POMO MO and Curly

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

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