Fiction vs History?

[Otto]

> A few brief thoughts before I get back to grading this stack of (theory)
> papers in front of me.
>
> Otto, your points are well taken, but I think you're missing a few
> aspects of Ghetta's argument.  First, I do worry that he's right in
suggesting
> that perhaps the deconstructive technique can become dogmatic.
> You've got to be careful not to universalize deconstruction as a
"technique."

But it is merely a technique, a "tool" to interpret cultural artefacts.

>If you do,
> this is as ideologically blind as what deconstruction aims to
> critique.  Perhaps deconstruction is the first philosophy to fail
> precisely when it begins to succeed--andfailsbecauseofthesuccess.

I think this is indeed the case. Deconstruction makes no defined sense
because making sense is part of the logocentric programme.
Stop Making Sense!

> Ought
> (there's a word kids in my generation seldom use!) one to always employ
> deconstruction?  Are there better techniques for certain kinds of problems
> and questions?
>

Of course there are. I wouldn't apply deconstruction to the education of
little children, but to point out to little readers that Harry Potter works
*because of* turning the underdog into a privileged position, from preterite
to elect surely isn't wrong.

> Second, Ghetta's point about "T"ruth being in the realm of God, wasn't
> playing the God Card.  What he was getting at, I think, is a point I
> raised a while ago: poststructuralists set up a strawman argument against
> knowledge.

I don't think that's the case. The argument is against "definite knowledge,"
not knowledge per se. There is knowledge but we have to keep in mind always
that this knowledge can be proven wrong one day.

> By positing that any error or ambiguity preclude knowledge or
> objectivity, poststructuralists set up an account of truth, knowledge, and
> objectivity that is 1) very easy to shoot down, and 2) an account of
> knowledge that very few people, if anybody, within the philosophical
> community would adhere to.  To reiterate a point made all ready: the world
> cannot be reduced to a text.  There are indeed extralingual things,
> aspects
> of this world that operate with or without our fancy words and
> theories.  The real challenge is to articulate a theory of meaning that
> accounts for error, subjectivity, and imperfect knowledge and yet does not
> abandon ideas such as truth or objectivity, a theory of meaning that can
> indeed draw a conceptual line between fiction and history.
>
> Perhaps a good way to approach this is through the work of Edward
> Said.  While it is indeed the case, as Said argues, nobody is able to
> extract their perspective from a social power construct, this does not
> mean that there can be no such thing as history.  Indeed, what is the
> point of a body of work like Said's--or, in a sense, Foucault's--except
> to point out a
> wrong line of historical thinking?  Behind such a project is the implicit
> assertion that they have a better notion of history--a version more true,
> somehow.  While it may not be the case that we will ever have a final,
> perfect history book (that is, a history book that moves from the gray
> area
> into the clearly defined black or white area), I for one adamantly believe
> there can be more and less accurate histories.  Who here would claim that
> a
> history text that denies the Holocaust is more*right* than Shirer's The
> Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or that official Soviet records denying
> the gulags is more accurate than The Gulag Archipelago?  Of course a
> historian is selective in choosing what to tell--the question is the
> rightness of those selections, though, is it not?
>
> O.
>

I've never read from any of the ones mentioned above that they've found a
better notion of history or truth. All they're doing is to challenge the
older versions who claim to be the only right solution.

GR provides a perfect example on the truth of official history in the person
of Wernher von Braun, someone who benefited from and had knowledge of the
Holocaust, but instead of sitting on the bench in Nuremberg went to America
to build more rockets:

"Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation.
Everything science has taught me and continues to teach me,
strengthens my belief in the continuity of our
spiritual existence after death."
Wernher von Braun
(GR p. 7)

Death was his business. It's been nice of him to declare that his victims,
the Londoners killed by the rocket and the Camp Dora-slaves murdered while
producing it, are still living, at least spiritually, isn't it?

According to my standards he's been a war criminal and according to
US-history books he was an honorable man. Both versions are selective but
which is more true?

Otto