MDDM: ch. 67 "Garden Pests"

[Terrance]

Otto wrote:
> 
> Only the American sun? Isn't that provincialism? Meanwhile I think that
> postmodernism is the post-WWII branch of modernism. What do you think of the
> Barthes-quote I posted, applied to Pynchon in general? Especially the last
> sentence, because I was thinking of you when I typed it last night:
> 
> "In precisely this way literature (it would be better from now on to say
> *writing*), by refusing to assign a *secret*, an ultimate meaning, to the
> text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an
> anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to
> refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his
> hypostases--reason, science, law."

God and his what? Hypostases? The ground? The foundation? The essence?
The underlying reality? God in three persons? 

Whatever, I can't quit figure out how/why writing does this. 
Also, the world itself is not a text or any possible sum total of texts.
Is it? 
Why exalt the text thus? Why reduce literature to writing and exalt the
text--equate it with the world.  The world is always both pre-textual
and post-textual in that it gives rise to and yet transcends all actual
or possible theories, including postmodern theories. 

Shakespeare is literature. Shakespeare is  surely not the same thing as
**writing** a post to the Pynchon list or writing a letter to my aunt
Lucy in Jamestown NY. Also, remembering my days as a Jesuit, it seems to
me that most theological/textual  activities rarely involved the fixing
of anything. I think most lawyers would agree that the same is true of
the law. Hell, while science may be read as a text of fixed, determined
and determining laws it is far from that. Isn't it? 

I don't like postmodernism philosophically,  I think it's sophism in a
semantic epoch, but I do like the application of theories to literature,
including some pomo ones.