Tuesday, October 7, 2014

It's not easy being epistemelogical--or phenomenological either


                  



Emoticons.
 

"Logic is a poor model of cause and effect. I
suggest it is the attempt to deal with life in
logical terms and the compulsive nature of
that attempt which produces in us the propensity
for terror when it is even hinted that such a
logical approach might break down" (Gregory
Bateson, Mind and Nature: a Necessary Unity.).


I consider myself logical, but I don't think syllogistically..
"Oh, that's logical," I say--because it makes my sense,
suits my agenda, falls into my aims and goals and
measurable outcomes.   

I consider my self reasonable and rational but don't
think in terms of ratios. "This rock is hard," I say--not
acknowledging  the relationship  between  butt and
rock that generates hardness like anything..

An emerging phenomena. " You're an idiot," I claim."
My cat's a Sneeze Maker".--
with no sense of ratios &
rationality and relationship involved: the reciprocity, the
back & forth, mutual, co-operation between subject
and object..

23 comments:

  1. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/tonyjones/2014/10/15/postmodernism-is-dead-again-and-its-successor-is-worse/

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  2. "A pseudo-modern text lasts an exceptionally brief time. Unlike, say, Fawlty Towers, reality TV programmes cannot be repeated in their original form, since the phone-ins cannot be reproduced, and without the possibility of phoning-in they become a different and far less attractive entity. Ceefax text dies after a few hours. If scholars give the date they referenced an internet page, it is because the pages disappear or get radically re-cast so quickly. Text messages and emails are extremely difficult to keep in their original form; printing out emails does convert them into something more stable, like a letter, but only by destroying their essential, electronic state. Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.

    The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I’ve hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’s technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert. Although we may grow so used to the new terms that we can adapt them for meaningful artistic expression (and then the pejorative label I have given pseudo-modernism may no longer be appropriate), for now we are confronted by a storm of human activity producing almost nothing of any lasting or even reproducible cultural value – anything which human beings might look at again and appreciate in fifty or two hundred years time."

    https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

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  3. Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the more numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble. In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent. This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists.
    Secondly, whereas postmodernism favoured the ironic, the knowing and the playful, with their allusions to knowledge, history and ambivalence, pseudo-modernism’s typical intellectual states are ignorance, fanaticism and anxiety: Bush, Blair, Bin Laden, Le Pen and their like on one side, and the more numerous but less powerful masses on the other. Pseudo-modernism belongs to a world pervaded by the encounter between a religiously fanatical segment of the United States, a largely secular but definitionally hyper-religious Israel, and a fanatical sub-section of Muslims scattered across the planet: pseudo-modernism was not born on 11 September 2001, but postmodernism was interred in its rubble. In this context pseudo-modernism lashes fantastically sophisticated technology to the pursuit of medieval barbarism – as in the uploading of videos of beheadings onto the internet, or the use of mobile phones to film torture in prisons. Beyond this, the destiny of everyone else is to suffer the anxiety of getting hit in the cross-fire. But this fatalistic anxiety extends far beyond geopolitics, into every aspect of contemporary life; from a general fear of social breakdown and identity loss, to a deep unease about diet and health; from anguish about the destructiveness of climate change, to the effects of a new personal ineptitude and helplessness, which yield TV programmes about how to clean your house, bring up your children or remain solvent. This technologised cluelessness is utterly contemporary: the pseudo-modernist communicates constantly with the other side of the planet, yet needs to be told to eat vegetables to be healthy, a fact self-evident in the Bronze Age. He or she can direct the course of national television programmes, but does not know how to make him or herself something to eat – a characteristic fusion of the childish and the advanced, the powerful and the helpless. For varying reasons, these are people incapable of the “disbelief of Grand Narratives” which Lyotard argued typified postmodernists.

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  4. That copied twice; weird.

    We see now, at the end, what bothers Dr. Professor A. Kirby: people are incapable of disbelieving grand narratives. Very puerile of them.

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  5. What's a grand narrative people are unable to disbelieve and why does that bother Professor Kirby? Or Lyotard?

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  6. It seems to be a blanket statement against all "fundamentalism" and dumbness. I am surprised he is not leading a charge against the use of oxygen, for its ubiquity and triteness. I think he is a case in point with his shallow generalizations, no matter how rarified the air he breathes.

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  7. Shabby & Shoddy? My Orthodox Presbyterian pastor might call it all "dung." And give a rack of bible quotations.
    Why do you suppose he finds fundamentalism and dumbness disturbing?

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  8. The imagined meta-thinking is over-simplified and tiring, sometimes tirade, sometimes false hope.

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  9. Every barbarism has always wielded the latest technology. We should should know that as easily as that vegetables are good for us.

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  10. You did not even read this quote.

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  11. Enough to get his gist. Had no problem with it. If this is tiring to you--walk away. Eat your vegetables.

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  12. I am interested on the impact of technology on the individual and the culture, but Jaron Lanier seems more qualified to comment. He can see the matter from both sides. http://www.dw.de/german-book-trade-peace-prize-for-virtual-reality-pioneer-jaron-lanier/a-17989388

    Professor A. Kirby's writing captured my interest, he points out interesting ironies, but in the end I don't find it helpful, for some of the reasons I have given.

    How do you the cultural milieu impacted and changing? How does technology change the narrative and the way we interact fundamentally?

    People have begun to bemoan that Wkipedia has the monopoly on knowledge. This could be worrisome but in an open environment the problem should be solvable...

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  13. I love the tech--but higher ed is basically the same as in the 50's: The students carry the information of the world, past and present, on their laptops, in their pockets: but we still run SCHOOL as if it were an information and instruction delivery system. It's not what we know that counts at this point but whether we can put it in play.

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  14. Carrying in the pocket is not the same as having at your fingertips. Putting into play means that you can say something from your own basic knowledge and understanding without necessarily consulting Wikipedia.

    The lady professor who came to teach music together drove a sharp distinction between being exposed to so much music as we are nowadays and from actually knowing any, singing actively, and performing together in society.

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  15. Kirby could have picked up on that. We listen to music all day but can't sing one song. If it is not the melody to twinkle twinkle we are stuck.

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  16. Yes--all these distinctions. Drawing distinctions is the heart of thinking, I think. Arguing them out--heart of academics? And relating them: heart of liberal art. Consult whatever's at hand. Sharp distinctions!

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  17. Consult what is at hand and decide what is reliable.

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  18. Walk on Eggs (WOE) or Walk on Water (WOW) - can't serve two magisteries. (Be very careful / be playful --a distinction, a frame of mind-set)

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