Mishakes & Chomsky/Foucault and whatever....
Terrance
lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Thu Nov 29 09:58:46 CST 2001
Dave Monroe wrote:
> (all sorts of fictional works have
> bought into all sorts of wacky and long since
> discredited, or, at least, problematized, ideas, but
> ...), but ...
Yeah, or not bought into, but only brought into the fiction to
serve fictional purposes. Sort of like Entropy perhaps.
I've just finished my little Foucault Reader (Paul Rabinow) and I'm
thinking about reading The Order of Things. Although I can't quite say
anything about Foucault w/o sounding like I've been misreading or
rehashing positivism ;-)
The objective and subjective are only two possible modes.
Foucault reads like an objective perspective although at times (not in
Said's sense, Said complains about Foucault's absent subject and poses a
hybrid
"perspective") seems to be a hybrid of the objective and disciplinary
(Aristotle's Perspective). I want to read his Order of Things next.
Foucault's analysis attempts to be nonjudgmental and
objective, asking how? How modes of thinking are formulating questions
or assigning meaning and so on.
His Method is clearly Agonistic.
This is one of the reasons (of course he himself talks about how
Nietzsche influenced his ideas) he has been compared with Nietzsche.
Rabinow notes that F's basic metaphor is one of battle and not
conversation. We could say, Agonsitic and not Dialectic. Rabinow also
claims
that F is "resolutely and consistently anti-Hegelian and anti-Marxist"
in the area of history, that is, F rejects a general and dialectical
theory of history. This is partly because F, like Pynchon, who satirizes
dialecticians in GR--Marx, Brown, Hegel, Plato, sees and seeks no way
out (see Norman O. Brown another Dialectician who seeks a way out of
Freud's Agon--eros and thanatos). And for both Pynchon and F, seeking a
way out is the greatest danger.
BTW, the contrast (on Human Nature) that Rabinow sets up in his
Introduction also tells us a bit about Chomsky.
"For F, knowledge of all sorts is thoroughly emeshed in the clash of
petty doninations, as well as the larger battles which constitute our
world. Knowledge is not external to these fights; it doesn't ot
constitute
a way out of, or above, the fray in the way Chomsky views it." (note the
Agonistic language here)
The way Chomsky views it, and this is one of the reasons I find Chomsky,
much as I admire his monumental contributions to linguistics, a
supercilious political hack, is that the *intellectuals* task (do note
that in the essay on Propaganda David posted Chomsky divides the people
as educated and common folk. I find this a despicable ploy. Moreover,
what he does is to set himself above both as the intellectual who is
able to see how even the educated masses are being manipulated by
forces invisible) is to escape, to find a way out of Plato's cave
through dialectic and
strive toward the ideal, to rise above the fray. Chomsky's reality is
Platonic,
a reality above, an ideal, be it of Justice or the State.
For those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world, there
can be no more urgent task than to come to understand the
mechanisms and practices of indoctrination. These are easy to
perceive in the totalitarian societies, much less so in the
propaganda system to which we are subjected and in which all too
often we serve as unwilling or unwitting instruments.
- Chomsky
Note that Chomsky also sets himself and his followers
apart, as those who stubbornly seek freedom around the world. F provides
a very good foil to Chomsky's Universal Truth claims.
Aslo of interest here, Chomsky, like McLuhen, Norbert Wiener may be
considered Luddites, but all three seek a way out through technological
means, faulting
political institutions and THEM. F does not, as Rabinow puts it,
attribute the practices of objectification to the orchestration of "some
unseen actor." We could
say, here I would disagree again with Thomas Moore's wonderful study of
the scientific influences in GR, that P brought these texts into his
texts even if he never bought into them, Or, even if he did, his
fiction does not.
Also, like Pynchon, F's Agons seem to include paradoxical dislocations
that he
views historically as abrupt shifts.
I can't remember, what does Melville say about mistakes in Billy Budd?
In terms of mistakes, Melville might be better compared with DeLillo in
this. Seeing as Pynchon and Joyce take ten years to do their research
and Melville and DeLillo crank out great fiction like writing machines.
ooops, Scriveners.
Although Melville, like Pynchon, is almost impossible to nail down on an
error. You simply can't attribute the apparent error directly to the
author most of the time because they don't write the kind of fiction
that allows for this. In both, time is not a good measure. It's very
difficult to say with any degree of certainty that Melville screws up a
date or even a place or to determine when anachronisms are deliberate
or who is talking for that matter. Is it Melville's apparent error or
Ahab's or Ishmael's or has the novel shifted into a realm of possible
spaces and times where dreams of the future are mixed with facts from
the past. Has the ship of fools entered a place of timelessness (science
fiction like time warps and character morphings and mappings onto and
doubles are common to both Melville and Pynchon's texts) or is sitting
on the pole, has it spiraled into a single or collective consciousness
or past the pillars of Hercules or into pastiche or parody of Dante or
Eliot? One of the marvels of P is his ear. He says he had a bad ear and
this is true of some of his Slow Learners. His southern talk is abysmal.
However, he gets very good at, he improves and while he says he knew
hardly a word of German, and he makes mistakes with German in GR, he
obviously improves markedly and he develops techniques to shade and
obscure his weaknesses. When an 18th century character speaks like
parody of a 20th century movie star, is this an error?
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