Slashdot Mirror
Engineer Deconstructs Literary Criticism
DNS-and-BIND writes "This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Another widely reported exploration into post-modernist literature was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokal. Sokal says, in order to "test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes."
Crikey!
The Army reading list
Step 1 -- Select a work to be deconstructed. This a called a "text" and is generally a piece of text, though it need not be. It is very much within the lit crit mainstream to take something which is not text and call it a text. In fact, this can be a very useful thing to do, since it leaves the critic with broad discretion to define what it means to "read" it and thus a great deal of flexibility in interpretation. It also allows the literary critic to extend his reach beyond mere literature. However, the choice of text is actually one of the less important decisions you will need to make, since points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance, although more challenging works are valued for their greater potential for exercising cleverness. Thus you want to pick your text with an eye to the opportunities it will give you to be clever and convoluted, rather than whether the text has anything important to say or there is anything important to say about it. Generally speaking, obscure works are better than well known ones, though an acceptable alternative is to choose a text from the popular mass media, such as a Madonna video or the latest Danielle Steele novel. The text can be of any length, from the complete works of Louis L'Amour to a single sentence. For example, let's deconstruct the phrase, "John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual."
Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want, although of course in the case of a text which actually consists of text it is easier if you pick something that it really does say. This is called "reading". I will read our example phrase as saying that John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual.
Step 3 -- Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. This can be either something which is described or referred to by the text directly or it can be inferred from the presumed cultural context of a hypothetical reader. It is a convention of the genre to choose a duality, such as man/woman, good/evil, earth/sky, chocolate/vanilla, etc. In the case of our example, the obvious duality to pick is homosexual/heterosexual, though a really clever person might be able to find something else.
Step 4 -- Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction. Since it's pretty much arbitrary, you don't have to give a justification for this assertion unless you feel like it. Programmers and computer scientists may find the concept of a hierarchy consisting of only two elements to be a bit odd, but this appears to be an established tradition in literary criticism. Continuing our example, we can claim homophobia on the part of the society in which this sentence was uttered and therefor assert that it presumes superiority of heterosexuality over homosexuality.
Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself. In particular, find a way to read it as a statement which contradicts or undermines either the original reading or the ordering of the hierarchical opposition (which amounts to the same thing). This is really the tricky part and is the key to the whole exercise. Pulling this off successfully may require a variety of techniques, though you get more style points for some techniques than for others. Fortunately, you have a wide range of intellectual tools at your disposal, which the rules allow you to use in literary criticism even though they would be frowned upon in engineering or the sciences. These include appeals to authority (you can even cite obscure authorities that nobody has heard of), reasoning from etymology, reasoning from puns, and a variety of word other games. You are allowed to use the word "problematic" as a noun. You are also allowed to pretend that the works of Freud present a correct model of human psychology and the works of Marx present a correct model of sociology and economics (it's not clear to me whether practitioners in the field actually believe Freud and Marx or if it's just a convention of the genre).
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
Dont slashdot's editors work in that field already?
I didn't bother to read the article, but a few key words in the write-up reminded me of Sokal's Hoax.
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
Someone has a God complex.
"Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Yeah, just become a Slashdot editor. Then you can mod down and delete any posts that disagree with you or complain about articles which get duped thrice in a day.
Happy Fucking Weekend, You cock-smoking tux-jerking asshats.
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
That's a field where everyone says you're wrong about everything.
In eleventh grade, I wrote my term paper on The Hobbit. Part of the assignment was to provide literary criticism of the work. I cited sources that stated how JRR Tolkien HATED allegory and reading deeper into works and therefore claimed I didn't need to provide any literary criticism of the Hobbit. My teacher bought it and I got an A. Tolkien rocked because he felt literature should be taken at face value.
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
You haven't been around any English departments, have you? My wife has an MA in English, and it sounds like the department was pretty vicious.
I'd argue that it's a lot harder being in a field with "soft" realities. Anything you say is subject to criticism, and it's really hard to "prove" you're right. I'll take an objective field, where I can demonstrate truth or falsehood irrefutably, any day. (I know that's an overstatment: you can always debate the meaning of experimental results. But you get the idea.)
The author shows terrific mastery and use of the rhetorical literary deconstruction techniques he derides. In other words, he couldn't have written the article without the very skills and work he criticizes.
Q: What do you get when you cross a Post Modernist with a Mafioso??
A: An offer you can't understand.
afterwards I'd wondered if we were talking the same language.
The first case was with a techincal support representitive with a large company that had migrated alot of their after-hours support staff off site. (The company rhymes with Crisco, the off site location rhymes with blindia.)
I'm not in any way being critical of the country of origin, and I _know_ this person was speaking in english...but we weren't talking the same language. Curiously, his emails were completely understandable...it was the verbal conversation I couldn't grok.
The second was a meeting of high level Government IT staff, and some other members of government to discuss centralizing Internet services. Things were going well as we all introduced ourselves and stated what we wanted to get out of the collaboration. Then a lady came to the floor and spoke very eloquently for a good five minutes.
I have no clue what she said.
I asked about her afterwards and it turns out that she was a) a lawyer, b) an elected representative, and c) a manager.
Pretty much a lit crit Trifecta!
Naturally the group dissolved after a few meetings when it was determined it was too little too late and the existing issue too complex to put in one box.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Step 1 -- Select a work to be deconstructed.
Step 2 -- Decide what the text says.
Step 3 -- Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort.
Step 4 -- Convert your chosen distinction into a "hierarchical opposition" by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction.
Step 5 -- Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself.
Step 6 -- ???
Step 7 -- Profit!
These sigs are more interesting tha
The best part of deconstruction is that it comes from the French who took it from the Greeks. At the heart of deconstruction is the theory that know understands what anyone else is saying. Lets add this to the fact they translated this from the Greeks, I can't understand my fellow frenchmen but I can translate this Greek and perfectly understand it, and then translate it into English.
I've been searchin for the chord I can't hear Ive been searchin for years Its somewhere inside But its well disguised
Engineer's Disease has claimed another victim.
"engineers disease": The delusion because you're ubercompetent in your chosen field, you're automatically an expert on everything else.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Consider the following paragraph from the article:
Now read an essay by the postmodernism generator. Can you tell the difference? ;-)
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Unfortunately, the postmodernists have attempted to apply their idiotic claptrap to science, claiming the existence of such absurd concepts as "alternative scientific truths". What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
I've always wanted to throw one out of a plane over China, and yell after them as they plummet to their death: "how are you finding that Far-Eastern Gravitation?"
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Actually, everybody can say you're wrong. They just can't prove it.
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
:)
That's why I like mathematics. Theorem, (optionally, lemmas), proof. End of story. The only way you can disagree is if you throw out the entire concept of logic or the axioms upon which it is based -- and if you do that, we'll usually throw *you* out.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
"317 is a prime, not because we think so, or because our minds are shaped in one way rather than another, but because it is so, because mathematical reality is built that way."
- Godfrey Hardy (1877-1947)
"There is nothing that living things do that cannot be understood from the point of view that they are made of atoms acting according to the laws of physics."
- Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
"Religion hinges upon faith, politics hinges upon who can tell the most convincing lies or maybe just shout the loudest, but science hinges upon whether its conclusions resemble what actually happens."
- Ian Stewart (1945-)
"All science is either physics or stamp collecting."
- Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937)
"The only possible conclusion the social sciences can draw is: some do, some don't."
- Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937)
My favourite example of postmodern papers is the Notes on postmodern programming. AFAIC they wrote it in order to get their tickets payed to a symposium. They could have been srious, but that's a rather scary though considering it includes one page with a hand drawn and rather irrelevant image.
Quite interesting and amusing though.
I leave it as a study for the reader to deconstruct.
Lasers Controlled Games!
This text is several years old, at least. In fact, the wayback machine puts it at about 5 years old.
Come on guys, you know this is really, really old.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
Computing IS one of the fields where you can be 100% right, the only thing that can go wrong are YOUR calculations,either your sums are right or they are not, unfortunately keeping layer upon layer of highly complex calculations correct is a difficult task (hence you get bugs) but theoretically if your mathmatics are correct all the way through the chain you can create a perfect flawless system.
build a water driven gate computer and see if you get unexpected math bugs
The article says:
"Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself."
In soviet russia, perhaps.
Baz
>> We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood.
I don't like where he went with this. The argument is that postmodernists speak with such obscurity, that they wrap themselves into an island. And that what they really say is just intellectual masturbation. Sure. Of course. Doctors, programmers, lawyers... all have this.
Personally, why not use words specific to the field? I don't think dumbing down should be encouraged. Learn the jargon, it doesn't take that long to do. Read a few theory books. Properly used, $0.50 words should not be labeled as 'jargon,' but simply as words to help facilitate communication into the edge of thought.
The Custom Mary
This whole article reads like a dogbert/catbert explanation to the pointed haired boss.
"In fact, one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set
is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or
truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment."
One only need to channel surf the cable-as-news networks in the U.S. to see evidence of this.
Who put this thing together? Me, that's who.
Most subtle, nuanced statements are going to sound pretty stupid if you render half the words meaningless and remove their context, which is exactly what happens when an outsider hears the language of some specialized field. It's very difficult for outsiders to judge the legitimacy of a field from the outside.
I see this all the time in the general public's reactions to both software and science, especially theoretical physics and medicine.
The article's author actually says this really well:
He goes on to draw what I think is a really useful conclusion (much more insightful than most of the posts on this thread, I'm afraid):
I wonder what we might learn if comprehensibility returned to the equation. There are a lot of very interesting ideas buring in academia.
I had to call some tech-support guys in Swanwick (you don't pronounce the second 'w') to re-load some data I accidentally RM'd- and I know he was speaking the Queens english but I'll be DAMNED if I understood a word of it. Mind you, I find Scottish brogue to be charming and sometimes understandable, but this fellow made Cockney sound like the AT&T computer operator voice.
On a differnet note I called other tech support (this time in Florida) and tried to figure out how I could print from our ol' VM system. We were on the phone for 45 minutes, I tuned him out after 15 and just did screen captures and cut and pastes because he obviously had no idea what he was talking about, but sure had a lot of ideas. He seemed genuinely proud of the work he had just done for me, too! I hadn't the heart to tell him I did it the cut and paste way.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I was prepared for a philistine reaction to a barely-understood domain, but instead the piece was earnest, honest and clear-eyed.
Most cultural studies academics are aware the problems of empty jargonizing, a reaction to it set in a while ago, and things are getting better. Part of the problem is that critical theory in practice is just that - practice, not new research, in working with texts. There's the same sort of inflationary pressures going on with people trying to make their work look as important as possible.
But there's a great deal of baby in the bathwater that's being thrown out. Sokal's best contribution was the recommendation that a metaphor used in criticism should be more, not less, accessible than the subject of the metaphor (if you're using x to explain y, x should be more, not less, comprehensible than y).
Ultimately, it should also be recognized that art, literature, and culture are a different type of domain from physics, even if it sometimes borrows its rhetoric. In one way, however, there's a similarity: the claim that there's "no right answer" in criticism is only true in the way that "nothing is ever proven true, only not yet falsified" in empirical science. In both cases, although in different ways, it's about comparing models.
As soemone who is getting thier Phd in a liberal arts field, let me just say that in reality, like any other field 90% of the stuff I read is crap. Once you get to the graduate level and move beyond the stuff that is famous in a field you will see how little good quality stuff there really is out there. I just started this last semester on my phd. I am finding that in my classes here at my new university, a good 75% of the assigned readings are either the exact same articles that I read in my masters program, or just articles that have the same ideas as other articles I've already read. While there are dozens of journals publishing papers every months, there is really just a very small finite amount of work that is really noteworthy.
In doing my personal research there have been lots and lots of books where I shook my head and asked myself how this could have been published. The same is true of conferneces. I've been to a handfull of academic conferences and it never fails that the vast majority of the papers presented are pointless or trivial. (Certainly there may be people who saw my paper and thought the same thing, who knows). Thus it is not surprizing that the conference discussed in the article was full of crap.
So lets not jump on academia and say it is ALL a bunch of crap. Yes 90% of it is but how is that any different than any other field. How often are there articles about incompetent tech support, or IT guys who just totally screw up simple things? Remember, 90% of everything is crap.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
If you're advanced enough in any field this can be so.
As long as your code works a bit, it isn't wrong, just not robust, or sub optimal.
It's sorta like intellecutal welfare, then? Call the Republicans!
How then do we "save" the humanities, as the author suggest?
I would have to say that this piece is very funny and in some senses very true too. I've also studied philosophy and French literature and I can relate to a lot of it.
However, the start of his speech that was a joke... well, it makes sense (apart from the end bit)
Think about it. It means people in chat rooms are not who you think they are. Even if you think you know. You can't see if they are black or white, fat or thin, male or female. The end tapers off it's not supposed to make sense.
The point, of course, is that saying this stuff in writing is always more condensed. Presenting it to your peers usually involves a bit more gesturing, pausing, and re-explaining in other terms.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
The article really isn't about deconstructing the humanities at all. That was the method the author used to expose the deeper problem: that the humanities are suffering because their most artful practicitioners have isolated themselves and no longer respond to the community.
One thing he didn't really emphasize, but only alluded to (in a paragraph where he admits how this thinking caused him to understand why it might be important to conisder the fraility of many kinds of writing) is that these humanitarian skills are really useful! Only undergrads aren't really shown what they could do with them in the real world, besides branching off into various fields of media criticism.
He should have driven his conclusion home harder... that academia needs a slap upside the head, and we ("Nerds") all could help a little.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
6 ...
7 PROFIT !
sorry
That paper used lots of big words and I didn't understand it at all, so it must have been written by really smart people!
"Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Choose software engineering, then. There is no known defence against the "It's not a bug, it's a feature" counter attack.
in said scene, a literary critic develops a program to count the frequency of words in a given book (ignoring prepositions, pronouns and the like) and then display the 20 most and least frequent words. the theory is that the core concept of the book can be gleaned by simply reading these lists.
now i have tried this myself and can say, while it does not work to the level stated by calvino, it does certainly give you a feel for the book. different genres have noticable word distributions especially. it's easy to identify, say, a western or sci-fi or romance novel from these lists.
2 1337 4 u!
I don't get why no one seems to have made that argument. It came to my mind within seconds of hearing the story.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Wesley Phoa has written a good text called
Should Computer Scientists Read Derrida? that i can only recommend. Unlike the usual Deconstruction-Bashers that don't bother to understand what Deconstruction is about, this text, written by mathematician, is pretty clued up!
Somehow you have to create a market for people to want to know the how and why behind the stories, cultural themes, whatever that people deal with/relate to day to day.
And I'm not talking about Reader's Digest. Example: It might take a tabloid publisher or something similar to find the right kind of spin and attitude to hook people into reading these uniquely informed opinions on modern cultural trends... condensed and simplified, of course.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
"So lets not jump on academia and say it is ALL a bunch of crap."
But with a PhD in Liberal Arts, I would expect you to be an expert on that particular subject.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
It does work extremely well on some texts. Look at the top twenty words in a William Burroughs novel and you'll have a very good idea what it's about!
In theory, theory and practice are the same.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Tsk, tsk. Why bother looking for the "right" anser when none exists?
Life is not a "problem" waiting for you to find the correct solution. Neither is literature.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
management consultants.
I'm still internalizing the *last* paradigm shift created to facilitate enabling my disempowerment.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
The Sokal argument on why postmodernism is flawed is a rather poor one. In submitting too a peer reviewed journal, there is usually an assumption of honesty in reporting results.
As an example, if I was a doctor, MADE UP some numbers on a cancer treatment that were overwhelmingly positive, had minimal side effects, and was ineexpensive, it would probably be printed ina number of prestigous medical journals. Hopefully peer reviewers would catch it, but they are human themselves and something could slip through the cracks. I doubt many of the peer reviewers now much about physics at Social Text, so it is no wonder that Sokal article was published, they assumed he was being honest in his writings.
Secondly, deconstruction does come in handy when considering a wide variety of topics, some favorites for slashdot such as legal battles between SCO and LINUX or the RIAA and P2P networks. One such deconstuction I have been working on is that of "authorship." I am a graduate student after all. Authorship can be deconstructed simply as "How is authorship defined? Has it always been defined in this way? What are the implications of varying definitions of authorship?" These are all questions that have relevance to issues many slashdotters hold dear.
it's been done before basically. My question, when is an academic in the humanities/lit crit area going to fight back with a hoax article in a scientific, medical or engineering publication.
As an avid reader, I have to say that this entirely true. But then again, deconstruction is not about being intellectual. It's about SEEMING intellectual, when in fact all you are doing is rewriting somebody else's work using the tersist means possible. In short: deconstruction is creative writing for essayists. It is a tool for those learning how to write. And expecting something so masturbatory to be anything more than a bit of clever fun is going to result in anti-intellectual rage.
When you deconstuct a work, you create a paper which is impossible to fail on a theoretical basis, because each deconstruction is in fact its own theoretical entity. It's very hard to say, objectively, that a deconstruction is "wrong." And therefore, in the eyes of many professors, your grade on this paper can only be judged on its logical progression and its written style.
In short: deconstructions can be interesting, can be fun, and show off a person's analytical and prosaic talents. But no, they aren't going to further the "intellectual" pursuit of writing. But this is no different from a forensics meet, where people argue a position they themselves may not hold, to showcase their oration and research talents. This is no different from a poetry slam or rap battle, where people read disconnected passages to gain a subjective edge over other poets. And it's certainly no different from engineers engaging in robot battles, code obfuscation contests, or blog entries about how literary criticism is bullshit.
Incidentally, while deconstructionists can never be wrong because they write their own assumptions, literary critics in general CAN be. In fact, one of my favorite exercises in my 350 level discourse class was to rebutt a literary criticism from the New York Times magazine. Literary critics make mistakes in logic, levy unfair comparisons and make mistakes of intent all the time, and these often result in an unlikely hypothesis being legitimized. Hence the popularity of Ayn Rand!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Somebody got a McGyver style recipe for some headache pills or something alike when going to a shop is not an option?
the guy who snuck a 5-year-old's fingerpaint/crayon drawing into an abstract art gallery and it ended up winning an award.
I'll leave it up to someone else to come up with a observation on the intellectual elite which ties this story together with the original post.
and, IMO, a cross between the engineer's view and PostModCrit is (ta-da!) MSTing someone.
If that's not deconstruction, nothing is.
mark "In objects that are obsolescent,
or instances instantiated,
I am the very model of a modern
program paradigm"
A nice piece of sophistry. However, when the hoax was exposed the editors of Social Text didn't take it so philosophically. They had, and there's no polite way to put this, a s**t hemmorage. They accused Sokal of mopery and dopery and aggravated intention to loiter. They claimed that he was really a right winger and that his volunteer work in Nicaragua was a lie.
Like most stuffed shirts they didn't handle looking foolish very well.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
Now to wipe off my drool from the keyboard.
hi boss..
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
This article is analogous to an English Professor reading a book or two on Extreme Programming and deciding they understand it. Without an education in the software engineering problems that extreme programming attempted to answer, you cannot really judge it or understand the 'why' behind it.
I'd argue that postmodern literary analysis is similar. Someone who is not versed in the problems and history of literary analysis cannot intelligently evaluate a particular school of literary analysis. Schools of thought only make sense in the context of the prolems they attempt to answer!
It does make sense within our heads, actually. It's just another lexicon to become fluent in. Read enough and you'll be able to do it too. Actually, I find this lit stuff, grad level mathematics, and programming to be cut from the same cloth. It's just about the time you devote to it.
Thankfully the writer of the article was exposed to only the version of deconstruction that is mainly used for literary criticism. Go for its philosophical tenants and you'll see a harsher world. Though there are several types of postmodern disciplines, the strongest is eliminative deconstructive postmodernism (EDPM). Its main proponents are Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, among others of course. EDPM doesn't just "stir up metaphysical confusion by questioning the very idea of labels and categories." It rather seeks to supercede metaphysics completely. And this is exactly why postmodernism is so difficult for traditional philosophers to argue EDPM into the ground. The critics will base all of their argumentation upon the basis of metaphysics, and EDPM will just say, "Hey, there may be an objective world out there, one where Truth with a capital 'T' exists. But how will we ever know of it?" (However, a great rebuttal of postmodernism in general is Alasdir MacIntyre's Beyond Virtue.)
More to the point, postmodernism isn't some fanciful construct created only because bored philosophers were secluded in the ivory tower. It's been in the making since the paradigm of Greek philosophy. Yes, just like the sciences (although it's hard for them to admit:), philosophy undergoes paradigm shifts as well. You had the Greecian thought which proposed (The Clouds or The Republic) that the gods are only the tools of poets. While there is no moral horizon because of the absence of divine retribution, there should still be an imposed moral horizon. In short, in lieu of having something True to believe in, we should make something up in which to believe. Through the centuries we've seen the reaction to this thought: the advent of rationalism and empiricism, the Enlightenment, Kantian ethics and the noumena, Heideggerian analysis of being, and existentialism. Since the advent of Modern Philosophy, not one person has agreed on a theory. Some like phenomenology. Others believe in Continental Philosophy while others support American Pragmatism.
With these centuries of shifting paradigms, philosophy has slowly been making a full circle. It went from believing in a created set of ideas to believing that Truth can be truly known to accepting that maybe some Truth can get to us to EDPM's spotlight: hey, let's live without it! Oh, may my former professors forgive me for so drastically simplifying the history of philosophy.
Oi, God, we need some bigger toilets over here! Too much crap! It's overflowing!!!
Aghghrhrhghhg.....*GLOOP*
> And it's certainly no different from
> engineers engaging in robot battles
Hm. I wouldn't lump this in with the obfuscated code contests. Programming a Robocode bot, for example, is "clever fun", yes, but it's also a good exercise in learning more about search and evade techniques, trig, and so forth.
A bot programmer is bound by the constraints of the bot environment - time allowed for each move, effect of a hit, etc - and thus must deal with those constraints to produce an effective bot. And the bots themselves are certainly "capable of being wrong" in that a poorly written bot will usually be crushed by the better ones.
The Army reading list
Sokal published a follow-up to the article describing all the intentional bogosity used in it, an article which those selfsame self-deceived editors rejected as "not meeting intellectual standards".
The editors saw something worthwhile to themselves, it is true: an opportunity to preen their feathers and strut their scientific sophistication in public. That the principles of postmodernism failed to disclose to them the hook inside the bait, a hook obvious to most geeks who read the original article, oughtn't to escape your attention.
Another thing to consider is, postmodernists claim to be able to deconstruct anything. That goes for your post, as well. You have no standing to insist that it means any particular thing, if I want to see it otherwise.
It's a goose-and-gander thing.
Aptal soru yoktur; sadece merakli aptallar vardir.
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
/., but that's another story).
Become a weatherman, then you can be wrong most of the time without loosing your job. Everybody expects you to be wrong (which happens a lot on
doesn't she bablle on like that?
BC
that they were full of shit.
Is there any topic on which Neal Stephenson is not right?
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Note that it generates the article on the fly. Reload and get a whole new one, just as brilliantly incomprehensible as the last.
This truly is anti-intellectualism at its smartest!
Modern literary criticism is like long drawn out hari-kari. Who knows why anyone would torture themselves with it. It reminds me of many years ago when I went back to college for an MFA in painting and happened to also take a cross-disciplinary course in literary criticism. My first degree had been in English and I'd decided not to pursue it because it just seemed fatuous, completely unrelated to the world I live in. Well anyway I'd hadn't been in this cross-disciplinary seminar for more than 10 minutes before my head started spinning and I had this horrible feeling of deja-vu, stuck in fatuous neverneverland, where anything could be said but nothing could be proved or disproved.
It's sort of like all code can only consist of goto statements and you spend all your time chasing your tail trying to find out what something really means, or where it gets its value. You can't because there'e nothing concrete there. Every goto goes to a new goto. The buck stops nowhere.
I suppose someone might be able to enjoy this but I think that the best artists and the best programmers eventually realize that total freedom is total chaos. There have to be some truths/constants/final variables/whatever. From there you can build something worth building.
Although I'm not a literary critic, I am married to one, and she always disagreed with Derrida (the father of deconstruction theory, as I understand it). Interestingly enough, we had the chance to listen to him present a seminar a few years ago in Auckland, New Zealand, as he was participating in a conference sponsored by the Auckland University School of Philosophy.
So we went to listen to him speak (unfortunately not on deconstruction, but she was still very excited to have the chance to hear him). We left the Town Hall after the seminar and my wife said to me "Dammit, now I can't dislike him any more, he's so nice". A few seconds pause, then "But he's still wrong about deconstruction".
The message the artist tries to convey - either consciously or subconsciously - to the audience is secondary. Art should reflect the essence of the audience - not the artist - back to themselves. Does my work make you happy? Great - why do you think that is? Does it make you hopping mad/afraid/sad? Fantastic. What is it inside you that made you react in such a way?
Great art always shows you something surprising (and not necessarily pleasant) about yourself.
Needless to say, this interpretation of art got me in a world of trouble in the literary class in high school where we supposed to learn the message of a painting or a poem by reading about it.
The owls are not what they seem
I think this is the coolest article ever. Or do I ? I used to troll - sorry - contribute to alt.postmodern under the name of Hipp. Stenoglepsis a long, long time ago, back when the internet was a baby and there were no pictures. Some of those guys have a sense of humour but I kind of preferred the others.
This pretty much summed up my 4 years at Columbia getting a degree in philosophy. It also explains why it took me 7 years to go back to school for a masters degree.
Umm, I'm assuming that articles and demonstratives don't count? I would think those would almost always be among the 20 most frequent, but perhaps I assume incorrectly...
There is not reality outside the text. There is only interpretation.
You claim yourself to be correct. I claim that you are a fool. Either claim can be challenged.
Neither of us can be right, as there is not reality outside the text.
Only we have now decided that we are both either fools, or both of us are correct. But are we right. To be right is not to be correct. Or is it.
This machine works. No it doesn't. Yes it does. Fine, it doesdoesn't. Now we are both correct again. But neither of us are right.
the mind set of postmodernism is "epistemologically challenged": a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves.
Whose job is it then to sort the wheat from the chaff? Are academics to rely on technical people to tell them what is good and what is bad? Are technical people to rely on academics to tell them what works well and what does not?
It does not take much for a computer professional or physicist to show how a good idea (postmodern deconstruction) can be used badly.
Nor does it take much for a postmodern literary critic to show that a good idea (Word Processing technology) can be impelemented patehticarly [sic]. Tschuss
This post reminds me, in general, of another classic disagreement between engineers and a philosopher:
I am reading John Searle's "Intentionality" right now... a very interesting read. His theories of consciousness and "intention" clearly have implications for machine intelligence. I had come across his chinese room argument before, but had forgotten his name in connection with it. When I found a footnote on the "chinese room" in this particular book, and reviewed it online, I was hooked.
Searle has some very well thought out analyses of thought and consciousness. I like a lot of what he says. But I feel like he's being stubborn in terms of the potential of machine intelligence.
See this page for a cogent discussion of Searle's classic thought experiment and some very comprehensive rebuttals, and Searle's rebuttals of the rebuttals. And some rebuttals of the ... ok, you get the idea.
I feel like Searle and some of the engineers are talking past each other. Ultimately, despite my appreciation for Searle's larger body of work, I come down firmly on the side of machine intelligence.
This post auto-generated by Eliza.
Uh, that's because the sentence was a joke, one that everyone in the room got, and the punchline of the joke was that the sentence sounded like it came out of a postmodernism generator. Jesus.
Got spare time? Earn extra cash :-) No MLM !!!!!!
/.er should make a new page, and sell it to them. It would be an offer they couldn't refuse.
When you click on DNS-and-BIND (submitter of this story) you link to this web site. It looks fake, particularly the page about their spokeswoman. But you can google and find recipes with their product mentioned. If the company is real, some industrious
Inasmuch as contemporary deconstruction is an sophisticated reading of a text within a social context, some of its "tools" are actually worth considering. Even scientists have egos and operate in social contexts whose foundations and assumptions are often not examined. (On the other hand, deconstructionist have their own egos, interest, and self-preserving institutional biases.)
However, within the social context of academia, the echo-chamber effect tends to reward political point-scoring. To a large extent, I think this is because radical leftist ideology has failed to catch on in the outside world, so its proponents find themselves trying to control words, something that can be done in a tightly confined, even solipsistic milieu, instead of convincing the world at large. In other words, we can't change the world, so we'll move the playing field to language and try to win there instead.
After staying up all night helping my then girlfriend, now wife study Freud I applied everything I had learned about him in my Medieval French Poetry class, and was hailed a genius. Now that my actions have been... deconstructed, I underst... no, wait... je comprends.
I'm probably obtuse, but -- no, I still don't understand. Your point is that Sokal is making a similar argument, right? And is his argument invalid?
My spin is just the opposite of his. If I'm a Social Thought editor, the argument I make (out of sincerity or out of damage control, as the case may be) is this: all this talk of "trust" and "deception" is irrelevant. Dr. Sokal submitted a provocative article and we published it. He can declare it to be gibberish, but that no more invalidates our decision than any other instance in which a reader declares some text to be nonsensical.
To put it differently, my reaction is the same as Sokal's "Or are they more deferent to the so-called ``cultural authority of technoscience'' than they would care to admit?" I'm just surprised that they gave up so easily.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
After some searching, I found Semiotics for Begineers, which was a pretty good introduction to the field, and written with enough clarity that even this programmer could figure out the strange language. Go give it a try.
It might also help you as a programmer. We use esoteric language all the time, like '\n', 0xDEADBEEF, deques and queues, stdout, stderr, stdlog, etc. etc., and semiotics tries to explain how these somewhat random characters can be attached to ideas, so that our community can send the characters back and forth to communicate the ideas. However, if it comes to an assembler class vs. a semiotics class, please take the assembler class.
I remember a foundations of mathematics class I took where we talked about the fact that you could prove that 1 = 2, as long as you ignored the definition which states that they are not equivalent. It seems like this is the source of the problems described by the author - it isn't that deconstruction is a faulty tool, in and of itself, but that the practitioners don't believe in base axioms or definitions and ignore them to their hearts content. In a world without axioms anything can be "proven".
In fact, this whole explanation is assuming the primacy of mathematical reasoning over other forms. Asserting this primacy is an attempt by me to sway the masses of my inherent correctness! Why would I need to convince anyone if I was correct? So, I must be wrong. The problem is, I have assumed that there are axioms. Poof! I have just "proven" that there can never be proof!
This Orwell essay speaks directly on this subject - using incomprehensible words and euphemisms to make yourself sound important, and then influence people.
Then he goes further and shows how using phrases and words like in these academic works, and in speeches, literally takes away any thought processes you might have. You no longer need to think, but just regurgitate words, as i'm doing now. Any semblance of creativity is thrown out the window (a very popular cliche, didn't even have to think to put it down).
There are plenty of copies of this essay on the web, just do a search. Brilliant read.
I find Sokal, on the other hand, just as much of a holier-than-thou elitist as the people he criticizes, though he's a good deal funnier.
What Morningstar claims to have found from his explorations is a few good ideas with a whole lot of shite slathered on top. That would describe many many other academic disciplines outside the humanities as well.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
can you parse this paragraph?
Wiz PT Z is inherently a ythy/Jeer-U stage - all apparatus structures are constructed using ythy. In fact, the FEP/MFC situation is itself constructed to the side of ythy/Jeer-U. However, there exist contingencies to ring ythy language from MFC language. Moreover, if you wish to disirk or outline an MFC entreaty using IMHI, you would need to use a Jeer-U plan called HeaveMFCEnt.
how about this one?
Mac OS X is natively a dyld/Mach-O platform - all system frameworks are built using dyld. In fact, the CFM/PEF environment is itself built on top of dyld/Mach-O. However, there exist provisions to call dyld code from CFM code. Moreover, if you wish to debug or trace a CFM application using GDB, you would need to use a Mach-O program called LaunchCFMApp.
context/background/familiarity are important. to a person without some sort of CS background, the second paragraph makes just as much sense as the first, even though it's taken from a very informative article linked to by slashdot yesterday. why should CS people be able understand litcrit writing without at least some instruction in that field?
Your search - "alternative scientific truths" - did not match any documents.
Engineers just can't see the forest for the trees.
Here is an introductory text which might shed some light for you: le click
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I remember an odd line in that book. At one point, reference is made (at least in the edition I was reading) to a "slime green volume". Since it's such an odd description, I inevitably began to wonder if it was a misprint, for either "lime green" or "slim green". Then I wondered if it could be an intentional misprint. Then I wondered if it wasn't a misprint, but was deliberatly placed to make the reader wonder about this. Then I thought about how clever the translator must have been if it was intentional. Then my head exploded.
In the spirit of "postmodern literary criticism" I choose the essay itself as my "text" and here are the exciting results.
Well, I tried to see if I could "see into" the essay as a satire and a wicked, though blunt, assessment of the current administration. I thought that the essay was a coded satire and similar to the work of Jonathan Swift, but without the humor and imagination. (Full Disclosure - I am an Engineer by training.) So here my application of the 5-Step methodology to "deconstructing" the essay.
I really don't know what Godel wrote but I have read an interpretation of it via Douglas Hofstadter's - Godel, Escher, Bach. Here is where I do find the similarities in the prescription laid out by Hofstadter and in the essay.
And here is where I can extend beyond mere literature into the nature of politics, govt, and the current administration.
True, it doesn't matter if I choose to focus on the current administration, or the mad-cow outbreak. The choice of the subject is actually one of the less important decisions that I have to make.
It is very interesting that such a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism was used by Mr. Donald Rumsfeld who was awarded the prize of 'Foot in mouth' prize for for it, and actually came very close to being awarded the "Man of the Year" by Time Magazine ! (Rummy declined honor as 'Person of the Year) His award winning poem was trying to create a metaphysical confusion by the following :
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
In high school we were supposed to write an essay on some book we read - I can't even remember what it was. At a loss for ideas, I recalled some commentary on something else I read elsewhere, and wrote about Apollonian/Dionysian conflict, primitive/cultured duality, natural/artificial, making connections between the characters in the book and the woodsman in Walden and Billy Budd in Billy Budd. It was written quickly - an in-class quiz actually. It made little sense to me but it sounded good. The teacher hailed it as brilliant; she read it to the other classes, and everyone in my grade knew about it. Two cute girls I barely knew, from one of those other classes, came up to me and told me how great my essay was. I guess the lesson is, for those of you still in high school, English teachers love dualities and connections to characters in other books that are not the topic of the essay.
Although this, like the Sokal hoax does have a lot of fun at the expense of literary critics, it is hardly a problem merely in postmodernist circles. Evidently in modern physics one can fairly easily do the same thing -- the
Bogdanov twins evidently published several physics papers that are complete nonsense in the respected journal Classical and Quantum Gravity
Just some asshole imagining things in a work that usually the artist never intended. Good work if you can get it, I suppose. I think if anyone told me they were a literary critic I'd laugh in their face.
Blar.
Yes. But this is a learning exercise to the same point as writing an essay on how the poem "Casey at Bat" is a metaphor for cold war politics (example stolen from a particularly awesome episode of "Northern Exposure").
In both cases, you are using skills that are important to your profession for a task which is not useful in furthering anything but experience.
I'm a big fan of experience for its own sake. I used to write a two page essay every day and throw it away (now I just post on slashdot...sigh), just to hone my skills. I feel deconstructions are about the same thing...only they're more colaborative, which is also a useful skill. Some of them can be quite brilliant, but that doesn't mean you should put them on the same shelf as Sausere and Aristotle.
Incidentally, it is not always the best written bot who wins Robocode style bot battles. A guy I used to work with used to submit entries to them that did nothing more than make completely random decisions...and he often got pretty far with them. Of course, a Wolfram-ite like myself might say that his randomness algorithm was more efficient than an intelligently designed one...
Hey freaks: now you're ju
...that you are getting a PhD in a liberal arts field and yet can not punctuate or capitalize worth a damn. Your grasp of grammar and syntax is similarly tenuous. Wow.
Don't you read the New York Times? One of their Best Inventions of 2003 was the Death of Critical Theory.
Of course theory has lost a lot of its bite as there have been Pomo deconstructions of the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog.
One problem is that no theory really dies. So Freud may be seen as an anachronism with no bearing on modern psychology... but he's still invoked as a rational critical view in the humanities. Its been a joke for a while in those fields (resulting in the above A&F stuff. I've also attended a presentation of a critque of poetry written on bathroom stall walls).
Its been dead. Finally the big heads of humanities are beginning to realize it. Dr. Cornel West of Harvard (he of Afro-american study and Matrix fame) said something to the effect "How I wish I was around decades ago when you all cared what theory meant."
What is music when you despise all sound?
Was that supposed to be "importance", or "impotence"?
Michael is not a homosexual.
Of course then Michael would mod it into oblivion.
Lasers Controlled Games!
When you deconstuct a work, you create a paper which is impossible to fail on a theoretical basis, because each deconstruction is in fact its own theoretical entity. Perhpas I misunderstand, but can I not create a new and yet wrong theory?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
This article simplifies a much larger issue.
Literary theory is an approach to textuality. If you posit that all knowledge that enters public sphere exists as text, then a study of the manipulation of meaning, knowledge, and interpretation is as politically necessary a venture as any I know.
And while one may complain that excessive jargon corrupts scholarship, we live in a world of jargon, coded language uttered by people with AUTHORity. It is the job of discourse theory to puncture the very heart of such authority. Thus, there are real world implications here. In fact, the whole project is being imported to secondary schools precisely because the goal of schools is to make questioning thinkers, not believers. Literary theory is a marvelous way to exercise such faculties.
Deconstruction is the most famous (and misused) reference to literary theory. It is the one most often used as an illustration of diffuse, pointless inquiry. If every person who studies theory hasn't heard this said a thousand times, then we have never heard it once. Frankly, this article it is just an immature attempt to contribute to field with an already substantial knowledge base.
This article adds nothing to it.
May I marmu dack face into the elephants?
This
I think Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles had a quite that said it all. "Speak the plain truth around here is getting pretty damn dull."
Never Politically Correct ~ I prefer the facts If you don't like what I say, get a life, or comment yourself.
Even though it's not smart enough to truly qualify :)
Must be an Englit major!
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Man: You sit here, dear. ...crap crap crap egg and crap; crap crap crap crap crap crap diarhea crap crap crap... ...or Lobster Thermidor a Crevette with a mornay sauce served in a Provencale manner with shallots and aubergines garnished with truffle pate, brandy and with a fried egg on top and crap.
Wife: All right.
Man: Morning!
Waitress: Morning!
Man: Well, what've you got?
Waitress: Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and crap; egg bacon and crap; egg bacon sausage and crap; crap bacon sausage and crap; crap egg crap crap bacon and crap; crap sausage crap crap bacon crap tomato and crap;
Vikings: crap crap crap crap...
Waitress:
Vikings: crap! Lovely crap! Lovely crap!
Waitress:
Wife: Have you got anything without crap?
Waitress: Well, there's crap egg sausage and crap, that's not got much crap in it.
Wife: I don't want ANY crap!
Man: Why can't she have egg bacon crap and sausage?
Wife: THAT'S got crap in it!
Man: Hasn't got as much crap in it as crap egg sausage and crap, has it?
Vikings: crap crap crap crap... (Crescendo through next few lines...)
Wife: Could you do the egg bacon crap and sausage without the crap then?
Waitress: Urgghh!
Wife: What do you mean 'Urgghh'? I don't like crap!
Vikings: Lovely crap! Wonderful crap!
Waitress: Shut up!
Vikings: Lovely crap! Wonderful crap!
Waitress: Shut up! (Vikings stop) Bloody Vikings! You can't have egg bacon crap and sausage without the crap.
Wife: I don't like crap!
Man: Sshh, dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your crap. I love it. I'm having crap crap crap crap crap crap crap diarhea crap crap crap and crap!
Vikings: crap crap crap crap. Lovely crap! Wonderful crap!
Waitress: Shut up!! Diarhea are off.
Man: Well could I have her crap instead of the diarhea then?
Waitress: You mean crap crap crap crap crap crap... (but it is too late and the Vikings drown her words)
Vikings: (Singing elaborately...) crap crap crap crap. Lovely crap! Wonderful crap! crap cra-a-a-a-a-ap crap cra-a-a-a-a-ap crap. Lovely crap! Lovely crap! Lovely crap! Lovely crap! Lovely crap! crap crap crap crap!
it is a "hoax" since, assuming the premise, the editors have no criteria with which to judge any text. why do they think they can select one submission over another, other than by (more or less) whim?
It's a matter of dogma--not science, empiricism, or any other claim to ultimate truth--that gets people so upset about lit. crit. Not only do they not understand the continental philosophical underpinnings of most contemporary criticism, they object that an unscientific endeavor should have its own terms, especially terms borrowed from common language (as the French especially are wont to do). This upsets attachments to infallible reference and Platonic idealism.
This is exactly the problem with the reports of poststructuralists making scientific claims, simply because (as far as I've read the criticized works quotes) they never made scientific claims. Sure you can excerpt declarative sentences of 'quantum this does that', but the discussions these are excerpted from are about the effect of scientific ideas on the thought of an age: deconstructionists aren't inherently anti-scientific; in fact, it's precisely because they accepted the scientific conclusions out of hand that the discussion took place--but, they didn't give up the prerogative to question the value and meaning of scientific truths in a wider context. That's philosophy in its proper place. Right?
The biggest and most common misunderstanding of Derrida is that he rejects the existence of ultimate truth. Derrida doesn't talk about ultimate truth; instead, he emphasizes the human perspective, saying, 'however the universe really is, it's a secondary question because we're trapped observing it from a prison, and that prison is language'. While it is true that, scientifically (or even casually) observed, the universe acts with apparent underlying consistency--and hence ultimate truth--we run in to trouble when we try talking about it, especially concerning areas pertinent to human values. Again, the term used, "language", is just the shorthand for what Derrida talks about, what he's called at other times "differance": it's a broader thing, our mode of thinking, not just human language capacity.
The speculation that we might be cut off from ultimate truth of course goes back to pre-Socratic thinkers, but Derrida more specifically developed a way of talking about this prison. It's a dualist philosophy that accepts contradiction (so do attempts at 'pure' logic-based philosophy--read the Tractutus). This isn't for fun or...
Step n-1: ????
Step n: Profit!!
There's no choice in the matter. This means that, while we may reject something as false (he neglected this important area until the last decade), the truth has an infinite number of sides because it has infinite expressions, and expression matters.
This all still leaves questions of the value of philosophy and 'criticism' and of what constitutes good or bad thereof. So how about asking those questions instead of using straw-men pinatas?
PHB could be auto generated. That hits closer to home I think.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
i think that's his point. If they (the editors) really believe that there's no privileged reading, then they shouldn't care that the author came out and said "haha! it's all crap!" because hey, the author doesn't matter.
However, they DID get upset...really upset. They should have made the argument "it doesn't matter that you didn't mean it, you still wrote really good stuff, intentionally or not" but they didn't.. in otherwords, they don't buy into their own philosophy (that the work is independent of its author)
There was an old episode of Murphy Brown where Murphy, scoffing at silly art critics, has a painting done by her toddler child entered in an art exhibit. One critic naturally finds it profound, wonderful, etc, while the other calls it amateurish garbage. The point was well made -- you can't dump everyone into a category.
Finally, regarding the author's attempt at deconstruction:
If you, an intelligent person who uses language carefully, heard the original statement ("John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual.") from another intelligent person who uses language carefully, wouldn't you wonder why they said it?Kuhn's 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' discusses the way theoretical 'paradigms' have camps of adherents and detractors. Postmodernism may simply be an example of a popular 'paradigm' in the immature science of literary criticism. The physical sciences were once populated with theories that we would consider ridiculous now. Of course, criticism of the weaknesses of Postmodernism is appropriate - but who wants to take on the really difficult job of supplanting PM with a more generally applicable theoretical structure? (I'm not up to it today anyway.)
The problem is that as scientists/engineers/rational people, the concept of "gibberish" has meaning. If "gibberish" is given the same standing in a journal like this as claimed "meaningful writing", then the logical conclusion is that there is no distinguishing between "gibberish" and "meaningful writing", and as a consequence there is no such thing as "meaningful writing" going on if it's all logically equivalent to "gibberish".
Thus, to be consistent, the po-mos must act as you say, but as scientists/engineers/rational people, we're not going to buy it and we're going to conclude they're full of crap. This bothers them, and again, it shouldn't since they despise our worldview so. This is what I believe Sokal was saying, and what I thought you were getting at. There's no inconsistency here from Sokal or the engineering camp, there's just inconsistency from the po-mos. (And hypocrisy, in the sense that by their own logic this isn't supposed to bother them, but it clearly does. As a scientist/engineer/rational person, I would claim this is because no matter how hard you try, you can only disconnect from reality so far...)
"Please find the part of the spec' that permits that feature, 'cos if you can't, I can certainly find the part of the contract that says you aren't getting paid until it's fixed."
So, this engineer "trolls" a group of insulated academics, then writes this long-winded self congradulatory rants about how he's solved "postmodernism."
Jeezuz christ, with the advent of Quantum physics, you'd think that people who called themselves scientists would be comfortable with a little uncertainty in the world.
And for you kneejerkers out there, postmodernism does NOT follow moral relativism! It doesn't mean nothing can be categorized as "good" or "bad." It just says that context must be considered, and that messages are interpreted in the mind of the receiver. This is not a new epoch or mode of thinking-this is common sense.
For example, think of this basic conversation that you might have with a co-worker:
CO-WORKER: I was late for work today.
YOU: That's bad.
CO-WORKER: Someone in front of me hit an armored car, and tons of bills spilled out all everywhere, all over my car!
YOU: That's good.
CO-WORKER: It was Canadian money.
YOU: That's bad.
CO-WORKER: Fuck you, eh?
See how context affects the notion of "good" or "bad"? It's not so much of a leap to think it could effect the perception of "true" and "false" in some contexts, is it?
If you think about the basic tenets of postmodernism, the mountains will not crumble into the sea, the sun will still rise tomorrow, and your shit will still smell as bad.
Deconstructing something is not a bad thing. I don't know who said this, maybe Gramsci, but the quote "Ideology presents itself as common sense," should be considered. Sharpen your rhetorical rapier and gain the power to question something.
Next time you see an anti-drug commercial that says "Marijuana: It's more dangerous than we previously thought!" you should scream at the TV: "We??? I had no fucking preconceptions!" Of course, this entire argument rests on the fact that when you die you become a blue ghost and can float around so don't kill yourself and SAY NO TO DRUGS!
Before becoming a software engineer I got a bachelors in psychology. While in college I went to a conference on phenomenology. I had taken a couple courses on the subject and thought I had a handle on it. However, the first speaker I went to was completely incomprehensible to me. Try as I might I could not put more than three sequential words of his together into anything that made any sense. At first I questioned my intelligence, but eventually I came to the conclussion that it was all a bunch of blather.
Standing next to me (it was standing room only) was a hot chick I had spoken to prior to the talk. She was looking up at him like he was the most brilliant man alive, making little nods and short buzzing noises of agreement. I wanted to have sex with her, and this led to my moral transgression.
After he was done speaking she gushed about how brilliant he was. Deep down I wanted to ask her if she could explain what gave her that impression, but instead I agreed with her. My little head was doing the thinking. I even spouted back some of the junk he had said in order to try to impress her.
No...I did not end up having sex with her. She went off to join the groupies surrounding the speaker, and I was left alone in my shame. I had helped to perpetuate the BS.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
So once an engineer wins her robot battle and goes into work, what does she do? Well, useful stuff, not more robot battles. So maybe the robot battles trained her to do the useful stuff better.
Once a deconstructionist finishes her paper on the hermeneutics of quantum gravity and goes into work, what does she do? More deconstruction. Deconstruction is the point - the papers are the end goal of the whole process. A deconstructionist is not training for anything, or testing their skills in an unimportant context, like the robot-battling engineer, when they write a paper. They are doing the exact job that they are paid to do. And that job is entirely useless.
What you are describing is a word frequency distribution with stopwords- this is commonly used for automatic classification of texts. Lots of cool stuff can be done with it, including generating zipfian distributions.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
Some excepts:
If you have an extra 20 minutes or so, it's a great read.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
"Underline the counterpoint of the unsurreal metaphore. Hmmm! Deaths to good for them"
> using skills that are important to your
> profession for a task which is not
> useful in furthering anything but experience
Hm. To me, the battlebot thing seems to be an example of "sharpening the saw". Kind of like a baseball player taking batting practice - it doesn't score any runs, but it will later. Does literary deconstructionism serve as practice for writers?
> it is not always the best written bot
> who wins Robocode style bot battles
Sometimes, yes... but I think that's more a statement about the other bot writers' skills than the virtue of randomness. Also, a randomly constructed bot wouldn't win much, because it would probably throw exceptions all over the place. That is, there's a fair bit of order that needs to occur to produce a "random bot" - implementing the correct interfaces, choosing a random action to take, etc.
You have an interesting take on this, though. I had never considered deconstructionism as literary fun... that's a whole different viewpoint. Thanks!
The Army reading list
First, the whole Blade Runner thing about how (amongst other things) the only time you see the sun is at the end once the revelation has been made and how the director is saying this and that. The reality of where the closing scene came from just highlights the idiocy of PM analysis.
The second is a film (the name of which escapes me) where the final third is in B&W and the PMistas draw all kinds of meaning from this, the reality is that the film makers ran out of money and colour stock so they finished it with B&W. No meaning, no nothing.
"The first thing to do when you find yourself in a hole is stop digging."
Here are some ideas for texts you might try to deconstruct, once you are ready to attempt it yourself, graded by approximate level of difficulty:
[snip]
Tour de Force:
James Joyce's Finnegans Wake
the San Jose, California telephone directory
IRS Form 1040
the Intel i486DX Programmer's Reference Manual
the Mississippi River
anything by Baudrillard
Comedy Gold!
In fact, it was written in 1993.
Here, you can find all of them.
Chip Morningstar (together with Randy Farmer and Doug Crockford) is one of the three gurus of avatar-based virtual communities. (i.e. Habitat, Club Caribe and WorldsAway/Avaterra).
The Bogdanov Affair
I'm going to start my PhD in philosophy in the fall. However, I have also worked extensively with software and software development; I've even written some stuff destined for commercial release. I can tell you that the solidity of the truth-criteria of software development and lit crit are very, very similar, and the fact that you have no clue about the goings-on at that conference of yours speaks only of a difference in field. For instance: Are more, or fewer, comments in source code desirable? How about highly-specific, tightly-optimized assembly versus a perl script? The po-mo's (and, btw, that pastiche of terminology you collected is in no way exclusively postmodern, or even, for that matter, literary) would have just as much trouble understanding the virtues of object re-use and garbage collection and multiple inheritance, and would be just as tempted to derision.
Your critique, BTW, goes much deeper, and is much less grounded than the Sokal hoax, which confined itself to apeing a particularly noisome constellation of theory; the converse of what you have done would be an attack on computer science based on the foibles of visual basic.
The upshot is: Do not be tempted to Volkisch, chauvinist rallies about your discipline. Ignorance, IMO, is fairly evenly distributed over academe.
- undoware.ca
That's a good book, even if the structure is a little gimmicky. It kind of reminds me of the movie "Memento" for some reason.
I'm not a card-carrying follower of the Church of Deconstruction, but I've studied it a bit, and tried to understand it. It's true that deconstruction would state that no statement is true. And that's a contradicion. But that doesn't mean it's not true. Or wait, it does. The point is, it doesn't make deconstruction less interesting. Deconstruction demonstrates how language fails, how logic is undermined by rhetoric and vice versa. The statements people draw from it are far less interesting than the thinking that leads to them. Like in all kinds of philosophy.
:-)
First, the usual disclaimer: This is a tough subject, and English is not my native language. All errors in logic and expression result from that.
That article you linked to is terrible, and the logic behind it is false or non-existant. And apparently not very honest: The author attacks deconstruction for confusing artificiality with convention and deceptive and false. However, his own argument against it is dependent on the same confusion.
Even if "all language systems are conventional" (this can't be called a "major tenet of deconstruction," as the author claims. The major tenet would be that all language is artificial, and that's something completely different.) necessarily must be a conventional statement if the statement is true, wouldn't in itself make it a self-contradictory statement. It would merely make it part of the same hermetic, conventional, language system. Now, this language system might be quite self-contradictory, and deconstruction is the philosophy of self-contradicion in the language systems, so the author isn't so far off. He just avoids the real issues of deconstruction, which have nothing to do with convention, and everything to do with artificiality.
Ferdinand de Saussure is important here, but not in the way the author thinks. The idea that the relationship between signifier (expression) and signified (meaning) is arbitrary does not lead to that meaning has "nothing to do with reality," but it does lead to the obvious fact that the two (meaning/reality) are different. What we think of the world is not the world. That should be pretty obvious: The word "I" is not the same as the person who utters "I." That a word is a fact about language, and not a fact about the world, follows from this. "Falsely," the author claims, but without any argument.
He goes on to state that Derrida's "most controversial idea," that "linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate," means the same as "I cannot utter a word of English." This is plain bad logic, and also not very good rhetoric. A better analogue would be "You don't understand a word of what Derrida is saying," and that statement would be true (if said to the author of the article).
This article's main tenet (n : a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proof), is as you quote: Deconstruction is a theory that is beyond being intellectually bankrupt -- it is intellectually meaningless and thus had no intellectual capital to begin with!, and the author goes out to scare people away from those who do not share that doctrine by spewing a lot of nonsense.
His main argument seems to be that Derrida doesn't follow his "master" Saussure in everything, and that is somehow "illogical", then he rounds off with concluding that "there is indeed one way to God," which he also means is "epistemologically self-evident." This article is just a bunch of anti-anti-religious propaganda. He's scared that deconstruction will destroy Authority, not truth.
From The Postmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/) Here.
The Expression of Fatal flaw: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Rushdie
Hans Q. Dahmus
Department of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1. Consensuses of failure
"Sexual identity is part of the paradigm of truth," says Derrida. But an abundance of dematerialisms concerning the textual paradigm of consensus may be discovered.
"Society is intrinsically elitist," says Lyotard; however, according to Hanfkopf[1] , it is not so much society that is intrinsically elitist, but rather the dialectic of society. Precapitalist narrative states that art is part of the failure of culture, but only if the premise of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory is invalid. Therefore, the main theme of Pickett's[2] analysis of neodialectic cultural theory is a mythopoetical paradox.
Hanfkopf[3] suggests that we have to choose between dialectic subdeconstructivist theory and the subcapitalist paradigm of context. However, Debord uses the term 'dialectic postcultural theory' to denote the defining characteristic, and subsequent genre, of capitalist class.
Marx's critique of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory holds that art serves to reinforce sexism. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a subdialectic desublimation that includes reality as a totality.
Sartre uses the term 'dialectic subdeconstructivist theory' to denote not, in fact, discourse, but postdiscourse. Thus, the characteristic theme of the works of Burroughs is the role of the participant as artist.
2. Realism and capitalist presemanticist theory
The main theme of Abian's[4] essay on capitalist presemanticist theory is the difference between society and class. The subject is contextualised into a Derridaist reading that includes consciousness as a paradox. However, Foucault uses the term 'capitalist presemanticist theory' to denote the meaninglessness, and some would say the defining characteristic, of textual sexual identity.
Subconstructivist theory suggests that consensus comes from communication. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a capitalist presemanticist theory that includes language as a whole.
If the textual paradigm of consensus holds, the works of Gaiman are postmodern. Therefore, Debord uses the term 'cultural Marxism' to denote the role of the poet as artist. Lyotard suggests the use of capitalist presemanticist theory to read narrativity. However, in The Books of Magic, Gaiman affirms realism; in Neverwhere, however, he denies capitalist presemanticist theory.
1. Hanfkopf, A. B. ed. (1978) Realism in the works of Burroughs. Panic Button Books
2. Pickett, V. P. A. (1981) The Genre of Narrative: The textual paradigm of consensus and realism. Loompanics
3. Hanfkopf, R. ed. (1996) Realism in the works of McLaren. And/Or Press
4. Abian, N. D. F. (1970) The Stone Sky: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Gaiman. Panic Button Books
This is the meat of the article, and, to my mind, accurately picks out that which is of value in the humanities.
As far as I'm concerned, the humanities need a major overhaul. Those majoring in english or art should have their science requirements increased beyond whatever they are now. At the same time, I think the sciency types of the world should be similarly forced to undertake a number of humanities courses. But the humanities teachers should be forced to explain themselves in terms as simple, obvious, and concise as the author did above.
Now, back to my botany studies...
The "soft" position is unpopular because it leads to the conclusion that many "sciences" aren't. Psychology, sociology, and most of economics lose out. So do the "retrospective" fields, like paleontology. They're considered belief systems, not sciences. Since there are more people in those fields than in the hard sciences, this is an unpopular position.
Engineering makes it clear which position is right. Engineering is based entirely on results which are experimentally falsifiable. Only results tested by experiments which could fail, but didn't, have predictive power. Engineering is about prediction. Without prediction there is no reliability.
and therefore not in the best posistion to be hurling stones about other peoples writing.
He had a really good point, but intentionally buried it with that same sort of cleverness the academics he critizes might use. At least he didn't resort to using meaningless jargon...
I think the fact that we're discussing these points right now (on Slashdot!) is probably a good thing, perhaps not intentional when he first wrote it, but after later reflection, allowed to stand as is.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
(Bring a fast java VM, and/or a lot of patience.)
MSK
Are people going to start talking about memes now?
Anyone who has not read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon", I recommend you borrow a copy and read the "War as Text" section about a lit-crit conference for which the protagonist is doing IT support. Dovetails nicely with the article, and is a real hoot.
Obviously, all humanities professors are not idiots. Some of it is valid (note I didn't say true, even less of it is true), but most isn't. Most of them know that most of it is horse shit.
So, why do they do it? Tenure. Publish or perish. Truly original, basic research in the humanities is so rare that they have decided that it isn't possible and make shit up instead. Not only that but the shit has to conform to the dominant style.
It all started with the rise of feminism in academia during the late sixties. Again some of the original feminist works are great and society is a better place because they were written. However instead of accepting that and moving on to other aspects of society the same paradigm of these original works was applied to every conceivable group of people in every conceivable area.
This approach has some validity and occurs in other fields as well (e.g. studying the movements due to gravity of every type of thing), but in the humanities it is usually the case that they are doing something comparable to using a theory of electro-magnetic force to explain the movement of the stars. It's either a clear misapplication of the theory or the explanatory value of the theory in that circumstance is miniscule.
The paradigm? Show how this group could have possibly been oppressed. If you are lucky, for maximum emotional effect, you'll be able to show how the opressed were actually superior to the oppressors.
For a truly wonderful example of this kind of scholarship, read anything by Judith Butler.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to say that there isn't some worthwhile stuff going on, but the demand that professors produce research creates the perfect evironment for pointless and fraudulent research. And that's true for all disciplines.
It all comes back to money. If the universities produce more research, they get more money (e.g. grants, fellowships, etc).
These days the reviewers seem to have trouble with two concepts: a) acknowledging that they are not qualified to review a given manuscript and b) they cannot even contemplate the option of rejecting an article. Most scientists are just too kind-hearted to reject a colleague's work no matter how bad it is.
The owls are not what they seem
Your English is as good or better than mine, so no need for apologies there :-)
:-)
> confusing artificiality with
> convention and deceptive and false.
Hm. I'm not sure what differences you're pointing out here.
> What we think of the world is not the world
Well... er... sure. However, this moves towards what C.S. Lewis called "nothing buttery" - that is, "that no smoking sign is nothing but ink on paper, so I'll keep on smoking."
> "linguistic meaning is fundamentally
> indeterminate," means the same as
> "I cannot utter a word of English."
Perhaps another way to state his idea is "I cannot utter a word of English and have anyone understand what I am trying to say"? I'm not sure how his idea is either bad logic or bad rhetoric.
> tenet (n : a religious doctrine
From dictionary.com: "tenet - An opinion, doctrine, or principle held as being true by a person or especially by an organization." No religious implications yet.
> the author goes out to scare people away
> from those who do not share that doctrine
> by spewing a lot of nonsense.
I don't agree with your analysis, but if it's true, then he'd truly be "deconstructing deconstructionism with deconstructionism"
> This article is just a bunch of
> anti-anti-religious propaganda
I assume you're referring to this line from the article: "Either there is one way to God or there is no one way to God". I don't understand - do you feel this is a false assertion? How is it false?
The Army reading list
Actually, the whole Sokal business was addressed, as are many of the issues Morningstar brings up in his article, in John D. Caputo's book _Deconstruction in a Nutshell_ -- a worthwhile read for anyone interested in deconstruction. (Warning: it is a philosophy text, and the "in a nutshell" part is, quite intentionally, a joke).
Deconstruction is not supposed to be a justification for interpreting a text any way you'd like. That is a common misunderstanding pervasive enough that entire schools of "deconstruction" (more aptly, "Yale School Poststructuralism") employ the strategy. Derrida and other significant contributors to the philosophy of deconstruction were after other goals. First, they wanted to propose what should be obvious to anyone who's read RMS's rants: there is always more going on behind the scenes than the author is letting on. Some of it is the author's inentention, some of it is social and cultural, and some of it is (brace yourself) generated by YOU in the reading of the text, as each time you read, you are interpreting. There is weird or particularly mystical about this assertion -- consider natural language parsing. If language was really so easy to break down, analyse and interpret in a definitive matter, why is it that NLP is still in its infancy, stuck on banal sytactical issues (like stemming) and barely capable of idetifying parts of speech?
Morningstar goes to great lengths to state that he, as a "commercial" engineer, is constantly forced to translate his language to easily understandable language. Surely, he jests. Just yesterday, I was talking to a co-worker trying to explain why one of his applications was crashing. My "easy to understand" language was not at all a real description of the problem -- were I to explain to him out-of-range errors on page lookups that led to segmentation faults in plain English, he would completely loose interest. I mean, come on, it would take easily an hour to explain to a layperson what I meant by that last comment! Jargon is necessary to identify complex (or specific) ideas in a minimal amount of words/time. It exists for engineers, philosophers, lit-critics and medical doctors -- and it exists because it has to.
Now, somewhere in this vast list of easily deconstructable comments, someone made the assinine assertion that deconstruction has no business messing with science, claiming that science is based _solely_ on empirical evidence. I thought such notions had long since dissipated. Hasn't anyone read Kuhn, Toulmin, Feyerabend or any other notable historians and philosophers of science? Wittgensteing? KANT, EVEN? Science is not built up of empirical evidence -- science is built up on theory and that theory's interpretation of evidence (which may or may not be accurate at all). 'Interpretation' is the key word, here. Thus, deconstruction, hermeneutics, and (post) structuralism most definitely ought to examine the problem. While it often escapes the notice of the casual observer, science is at a crisis point right now -- the lit-crit brand of deconstrcution can be thought of as a mirror reflecting the uncertainty of science. Science would benefit from the application of deconstruction and any other theory that might help it sort out what it means to claim that something is true, valid or meaningful. Is it possible that there are two versions of science, both true? I suppose. Maybe particle/wave theory is an example. Maybe the controversies in superstring theory are other examples. Are these indications that the universe operates in two different ways at once? Maybe, but I doubt it. More likely, it's just an indication of the argument that the deconstructionists have been making all along: language is not capable of specificity, and with jargon, social and cultural perspectives, indeterminacy of the writer and reader, etc, the quest for the grand unified theory is not possible.
Just like a picture is worth a thousand words, words themselves are worth more than their "text" value.
Some people read too much into things to impress others (or themselves), while other people are discounted as reading too much into things while in the pursuit of a deeper meaning (when there actually is deeper meaning). There can even be a deeper meaning than the author ever intended in putting into a text. The author can steadfastly refuse that it is even there, but it can still be there.
The reason why I get upset at this anti-intellectualism is that there is actual purpose to understanding things at a deeper level. It's not just artsy-fartsy claptrap. It's an attempt to challenge ourselves and our societies to improvement though understanding communication.
At a very simple level I can offer analogies of usefulness of decostruction. If you understand why someone is saying something, you can second guess them. If you understand that a person coming from a certain point of view says certain things then you can use "intuition" to anticipate and respond accordingly sometimes contrary to literal speach and action. This gives us such bounty as knowing when someone is lying to us, Understanding when we are going to get fired, and when a cute person is flirting with us. These are simple uncluttered things that we deconstruct instantly and silently all the time. The deconstruction that others do is a more complicated more time consuming process, but a process that yields results nonetheless.
I guess the best engineering analogy would be that deconstructing something gives us feedback and closes the loop on expression and thought. Now some deconstrution is so annoying and flamboyant that it does seem intelectually bankrupt, and it produces zero feedback value (or even worse deconstructive feedback (mind the pun)). Some deconstruction has valuable elements that are thrown out due to anti-intellectualism, eliminating a valuable feedback network.
It's as if there is this giant control system that encompases all of us, affects the way we interact with one another globally, and locally, yet we eschew a method to make our orchestrations more wieldly. Look it up, it's "meta-communication." It's subjective but damn interesting.
As a final thought to a poorly composed rant: you can either sift through the crap and get some value out of these intellectual pursuits, or you can be a linguistic/intellectual luddite.
Oh, and John F. Kennedy was not a Homosexual.
postmodernsideshow.com
On the other hand, architectural deconstruction has lead to some wild buildings, like Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao.
I had and entirely different opinion about Philosophy of Science when I took it. The purpose of the class from my point of view was to clearly draw boudries of what was scientific, and what was not. As well as what could things could be answered by science and what things could not. There are many ideas which cannot be proven one way or another - for example the existence of free will. Therefore any ideas about whether free will exists or doesn't is an opinion. Now it's one thing to believe something contrary to science, but it's quite another to have opinions on things which are orthoganal to science.
At my school it was not required, but I felt it should have been, or even better covered briefly at the high school level. I have known way too many scientists that treat their opinions on god and free will as though it were scientific fact, and will ridicule anyone who thinks differently. Falsely attributing a personal opinion to science is just as dangerous as attibuting a personal opinion to a higher power. It gives one's words more power than they should have. Furthermore, it hurts science to allow non-scientific beliefs into the collective cannon.
My philosphy of science class made me both more rigorous when it comes to scientific matters, and more tolerent when it comes to non-scientific ones. I considered both of these effects to be greatly benificial.
PS I protect my above rant from spelling or grammatical attacks because that damn "submit" button keeps looking more and more like "preview"
postmodernsideshow.com
Most literary critics do not engage in the "no one can prove you're wrong" kind of nonsense, just the avant garde Francophile critics.
Actually, yes. Whether writing fiction or poetry or.. well, pretty much anything, I suppose, you have to be careful how you present your ideas or stories or words, so as to (if it is your desire) limit the available interpretations.
One of the challenges writing short stories or poetry, for example, is to write it in such a way as to impart to the reader your interpretation, what you want it to mean, and what you want the reader to get from it. This can be extremely difficult to do.
By picking apart other works and comparing your results to the results of others who have done the same, you get an insight as to what types of meaning different people will find in certain writing types, styles and manner presentation. This helps you anticipate some possible interpretations and avoid them.
Buy the President
I agree with the author in the broad thrust of his argument: that there is something useful in the technique of deconstruction but it's hard to tell what it is because there are no objective standards by which to measure things. I thought the sample deconstruction was excellent -- did no one else wonder why anyone would bother to discuss whether or not John F. Kennedy were homosexual?
I do wonder whether or not his assertion that commercial pressures keep engineers and others more "realistic" is true though. What about all the work done by scientists and statisticians in the employ of tobacco companies? Did they just look in the wrong place for the evidence? It can be plausibly argued that commercial pressures distort objectivity and hide truths as argued in this essay by Edward S. Herman:
The point is supported by other essays on the subject Science, Rationality, Post-Modernism and the Left. The nice thing about this, however, is that there are objective scientific standards that can be used to inform public policy if we decide to apply those standards: if there weren't then the managerial-PoMos would walk all over us.
Other posters have already mentioned the Sokal's Hoax affair and might find another essay on the subject Post-Modernism and Science interesting.
WARNING: all the above information comes from people who agree with Karl Marx on many things. Edward S. Hermann was Noam Chomsky's co-author on Manufacturing Consent and Michael Albert is the editor/publisher of Z Magazine. To be sure these people are more anarchist or social-libertarian than anything, but they're probably in agreement with Marx about significant numbers of things. So, if you're afraid of reading ideas you may not agree with don't, for the love of mike, open any of those links. Just open another tin of Instant Dismissal and whip it up well with some bile until it froths.
I used to run a website called "A Hundred Lines." On it, I would showcase attempts by amateur poets, authors and programmers to hone their skills by writing one hundred lines of ANYTHING, from pseudocode to psychobabble.
It was pretty popular at my university, but alas, it took a lot more time than just tossing out your practice. Because when you put it on a website, you felt the need to edit -- or at least, compile -- what you'd written, and that's a completely different skill.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
He aparantly failed to realize that post modernism is esentialy one big joke...
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
> However, most of what is interesting in the world is subjective. Is this a nice GUI? Subjective.
> Is this art good? Subjective. Is this food yummy? Subjective. Is this food good for me? Most
> likely subjective, unless it contains things that are poisonous to all humans, or contains no nutrients.
> I thrive on a vegetarian diet, and my wife is allergic to tofu (well, soy). Ultimately, food will kill you.
However, ``taste" (if I may use that word) is not as subjective as it appears. The philosopher Wittgenstein considered the problem (which is rooted in epistomology & the issue of solipism), & offers an intreguing argument that we can discuss these matters.
On a more pragmatic level, the novelist John Gardner reports a study where a number of professional African musicians were exposed to Western Classical music, & their opinions about which works were better than others tended to confirm what the Classical music buffs thought. Or as T.S. Eliot once stated, one is not born with good taste, one is acquired through education.
Thus, if one is skilled in reasoning & logic, & takes the time to learn the strengths & weaknesses of one given craft or genre, that skill can be applied to other skills or genres.
BTW, years ago when I wanted to write the Great American Novel, & attended a number of creative writing classes & workshops, the general opinion serious literary writers had of Deconstructionism was not as nice as this engineer. I'd say it was equivalent to how a Linux or BSD hacker values the opinion of the average Microsoft salesman.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
I'm no fan of postmodernism or deconstructionism, but answers.org is a fundamentalist tripe-site. There are more logical treatments of postmodernism, ones free of the biases found at answers.org. Is "Magic: the Gathering" an occult plot? Answers.org wants you to know! answers.org/issues/Magic_game.html
Speaking of 'bogosity' and lack of 'content', I think the article scores high on both. A news flash to the author, literary criticism is not a science and it's not mathematics. You can not prove something good. All of the author's arguments were of the following form. 1) Criticism says Shakespeare is great writer because his writing is good. 2) Why is it good? Criticism says because of x, y, and z. 3) I compose or find a horrid work that contains x, y and z 4) I say that your criticism is bogus and content free because of the above contradiction of a bad work matching your specification. 5) Shakespeare is therefore not a good writer. Since I can always perform the above operation on almost any statement in the field of literary criticism, then all literary criticism is bogus. What the author has really proved is that he made a correct career choice by going into hard science or engineering rather then the humanities. Professors of literature are, by and large, one the lowest paid class of professors on college campuses and the competition for the positions is fierce. In the same way I don't begrudge Madonna for making a living out of something she loves and that some people find value in, I don't begrudge Lit professors their job. In truth, my fondest memories of college are from my English and American lit. classes.
Oh, but postmodernism does acknowledge that there are priviledged readings of something - the readings that are accepted by society as a whole (society being the white, male, upper-middle class, educated individual). What postmodernism attempts to do is to illustrate/prove/uncover the idea that one reading is more true than another. However, postmodern critics vehemently and loudly protest the dominant class and do it through deconstruction and foucaultian readings of "texts". Just two cents from a PhD candidate in Rhetoric, who can't wait to get out of academics.
Well, by definition a theory isn't ever "wrong." It can be unfounded or incomplete or poorly argued or based on bad information or just plain stupid, but it's no more "wrong" than any theory can be "right."
See, a "theory" is just an abstract hypothesis. It's that way in science too...you can never "prove" a theory, only show that a given data set is explained by the theory. Literature is the same way...there is data (what characters do and think within a story) and deconstructionism is an effort to explain it. Sometimes it makes sense, like when you call Moby Dick an allegory for the struggle of man again [whatever]. Sometimes it doesn't, like deconstructing To Kill a Mockingbird as black nationalist propaganda (I've seen it). But as long as it explains the data, it's a valid theory -- even if it's crackpot as hell!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
This article is a great illustration of the wall that runs through the cultural divide between engineers and artists. Even though it illuminates only one side of the wall. Here's a bird's eye schematic, from a transcender of the barrier (I've been paid to produce both art and engineering in my career)
Engineers have "right or wrong" goals, based on proof, personal demonstration of facts. We stop working when we get it "right", and not until then. Our job is mainly to communicate with machines, or other engineers (and sometimes other people) as a means to that end.
Artists (literary and otherwise) are people who represent experiences. Sometimes the experiences are external, in the shared material world, sometimes they're internal, in the private mental world, usually at least a little bit of both. Artists work in the kinds of knowledge that aren't constrained by proof: belief and even faith. Belief is knowledge of facts that haven't been personally demonstrated, but accepted anyway. Faith is knowledge that can't be demonstrated, no matter how clever or diligent the effort, unconstrained (and even destroyed) by proof, but still true. Artistic criticism isn't concerned with right or wrong, but higher level "validity", and even higher (in human scale) "interest" and "relevance". Artists usually don't stop, except when pressured by the market. Our job is mainly to communicate with people, and sometimes machines as a means to that end.
Artists are often as frustrated by engineer's rigor and simplicity as engineers are frustrated by artists' fuzziness and complexity. But the division between the two is culturally recent, and they're two sides of the same coin: people who make things. Both have a lot to offer the other. And at their interface, where people transcend their job descriptions to express themselves with innovation, there's a lot of excitement and productivity, not to mention influence. Photoshop, the GIMP, renderfarms, AI, "eloquent" programming, grafitti, these all are representations of experience with style, using the highest tech available, even inventing new tools from the shards of the wall torn down by those who refuse to be confined to just one side.
--
make install -not war
What makes you think the author is correct? Engineers can be as reductive of other firelds as anyone else.
The article is is primarily argument by assertion; "Chip Morningstar" claims his stance is correct without providing any direct examples or quotations, and you all jump to agree without knowing anything about the subject? What a bunch of lemmings.
----- Trapped in time. Surrounded by evil. Low on gas. --Army of Darkness
"in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gddel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties."
This is wrong. Firstly, the proof is a mathematical theorem and is an argument based on logic. Secondly, the purpose of the theorem was not to "frighten mathematicians"; it showed that the Principia Mathematica was not a completely correct model of mathematics and that any logic system as complex as arithmetic was inconsistent or incomplete. The theorem is nothing like the absurd postmodernism that the author is criticising.
Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science by Sokal, Bricmont is probably the most useful resource for anyone interested in this.
Sokal and Bricmont choose their fight carefully. They pick some of the most highly regarded articles in the genre and point out some factual and logical errors made by the authors when appealing to 'science'. Some of these are an absolute hoot. If you have a science education, do not drink fluids while reading this stuff, or you'll snort and drown.
S&B find some people worse than others. Their most comprehensive slapping is given to Lacan, one of the most revered practitioners, famous for his apparent depth, erudition and familarity with hard science ideas. S&B point out the Lacan's bizarre misuse of such fashionable pop-science topics as quantum mechanics, chaos theory and information theory. Sometimes their exasperation is evident, and they come close to ridiculing this hero-to-many. But mostly their criticism is scholarly and dead-on.
'Intellectual Impostures' will supply you with plenty of ammunition for those debates with the cigarettes&coffee francophile humanities types. More seriously, it's a very thought-provoking book. Should be required reading for post-modern critics/philosophers, and also highly useful for scientists who like to think about a little more than which kernel branch to use.
I worked with Chip Morningstar at a startup he cofounded called Electric Communities in the 1990s. His article on deconstruction was already up on the web back then. I find that Chip's article helps me understand what Chip did at E/C.
Chip has a wicked sense of humor and was fun to work with. He also has a strong formalist streak that he brought to our design problem, which was to create a "next generation protocol suite for global cyberspace".
When I started there, I was very excited. We had some of the smartest people in the world working on a compelling problem. Chip was the leader.
Of course the problem that immediately came up and never went away is the "cat herding problem". Still, Chip had an enormous amount of influence on what we did.
We wound up with an ontology for cyberspace that was made up of "Unums", "Presences", and "Ingredients". Unums were the shared knowledge of an object, Presences where the awareness of an object from a particular agent's point of view, and Ingredients were like Aspects in Aspect Oriented Programming.
We built the whole system in a modified version of Java which had closures and an asynchronous messaging system. That was our big mistake - none of the standard Java development or debugging tools worked, so we wound up using printf as the only debugging technique. We also generated dozens of specialized Java classes for each Unum. The final system had something like 6000 generated Java classes and took many minutes to load. The Java variant was called E. The aspect compositor was called Pluribus.
The system became a combination of a global agreed set of verb meanings and a 1 on 1 intersubjective concept of object identity.
They did not even put a version number in the protocol anywhere. That meant that when they found a bug, they had to change all the clients simulatenously.
So we see, reified in software project, an interesting twist on Morningstar's take on Postmodernism, where he tried to formally blend objectivity and intersubjectivity.
His mistake was to de-emphasize hermenuitics - or the process by which a shared understanding of meaning changes. That version number would have changed everything.
After the entire E, Pluribus, Unum experiment failed, E/C tried to recover by doing chat systems (and failed) There was also a seperate spin-off project, also called E, that Mark Miller is still pursuing. Miller's E is heavily influenced by Scheme, has a scripting language syntax, and is oriented towards secure computation. If we had used E, or a Java extended via pattern rather than language facility, we would have likely succeeded.
Chip is still kicking around - he, like many of us old birds, gets right back up on the horse every time he falls off. I remember him fondly.
-- Jamie
It's that way in science too...you can never "prove" a theory, only show that a given data set is explained by the theory. Literature is the same way...there is data (what characters do and think within a story) and deconstructionism is an effort to explain it.
A theory doesn't explain data, because the data is inherently there, the data is always right (as long as you've collected it properly). The data tests wheter the theory is an accurate model of reality. "The earth is flat" is a theory that is contradicted by observation on a larger scale, for example. g=9.81m/s^2 is a better theory than "apples drop, so what?" but it's not correct when you're making observation on Mars.
When lit crit ventures into what a text is saying, it's trying to explain a text sure enough, but there is no test. Often an author will say "that's not what I meant" and laughed away, how could an author know what his/her text is trying to say?
Lit critics will tear apart a speach by Bush saying that he's implying such-and-such about modern societal blah, but empirical research (opionon polls) show that what the text is actually perceived to mean is "Saddam is behind 9/11". If lit crits were to make themselves useful, they'd study propaganda, but those who are good at it work for ad agencies and politicians, because you can earn money that way.
Good and bad are different than right or wrong. If I write a C program that's supposed to perform some algorithm it is easily testable. Qualitative judgements of good/bad in art and food etc are different.
For instance, let's assume that pomo crit is bullshit. Admittedly lots of it is although I find a decent quantity of deconstruction to be fascinating and Baudrillard is so full of shit at times it isn't even funny. At any rate, there is no denying that these critics have a ball at what they do. Deconstructing a paper towel in the crudest way may not lead to insightful lingual and semiotic theories but could be infinitely fun for the practitioner. Similarly, all those people who love Thomas Kinkade paintings live in their own bubbles too.
In this I find some validity for these criticisms. It seems that in some ways litcrit has gotten itself confused with hard science and baffled via its own absurd relativism, and in other ways it hasn't. Originally litcrit was simply effusive gushings regarding the critic's emotional identification with the author. Indeed, literary criticism was actually seen by some as a social stabilizer in britain in the wake of increasing secularization. A tool for people to identify with their nationality, heritage, and humanity (which are easy to see as being bound up in each other in colonial england).
When we look at it historically we see this shift from liberal humanist theory to pomo, deconstructionist etc.. There is no denying the subjective interpretations and experience of literature.
Trying to prove an enjoyable experience through 'hard science' is a fallacy. An example would be Jackson Pollock. No doubt one of the most controversial artists of his time. Indeed, Pollock is still controversial. One interesting thing about Pollock is the fact that his paintings are amazingly natural fractals as one mathematician discovered by running some algorithm over scans of his work. This is no common feat; most people who attempt to do such a thing fail when computers scan the work. So here we have a work with an aesthetic quality that has been 'scientifically proven' yet it is not universally loved! The only answer is that enjoyment of art is defined in many ways culturally. Pollocks fractals coincided with the modernist movement, at no other time could they have ever been accepted or most likely even concieved.
To wind things down one could say that what I am saying is that lit crits are happy believing in their pseudoscience just as everyone else is. I will admit that I despise many of their links to physics and other things. Sokal later wrote a book dismissing most of the scientific links that authors draw up (like Lacan and Topology). Obviously they got carried away. The fundamental truth of the lack of a universal enjoyment of a work and the need for social context however are important and useful. Additionally, even as the writer for the above article admits Deconstruction can be useful, especially when one carefully examines etymology and other such things in noticing social trends via language and other symbols. Have many gone too far and used sloppy science and judgement? Most definitely. Are these people completely wrongheaded? No. There is use in these techniques and I am fascinated by the possibilites they leave open. Unfortuanately they are victims of their own convictions taken too far.
Photos.
but.. a paradox isn't something with no answer. a paradox consists of conflicting propositions. no?
:)
anyway, i understand (i think) your argument:
1) the universe is subjective:
2) deconstruction is an objective process --> the result of deconstruction (say R) is objective.
3) but R belongs to the universe
--> therefore R is subjective. Contradiction.
No disagreement there,
however, you are using that to demonstrate:
1) every topic of discussion is subjective
2) communication is an objective process --> the result of communication (say C) is objective
3) but C is a topic of discussion
--> therefore C is subjective [here you say 'communication is impossible' in place of subjective]
and my argument is with your use of
" communication is impossible"
instead of
"comunnication is subjective"
hence all that 100% transfer of info, and the reconstruction of info during communication.
i believe communication is subjective,
that does not mean i believe it is impossible.
shanat
So therefore Postmodernism is like law and religion combined.
1 -- Because the result is always explained away, regardless of the outcome.
2 -- Because one can use it to prove any point one wants.
3 -- One is never quite sure if it actually revealed the truth of the matter at all.
You jerk, that sentence from the article was meant to illustrate the sillyness of postmodern jargon. It's the only sentence that doesn't make sense.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
tr "A-Z" "a-z"|tr " -A" "\n" | sort | uniq -c | grep [a-z] | sort -n |grep -E -v ' the$| a$| and$| or$'|tail -n 20
Add or remove words to ignore (including any markup that gets in) from the grep -E -v line. Replace tail with head to get the least used words.
You can get a very dim idea of what an article is about, but that's really about it.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
I believe this quote is from JFK (or maybe he stole
it from Truman).
"Don't tip high and say vote Democrat; tip
low and say vote Republican".
In "The Mythical Man-Month" Fred Brooks said that the structure of a program mirrors the structure of the organization that produced it. One of the main ideas behind litcrit and deconstruction was the same thing, stated for language in general. In the case of language, the "organization" was any structure of cultural power -- for instance, the folks who said "right to life" when you were trying to say "anti-abortion".
Deconstruction and litcrit were tools for fighting power -- nothing more. The problem with fighting power is that power controls the most powerful weapon of all, which is language. You can't step outside language to fight the control of language; you have to fight from inside language, making appropriate tools as you go. But as with every other powerful idea, decon and litcrit also became ways for people to get jobs. Once that happened, it was very difficult for a layman to tell the difference between what was decent work and what was jargon used for raising funds and holding down jobs.
The fact that you can buy a Windows box doesn't make Debian or SuSe less cool, even though the average joe won't notice the difference. Don't fall into that trap with litcrit. There is good and bad. Don't trash it until you can tell the difference.
"News for Nerds"? "Stuff that matters"? What did I miss?
If people are unhappy they will work to try to make themselves happy. A content society ceases to strive for something better. Advertising and media are constantly telling us we need to buy things to make our lives better.
An unhappy society has a competitive advantage over a happy one.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
The whole point of presenting the paradox is that you can then attack it logically and learn stuff from it, which you have done. However, I think you've arrived at too pat of an answer.
The problem is really with the idea of objectivity, not with the idea of communication. Objectivity is a theoretical ideal, but there's really no way to confirm that there is such a thing as an objective truth - the best we can do is to claim that there is, because there is no evidence to contradict its existence.
So then the question about communication is, when I have an idea and I want to communicate it to you, and I in fact try to communicate it to you, and I get back some confirmation that you've understood the idea, what has happened?
Was it the case that there was some kind of objective idea that I understood, and then I undertook to make you understand it, and then both my mind and yours had a referent to the same objective idea? Or was it the case that I had a subjective idea, and I attempted to describe it to you, and you understood an idea based on what I described, and that my idea and your idea were not in fact the same idea?
I'm not claiming to answer that question - I'm just raising it. I'm not convinced that it's even important to answer the question. The point is to consider the question, and to let that consideration color your understanding of the nature of communication. If you do not consider the question, you are likely to make the default assumption, which is that communication is about objective truths.
This is likely to cause trouble - if I think that I am talking about an objective truth with you, and you don't experience this truth the way I do, then at least for truths that matter, it's likely that our failure to agree, in combination with my misunderstanding of what has happened, is going to result in me being pissed off at you, or discounting what you say, or the like, with greater or lesser harmful results coming from that.
in a direct quotation, or leave it as is. The [sic] is quite unnecessary, as no one cares about your superior spelling ability, unless you wish to paint me a fool.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Hey, you're preaching to the converted, man. I'm a rhetoric grad -- rhetoric being the study of language-as-effective-communication (the nicey nice, "we read socrates and aristotle" side of propaganda), as opposed to literary criticism which is the study of language-as-an-artform.
Literary critics certainly are useful at helping people appreciate literature as art. But when it comes to what you're talking about, they're really about as effective as a web page designer offering advice on algorithm efficiency. Subconscious hypocritical aspects of discourse are hardly important when the focus is about something completely different.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
It's rather depressing how few people here seem to be prepared to do anything more than take the lazy "hurr hurr, these people think they're clever cos they use long words, ha ha how lame they are" approach rather than actually thinking about anything - particularly given the supposed imporance of Zen and zen-like ideas to the alleged hacker ethos/mindset. And I speak as a professional geek, writing this on a Linux box.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
You can definitely pronounce judgement on literary criticism. The trick is to apply whatever critical rules the author is using in his own critique of a work of literature to his own critique. Typically, they make the same "errors" they accuse the literary author of making. It's kind of fun.
The best way to study Lit. Crit. is with a pitcher of good beer. It helps to have nice looking members of the opposite sex in your study group.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Assuming your head has grown back now, you'll probably want to keep it away from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: you'd be in for a series of explosions that would make your head sound like a Gatling gun.
I do wonder sometimes if there was a proofreader for that book and, if so, how many years of rehabilitation he required.
"Are you being weird, or sarcastic?" said Emma. I said I didn't know because I get the two feelings mixed up.
I'm not pointing out any differences. My point is that neither does the author of the article, yet his argument rests on the same confusion. Deconstruction does not confuse the terms. Actually, convention is what makes (albeit an uncertain) understanding of the artificial language possible. Something can be both unconventional and artificial, and something can be conventional and un-artificial, like love, which brings me to:
No, it does not. Just like all writing and thinking about love is artificial, yet love itself isn't (I hope): the sign doesn't mean that you're not smoking, it means that you should not. It's conventional, and it's artificial. If you're unconventional, you can puff smoke all you want in spite of it, so it's obviously artificial as well. But this has nothing to do with deconstruction: If there's any ethics in deconstruction at all (and I sincerely think there is), it would be that understanding is hard (total understanding impossible), and you should respect other people's right to (mis)interpret. Which means you should ask the nothing-buttering asshole who continues to smoke yet again, in a different way (he might be blind, after all), before you get a bucket of water. Deconstructionism doesn't say you can do anything you want, and that other people are illusions. It's not an insane school of thought.
Perhaps, but it's still not an adequate understanding of Derrida. But as both I and Derrida have said, understanding is difficult. Understanding Derrida is probably impossible. That "linuguistic meaning is fundamentally uncertain" is a statement that illustrates its own uncertainty. It has to, or it would be self-contradicory in a different way. The statement "Linguistic meaning is certain" is self-contradictory by having many possible meanings (it has, just read it over and over again until you don't understand it!), but it lacks the virtue of being self-explanatory in all interpretations I can think of.
(Oh, and BTW: my definition of the word "tenet" was taken from WordNet 2.0.)
No, he doesn't. He tries to apply simple R.A.A.-tests (Reductio Ad Absurdum) to Derrida's writing (and various claims that I've no idea where are taken from), but he doesn't do it well, as logic actually demands precise definitions, and Dr. Tom Snyder needs confusion of terms to do his logic tricks.
Deconstruction would show how the text's own logic creates the confusion of terms; how metonymy becomes or undermines metaphor, and vice versa. It's not the statement that linguistic meaning is uncertain that is interesting, it's how the indetermination is demonstrated, and of course the indetermination of the demonstration.
I don't claim it's false, I claim that it's not epistemologically self-evident that there is one way to God, and that in claiming so, he shows his agenda.
I was wondering what that mess was...
Shame on Google.
Don't your realize that 95% of the humanities is designed to trap people with severe mental defects, so they don't get out into the Real World? By keeping them safe and talking to each other, society inures itself to their unique, but completely worthless jabbering. Indeed, the humanities could be viewed as an experiment in large group masterbation.
The only ones with this defect who have successfully managed to escape from academia are lawyers, psychologists, and economists, much to the detriment to society at large.
Modern science is currently unable to devise a way to sequester practitioners of the above 'disciplines', but have successfully segrated english departments by planting a mental virus (deconstructionism), making most english graduate students and faculty unemployable.
Here are some ideas for texts you might try to deconstruct, once you are ready to attempt it yourself, graded by approximate level of difficulty:
Beginner:
Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea
Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers
this article
James Cameron's The Terminator
issue #1 of Wired
anything by Marx
Excellent! You have deconstructed the one of the Beginner assignments! Care to go for the rest?
For your amusement there is a postmodern essay generator based on a Chomsky grammar tree available here:
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
oh, i totally agree with that. :P
big chunk of the nastiness in the world comes from peoples failure to get this. at a lot of cocktail parties, when religon comes up, my standard answer is always to agree with the majority view, as it is safest. [grin]
of course, when i am with friends, drinking, it's most fun to play the devil's advocate. irritating habit tho...
was just nipicking with my original arguement
but... as you say, the action is important. and therin is the value of deconstruction to a person.
--> as a means, not an 'end-in-itself'.
shanat
Guess what folks! Even the foundations of mathematics are not really foundations. They ARE NOT a reflection of reality (realities, maybe). You can start with Wittgenstein and then through Feyerabend on the "positivistic" side of things to see that even hard science isn't that hard, especially the "underpinnings" of mathematics. As a matter of fact, it is particularly soft, since most science is colored by those doing science -- their nationalities, their gender, their 'race,' their politics, etc. No one disputes in 'postmodern' criticism the validity of the claims of science, just the culture behind the claims. To think this is at odds with science to not even understand the project.
I heard a funny quip from a theoretical physicist friend once: "Engineering is science for Southern Baptists. All the fun, none of the consequences." So what is going on there? A critical theory person would not ask who is right or wrong, he/she would just do the history, archaeology, etc of the claim. Think about it. Thinking is fun.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
In the hard sciences, the citation rate for papers (that is, number of times a paper was cited in other papers) was fairly high (I forget the number and won't guess). In English/Lit, it was 1. Inference: nobody reads these things. So I don't think the hoax would be discovered had it not been announced.
I admit a certain hostility - I abandoned English classes after attending one as a prospective student. The class was discussing an essay of criticism on "Huckleberry Finn". After 20 minutes or so of discussing the essay, the Prof. asked how many had actually read Huck. A minority of hands went up. Now, we can assume that some hands stayed down due to reticence or something, but to me the conclusion that criticism of text had been elevated to a status independent of text was alarming and conclusive. (Also the possiblity that people could reach that point in life without having read it - weird!)
I still read seriously, but I am inclined to be dismissive of the academic lit. crit. industry. One class is not sufficient evidence for such a decision, of course, but I just don't see enough evidence to the contrary to revisit my conclusion.
You hit the nail right on the head
> Understanding Derrida is probably impossible
Not having read Derrida, I'll take your word for it. However, if we can't understand what we're saying, how can we hope to communicate anything?
> That "linuguistic meaning is
> fundamentally uncertain" is a
> statement that illustrates its own uncertainty.
Does it illustrate that? It seems to me to be an example of a contradiction, same as "there is absolutely no absolute truth".
> I claim that it's not epistemologically
> self-evident that there is one way to God
Ah, OK. Yes, I agree that his last conclusion "there is indeed one way to God" doesn't follow from his previous statement "Either there is one way to God or there is no one way to God".
The Army reading list
The problem where people in a certain sector only get interactive feedback from others in the same sector applies well to TV news anchors and newspaper writers. There is an inside look at Dan Rathers in a book by a Bernard Goldberg, "Bias". He notes how Rathers is surrounded by people who think exactly the same way he does. This leads Rather to thinking his views are centered within the mass population.
--Brian
However, I also noticed that Postmodern Lit Crit had become a growth industry on some college campuses, creating a whole strata of students and teachers involved in a constant circular conversation whose only purpose seemed to be the stimulation of recursion and the attaining of tenure. The theory produced some original and interesting thought, some patently ridiculous shit, and lots and lots of boring fiction. I even developed a nickname for such fiction -- MFA fiction. It's usually written by middle class white folk with little or no experience outside the ivory tower world with a condescending fascination on working class 'Merica.
This guy's onto that, and in a really good way. Unfortunately, any group produces its own symbols of group identity and people who are dependent on that group identity for everything, and just as there are people who would fold up and die if the next Lord of the Rings movie doesn't come out on DVD, there are people who, without their Masters degree and sense of superiority, would have no reason for living. The guy doesn't have the whole story, as there is some real value in all this theory -- The Matrix takes a lot from Baudillard and his postmodern work. Postmodernism is also a valuable tool for looking at cultural context, i.e., understanding the ways in which disparate cultures come together and clash. The "rootlessness" of Postmodernism is a great help here, as it is not dependent on one world view, such as earlier cultural analyses (Social Darwinism comes to mind). This aside, he has hit the bullseye on the bullshit side of modern Lit Crit.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
"You know Po-Mo.."
"Weird for the sake of being weird.."
100% Insightful
Derrida's perceptive reply went to the heart of classical general relativity:
Does that passage make any kind of sense at all? It's even more hilarious that the Social Text editors read this and didn't realize this was meaningless babble, just because Derrida wrote it.
The posts on this site are written by a longtime techie Stephen Den Beste, but are not the usual techie subjects. I also like his Strategic Overview of the US war on terror in general, and Iraq in specific.
Also, more techie oriented, this discussion is about the creation of a Super-human Intelligence that's probably not what you'd think it is.
I read USS Clueless pretty much every day now.
Damnit! And I just got my degree in critical studies! Ahh well...I knew it was BS when I started. The trick is realizing that so is everything else. ;-)
Disclaimer: I am a technologist, not a literary academic; I married into the latter field.
You know how annoying it is when a non-techie gains insight into some aspect of technology and goes wild with their newfound knowledge, believing it has granted them an understanding of the entire field?
That's exactly what Mr. Morningstar has done.
To put it another way, he has been building dinosaurs. He looks at the pieces he's got, assumes they comprise the whole, and assembles them based on his interpretation of their function. Except he doesn't know anything about dinosaur bones, or about dinosaurs, for that matter.
The assertion that you can deconstruct anything into anything else is the remedial argument of one who doesn't understand deconstruction or its place within the greater field of literary and artistic criticism. He uses elementary logic and supposition to build his argument, while ignoring the actual facts of the field.
First and foremost: neither postmodernism nor deconstruction are the field of literary criticism, nor are they the field of academic humanities. They are tools of criticism that have evolved and taken shape as the community has broken with the methods and ideas of the past.
Deconstruction was the first of the literary theories, having been influenced by the deconstructive methods of Freud's psychoanalysis. It in no way promotes or validates Freud's psychology but, just as modern psychology, has borrowed much from Freud's methods. Deconstruction has since been demoted from a theory to a tool as I understand it. And just as Occam's Razor is very useful where appropriate, it is hardly descriptive of the field as a whole.
Which is why the field continues to progress. It keeps deconstruction as one of an array of tools for applying the various literary theories which now abound. Before deconstruction, all literary criticism was, "get in the author's head and figure out what he/she was thinking," performed in ivory-tower isolation. That is the mode of criticism that rests on being clever rather than being right. And this type of criticism still exists, this type of scholar has not been eliminated from the field, but is part of an aging minority.
And it's easy to see why. We cannot get inside an author's head, nor assert to have done so. The only way to defend such an approach is through ivory-tower isolation and exclusion--a detriment to constructive dialogue.
Furthermore, it is fundamental to our contemporary view of art that we can gain more and varied insights than its creators intend. First, because it reflects aspects of the artist's thinking that are the result of social and historical influences that are better understood in hindsight. Second, we interpret everything through our own experience and biases, which determines on a very fundamental level how we experience a given text.
Postmodernism, modernism, feminism (which is not the same as political feminism, but is more aptly framed as "women's studies"), gay/lesbian studies, racial studies, etc. These are the fruits of twentieth century progress. The old order ignored--no, categorically rejected context--historical, social, personal, etc. Rejected the significance of race, gender, belief: everything but the words on the page.
Literary theory incorporates all of these into it's processes. It is not about being right *or* being clever. It is about delving into the work itself and seeing what of value may be found. Scholars search for insight into the works, the times and events surrounding them, and ourselves and our time. The very use of the word "text" as something distinct from "work" is indicative of this shift. We study the text, among other things, in order to study the work.
This has resulted in the field, previously dominated by white men of letters, to become much more inclusive. And more importantly, it makes the work of the field much more accessible to those outside it. More significantly, the fruits of these change
I want to a highschool where literary critism was a normal event in literature classes. I've always been opposed to this nonsense, since I started out as an artist and have heard people reading things into paintings I've done, or paintings that have been done by people I know: paintings which in many cases mean absoultely nothing. In addition, a good percentage of the art teachers I've had have taught "tricks" like blind contour drawings as basis for paintings, and using color schemes that apply a meaning even when no meaning exists.
In any case, in my softmore year, we were assigned the hobbit which we had to read, and then explain what the book was really about. Aside from having read the book several times prior to the class, I happened to have the first official U.S. priting, which had a rather extensive introductory letter by tolkien. Aside from the very beginning, which talked about how this was the first printing, and not to purchase the book from other U.S. publishers (they did not have the rights to publish it and were not giving him residuals) he went on to discuss the meaning of the book -- speciffically, the entire lack thereof. He disavowed the book being a metaphore for anything, and asked the reader to accept it for what is was - a story, a flight of fancy, a fantasy which he wrote for nothing other than the purpose of enjoyment. I photocopied the introducion, wrote a quick appology for not disecting the meaning of the book considering that I felt it would be disrespectfull of the author to read meaning into it when he has specifically asked his readers not to. I got a D-.
RandomAndInteresting.comdefending the world from stupidity since 1979
Play with the URL:
"Answers In Action is a dynamic non-profit, evangelical, Christian organization based in Costa Mesa, California, which trains individuals to think logically and reasonably about all things."
Logical, reasonable evangelical Christians says it all, I think.
I got my bachelor's degree in English, Linguistics and CS. My senior thesis in English was intentionally written in plain, easy to understand US English. I received many, many compliments for the readability and understandability of my work from my thesis committee. The professors on my committee (a US News top-10 English Literature program) hate "postmodern" critical techniques. My father is an art professor at the same school. He detests this (as someone posted earlier) masturbatory writing style. I have a feeling PoMoLitCrit will be short lived. It is not taken seriously by anyone in the humanities who does not have something to hide academically. Please do not make the error of using a few academically dishonest, mistakenly tenured morons to judge the whole lot of us.
For more on this subject check out Richard Dawkin's article post-modernism disrobed
Also here Noam Chomksy reaches similar conclusions.
From Chomsky's comments...
So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.
Tell me about it. My head will explode if I, e.g., see one more paper about heuristic solutions to problem X using genetic algorithms. Every displicine has its share of cookie-cutter papers and pretentious jargon.
Derrida's assertions really aren't that radical. You can find many elements of them in Peirce 60 - 80 years earlier. (And in his critique of Saussure Derrida mentions Peirce a lot). Rather than saying "indeterminate" simply say "incomplete." There is a common view in many fields that when you say anything the meaning is total and finished. Derrida simply points out that this isn't the case. Further he tries to analyze the logic of what enables meaning. But he is often cast as being opposed to truth or meaning. This isn't the case and he has emphatically denied it. I like the way Eco puts it. Derrida finds non-obvious truths as well as stating common truths from non-obvious points of view. The problem is that most in the humanities aren't really able to deal well with careful rigorous thinking. So Deconstruction is amazingly abused in literature and the social sciences. But those abuses have more in common with Margaret Mead and the tendencies towards relativism that arose out of anthropology than the kind of philosophy espounded by Derrida. Derrida's weakness is that he seems only willing to speak in terms of a deconstruction of the questions at hand. It is rather rare that he speaks clearly. You can see this in his answers to questions about 9/11 that were widely quoted on the net. This is unfortunate as it propagates the idea of his being focused in on obsfusication and gibberish. While I don't know why he does this (and he certainly makes mistakes in such offhand comments) I suspect it is because he is concerned about the ethical implications of deconstruction. A lot of criticisms in France about deconstruction relate to how it deals with human actions. It appears to really offer nothing. (And I think it does that. I don't understand why an analysis of linguistic ought to have ethical implications) He, however, clearly wants an ethical theory in the more French tradition. I think he largely failed in this. But his attempts to find some larger purpose certainly are interesting. (_The Gift of Death_ being the most interesting)
> Logical, reasonable evangelical Christians
> says it all, I think.
Hm. Supposing that blurb said "logical, evangelical Muslims"? Would you still dismiss it?
The Army reading list
That was the worst logic I have ever seen!!
I have to defend the editors here. Maybe there is not a privileged reading but this is not the point. The reading of the editors has been harmed by the deception they have been subjected to. The reading of the editors included the fact that they had acquired a trust in the authors of papers submitted to them. They did not need to verify every details of an article they didn't understand because the trust in the authors filled that void. If they knew some people were trying to deceive them, maybe they would have been doing reading based on the submitted article only and not on trust. Doing extensive research and reading every article they planned to publish would not have been practical and not necessary assuming the trust I mentioned.
I think Sokal made a point here but not a strong one. If he had anonymously warned the editors beforehand that a bogus article was coming and that they had to be watchful. They wouldn't have relied on trust to judge articles. If they still could not detect the bogus article then Sokal would have made a really strong point.
That's not accurate either. A better way of saying it is to say that you can't understand a complete or total meaning of what is being said. An other way this is often put is that there is only say-ing and not a said.
The basic analysis that I think fits what Derrida is doing can be found in the analysis of death and metaphysics in Heidegger's _Being and Time_. While Heidegger also is being so careful so as to be confusion, the basic idea is this. To speak of metaphysics (a discourse where entities are complete or determinate) there must be an end to a discussion. No more *new* can be understood or expressed about the entity. It is complete. Thus the possibility of metaphysics requires an end or death. Yet to be able to quote or use a text implies that it is not yet dead. Thus this can't be true. So we have to move to a view of ontology which fundamentally involves incompleteness or indeterminism.
The error most make is to assume that indeterminacy involves total indeterminacy. Yet clearly we communicate and understand. So this is obviously false. However I don't think Derrida (or Heidgger, Levinas, or others) argue for this. So it is the attack of a strawman.
A different way of putting it is in terms of realism. Consider speaking about a person. The meaning of that term I use to communicate is *not* limited by my understanding. When I say "George went outside" clearly I mean the real person George and not simply what I understand by George. But the meaning of George is always unfinished. A 100 years from now someone may have some new understanding of George in terms of those future current events. So the meaning of any term is always unfinished and this means all things I say are unfinished. They have new meanings which are fundamentally entailed by my intents because I intend in terms of real entities.
When put that way deconstruction is far less controversial.
Am I the only one reminded a bit of Bayesian
spam filtering?
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Wow. Thanks for that informative reference, it really does go a long way to vindicating the publishers of Social Text, who at least admitted ahead of time that they weren't physicists and were taking someone from an outside discipline at his word. The people who published the Bogdanov papers have no such excuse.
Until postmodernist theorists came along in anthro, it was always assumed that any write-up of a cultural activity could be viewed as the objective analysis of the observer. In reality, there's *a lot* that can influence the anthropologist to see (or more often, not see) important parts of an expressed social behavior. The positive consequence was the harder-working anthropologists could take the time to catalog as many perspectives as possible and formulate a sophisticated analysis for application. I had a few professors who contracted with Xerox PARC, and their work in workplace communication was obviously stronger because they had taken the time to try different approaches to seeing where there are snafus between individuals and departments (Quick aside: much of this work can be applied to understanding the communication problems that arise between off-shore firms and domestic customers).
The biggest problem with postmodernism being applied outside lit-crit is when the critics start taking criticism as canon. As Walter points out, a PoMo anthropologist would take the "better" value judgement from adaptationism as proof that it's just a limited opinion. I once sacrificed an A in a class arguing with a T.A. that a poor choice of words by an author shouldn't invalidate an entire body of scientific evidence. The most extreme versions of this attempt to partition "postmodernist knowledge" from "scientific knowledge" led Stanford's anthro department to fall apart a few years ago into two distinct departments that spend most of the time arguing with one another (or, at least, that's how it comes across in journals).
My favorite archaeology professor once said, "The only thing postmodernists proved absolutely is that talking to yourself can get you published." My favorite "postmodernist" anthro professor said essentially the same thing years later. The best postmodernists don't try to prove "science" as irrelevant; they try to prove why other people think it is (after all, somewhere around 75% of Americans think evolution is untenable in the face of creationism). Alas, theorists in this vein are few and far between, and that bodes poorly for both lit-crit and the social sciences.
Why would he mod it down, because it's not true?
Hyuck hyuck hyuck. JK, mods!
Man, once your field has produced that level of repeated stupidity, you don't have leave to say sh1t about anybody else's failure to make sense!
the obvious reason why he had a hard time understanding the humanities academics is because humanities majors are often not that far off from business majors. Both fields are (generally) contrived bullshit so as to try and create the appreance of actual substance. Most of the people in these specific fields of academics are worthless sacks of flesh, and don't have many, if any, redeemably qualities outside their field, let alone an independent, intellectual thought: they simply pick and chose from what the Greats have to say.
- an ex-English, ex-IT, CS major.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
In the end, though, it might be easier and every bit as effective to just continue assuming all the marketing types are on crack.
The paper that this article is linking to was actually written in June 1993, as the version on the author's own site shows.
Nevertheless, it's an interesting paper, because the author went to extraordinary efforts to make sense of the literary criticism, instead of just shallowly dismissing it all as jargon.
Actually, I'm in the middle of an article (now several months old, I'm a bit behind) in Discover about a guy who has come up with a compelling theory based on the idea that c may, in fact, not be constant.
The theory doesn't argue that c isn't constant now, but rather that it may not have been constant during some breif period in the Big Bang. As I understand it the theory suggests that light may have energy states similar to matter, with the current state being "solid", like ice, and thus c being constant.
Obviously, though, the theory deals with whether c is a mathematical constant. I don't know what the hell Derrida was trying to say.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Have you ever seen The Princess Bride? Remember the scene where the Prince is about to toast and drink with Wallace Shawn's character Vizzini the "intellectual" leader of the "bad guys". The scene's set up spawns a monologue for Vizzini wherein he thinks aloud about who's going to be a victim of "Iocaine" poison. His rationalizations about which goblet to pick begin with an attempt to read The Prince and spin off into absurdity without ever completely loosing a thread of "smart sounding" logic. The humor of the scene stems from Vizzini's solipsitic outsmarting of himself.
I think most of the publication that came from this literary/cultural movement should be perceived as we are supposed to perceive Vizzini. The character died because he was so enamoured with his own ability to "talk smart" that he lost sight of the original problem.
I remember reading the article /. is pointing out here a long time ago (this may be a dupe). The points made about the self-containment of the Humanities' academic community are worth as much as Sokal's example. A mutual admiration society whos members compete for the captain's chair in the Flying Wedge of avant garde literary criticism is bound to go a little nuts.
That's exactly how Sokal did his experiment. Anyone who knew anything about science or who even asked a scientist "What the flerp is this guy talking about?" would have seen the article for the steaming pile of unprocessed effluent that it was.
The editors didn't. Instead they went with the warm fuzzies that the reference list and conclusion gave them.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
The people on the side of literary and science criticism and philosophy make some excellent points, and in Sokal's replies he gives ground and even offers retractions (usually in the form of "Oh, I never meant to say that in the first place. Here's what I really meant..." (paraphrased)).
These are complex issues. And, while the typical layman, science geek or Slashdot reader might take a cursory look at the Sokal hoax and hastily conclude that "Har! Har! Those Pomo eggheads sure got taken down a notch!" or look at it as a "score for hard science", if you look deeper you'll see that Sokal isn't standing on as solid a foundation as he'd like you to believe.
Not that he didn't have any points worth making. He did have one, relatively minor, point. Specifically, that certain authors sometimes misuse scientific terms. However, this does not mean that postmodernism, much less all of philosophy or all of the humanities are fraudulent.
Of course none of this will deter scientimists, crypto-materialists and logical positivists the world round from continuing to build monuments to Sokal anyway.
Fidel Castro on Communism: "We all knew this mumbo jumbo wouldn't fly."
I do wonder sometimes if there was a proofreader for that book and, if so, how many years of rehabilitation he required.
Finnegans wake? Proofreading? The story I remember is that Joyce sent the book off to be retyped with the hope of adding errors that he hadn't thought of himself.
I found your post quite interesting and was puzzled as to why you would post it anonymously. But in any case, I have a philosophy degree and see this discussion as echoing a larger (or perhaps just similar) issue in philosophy as a whole. In my studies it seemed no single philosophy could really take you from the primacy of your thoughts and your existence to the day to day reality of practical things. Studying each philosophical viewpoint was interesting in that it showed connections and made observations that were illuminating in some respect. But when criticized, none could withstand relentlessly applied logic.
You referenced Kuhn and his philosophy of science. While widely paraphrased (and to my understanding, bastardized) his work regarding paradigms of scientific viewpoint were irreconcilable with each other. The Copernican paradigm completely replaces the "Sun revolves around the earth" paradigm. But as I recall, he didn't really have an answer for how incremental scientific progress is made. How has medicine has improved to give us longer and healthier lifespans, if every preceding theory is thrown out when a new one is adopted.
This seems to me to be a metaphor for the disconnect of philosophy and (for lack of a better term) the practicalities of daily life. You suggest that science is at a crisis point. But it seems to me that this crisis of science floundering for practical answers to deeper questions and philosophy floundering to explain fully even the most obvious practical facts, has been going on for some time. It does seem to me that science is making inexorable progress. I don't know if the same could be said of philosophy, but either way I don't know that I can agree with your conclusion that a "grand unified theory" is not possible.
I can certainly understand why you would be skeptical of its being achieved anytime soon, but I would submit that we just don't know enough about our unsolved problems to know whether we will ever solve them.
It's easy to use deconstructionism to tear down every thought and expression, but I think there is tangible evidence of increasing knowledge. I can not deny that I am sitting here having a heady discussion virtually with someone who could be anywhere in the world, in a way that was impossible just a few years ago. I can think of a number of similar examples.
Good discussion. I apologize in advance if I put words in anyone's mouth that they didn't want there.
"Contrarily the lookaside buffer might not be the panacea... "
The paper took an extra year to be published because the editors couldn't find any reviewers who were
It is to the credit of the potential reviewers and the staff at the journal that they took the time and care on this.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gddel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties.
Actually Godel's work in the 1930's had meaning, because mathematicians where looking for a way to establish an absolute consistency of a formal system. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but the work really was brilliant. It's really philosophy quantified in math. I can't imagine in a world where communication (english), not rigor (math) is key that semantics could be so flexible.
However, I do have one rational defense for deconstruction. We know that writers often draw from their own experiences. We also know that each of us tends to be biased when interpreting reality. So perhaps, our subconscious betrays us or little details and omissions can hint to things the author has overlooked. Although, I believe this relates more to psychology than the humanities, this may partly explain the origins of deconstruction.
Incidentally, I do get a kick out of an engineer deconstructing deconstruction. Very Feynmanesque.
EXERCISES:
Construct a deconstruction of all deconstructions including the meta-deconstruction itself. I'll leave it as a trivial exercise for the reader.
What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean my sig is repetitive? What do you mean....
That's a very good question that I think only the editors can answer. But my guesses would be that they were either so angry that they were being experimented on in this fashion that they couldn't come up with a proper response, that they really are "more deferent to the so-called `cultural authority of technoscience' than they would care to admit?", or they're not nearly as bright as they want us to believe.
The author has an inferiority complex so large, it will collapse into a singularity and crush us all.
As someone who both studies English at the graduate level and reads Slashdot daily (!), maybe I can shed some clarifying light on deconstruction and postmodern literary criticism.
First of all, as several previous posters have noted, this article is quite old--I read it a few years ago.
It is probably prudent to note that there is--and has been for a number of years--an ongoing backlash against postmodern literary criticism in the ivory tower. While critical methodologies informed by deconstruction/postmodernism were very much in vogue during the early and mid 1990s, their popularity has waned in recent years.
In my judgment, part of the reason for this precipitious decline is that there is an increasing number of academics taking issue with the explicit politicization of most deconstructionist criticism. While acknowledging that all criticism is political in some sense or other, these individuals (among whom I number myself) decry the explicit advancing of a political agenda through literary criticism. It seems cliche to skewer deconstruction-based theories as political soapboxes, but the cliche exists for a reason.
I am glossing over some complex arguments with many shades of gray. Still, I know of many academics (with liberal political beliefs, I might note) who have always encouraged and pursued conservative, old-school "close readings" rather than politicized, agenda-based deconstruction. My sense of the current state of English studies is that many such scholars learn and appreciate contemporary literary theory, often utilizing its useful ideas and methods while keeping their scholarship firmly grounded in close, responsible reading.
Although this article is engagingly written and entertaining to read, it seems unlikely that an article such as this one would have much freshness or currency in the humanities academy nowadays. Just a few thoughts from someone who is in the midst of it all.
interesting. So no more trying to figure out whether cyberspace is a text?
i hope this is the same guy that worked on SCUMM / Habitat...
man, to have worked at lucasfilm games back in the day...
Keep your packets off my GNU/Girlfriend!
Actually, it's mostly just artsy-fartsy claptrap.
Have you ever wondered how in someone's right mind they could write something, argue some point, make some speech, appear in a terrible movie, etc. - while lacking the ability to ask them and/or get a direct answer?
Well the Humanities are (in theory) supposed to give you the insight into reading behind the lines, and figure out what motivates people (or society) to do the things they do. Usually they equip you to do this by analyzing and studying older cultural artifacts (history, art, literature) in the hope that it brings perspective.
It seems that academia has given up on trying to make this stuff relevant anymore, except maybe to social scientists and anthropologists.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
But Sokal didnt start a whole new branch of physics.
If he explores all forms and substances Straight homeward to their symbol-essences; He shall not die.
The Sokal paper wasn't a primer on physics, so the situations aren't comparable.
IIRC, /. ran a story (long ago) pointing to a theory like that, or rather, the article claimed that c might have been a bit "slower" than it is today.
The paper was written by smart people, though they wrote it as a joke.
My other first post is car post.
"But the tangle offers a safe refuge for the academics. It erects a wall between them and the rest of the world. It immunizes them against having to confront their own failings, since any genuine criticism can simply be absorbed into the morass and made indistinguishable from all the other verbiage. Intellectual tools that might help prune the thicket are systematically ignored or discredited. This is why, for example, science, psychology and economics are represented in the literary world by theories that were abandoned by practicing scientists, psychologists and economists fifty or a hundred years ago. The field is absorbed in triviality."
Here, despite all that you have learned about deconstruction, you show that you have yet succeeded in understanding it. Deconstruction has always been not about the practical, but about the bare foundations of thought. Though this may be trivial to you and your goals, this is exactly what the purpose of deconstruction is.
As for 'the wall between them and the rest of the world', your notion seems to lead more towards conformity and ad populum, rather then express rationality.
The difference being that the Bogdanov brothers might have actually believed in the nonsense they were spouting, and the journal their paper was published in wasn't exactly a premire physics journal.
... oh nevermind. :P
But what is worse about the Bogdanov case, is that in this situation you have two people getting their degree's while sliding down a train of this shit. One wonders how much math and physics they actually know. They use so many different concepts from different fields, that it takes slow people like me a good 10-30 minutes with references to determine that an entire paragraph is totally incoherent garbage. I remembered one part where they were talking about the singularity of the big bang universe having a +,+,+,+ metric and not a +,-,-,- mertric and they for some reason they
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
Though I also wish this AC had provided some insight into where current thought in this field has gone since.
It also occurs to me that the original critique describes a group of people and an intellectual discourse that bears at least some resemblance to the state of institutions of higher learning in the Islamic world. It has been alleged that more than half of all student in universities in the Islamic world are studying Islam, with a low - or relatively low - component of business, engineering, medicine and other worldly pursuits. The worldly pursuits, of course, are those which tend to run hard aground when they lose touch with reality, whereas religious or philosophical studies can remain afloat in illusion for far longer, if not indefinitely.
To hear the gods laugh tell them your plans.
The parent author is very literate and has some interesting ideas, but since s/he exposes an ignorance that is unusual for someone who seems otherwise intelligent, I'll venture that s/he's actually a troll. I'll bite just for fun.
"If language was really so easy to break down, analyse and interpret in a definitive matter, why is it that NLP is still in its infancy...?"
You don't need to be a deconstructionist to parse natural language. NLP is still in its infancy because common sense is often necessary to remove syntactic and semantic ambiguities.
"Science would benefit from the application of deconstruction and any other theory that might help it sort out what it means to claim that something is true, valid or meaningful."
Scientists aren't fools; they understand a theory as an interpretation of evidence, and consciously use the word "true" as a brief way of saying "so likely as to lie beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt." This understanding is the basis of the scientific method and is essential for success in academia (even though silly politics are too).
"Is it possible that there are two versions of science, both true? I suppose. Maybe particle/wave theory is an example. Maybe the controversies in superstring theory are other examples."
No. Wave/Particle duality is part of a single theory that is half wrong when either component is taken away. Controversies in String Theory are aesthetic because all String Theorists agree that future experiments, as difficult as they will be to devise and conduct, are necessary if the theory is to hold water. More generally, in the scientific community all disagreements about a theory are aesthetic: they vanish when the theory is shown to predict the behavior of a system better than the prevailing one.
"language is not capable of specificity"
You can never completely eliminate the possibility of being misinterpreted, but you can get arbitrarily close. In other words, you're theoretically right but practically wrong.
"with jargon, social and cultural perspectives, indeterminacy of the writer and reader, etc, the quest for the grand unified theory is not possible."
Is it possible that your claim is incorrect? If so, then it is possible that "the quest for the grand unified theory" is possible. If it's possible that it's possible, then it's possible. So the remotest possibility of folly renders this claim completely wrong.
If you would argue that this claim must be absolutely correct, you won't get my vote without a fairly rigorous proof.
Instead I'll assume that by "not possible" you mean "highly unlikely". I'll counter that with the observation that misunderstandings in the scientific community are naturally ironed out by the rigor that scientists employ when making their arguments.
In particular, jargon is an important part of that rigor rather than a hindrance to it. I believe it was you who wrote, "Jargon is necessary to identify complex (or specific) ideas in a minimal amount of words/time." (So is language capable of specificity or not?)
Your entire argument is so strongly based on the need to take great care when proclaiming something to be true that I'm surprised you were so bold in this final claim. More than anything else, this is what has me thinking you're a troll.
Alright, I've had my fun. If you meant all of the above sincerely, I apologize for calling you a troll.
unfortunately post-modern criticism of every kind is a field where many people can (and often do) say you're wrong. When there is no "right" answer, they're all wrong, right?
I am an English professor who teaches software engineering to humanists (long story). I also spent years as a professional software developer working.
Imagine if some English major skimmed through Knuth (TAOCP) and said:
"At first it seemed mostly like a bunch of squiggly lines and numbers. I suspected it might be bullshit (that was my working hypothesis), but in my magnanimity I decided to check it all out and see if it made any sense. I read a couple of books on how to write Perl programs, and I even hung out on the comp.algorithms newsgroup for awhile. I've now reached the conclusion that it is indeed mostly bullshit (I still can't understand Knuth), but there's really something there."
I'm quite at a loss reading this whole discussion. "Deconstruction" is held up as a blanket term for "anything goes" literary criticism, poststructuralist thought is repeatedly characterized as being 99% bullshit, and the language of modern critical theory is portrayed as a sort of nonsensical in-joke among a group of people who are fooling themselves into thinking they're actually saying something.
Yes, of course, there is much nonsense going around in contemporary literary criticism. There is also much nonsense going around in software engineering. I do not imagine there are many fields in which this is not the case (those who think the sciences are immune from this malady are suffering from a delusion that is at least as deadening as the worst excesses of poststructuralism).
Lacan, Lyotard, Barthes, Baudrillard, Gadamer, Zizec, Foucault, Habermas, Bakhtin . . . It is disheartening to sit here and listen to a bunch of people who manifestly have not read any of this talk about how it's all a bunch of nonsense. It is not. These are all brilliant, provocative thinkers with something very substantive to say. You don't get a sense of their conversation from going to a conference or two and hanging out on some postmodernity newsgroup. You get it by spending many years (not necessarily in a university context, though that certainly helps) studying their works. Looking into the previous 2500 years of hermeneutic philosophy doesn't hurt either.
How could it be any different? We're talking about some difficult questions here: what does it mean to interpret language, what is meaning, what criteria should we use for adjudicating truth from falsehood? The language we use for discussing these things need not be so opaque (I am a diehard fan of the plain style), but it's only natural that literary criticism would develop its own set of terms (as did mathematics and computer science).
One thing is certain: we (in literary criticism) have done a truly dismal job communicating the nature of our field. This discussion proves that beyond a shadow of a doubt.
I would say that my experience with postmodernism does have a clear political aim: dismantling those in power and intimidating those graduate students who believe in any established form of anything, from the safe distance provided by the ivory tower. The people I encounter who know Derrida, Fish, and knew Barthes really lean towards the idea that these men wrote to provoke thought. The people I encounter who read these men and use their writings are the ones who appear to have the political agenda. I agree with what you are saying about Vizzini and losing sight of the problem (although I have not seen Princess Bride). Academics are mainly talk. We sit in our classrooms and at our conferences and mentally masturbate about shit (pardon me) that means nothing when put in to play. It's the theory verses practice debate. My experiences in graduate school have not been enough to indoctrinate me into an academic frame of mind - I keep getting in touble for asking my profs why I should care about xxxx or what xxxx has to do with anything in the real world. Part of what I see going on is ego, another part is that we are so amazed with ourselves that we don't bother to ask how we can help others - instead we would rather deconstruct those who are trying and show why they are failing, without getting out and failing ourselves. These are the ramblings of a disillusioned PhD candidate (who can't spell). But, yes, I think those who teach pomo and fall in line with the use of the theories do have a political agenda. It is extreme left-winged, close-minded, propaganda -- and it is being fed to 18 year old college freshmen everyday. I cannot claim that postmodernism had any agenda, except to promote thought.
I think there a a few important things that the article left out. First, that there are a lot of people in the field of literary criticism who got where they are by parroting famous and respected ideas to students, and by combining famous and respected ideas with gibberish in the papers they write. The presence of vocal, incompetent people is not occupation specific.
I think the second point is a bit more subtle. Deconstruction does not allow us to claim that a text means anything we want it to. Rather, it asserts that the meaning of a text is not determinate. I have a simple example that was given to me in an introductory course long ago:
Take the first sentence of Melville's Moby Dick. "Call me Ishmael." Now, we use the trick that the author of the article explained fairly well. We look at what the sentence implies.
Typically, in normal English, we would not use the imperative form to introduce ourselves to someone. We would say "My name is Robert." Not a command, but a statement of fact. Where do we typically hear the phrase "call me x"? When we've been introduced to someone by a name that they don't want us to use. "My name is Robert, but you can call me Bob."
The simplest reading of the first words of the text imply that the narrator's name is Ishmael. But there's also a little doubt planted in our minds (even if we're not literary critics, I think that this odd construction may cause some curiousity, even subconsciously). The sentence seems to imply two opposite meanings. And this, I think, is an entirely defensible position to take. Melville was an educated man and an experienced author. He had some purpose in phrasing this line of the novel so much differently than common usage would have it said. Whether or not the narrator's name is actually Ishmael is not relevant--what is relevant is that Melville has used a trick of language to introduce some tension to the text.
This does not mean, for example, that we can make use of deconstruction to claim that the text actually means "my dog has no nose" or anything that extravagent. And it doesn't mean that scholars should go out and examine each line of the text looking for contradictions, because they will always be able to conjure something up.
There's a lot more to it than that, of course. And there are a lot of people who study it for years and come out speaking nonsense. Opponents of the theory don't have to invent straw men because there are plenty of absurd people already immersed in the field. But almost all of the opposition that I've heard has taken the same form as this article does, that you can use deconstruction to show that a text means anything, when it just doesn't work that way. All it does is allow you to show that the meaning of a text cannot be fixed to a certain interpretation, that others are also valid.
Deconstruction is a useful tool in literary criticism like a monkey wrench is a useful tool around the house. You don't apply it to every problem you have. But you may find that it comes in handy in specialized instances.
English is an annoying language. While 'proven' is the past participle of 'prove', the past participle of 'disprove' is 'disproved'. 'Refuted' is probably a better choice of word anyway.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Come on--ignorant ridicule of academia was interesting for a few minutes 8-14 years ago.
But jeez, this sort of fox-news make yourself and the rest of the ignorant feel better about your and their ignorance is just sad.
Do something more important like actually reading a book of post-modern theory--try Lyotard's seminal work--you probably believe half of it by this point (almost 30 years later) without actually knowing it, rather than engage in that sort of self-satisfied Bill O'Reilly mental flatulence.
There's a reason why "post-modern" theory is so widely accepted in academia--it is very useful for thinking about certain sorts of problems. It is a useful tool like any theory--surely an engineer should be able to grasp that point without having one's knee-jerk prejudices threatened.
I once walked I into a bar that was populated by DEC marketing types. I walked up to a woman sitting alone at the bar and asked her what she did. She replied that she "did programmatic development that was educative." DEC deconstructed soon after.
Evolutionary biologists often come up with explanations of why a particular organism evolved a particular feature in a given environment.
Postmodern critics are trying to come up with similar explanations for why a particular meme developed in a given culture. Chip describes one of the methods PoMos use to discern "selective advantage" in a class system.
Unfortunately the last thing the PoMos want to do is read "The Selfish Gene" or its progeny. Its too bad - as the concept of memetics cleans up a lot of the deliberate intellectual mess that has been made.
The author has a lot of problems here that have been pointed out several times over, and some good points as well. One thing that seems to completely escape him is that he must apply deconstructionist techniques in order to deconstruct the particular brand of deconstructionism that he has run into. In and of itself, deconstructionism is merely another tool with which a text (yes, it is the accepted term for anything that can be interpreted) can be read (conotatively meaning "interpreted").
Think of it as a sort of reverse engineering. You break something down into component parts and try to find out how it works. One of those component parts is the author. In the case of "JFK was not a homosexual," we need to know how the author feels about the state of homosexuality; if he is homophobic, than I would say yes, it CAN be legitimately interpreted as a statement of superiority of character. It could even be taken as a statement of envy.... in the context of descibing how many women JFK had sex with, for example. However, in the context given, it is little more than a butterfly under glass. Maybe it's useful in trying to understand the author better (why this particular example), particularly in the context of understanding some of his other writing (particularly about JFK or sexuality).
You shouldn't think of deconstruction as masturbatory any more than you should think of grokking a block of code as masturbatory. Yes, it is completely possible for deconstructionist critics to move in circles in never ending battles of who has the most style in presenting their argunments, however, as I have seen pointed out here, this is a lot like obfuscated code contests (yes, both of those are primarily self indulgeant excercises). However, one of the primary reasons why arguments are so often deconstructed is to determine whether or not the person is wrong. If there is an error in logic or in fact (Like a critic making an argument based on Huck and Jim being on the Colorado River in Huckleberry Finn), a deconstruction of the argument is bound to reveal it.
As someone who spent ample amounts of time in both my college's English and Computer Science departments, I am surprised about the misunderstanding that I often here the geek crowd voice about literary/philisophical/theatrical criticism. A good body of such criticism is language based, and shares much in common with Comp. Sci's language and Machine theory.
Anyway, allow me to offer an alternative reading of the reaction to his introduction. The nods he was getting were merely encouragement from an "in-crowd" trying to be polite to an outsider who was trying to fit. The laughter was due to the fact that everyone knew the author was BSing, and when it became apparent that the author knew it too, there was nothing impolite about acknowledging the fact. Of course, to know for sure one way or the other, we would have to ask the attendees, so I suppose we'll just have to live with possible interpretations for the time being.
If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don't?
I understand that a similar stunt was once pulled on a women's studies department with a bogus article about lesbian behavior in sheep.
Background required... Mating behavior in normal sheep is:
- The ram kicks the sheep in the side.
- If the sheep is not in heat, she moves away.
- If the sheep is in heat, she responds by holding still.
- Upon determining that kicking the sheep in the side causes her to hold still, the ram mounts her.
Therefore, if there WERE a lesbian sheep, she would demonstrate her attraction to another sheep by holding still - which would be essentially indistinguishable from disintrest. This would make it VERY difficult to determine whether lesbian sheep actually exist.
So a young lady who was thoroughly fed up with the women's studies department put her tongue firmly in cheek, wrote this up, and submitted it.
Of course the department didn't recognize they were being put on and made quite a big thing about this brilliant paper by their new star student. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Maybe Stanley Fish already said it all: "Academics like to eat shit, and in a pinch they don't care who's shit they eat."
"...One conceivable way to discriminate between a scientific intellectual and a literary intellectual is by considering that a scientific intellectual can usually recognize the writing of another but that the literary intellectual would not be able to tell the difference between lines jotted down by a scientist and those by a glib non-scientist."
He goes on to reference other works including one by Sokal. Here's a useful (er, funny) item I found by reading the book: The Postmodernism Generator , based on the Dada Engine (a tool for generating random texts based on specified grammars).
This all reminds me of architecture school (shiver)
Read my keyboard review.
...More likely, it's just an indication of the argument that the deconstructionists have been making all along: language is not capable of specificity, and with jargon, social and cultural perspectives, indeterminacy of the writer and reader, etc, the quest for the grand unified theory is not possible.
The quest is always possible. The outcome is indeterminate.
I drank what? -- Socrates
too many big technical words, blacking out..
i am the self-proclaimed king of free stuff
Hence the popularity of Ayn Rand!
Huh? What do you mean? (I'm actually pretty interested.)
What is this trust in submissions? They are publishing a professional journal and part of the professionalism is reading the submissions and deciding their merit. An editor and publisher is responsible for what they publish. If they get egg on their face, it's their own fault. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to own their work (publishing their journal) and accept all derogations and accolades. So they made a bad call. It does not matter whether the material they published was bogus by intent or error. It is their job to pick the good from the bad.
I drank what? -- Socrates
We have the scientists on the one hand, who are used to working with verifiable facts (eg "2+2=4") and potentially disprovable hypotheses (eg "pi is infinite" which could potentially be disproven but so far has not been).
On the other hand, we have humanities people who are used to working with ambiguous data (eg "What's our next move?" could be either an inquiry as to strategy, asking when/where we'll next move house to, or both) and hypotheses that are neither provable nor falsifiable (eg the statement "The Wind in the Willows is a good book" cannot be proven, because there is no objective standard for measuring a book's quality, and cannot be disproven for the same reason).
Returning to the article, though. The author makes this statement:
While the analogy is good, he is overlooking a major environmental factor: departmental funding. This is the lifeblood of an academic department. Without funding, the department dies, and takes all the jobs with it. It is a limited resource, and every department is a competitor for that resource, regardless of topic. This means that the English Department is in competition with the Electrical Engineering Department for existence. In short, the English departments are NOT "an isolated population with unique selective pressues"; departments are more analogous to species in competition with one another. They share an environment (the "Ivory Tower"), and all of them have the same set of pressues ("produce, or the funding dries up").
My theory is that the humanities have adopted these impenetrable (and often useless) theories in order to compete with the sciences, which have absorbed increasing amounts of the overall budget over the last century. They have to compete on the sciences' terms, because the benefits of training people in judging the relative merits of ambiguous situations are not immediate, and may not come into play until well after the students have graduated. But in the competition for funding, it's immediate results that matter. The sciences can say "We've found out how to split atoms! We're going to win a major award! But there were these interesting side-effects we'd like to investigate further." And then they get more funding to continue research. If the humanities say "We've turned out a citizen who is well-equipped to make choices in an ambiguous world!" they don't get funding -- but if they say "We've opened up a whole new area of inquiry with our article on 'The Parturition of Culture in Beowulf'*!" then maybe they get enough funding to survive another year.
Adding in all this fluff makes the field inaccessible to laymen, and obscures the valuable stuff with loads of crap.
My greatest objection to this process is that it undermines the most useful aspect of humanities: making judgements based on ambiguous or even contradictory data is an extremely valuable skill. We are confronted with ambiguous situations every day, ranging from the mundane (eg "Wheaties or Kix this morning?") to the vital (eg "Would it be a good idea to go to war with Iraq?"). Humanities, and especially literature, allow an individual to (in essence) perform thought experiments in judging ambiguous situations of all sorts (political, moral, and ethical, to name a few) without dire consequences attached. This, IMHO, is the true value of studying literature and other humanities, and I worry that drastically reducing or eliminating these studie
Just as Americans are often puzzled by how highly esteemed Jerry Lewis is in France (I am French, and I don't understand it either), the French are bemused by how Derrida has become central to discourse in American humanities departments.
When I was in college, I had never even heard of the guy before I started reading US scientific publications, where physics professors would bemoan him in terms very similar to the original article.
In French humanities classes, Derrida's theory is mentioned as a clever prank, which the understanding ultimately deconstruction has to deconstruct itself and self-destruct.
"Either reality is objectively knowable or reality is not objectively knowable. Either absolute truth exists or absolute truth does not exist. Either there is one way to truth or there is no one way to truth. Either there is one way to God or there is no one way to God. Since the second statements in each of these four sentences are clearly false, we must conclude, therefore, that reality is indeed objectively knowable, that absolute truth does indeed exist, that there is indeed one way to truth, and that there is indeed one way to God. I don't reject everything that the structuralists and poststructuralists say, but I hold the preceding truths to be not only ontologically absolute but also epistemologically self-evident. "
I don't think the way to discredit deconstructionism is to flee into the black depths of dogma.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
That author needs a dose of his own medicine. Consider this statement from that article, as an example:
To say there is no one way to truth (or no one way to God) is to actually offer one way to truth. Such an absolute pluralism is inherently self-contradictory. Consequently, it is absolutely false.
To say there is no one way to truth is to say that there are either no ways to truth, or multiple ways to truth. If that statement "actually offer[s] one way to truth", how is it self-contradictory? The offering of a way to truth is consistent with the existence of multiple such ways. What one can't do logically is state that there is only one way to truth, and then offer a way that is different from that one way; but that isn't the case.
By asserting that there is only one way to truth, as he does in the final paragraph, the author is in fact offering a way to the truth that is necessarily different from the only way he claims exists. Therefore his conclusion is illogical.
I had a dickens of a time trying to read "A Tale of Two Cities." It was literarily unreadable.
Perhaps the entire question of objective .vs. subjective is an approach to any given topic that may not result in a discourse or communication that enlightens. Please briefly endulge me.
What if, for any given thing discussed, it may be held that subjective can not be considered seprately? Rather than to think of something, such as a truth, as objective or subjective, perhaps think of it as containing a varying amounts of each? Perhaps it may be more harmonizing to think of subjective and objective as two that interact, rather than contradict.
I propose a model of analysis that harmonizes rather than contradicts. Distinction can be had by harmony as well as conflict. Individuality asserted by separation alone is not as complete as individuality reached by both separation and integration. Simply extrapolating this basic notion, a truth which is objective alone is not so useful as a truth which as valid subjectively as well as objectively.
Perhaps the problem arises in that we wonder that our experience is the same as that of the experience of others. This seems a natural question to ponder, I guess. After all, we know how we react to being burnt, for example. We perceive that others react the same way, so we know that there must be a basis for common experience with our fellow human beings. But, then we realize that we react differently to some things from others, as with the flavor of some favorite or despised food. We may not like meat, but we notice others do, for example. These two seem to conflict. However, they are not necessarily opposed. It only means that some things are common, and some things distinct. Commonality and distinction are not in opposition.
In an ecosystem, a myriad of things need to be present, in interaction with each other, and nothing can accurately be considered or studied in separation from its surroundings or context. Subjective and objective are not as useful separated as they are together. Peace is more useful than war for forward movement. Life need not be one step forward and two steps back.
Its important to observe the mental methods used to assert an approach, and detach from them without care to social, logical, or other convention. To do otherwise is to be trapped by ones own mind.
By the way, I realize I skipped some rather large expanses of territory from one statement to another earlier, but brevity has an eloquence all its own. This entire thread seemed to me to be a struggle between objective and subjective, with arguments weighing in on one camp or the other. There must be a way to perceive them as two that modulate, interact, and harmonize.
me
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
I was called in to talk about my final paper which apparently disturbed her, as not being up to my normal participation. In fact it was a closely argued at least 30 pages which ended up that most of this is bullshit. She had given me an F on it, but changed it to an A because as she told me, she agreed.
Here is a typical example, from
w ebservices/
http://www.west-wind.com/
presentations/dotnet
DotNetWebServices.asp
This is certainly as bad as anything an isolated academic would produce, from the persepctive of a non-engineer.
"SOAP implementations provided by vendors typically consist of two pieces: A client side Proxy that handles the SOAP message creation and result message cracking to return the result data, as well as a server piece that implements the Web Service logic. The server piece tends to be an application server that calls out to custom Web Service classes that you create and that contain the business logic of your Web Service. The server code you write essentially consists of simple methods to handle inputs and outputs via parameters and return values respectively. The logic you write in the actual method is up to you and contains any functionality that your language of choice supports. This means writing code to call your business objects or if the process is simple enough using procedural code to perform some operation. Although Web Services can expose classes, you'll find that typically you end up creating wrapper classes for existing business objects in order to handle the specific logic required to drive your Web Service. As such you're breaking up the business tier with a front end service (the Web Service) and a business service (your actual business objects - or if you use procedural code just that code)."
I say I'm "middle of the road" because I do some programming, but I'm also an English major. And I do have to say that I have read articles that seem like someone took the Star Wars roofer conversation from Clerks and made it five times (accurate figure) less interesting and more obtuse. My pitiful job at the campus library involves sending articles over ARIEL, a protocol for sending book images over the net to other libraries, and along the way I'm pretty sure I've seen a good cross-section of articles, or requested articles at least.
Some of them are cool, some are impenetrable, some pointless. But I've had the benefit of having some relatively down-to-earth professors. Maybe it's telling that I'm almost done with my undergrad degree yet I'm still not quite sure what the hell post-modernism is supposed to be, if it's not just an excuse to goof around and write funny things, whether intentionally or not. I'm down with writing the funny, but it's vitally important to me that when people laugh at my work, that they're laughing at the same things I laugh at.
Anyway, the guy who wrote the article, I recognize his name. Chip Morningstar and Randy Farmer created Habitat, the first true graphical virtual world, distant Commodore 64 predecessor of things like Everquest. Think if Maniac Mansion were several thousand rooms in size, thousands of players, and everyone had their own character. The man has good ideas.
Ummm, those syntactic and semantic ambiguities which require common sense are part of what the parent was talking about. And context and many other things are also often necessary. Deconstruction is agreeing with you here, but saying that there are more factors involved than just your common sense. To repeat, these are the reasons that NLP software is still in its infancy.
Genetic Algorithms are passe. Join the MDL band-wagon. :D
If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing
...getting tired of vi.
Oh, goodie! Where can I download this new texteditor?
>>Hence the popularity of Ayn Rand!
>Huh? What do you mean? (I'm actually pretty interested.)
Me, too. Leave the objectivists out of this discussion - you don't want them to come poopi^H^H^H^H^H realizing their full potentials around here.
Engineers take a lot more humanities and social science classes than humanities people take physics.
And you're right, all the talk about breadth requirements is one way. Gosh, the engineers should take more sociology! Okay, fine. Then the poli sci majors should take more chemistry.
Ideally yes, but I think in the real world one cannot stay competitive without cutting corners. Its the nature of capitalism.
This sort of reasoning where people should be subjected to extreme ideal standards sort of annoy me. I see it everywhere: The work safety comity where I work, who threatens to call the police every time repairmen come in because apparently they don't meet the safety standards. The people who wants me to waste my time listing every software installed on my computer so that they can verify the exact number of licenses we must own. Also there is always the ethics comity, who will burry me in red tape when I want to send a simple survey to a group of people as part of my research. If I did all these people wanted I would barely ever be doing any useful work! Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrgghh Ok sorry I had to vent.
The point of the original rhetorical question is that you can't interrogate the person (or group) directly because it is infeasible or impossible. All you have to go on is distorted versions of history from every interested party. I am suggesting in the second paragraph yhsyyou need a specific set of mental tools (the Humanities) with which you pick such situations apart for the purpose of making future predictions, or just the satisfaction of knowing "how we got here".
That fact that you disagree this what the Humanities are good for is further evidence that academia has distorted it's original purpose.
The undergraduates are not perpetuating this, they are only being indoctrinated. I did not mean to group undergraduates with academia in the final paragraph. They are NOT being shown how they can apply it to the real world by the same people who should be doing so; their professors and understudies lead by example, having cut themselves off from the rest of society.
I think you're being semantic so you can avoid addressing _why_ you feel you disagree with my position on the Humanities purpose. You haven't shown me how they are not supposed to provide you with the means to analyze social situations, regardless of the current dismal state of the art.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Scientists aren't fools; they understand a theory as an interpretation of evidence, and consciously use the word "true" as a brief way of saying "so likely as to lie beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt." This understanding is the basis of the scientific method and is essential for success in academia (even though silly politics are too).
On the contary, true is shorthand for nobody has produced a repeatable experiment showing it is false. Any attempt to measure how probable a "truth" is based on experiment fails because the finite number of times you did the experiment divided by the infinite number of times you could do it gives zero.
Someone more versed in philosophy could tell you who first came up with this argument, and how later philosphers have tried to answer it (I think Kant was in one of these groups, but it was a long time ago that my philospher friend floated this stuff past me.)
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
> As soemone who is getting thier Phd in a liberal arts field, let me just say that in reality, like any other field 90% of the stuff I read is crap.
My condolences on the state of your field, then.
I'm nearing the end of a PhD in computer science, and 90% of the published work I see is most certainly _not_ crap. Even at the smaller conferences, the majority of the work is useful contributions. Simply because your field is wallowing, don't assume all fields are.
More importantly, don't assume your field is doomed to that fate. Every field has valuable research it can do, and it's the responsibility of researchers in that field to make sure it doesn't get mired in shit.
> have you ever hung out with humanities profs? Many of them pull 12-15 hours 6 days a week
Irrelevant.
Rigour has very little to do with the amount of time one spends working. I can spend 20 hrs/day throwing bricks at each other, but that doesn't mean it's a good way to build a house.
The work of these profs can desperately lack rigour and still require a lot of effort to fulfill the criteria required in their field. All that means is that if rigour isn't one of the criteria, they won't spend time on it.
Hm, perhaps I'm missing something here. I disagree that anything more than common sense is missing in our current attempts to automate NLP. Now, in the term "common sense" I include the ability to employ context in the interpretation of natural language. I also exclude those texts that are not straightforward. For example, the text of a news report is something I'd label "straightforward", while good poetry and certain fictional works (like _Ulysses_) are more in my "oblique" category.
Perhaps the difference in our points of view lies in what we think computerized NLP must do in order to be considered a success. I would be thoroughly thrilled if we got a computer to read USA Today. This is what I mean when I say that deconstruction is unnecessary in this case. I think you'll agree that people don't deconstruct the news, they just read it.
However, I'll assume that you were speaking in the context of serious science. A theory doesn't become "truth" until the amount of existing corroborating evidence and fruitless searches for refutative evidence is appropriate for the strength of the claim.
It is true that scientists measure the strength of a prediction by asking, "What is the probability that random chance could produce this level of agreement between theory and experiment?" But nobody does this by dividing the number of successful experiments by the number of possible unconducted experiments. This is as it should be because scientists assume that the universe is subject to understandable rules. If a repeated experiment has been devised and carried out carefully enough, it is safe to assume that the outcome of that experiment will always be the same.
Now, a theory basically says, "The relationship between parameter X and parameter Y is Z." So an experiment varies parameter X and looks at parameter Y. To evaluate how close the prediction is to the outcome, scientists use the Chi-Squared Test, which returns a probability that random chance could produce such a good fit. So when you read a paper describing some study and it reports something like "p=0.03", that's saying that there's a three per cent chance that the positive outcome was just lucky. In general, a publishable study should achieve p<0.05.
I'd be vastly surprised if any serious philosopher put that argument forth. I'd be even more surprised if anyone who knew something about the philosophy of science had trouble trying to answer it. I'd be even more surprised if anyone bothered to write about it in a book except to comment about how surprising it is that any serious philosopher put that argument forth.
> The same holds true in the humanities, except the 'acid test' -- the 'objective', or intersubjectively verifiable, criteria -- are found in other books.
:)
You appear to be conflating a couple of subtly different things:
1) Objective facts
The true state of the universe, which science attempts to discern.
2) Results of assumptions
This covers a great deal - such as the grand structure of mathematics - but "2 + 2 = 4" as we use is a result of our assumptions (of how logic and set theory work).
In some sense, all of our conclusions fall into bin #2 (results of assumptions), but some of those conclusions will be influenced to a greater or lesser extent by objective facts. For example, if I drop a hammer, whether I conclude that it falls or not will be influenced by my assumptions (about how my visual system works, etc.), but will also be influenced by objective facts (such as the workings of gravity, which is separate from how we believe it works).
In this way, science aims to test its conclusions in such a way that objective facts play a powerful role in the outcome of the tests. Our conclusion is that this provides an effective method to weed out erroneous or superfluous conclusions from our beliefs. (This conclusion could itself be flawed, of course, but the existence of the internet suggests it's a very valuable conclusion regardless.)
Do literary criticism or philosophy have similar ways to bring objective facts into play? You say the "objective facts" of philosophy come from other books - what if those other books are wrong? I'm sure they're validated against yet more books, but what if those are wrong, too?
The key is that science validates against _true_ objective facts, which can never be wrong - the logical chain of reasoning has a secure foundation. From your description, it sounds like philosophy's chain of reasoning is anchored to itself, a situation alarmingly similar to begging the question.
Observations can empirically show that some scientific theoretical constructs have value, while others - even though they may be internally consistent - have lesser or no value. These external tests are _crucial_ to preventing discourse from becoming detatched from reality and little more than mental masturbation. The mere fact that a system of discourse is internally consistent does not mean it's not a waste of time.
Personally, I think some disciplines have become too insular, retreating into their own methods and rules until their research loses all relevance. I also think that's terribly sad, since a lot of bright people with sharp minds and good ideas spend their creative energies in what amounts to little more than an incredibly complex game. Worse, those fields degenerate to the point that they can no longer fulfill their valuable potential, and we all suffer for the lack. Like a society cut off from the world at large, those fields wither, regress, and die.
This, IMHO, is what the article was about - to avoid degeneration, all fields of research need to maintain strong contacts with the world at large. This is easier for scientists - businesses seek us out - but is no less necessary for the humanities.
In other words, get the hell out of your office and interact with people! Dammit, you're getting like a bunch of EverCrack addicts!!
The main problem with Morningstar's article is that he completely dismisses all of the literary criticism, simply because the postmodernists got it wrong. Like most other disciplines, there are a wide variety of ways of studying a problem, postmodernism being just one of them. Just because the postmodernists have been discredited doesn't mean that all of literary analysis and criticism is equally bankrupt. The latest trend is to include a broad analysis of the literary, political, history and economic context of both the piece and the author. Some of it is very compelling and easily accessible.
Your phrase "so likely as to lie beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt" seems to be exaggerated to me. Perhaps you'd like to expand on it. What it suggests to me (limiting process between number of positive trials and truth) is probably not what you meant.
My friend put that arguement to me to warn against the search for absolute proof based on empirical results in science. I'd be very surprised myself, if historically philosphers of science hadn't looked down this avenue before. Its one of those things that seems quite intuitive, the more we can repeat something the more likely it is to be true, but won't fit on logical foundations.
Special Relativity: The person in the other queue thinks yours is moving faster.
I too would consider that a worthy goal for computerized NLP, but I'm not so sure that people don't at least partially deconstruct the news. Intelligent, critical readers often intuitively deconstruct things such as news, which embody all kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle biases, and sometimes what is conspicuously absent in an article tells us a lot. To a point, of course. I wouldn't argue that intelligent readers create self-reflexive interpretations in which the article is really about the article itself or the act of writing the article.
To answer you directly, if all we are talking about is 'parsing language' (which is what you actually said), then I agree with you, but if we mean extracting meaning from language (as in, extracting more than just the obvious meaning that occurs to an 8-year old), then I believe more is required, since common sense fails for many people to extract more than the meaning that occurs to an 8-year old. Insofar as understanding meaning, and not parsing language, is the ultimate goal, I'd argue that some of the deconstructionist's reading strategies are helpful and perhaps required, and common-sense alone won't cut it for disambiguating semantic (and perhaps sometimes syntactic) ambiguities.
Scientists and engineers -- god bless 'em -- tend to be incredulous whenever they discover some branch of education that they do not understand, where the language and mode of thinking does not form clear and distinct ideas, and which (most important) does not belong to an established field of science, pure or applied. They wonder -- hey, this is not science! How come it makes no sense to me? Science is the highest form of knowledge! How can this be so?!? They seem to be particularly miffed when they read some scholar in the humanities who does not seem to agree that All Human Behavior Can be Reduced to Genetics, or that All Culture can be Reduced to Material Conditions.
Give me a break. They ought to spend some time trying to understand the liberal arts and the goals of humanistic research. I supposed this fellow would mock Paul Ricouer's work on narrative and the self. His loss.
The best text I have found to explain the humanities to scientists who don't get it is Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos. And if you want some good parody natural scientists, read Emily Martin. Yes, scientists are human beings too, and they too are stuck with mataphors and the foibles of language in their encounters with the world.
How do you come to the conclusion that the critique is of Derrida? It seems to me that he was talking about Deconstruction as it actually exists in the wild, not as it was concieved. From what I've read here Derrida's origional ideas and what has become Deconstruction are as different as Jesus' teachings and Christianity.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You have a point, but at any point that the writer actually is specific about anything, he mentions the name Derrida. The rest is too vague to criticize (and too vague to be a critique), although I disagree with most of that as well. Deconstruction is one of the philosophical "schools" that have been too popular for their own good: many of its followers don't understand what they think they support, and many of its opponents only understand that. Personally, I don't find that quite as interesting as the theories. (I'm much more familiar with Paul de Man than with Derrida, by the way.)
Discussing deconstruction from the basis of wannabe lit crit snobs, nihilists, and stupid people in general, is like discussing the pros and cons of Linux from the fact that many geeks lack social skills. It doesn't help you understand anything at all, and it doesn't take the topic seriously.
But those around you may have. I have that effect on people and I'm only 17.
... to work in a field where nobody can say your wrong?" I'm a philosophy prof. Although I don't work on post-modernism at all, I encounter this kind of comment all the time. The nature of the field may make it harder for someone else to definitively prove you're wrong, but it also makes it harder for you to prove you're right... which makes it EASY for EVERYBODY to SAY that you're wrong.
This post is dedicated to all of those
From the linked essay:
Another major belief of these social critics is the idea that the relationship between the sounds or letters of a word and their meaning is arbitrary and that the relationship between the meaning of a word and what it refers to is also arbitrary.
Strange. I always argue the opposite: that the only significance of a word is the affect created by experiencing the sound as music. For instance, the "luuu" of love of the "KCH!" of fuck. Words really are a pressure wave in a media, and really do touch us, the same as a fist or a caress.
Those who argue otherwise have moved the word through repeated abstractions, so they become correct through their own machinations. These people are actually talking first about the written word, a very low fidelity representation of speech, and then their idea of the written word. They make an observation about the twice abstracted word and apply it to the original spoken language.
Language has two distinct contexts, the emotional and the technical. Vocabulary works best in the the technical context -- how are we going to build this house or engineer this computer? A lot of words, pictures, and formula help in technical endeavors. But the technical words and the use of language have no significance outside of the intended technical context. A large vocabulary is not useful in an emotional context; hard and soothing, loud and quiet, pretty much do it. Great confusion occurs when technical concepts are applied to an emotional context. This is where we get religion and philosophy. Skillfull mixing of the two contexts gives us the paradox of poetry.
I believe it was Hume who argued that you inductive reasoning will never tell you if something is true or not (e.g. you can't prove that "all crows are black" through observation, because no matter how many black crows you see, there is always the possibility that the next crow you see will not be black).
-- Will quantum computers run imaginary-time operating systems?