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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?"
"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)
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.
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
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!
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
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.