IsmDeModConstructionPost

[Otto Sell]

This is very nicely said, Terrance, you really have a way with words.
But I'm still not happy calling it "just" a play.
These are important ontological questions for every human being.
One of the logical consequences of our absurd
modern-postmodern-state-of-the-nations is that nothing makes sense and you
can easily kill yourself because it would doesn't matter. But it's like
this: if it doesn't matter if you're alive or dead you can best stay alive
as well and makes the best out of it, maybe reading those old "dusty" (as
someone on this list called them) Greeks.

Otto
(water-shy)

----- Original Message -----
From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 20, 2000 12:17 AM
Subject: Re: IsmDeModConstructionPost


>
> Postmodernism, we can't agree on what it is, but it seems to
> be, oh let me say, I mean play that it is, a number of
> concurrent and parallel movements in various disciplines,
> but because it has many forms and shapes, it also has many
> meanings and because it advocates the importance of finding
> a new way of thinking- - a "new paradigm," and because this
> new paradigms is not a mere shift in the orientation of
> thought, but rather a radical transformation of the
> framework with which we
> cognitively operate, and since none of us has any idea how
> it is that we cognitively operate, we can only play.
>
> Now we can't read V. anymore, not like we read Dickens for
> sure, because who or what is is going to decide what we are
> reading, not just the meaning of what is meant, the meaning
> of the text, but in what and in where we should search for
> meaning? Between the covers?  The new paradigm says no, not
> in the book, why with all these readers shifting about there
> is simply no room between the covers for authorial intent,
> roll over, and they all rolled over and the author fell out.
> And they all rolled over and what fell out? Why the original
> social setting, the original audience, and the book, and
> they all rolled over to make room for the interpreter. Of
> what you ask? Don't be such a Romantic!
> Here we go round the Hegelian gyre, the Hegelian gyre, at
> Zero OH clock in the morning, here we go...and the past is
> ontologically alien to the postmodern reader, her we go and
> every age understands the text, the text of the past and the
> past of the text differently. Dizzy? Oh but our own cultural
> entities have genuine immediacy for us, so we can determine
> some immediate meaning whirling and fleeting. And how could
> anyone not read the Sophists today? Why those Greeks, they
> had nothing to say, nothing, just wave the finger as you
> don't even step into the same river once.