POMO MO and Curly

[jonathan schultz]

Ummm, I think I agree with the general thrust of your argument, however, I
feel it is necessary to reconcile some of your evidence.  First, on many
levels postmodernism is not an adoptable philosophy, although the premier
bucket heads of American academia would like it to be (that way they could
offer it in colleges as a 101 intro class and co-opt it over to the
business department.)  It is, for most serious thinkers, an era, a symptom
of the times in which we find ourselves.  Second, can we really speak
objectively about aesthetics anymore, I mean really, with any sort of 'good
faith'?  We can certainly base some rhetorical comments on cultural
precedents, but a belief in an ultimate aesthetic is impossible, despite
the comfort the possibility of one might give us.  As far as metaphysics
are concerned, you can trace the beginning of the schism between serious
thought and metaphysics back to Descartes and his meditations.  Although he
ultimately relies upon God as the stopping point of critical regress,
evidence suggests that he intended further probing and 'fudged' the logic
of the VII meditation in order to stay in the good graces of the church who
was signing his weekly paycheck, and capable of ruining a good logicians
career permanently.  The first obvious, mainstream break with metaphysics
that I know of was not Heidegger - who may be great, but was a Nazi,
besmirched Nietzsche's good name and never managed to explain why he
created the Volksgeist and then married a Jew - but was Nietzsche himself,
"God is dead."  As for philosophers who haven't read Wittgenstein, they are
obviously college graduates who took their studies so seriously they forgot
to acknowledge the world that was beyond the ivory towers.  The importance
of Wittgenstein's work, indeed the reason he is dusted off as a compatriot
by so many Postmodernists is that he tried to create a logical language and
realized that he could not.  Unfortunately, or fortunately (for folly's
sake it matters little) no one would have known had he not publicized his
own recanting.  This quasi-proof for the subjective footing for language
allows Derrida to prove then that the subject often has ulterior motives,
hides his crime in his apology, admits what he hopes to conceal.  As for
the rest of French crew, they have all done their part to deploy a general
program of study, but all have done so for many different reasons with just
as varying methods.  If you really want a concise example of some of the
underlying structures of Postmodern agenda read, "Anti-Oedipus, Capitalism
and Schizophrenia," by Delueze and Guattari.  Very important book, the kind
of thing our grandchildren will wonder at why we didn't learn anything from
it.

Jonathan Schultz (a high school drop-out, with all the venom for academia
to prove it)

Nihil verum.  Omnium licet.
----------
> From: Terrance F. Flaherty <Lycidas at worldnet.att.net>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: POMO MO and Curly
> Date: Thursday, October 07, 1999 5:48 AM
> 
> Post Modernism and  Modernism, ought not to be set in an
> agon and folks that are being educated in the current
> postmodern academic environment ought to bear in mind the
> history of such fruitless oppositions. Defining criteria is
> constructive and helpful, but fixed criteria often become
> prescriptions in the manifestos
> of schools, in the varied and changing tastes of individual
> critics and what is
> happening in academic camps or in the principles and
> assumptions of aesthetic systems. Under such conditions,
> discussions are easily deflected from the problem of
> drawing attention to literary or artistic qualities and
> facilitating their discovery to discussions that involve the
> fascinations of sectarian disputes and to the
> revelation or invention of absurdities in opposed theories.
> In philosophy, postmodernism is not a new position, but an
> ancient one. It's unfortunate that in certain postmodern
> styles of philosophy practiced today one encounters a
> self-serving strategy of declaring the end or the death of
> metaphysics--that is to say, its closure and demise. This
> notion and this strategy can be traced to the great one,
> Martin Heidegger, although it now enjoys much wider
> currency. But Heidegger's claim and his strategy is very
> old, at least as old as Aristotle and has parallels in
> ancient Hebrew and Asian texts. The "Neo-Nietzchean"
> (deconstructionism, postmodernism) philosophers can not
> simply be divorced from the history of philosophy, in fact,
> although these philosophers are often lumped together by
> academic camps, the texts of Derrida for example, differs
> radically from those of Wittgenstein and the so-called later
> phase Wittgensteinians. Wittgenstein's view of reality
> actually agrees more with Russell and other logical
> empiricists, who follow in the giant footsteps of Hume. This
> distinguishes him from Derrida, who asserts that a
> perception "can never be booked in the present." Since no
> one reads Wittgenstein (I've only met ONE philosopher that
> has truly read him) he is tossed into a group and molded to
> a criteria to serve academic political ends. Rather than
> READ him, Wittgenstein is approached only from his
> method--his "language games" and "forms of life"--which show
> some resemblance to Derrida's logical operator--the
> polarized form of presence and absence. 
> 
> In any event, philosophy is for the living and the academic
> schools simply can not provide a true account of the
> diversity of styles and schools of even contemporary
> philosophical culture, let alone, the tradition that
> postmodernism stands so precariously upon. In his Luddite
> essay, Pynchon takes up Snow's old agon and notes that the
> argument is not simply between art and science. As a natural
> dialectician, he rejects polarities and addresses the
> problem of specialization, problems exacerbated by
> postmodern culture. With specialization comes another
> problem--the need to assert minor differences. Peirce noted
> that mental life seeks to fill up all the available niches
> in cultural landscape. Freud described the process through
> which mental cultures become narcissistic and thereby assume
> adversarial forms. But good ideas, and great books, like
> houses built on stone, will stand while the hot winds of
> current debates blow through the halls of academia.
> 
> 
> "That individual philosophical concepts are not anything
> capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in
> connection and relationship with each other: that, however
> suddenly and arbitrarily they seem to appear in the history
> of thought, they nevertheless belong, just as much to a
> system as all the members of the fauna of a continent--is
> betrayed by the fact that the most diverse philosophers keep
> filling in a definite scheme of possible philosophies...."
> 			---Nietzche
> 
> 
> 
> Terrance