Yer one of them Enlightenment thinkers, aincha?
In the company I keep, it seems I can't avoid the topic of post-modernism. Find myself reading Butterflies and Wheels' notes section pretty much twice weekly, at least, wherein the lovely and talented Ophelia Benson and her esteemed associate Jeremy Stangroom regularly take on epistemic relativism (not to mention certain related and equally flagrant abuses of reason certain purveyors of pseudoscience regularly commit). I usually drop in on David Brin's long rambling thing on modernism, post-modernism, the Enlightenment and just about everything else about half as often. And Holly Messinger, of course, who has her own occasional complaints on the subject, I read more frequently than any of them.
It was Holly, actually, who got me started on this particular post. Reading my comment that I found the plot in my current literary millstone (The Manuscript That Would Not Die) a bit too linear for my tastes, she took it upon herself to warn me away from any annoyingly pretentious post-modern non-resolution resolutions in the area of the climax of the thing. A warning, it must be said, she composed most eloquently.
I was able to assure her there's really no danger of that. I mostly like to know when a story's over, thank you very much, and preferably not just by my encountering the back cover. I'm pretty sure I mostly learned my storytelling techniques from such sophisticated and pretentious literary practitioners as nightclub comics doing racy standup, an awful lot of pulp fiction, and kids telling fart jokes in grade school. And very few of those were much for that non-resolving story line thing (there's one exception I can think of, actually, in the standup routine category, and actually it's pretty funny—remind me to tell it to you some time—though I digress). So yeah, the stuff I do does have a way of ending pretty clearly, no fear.
Somewhat more seriously, I've my own beefs with post-modernism, both within and without literature.
Without literature, I'd put myself firmly in the camp of those (Ms. Benson, maybe? I don't want to put words in her mouth) who mostly think that post-modern ideas about the significance of context to observations might be useful things to keep around, but anyone taking this so far as to suggest this implies there is either (a) no tractably knowable objective reality or (b) actually no objective reality is probably either (1) incredibly silly, (2) sadly deluded, (3) grinding an axe for a pseudoscience, or (4) all of the above.
More to the point: my one actually complete degree is in Biology (a subject I studied almost entirely out of love for the material, I might add; I'm terribly old-fashioned that way), and we were taught pretty much from day one that context is pretty durn important to observation. Hell, read any paper in any major journal, and it's usually about half establishing context (or, more technically, describing the experimental conditions), so the observations might actually prove repeatable. So it seems to me good empirical science has pretty much always got that context is important, and while yes, post-modern ideas about the pervasiveness and invisibility of certain assumptions might be useful toward understanding why science investigates what it does, the bleating hordes who natter that 'Western science' is parochial, or racist, or blinkered, or just terribly arrogant make me wonder if any of them have ever actually read any real research.
My message to these folks: yes, I get we all have our contexts, all make assumptions shaped by those. Yes, we get they're hard to notice, sometimes. Kinda knew that, already. But thanks for the insight anyway.
Now: got anything else?
No?
Alrighty then. Next.
Beyond these goobs, of course, there's the out and out apologists for unreason, hiding behind postmodernism's flag. You can't live long as an atheist without encountering at least one slackjawed evangelical preacher who insists his firm belief in an invisible sky fairy is somehow 'post-modern'... or justified because post-modernism sez there's no reality anyway, so he can believe whatever he durn well wants, thank you very much... Or somesuch rot.
True story: one of these I met, attempting to answer my ridicule of his rhetoric, responded to me with the line: "You're such an Enlightenment thinker"... as though, apparently, I was gonna take this as an insult or something.
Hardly. Me? An Enlightenment thinker? Awwww. Thanks. But I bet you say that to all the heathens, don't you?
Anyway, moving on: within literature, I guess I'm not far from Holly's camp. Though I'd say: I've read the odd piece with some arguably post-modern trappings that uses them to good effect. Brunner's mighty Stand on Zanzibar, to my mind, though it probably predates much of the 'fashionable nonsense' (thank you, Butterflies and Wheels) that is current post-modern literature, certainly does marvellous things with multiple points of view. But overall, my feelings about post-modernism informing art are much the same as are my views of a lot of other such once overly-fashionable movements: that most of these consist of nothing more than a few clever and only occasionally useful ideas taken vastly too far and promoted immediately to dogma.
So sure, there's a work or two out there that proves the idea can lead to good art, but suddenly, if you're not 'post-modern', or can't at least stamp it somewhere on the dust-jacket, you're not hip or something... Which, mostly, leads to a lot of really, really bad art, entirely overwhelmed by the weight of the ideology that drives it.
So, responding to that movement, I guess all I have to say is, umm, thanks, but I can live with being unfashionable, thank you.
I mean, hell, you should see the way I dress.
Anyway. That's all (except to say to all of you noticing my nattering about being overly busy inevitably comes on the same day I write three or more blog entries, yes, my time management and prioritization are incredibly bad, and thanks for noticing).
Finally, in case anyone's wondering, and like I told Holly elsewhere: my concerns with the linearity of the manuscript's plot were entirely with it being a bit too predictable, nothing more. Will ends nice and neatly, and almost certainly will whatever else I might do to it. Just like any good campfire story's supposed to.
It was Holly, actually, who got me started on this particular post. Reading my comment that I found the plot in my current literary millstone (The Manuscript That Would Not Die) a bit too linear for my tastes, she took it upon herself to warn me away from any annoyingly pretentious post-modern non-resolution resolutions in the area of the climax of the thing. A warning, it must be said, she composed most eloquently.
I was able to assure her there's really no danger of that. I mostly like to know when a story's over, thank you very much, and preferably not just by my encountering the back cover. I'm pretty sure I mostly learned my storytelling techniques from such sophisticated and pretentious literary practitioners as nightclub comics doing racy standup, an awful lot of pulp fiction, and kids telling fart jokes in grade school. And very few of those were much for that non-resolving story line thing (there's one exception I can think of, actually, in the standup routine category, and actually it's pretty funny—remind me to tell it to you some time—though I digress). So yeah, the stuff I do does have a way of ending pretty clearly, no fear.
Somewhat more seriously, I've my own beefs with post-modernism, both within and without literature.
Without literature, I'd put myself firmly in the camp of those (Ms. Benson, maybe? I don't want to put words in her mouth) who mostly think that post-modern ideas about the significance of context to observations might be useful things to keep around, but anyone taking this so far as to suggest this implies there is either (a) no tractably knowable objective reality or (b) actually no objective reality is probably either (1) incredibly silly, (2) sadly deluded, (3) grinding an axe for a pseudoscience, or (4) all of the above.
More to the point: my one actually complete degree is in Biology (a subject I studied almost entirely out of love for the material, I might add; I'm terribly old-fashioned that way), and we were taught pretty much from day one that context is pretty durn important to observation. Hell, read any paper in any major journal, and it's usually about half establishing context (or, more technically, describing the experimental conditions), so the observations might actually prove repeatable. So it seems to me good empirical science has pretty much always got that context is important, and while yes, post-modern ideas about the pervasiveness and invisibility of certain assumptions might be useful toward understanding why science investigates what it does, the bleating hordes who natter that 'Western science' is parochial, or racist, or blinkered, or just terribly arrogant make me wonder if any of them have ever actually read any real research.
My message to these folks: yes, I get we all have our contexts, all make assumptions shaped by those. Yes, we get they're hard to notice, sometimes. Kinda knew that, already. But thanks for the insight anyway.
Now: got anything else?
No?
Alrighty then. Next.
Beyond these goobs, of course, there's the out and out apologists for unreason, hiding behind postmodernism's flag. You can't live long as an atheist without encountering at least one slackjawed evangelical preacher who insists his firm belief in an invisible sky fairy is somehow 'post-modern'... or justified because post-modernism sez there's no reality anyway, so he can believe whatever he durn well wants, thank you very much... Or somesuch rot.
True story: one of these I met, attempting to answer my ridicule of his rhetoric, responded to me with the line: "You're such an Enlightenment thinker"... as though, apparently, I was gonna take this as an insult or something.
Hardly. Me? An Enlightenment thinker? Awwww. Thanks. But I bet you say that to all the heathens, don't you?
Anyway, moving on: within literature, I guess I'm not far from Holly's camp. Though I'd say: I've read the odd piece with some arguably post-modern trappings that uses them to good effect. Brunner's mighty Stand on Zanzibar, to my mind, though it probably predates much of the 'fashionable nonsense' (thank you, Butterflies and Wheels) that is current post-modern literature, certainly does marvellous things with multiple points of view. But overall, my feelings about post-modernism informing art are much the same as are my views of a lot of other such once overly-fashionable movements: that most of these consist of nothing more than a few clever and only occasionally useful ideas taken vastly too far and promoted immediately to dogma.
So sure, there's a work or two out there that proves the idea can lead to good art, but suddenly, if you're not 'post-modern', or can't at least stamp it somewhere on the dust-jacket, you're not hip or something... Which, mostly, leads to a lot of really, really bad art, entirely overwhelmed by the weight of the ideology that drives it.
So, responding to that movement, I guess all I have to say is, umm, thanks, but I can live with being unfashionable, thank you.
I mean, hell, you should see the way I dress.
Anyway. That's all (except to say to all of you noticing my nattering about being overly busy inevitably comes on the same day I write three or more blog entries, yes, my time management and prioritization are incredibly bad, and thanks for noticing).
Finally, in case anyone's wondering, and like I told Holly elsewhere: my concerns with the linearity of the manuscript's plot were entirely with it being a bit too predictable, nothing more. Will ends nice and neatly, and almost certainly will whatever else I might do to it. Just like any good campfire story's supposed to.
posted by AJM at 1:09 p.m. (Permanent Link)
