facts? interpretations?

[Swing Hammerswing]

>From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: facts? interpretations?
>Date: Sun, 20 May 2001 10:19:40 +1000
>
>
>     Facts are but the Play-things of lawyers,-- Tops and Hoops,
>     forever a-spin....
>                                         (_M&D_ 349)

You are citing a character/narrator/ in a Pynchon fiction.

So what? Doesn't mean donkey dick unless you comment on
it. WC aint TRP!! You and the Doug, no wonder you go at it, at the
expense of the list and with the total disreagred for the Pynchon list.


Facts are but plaything my ass, this is WC. If Pynchon
believed this pomo history he would be the hypocrit of the
century. Hey, get Sasuly and read it, maybe you will
bet a clue about P's true understanding of America. You
think theory is science and america is the land of satan
and you try to make Pynchon  your dummy, but we aint buying.




>
>----------
> >From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
> >
>
> > That language is "not instinctive" is far from universally accepted
> > as accurate; to the contrary, we seem to be hard-wired for language
> > and culture,
>
>Yes, this is the unstated alternative viewpoint in Bauerlein's article, 
>that
>language is instinctive, somehow miraculously-bestowed on humans at birth.


BULLSHIT! He never says this. What is unstated
is unstated, if you state it and attribute to
the essay it's yours not the authors.


Give it up, ther is nothing much worth arguing about, that
Monroe guy and Mike R said it best, now cut bait.


>But if you compare an actual instinct, like suckling or breathing, which 
>any
>mammalian newborn is able to do immediately, to the way that language &
>communication skills develop receptively and then actively through manifold
>stages, and only after a long period of immersion in an environment which 
>is
>already language-specific, then it's pretty obvious that they are
>qualitatively different phenomena. Who was it that was able to teach that
>chimp to communicate using English language?

If you don't know, but sure you do, this is a fake out,
you don't know, but either way Man, you have no idea what
the hell you are talking about so pleeeeeeeez.


>
>I'm not sure how "culture" might be instinctive: this proposition seems to
>ignore the fact that human society is and always has been a culturally and
>linguistically-diverse place.

What is cultture? Give me a simple anthropological definition OK, look in 
the archives, there is a very good one in there.

You guys, stick to Pynchon.




>
> > which appear to possess an evolutionary history that
> > preceeds our own,
>
>Are you saying that human language(s) and culture(s) preceded human
>history???!

Yeah, so what, how is this any different from any of the
other stupid srtuff you guys are talking about here?




>
> > which arise naturally among humans (and other
> > animals) and conditioned by our physical make-up-- quite a bit of
> > exciting work is underway exploring those areas; an interesting
> > starting point is Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its
> > Challenge to Western Thought by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, plus
> > tons of research that's beginning to uncover the physical components
> > of emotions and thought.
>
>Nature vs nurture: there's nothing new in the debate. I agree that there
>must be physiological aspects to thinking and emotion: the way that some
>foods and chemicals are able to produce mind-altering states certainly
>supports this thesis. But the fact that different human cultures (and
>individuals) value different "emotions" and "thoughts", or prioritise them
>differently, or even seem to "think" and "feel" differently, seems to me
>self-evident. Pynchon:
>
>    "My god," Saul flung up an arm. "Dehumanized? How much more human can I
>  get? I worry, Meatball, I do. There are Europeans wandering around North
>  Africa with their tongues torn out of their heads because their tongues
>  have spoken the wrong words. Only the Europeans thought they were the 
>right
>  words."
>    "Language barrier", Meatball suggested.
>    Saul jumped down off the stove. "That", he said, angry, "is a good
>  candidate for sick joke of the year. No, ace, it is *not* a barrier. If 
>it
>  is anything it is a kind of leakage. Tell a girl: 'I love you'. No 
>trouble
>  with two-thirds of that, it's a closed circuit. Just you and she. But 
>that
>  nasty four-letter word in the middle, *that's* the one you have to look 
>out
>  for. Ambiguity. Redundance. Irrelevance, even. Leakage. All this is 
>noise.
>  Noise screws up your signal, makes for disorganization in the circuit."
>                                                         ('Entropy' 1960)
>
> > Where does Pynchon come down on this question?  Hard to say, but
> > given his devastating critique of the systems approach, and of
> > religious dogma, it's difficult to imagine him applauding a system of
> > thought as limited and dogmatic as social constructionism
>
>Just chanting over and over again that a widely-held proposition is 
>"limited
>and dogmatic" doesn't actually make it so. But Pynchon certainly addresses
>the alternative viewpoint in elaborate detail. Throughout _GR_ he satirises
>the inter-relationship of "shit, money and the Word", Puritan "vanity"
>(267.23), and that "Puritan reflex of seeking other orders behind the
>visible" (188.14):
>
>     It touches Slothrop's own Puritan hopes for the Word, the Word made
>     printer's ink, dwelling along with antibodies and and iron-bound 
>breath
>     in a good man's blood ... (571.33)
>
> > -- the
> > world exceeds its grasp quite easily, it founders on self-cancelling
> > contradiction ("no facts only interpretation" erases anything like
> > certainty for the claim of fundamental truth that its defenders make
> > for social constructionism), it fails to capture anything like the
> > complex richness of life and thought.
>
>There's no need to treat Nietzsche's maxim that "there are no facts, only
>interpretations" as a "fundamental truth", particularly as some people, 
>such
>as Bauerlein, appear to interpret things differently. (This, to my mind, is
>part of the *proof* of the proposition .... ) But if it helps at all then
>think of it as a scientific hypothesis, just like the observation that the
>planets orbit the sun. As with the latter, many scientists nowadays happen
>to agree, to a point where it has become accepted without question in their
>discourse. Just as academics in this field aren't obliged to demonstrate 
>the
>proof of planetary solar orbit every time they write a paper (however much
>the atavists at the Flat Earth Society might protest), neither do linguists
>or anthropologists need to demonstrate the proof that language, and thus
>knowledge, are social constructs. Surely the onus is on naysayers such as
>Bauerlein & co to provide substantive corroboration of an or the 
>alternative
>viewpoint/s, not just fire off broadsides against straw men?
>
>best
>
>
>
>


What a bunch of crap, come on, this is what you have learnt
in your foucault seminars and it can't be applied to
pynchon unless you qualify it as such. It's your
theory taken from the run of the mill intro to relativism
and applied to GR. What a bunch o9f crap.
_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com