I'm sure it read like six!
And, folks, *I'm* the editor/proofreader in chief in this here enterprise, so mea much more culpa than Dr Parsons.