Being neither a philosopher nor a philosophy scholar, perhaps I can be forgiven the following LD heresy: philosophers are the most boring people on earth. I mean, don’t any of these people ever take writing lessons? We’re talking a 10 to 1 ratio of dreck to good stuff, and that’s overall oeuvres. Unfortunately it’s someone like Nietzsche, who is a totally loose screw, who can make words sing on the page while your more, shall we say, useful thinkers write as if they wouldn’t recognize understandability if it hit them in the head with a brick.
Which doesn’t make our job particularly easy. That is, if our job is to begin understanding the universe, it would be nice if those who make some claim to insight would do a better job of sharing the wealth.
Case in point: Lyotard. As I’ve said, his material is not bad, and I find the gist of what he says reasonable enough. But he is writing only for professional philosophers (in which I will include serious undergraduate students of philosophy). He seems to have no interest in saying anything to the great unwashed, which is fine, I guess, except that his thesis on postmodernism is about the breakdown of the metanarrative and his own writing (for the predisposed) is a perfect example of what he is citing as the problem. Thanks a lot, you #$%^&* French person! At the point where philosophy is only accessible to philosophers it is completely jejune. Or precious. Or whatever you want to call it. One of the goals of debate would seem to be to introduce new students to philosophical ideas, but most of your garden variety philosophers aren’t much help here. And it’s not just pomos (although some of them do, by their nature, take unintelligibility to great depths). All philosophers who limit philosophy to scholars--people sharing their own ivory towers--deserve to be taken out and made to read Garfield comics until their brains fall out. Which, one would imagine, wouldn’t take too long.
What I miss from Lyotard, style and strategy aside, is facts. Warrants, if you will. He claims that the cultural metanarrative is over, but he doesn’t give you a lot of feel for what that means (which is what I tried to do in Caveman). Still, I think he says a lot of true stuff (although to him, things don’t seem to be provable as true, but merely capable of being legitimated, and most of the text is about the process of legitimization). Take the narrative of science (and I’ll skip the gobbledygook here, which means that if you’re a philosopher yourself, you probably won’t understand what I’m saying). Whatever it is, it is a broad story with a simple process of truth-testing: you can prove or disprove a statement of scientific fact, because that is the very nature of science. The structure of scientific information transfer (since Lyotard is writing about knowledge per se) is either educational or research-based. That is, either a teacher who knows something is relaying information to a willing student who doesn’t know, and the provability of the statement is the legitimization of this process of education, or we have a scientist proposing to a willing colleague a hypothesis, and the two together can investigate the proofs of that hypothesis through research. The problem in the postmodern age is the atomization of information. Science becomes little islands of scientific knowledge that become difficult to legitimate because of their isolation from one another. The structure of science (the metanarrative of science in culture) falls apart. Education and research can no longer be legitimated. A new process of legitimatization is required.
Whatever.
I do accept much of this. Given that we live in a country where most people do not accept science on face (evolution, most notably), we’ve got to believe that something is wrong somewhere. It would seem that we have clearly lost the metanarrative of science in American culture, which is rather odd given the “Yankee ingenuity” that informs our character. We’ve gone from a supposed nation of clear thinking, practical, amateur engineers to know-nothings who refuse to believe in engineering. No wonder we’re attacking countries at random for no apparent reason. You can easily apply the breakdown of knowledge and legitimization to the political arena, except here we’ve replaced any sort of factual legitimizing--e.g., there are no WMDs, therefore, Oops, we’re wrong--with conceptual language games--our troops are fighting a war and we can’t abandon them, or we’re fighting a war on terror which excuses all actions because we can glibly create a verbal smokescreen that confuses terrorism with whoever it is we happen to be shooting at. The concept of a war on terror is meaningless, once you understand the various politics and beliefs of the players involved. There is no monolith. And in a way, almost any action we take against this war is seen as fuel for the conflict on the side of the terrorists. There’s a nice pickle for you. And the creators of this “war on terrorism” are aware of these issues. My worry is not so much that in US politics that language has replaced reality, but that so many people buy the replacement. You could probably argue that, to some extent, this acceptance of language to replace reality is a rather pathetic attempt by Americans to believe the metanarrative of American historical global white-hat-ness, a concept that should have been put to bed after Vietnam. We’re just another bunch of schmucks on the global stage, albeit rich and powerful schmucks, and we don’t like that, so we cling to the old narrative. Over the next few centuries, as presumably China becomes the biggest global superpower, we are still probably going to cling to our dead fictions, but at least then we’ll be all snarl and no bite. Sort of like postcolonial England: the Empire is no more, so deal with it. It won’t be long before the American Empire will be no more, too. Oh, we’ll still be rich and powerful, but we won’t be supreme: we will be long past any postmodern conundrum into being just another country. Like, say, Norway. Our metanarrative as supreme will be, I hope, long exhausted.
If you’re still alive a couple of hundred years from now, send me a postcard and let me know how it’s working out. I’d be curious to know if I was right.
2 comments:
As always I agree with you, but I don't think you are taking this far enough. The problem with the continental europeans (primarily frenchies) is that they almost force you to abndon the warrant. Think about exactly where their thought takes them. For starters, objective reality can't be trusted at all since it is merely constructed of signifiers that we create through language. If nothing I do with my senses is true, then what kind of proof can I give you? Also, if language can't be trusted because it is incomplete, deceptive, or otherwise, how can I possibly construct an argument logically? These are the condundrums that postmodernism has brought about. Although none of this is explicit within the text, these are certainly the results and the logical conclusions. In fact, the closest thing you get to a warrant nowadays is when Zizek talks about some random John Travolta film. Slavoj Zizek by the way should definitely go on your reading list. You doubtlessly will have a zillion problems with what he says, but he may be the best writer of the bunch. There are countless pop culture references, the words are well chosen albeit dense, and there is a cohesive narrative to the whole thing. I don't know exactly where to start with him seeing as I picked up the one I thought had the best title (Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?), however I doubt that will stop you. His latest book, The Parallax View, is supposed to be fantastic-so says Oxford Philosophy Professor who teaches one of my classes-and if it is I suggest you pick that up. I intend to do so in the near future. By the way, if your brain melts after reading all of these books that I recommend, I apologize in advance.
Oh! I know. The Dark Knight Returns.
Because graphic novels (hell, even comic books) are literature too.
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