The Linguistic Turn (was Re: absinthe addled frog/Foucault

[jbor]

----------
>From: calbert at tiac.net

> 
> Captain Hugh talks about Vheissu as a tattooed savage, suggesting
> that he never did glimpse its "soul". On a very superficial level this
> could be a hint of the debate between sense datums and naive
> realists both at the level of philosophy and lit crit. It remains to be
> seen whether or not Foucault has a place at this particular table.

I'm not sure that the sense datum v. naive realists debate (which goes by
any number of names in any number of disciplines I suspect) is in fact
"won", or that it ever will be. The latter viewpoint doesn't actually negate
the former, it merely marks a reversion to pragmatism/s (imo). Anyway, from
Richard Lehan, _The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural
History_ (UCal: Berkeley, 1998, pp. 266-268):

      The modern and the postmodern novel differ in their narrative modes:
    one -- involving myth and symbolism, cyclical time, forms of Bergsonian
    consciousness -- was undone by the other. Pynchon, Barth, Coover,
    DeLillo, and others systematically undo "the wasteland myth", the search
    for meaning in the historical past, and the belief in a subject -- that
    is, a consciousness that centers meaning. This narrative shift was in
    keeping with and parallel to a philosophical and theoretical movement
    that collapsed consciousness into forms of structure (Saussure),
    discourse (Foucault), paradigm (Kuhn), systems (Bertanlanffy), or
    grammar or rhetoric (Derrida, de Man).
      Critics no longer argue about whether postmodernism is merely a
    realignment of modernism; I think most would agree that postmodernism
    creates a totally different kind of reality, whether we are talking
    about the city or the literary text. While modernism owed much to
    a theory of aesthetics, postmodernism takes its being from the
    linguistic-philosphical-anthropological paradigm displayed in Saussure's
    structural theory of language and applied by Lévi-Strauss to the reading
    of culture. Meaning is no longer in nature, manifested through
    revelation (Defoe) or through the unfolding of symbolism, whether cosmic
    (Coleridge) or evolutinary (Darwin); it is now understood as the
    structure the mind creates, so what is common between cultures is
    explained by shared consciousness and not by influence. Synchronic time
    replaces diachronic time; substance gives way to a system of signs and
    reality to relation. Meaning is "discovered" not in nature but in
    systems as vision is replaced by hermeneutics: objects (natural or
    social) become texts to be interpreted according to paradigms.
      Moreover, postmodernism takes us away from the Newtonian universe,
    in which matter in motion is subject to predictable, mechanical laws
    of nature, to Max Planck's theory of discrete quanta of radiation.
    Niels Bohr's work on the discontinuous nature of energy in subatomic
    particles advanced Planck's theory and was advanced in turn by Werner
    Heisenberg and Kurt Gödel in their work on the uncertainty principle
    and probablity theory. And Claude Shannon and Charles Sanders Pierce,
    who applied the principle of entropy to the way we process information,
    found within every principle of organization a principle of disorganiz-
    ation: information comes to us through static, noise, and redundancy.
    These scientific inquiries challenged what we know and how we know it.
    Probability and uncertainty replace determinate knowledge, as the world
    itself becomes both discontinuous and indeterminate: the complexity of
    the information we gain depends upon the complexity of the paradigms we
    produce. In this new interpretive context, the city becomes a very
    different realm of meaning
      Finally, postmodernism challenged the idea of the subject, the self
    as the source of independent consciousness. As we have seen, by
    challenging both Christian and Enlightenment assumptions Nietzsche was
    instrumental in fashioning the idea of the modern consciousness.
    Modernism, I would argue, begins where Nietzsche left off -- with human
    consciousness confronting an unmade universe, a universe without a
    creator. The quality of that consciousness may differ in James, Eliot,
    Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway, but their characters all define
    themselves and their world in terms of it. Postmodernism takes us one
    step further by asking us what would happen if we postulate a universe
    without such subjectivity -- a universe that is intelligible in terms of
    consciousness that is already collapsed into culture and thus
    inseparable from discourse, from the way we talk about it. No longer
    independent and in control, consciousness then comes into play as part
    of a system. Such consciousness is generated by and inseparable from a
    specific culture, held in place by that culture's institutions (that is,
    by power) and no longer personal. As a result the city becomes a state
    of mind: it thinks us and not the other way around.
      Thomas Pynchon is central to these cultural and literary changes: he
    systematically undercuts the mythic, historic, aesthetic, and moral
    elements of modernism, creating a series of "flattened" characters who
    lack subjectivity and find the past emptied of all but "stencilized"
    meaning. ...

I think Lehan provides a remarkably clear and succinct picture of who's at
that "table", though his interpretations of Pynchon's texts themselves are a
little thin. I'll post more from him later when I have time.

best