Leggo my Pomo

[still lookin 4 the face i had b4 the world was made]

I didn't reply to all of this interesting message yesterday.  Here are
a few more comments ...

On Fri, 23 May 1997, Craig Bleakley wrote:
> Hi.  My name's Craig and I'm a Postmodernist. [Choral response: Hello, Craig]
[...]
> As for M. Derrida, who I don't pretend to have read or to understand, I hear
> that his project is to say that Western philosophy took "the wrong fork in
> the road" with Plato--in other words, mighty early on.  But because this
> wrong fork became a foundation, it's hard to even imagine other forks.

Yes, it's an interesting thesis.  I have discussed this a lot with my dad
(who has a doctorate in English to my lowly B.A.), and he is of the opinion
that Jacques misreads Plato, or reads him rather narrowly, in some of his
criticisms.  For my part, I was not able to slog through all of _Envois_,
being turned off by some of D.'s rather odious "jokes" about Socrates having
his period, Plato buggering Socrates, etc.  

I have developed some tentative conclusions of my own regarding Derrida,
Plato, Socrates, etc.  Derrida accuses Socrates of being a mere sophist, no
better than (in fact maybe worse than) the so-called sophists that Socrates
himself criticizes.  Perhaps Plato's version of Socrates is prone to
sophistry...but if Derrida's own word games are not sophistry, what is? 

Also, post-structuralists generally seem to have an unreasoned grudge
against the whole idea of "metaphysics" that comes down to us from Plato
(though it is arguably not just some concept invented by Plato that the rest
of us have been deceived by for millennia--maybe it predates Plato--maybe
it is paralleled by the ideas of other civilizations--maybe later
Western thinkers used some of Plato's terminology because it agreed with
their own views, not because they were having the wool pulled over their
eyes).  I personally find the good old "Cave" story to be tremendously
subtle...I see it pointing toward a "hyper-essentialist" metaphysics of the
sort I tried to describe in my last message, not toward the dogmatism of,
say, rationalistic, medieval Catholicism.

> For my money, Pomo is all about re-recognizing wrong forks and excluded
> middles--sound familiar?  What counts as "true" are simply ideas that have
> achieved a certain critical mass.

But must we now say that these ideas received as true are necessarily false?
Must all the forks we have taken be the wrong ones?
 
> One of the pithiest summaries of pomo I've ever heard comes from Murthy's
> pal Leonard Cohen who writes/sings/coughs, "There is a crack in
> everything/That's how the light gets in."

I'm a fan of L. Cohen myself.  But postmodernism is not nearly as original
in making such observations as it would like to think of itself as being. My
fiancee has pointed out that many "pomo" ideas/attitudes are at least as old
as the Book of Ecclesiastes.  "There is nothing new under the sun..." 

[...]
> there's always Terry Eagleton's "Literary Theory: An Introduction," which
> I recommend, if you don't get too put off by his first chapter that argues
> that, like pomo, there's also no concrete definition of words like "art"
> and "literature" (I'd include "love"). 

Q:  If a thing cannot be concretely defined, does that mean it is merely an
illusory construction?  Or might it exist in some perpetually indefinable
way?

On the subject of books, the only one I've tried to make a go at since
graduating from school is _Deconstruction: Theory & Practice_, by
Christopher Norris.  I've never gotten very far, there usually being much
more entertaining reading material at hand.  :)

> Or we could back the truck up and argue what it means to be "Modern."     

Sometimes I have felt that certain postmodernists set up a straw-man version
of modernism, emphasizing positivism, progress, unity, etc., in order to
debunk it.  But I find most supposedly "postmodern" impulses were already
apparent in the broad current of modernism.  Look at movements like Dada, or
existentialism, for example...

Max

M a x i m u s  D a v i d  C l a r k e | There's a blaze of light in every
         http://www.afn.org/~traveler | word/It doesn't matter which you
                "Surrealist-At-Large" | heard/The holy or the broken
                     traveler at afn.org | Hallelujah... --Leonard Cohen