MDDM World-as-text

[jbor]

MalignD wrote:

> I don't think that any one critical position is ultimately
> correct or right--I don't know what Rob or Otto would say--

Yes, I would agree with that 100%. All critical positions, all
interpretations, all perceptions/representations of the world, are limited,
partial. A shorthand way of making this point is through this idea of
world-as-text, which does figure prominently and often in Pynchon's work. I
agree with Otto that Pynchon's work is highly critical of any logocentric
notion which constructs the world in terms of this or that universal and
inviolate "truth", of those human constructs which don't permit or respect
alternate possibilities, worldviews, *texts*.

I think Derrida has stated that his own philosophical ideas will indeed be
superseded, something which he welcomes.

"The only attitude (the only politics - judicial, medical, pedagogical and
so forth) I would absolutely condemn is one which, directly or indirectly,
cuts off the possibility of an essentially interminable questioning, that
is, an effective and thus transforming questioning."

http://www.mythosandlogos.com/Derrida.html

And I agree also with John that the historical breach between modernity and
postmodernity (that breach occurring in the 1930s and 1940s, with WWII, the
Holocaust, Hiroshima etc), is more tangible than the aesthetic slide or
rupture or breakthrough from Modernism into Postmodernism. The only thing
I'd add, and John made the point himself, is that art and theory, and the
way that we respond to these, also were irrevocably changed by the events of
those two decades. Many artists and philosophers consciously repudiated what
had come before in their respective disciplines as not being sufficiently
committed or strong enough to foresee or prevent such catastrophes and such
degradation of the human "spirit". In literary terms, that Eliot and Pound
and Woolf stand largely on one side of the historical breach, and, say,
Pynchon and Gaddis and, I don't know, Julia Kristeva, on the other side,
seems to me to be self-evident, and a useful distinction to make, and one
which has been usefully made by many theorists and commentators. With
someone like Joyce, or Nabokov, or others whose work spans across the
breach, I think there is a perceptible development, a change in attitude or
perception of the place or role of the artist and the work of art in
society, of their own travails (manifesting often as an increased level of
self-scrutiny in and through their "texts"), as a direct, though perhaps
unstated or even subconscious, result of the terrible events of history
which they bore witness to. The differences between _Ulysses_ and _Finnegans
Wake_ exemplify this contrast between literary modernism and literary
postmodernism imo.

I don't have a problem talking about postmodernity (society and culture
since 1945), post-Modernism (art and literature produced since 1945), and
postmodernism or the postmodern (a trans-temporal category which brings
together an eclectic array of thinkers and artists - in literature, the
Cervantes-Sterne-Melville-Joyce-Pynchon line is one example - as well as
disparate stylistic tendencies, such as that Pynchonian hyper-realism in
representing the patently "unreal" which Bandwraith alluded to), though I
certainly don't assert that these are prescriptive categories or set in
stone. I think they are useful as points of departure for thinking about,
and discussing, art and culture, and Pynchon's work in particular.

best