The linked essay makes perfect sense to me; and I’m certain the only reason it doesn’t to you is indeed just the jargon. I don’t think it’s a particularly good analysis, ultimately, but for boring reasons that would make any essay weak, not because it’s saying nothing. It’s also not attempting to be a knock-down argument, not on account of its theoretical stance, but because it’s a short blog post firing off some impressions in a perhaps unjustifiably confident tone, which of course Manly Man Rational Economists(tm) do all the time.
That said, my acquired intuition is that within [the cluster of people/ideaspace that the typical LessWrong reader would ugh-field as “pomo”], as within many other clusters, the lack of clarity in language does certainly covary with lack of clarity in actual thought. But I can’t really say how much my own tribal academic loyalties (or desire to believe that I can understand anything that means anything) have helped produce that sensation.
I can read it, and I’m pretty sure I can see what it’s trying to say, but I can’t find a cogent structured argument in it. More pressingly, after I tease apart its wilfully impenetrable written style, so what?
It has a reasonably coherent central idea (albeit one that could have been conveyed in a fifth of the wordcount), but it doesn’t present a case for it. It just makes claims, occasionally referencing other people’s claims. I can make claims too. Brigitte Bardot has a birthmark on her ankle in the shape of a duck. Does she? I dunno; maybe. It’s not now your job to go away and research whether Brigitte Bardot has any birthmarks in the shape of waterfowl. It’s mine. It’s always mine.
It makes no effort to convince me it’s not just some random stuff some dude is saying (cf. timecube.com). Lots of dudes say lots of random stuff. Why should I care about this? Why should I put it in my head and allow it to influence my expectations of what’s going to happen? What’s the difference between a world where this is accurately describing something and a world where it isn’t?
If this structure, this mechanism for saying “here’s something, and here’s why” actually exists in there, please tell me where it is.
A world where this accurately describes reality, rather than one where it doesn’t, is one where 1) most people consent, more or less, to the idea that they should pay their debts, 2) indebtedness is stigmatized, 3) debt is seen primarily as a relationship between individuals, 4) the indebted are less likely to be politically active than they would if they were not indebted, …, &c. It’s intended to resonate with one’s phenomenal experience and background assumptions, and no, it doesn’t attempt much more than that, so like I said, it’s a bad argument.
This may sound like a glib remark, and it is, but it’s also a legitimate query: where are they hiding all the good arguments?
My lit-crit friend, a Ph.D. student herself, presumably provided this example in the misguided hope that it would offer an insight into the value of her way of thinking. Was it just a bad choice on her part? Is there some secret trove of critical theory observations on debt that I might look at and think “woah! This is knowledge worth having”?
It’s a reasonable question. First, I think that the linked example is not the best of post-modern thought.
More importantly, a lot of post-modern thought is co-opted and the label is forcibly excised. Here are some examples of what I think are good post-modern ideas.
There was a tendency for colonist-era Europeans to ascribe exotic virtues to Near and Far Easterners that had little relationship to the values of those communities. Orientalism is a discussion of this dynamic related to Near Eastern culture. I don’t think the dynamic can be well explained by reference to in-group/out-group, but post-modernism does a good job, in my view. Consider also the phenomena of the Magical Negro (warning: TVtropes)
Death of the Author (TVtropes), the view that the author’s opinions do not control a work’s interpretations, is also heavily influenced by post-modern thought (or so I understand—I’m not very interested in most lit crit of any flavor)
The slogan “The personal is political” is insightful because it highlights that “political” (i.e. partisan electioneering) is not really a natural kind in political-theory conceptspace. Issues of personal identity are just as mindkilling, for essentially the same reasons. Also, post-modern theory helps explain why the legal distinction between public action and private action is not well defined in practice.
Also, post-modernism is often intentionally filled with hyperbole. For example, I’m persuaded that Nietzsche was not anti-semetic or fascist, but reading Geneology of Morals literally can easily leave that impression. There are reasonable methodological arguments about whether hyperbole is a good idea, but post-modernism is usually on the side of more hyperbole (in part because colloquial usage often does not encompass a natural kind).
Finally, post-modernism is closely clustered with anti-capitalism and anti-empiricism. I can’t defend this association, but it exists. I think much of the perceived poor quality of post-modern thought is really disagreement with those other positions. I don’t think those positions are an essential part of post-modern thought—for example, I think Foucault is trying to be a high quality historian. If I were persuaded that his history was bad, that would necessarily cast doubt on his conclusions from the historical evidence.
It’s funny you should mention Death of the Author. I have another friend whose academic background is in literature, and he rants to the point of blind fury about how ridiculous a notion it is. I showed him the above link to get his opinion, and his most pointed comment was how the author’s emphasis on academia, student debt and being forced to work menial academic positions was not a shining indictment of Roland Barthes.
Barthes is good, comprehensible and generally on the ball. He’s actually not a waste of your life to read. Start with Mythologies like everyone does. (No-one who lives on the internet would find it radical these days, but it certainly was when it was published.)
Personally, I’ve long been of the opinion that Death of the Author is, if not exactly wrong, still an idea which has been more harmful than useful with respect to its effects on literary criticism.
The central idea of Death of the Author is to judge the text itself without limiting interpretation to that which is imposed by the author’s intentions. There are certainly cases where one can glean valuable information from a text which the author did not consciously choose to add to their work. For instance, the author might have views on race which will leak out into their writing, in such a way that a perceptive reader will gain insight about their views even though the author did not intend to make any sort of statement about race whatsoever. However, I think that to divorce the text entirely from the context of its creation is an invitation to abuse the basic principles of communication.
As Roland Barthes put it, “To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” But imposing limits on a text is necessary in order to extract any information from it at all. It’s only by narrowing down our space of the possible referents that we can distinguish the meaning of “an indictment of Roland Barthes” from “oogabooga.”
A text has no inherent meaning, so it makes no sense to judge “the text itself” divorced from the context that granted it meaning in the first place. Obviously, we didn’t need to wait for Barthes to come along in order to realize “hey, we can gain information about the social norms of the ancient Greeks by reading the Iliad which Homer never realized he was putting in there in the first place!” When we do this, information is being conveyed from the writers of the text to us, because the narrowness that we and the author mutually impose on the text carries more information than the author was conscious of. But if you decide, for example, “Hey, I can interpret “The Faerie Queene” as a narrative of the history of Communism!” information is not being conveyed. You might as well be spending your time deciding what clouds look like.
There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we’re interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn’t in the text, it’s in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you’re independent of the author’s context, you’re only getting out of it what you put in yourself.
This is at the notion level, but I’m wondering where the meaning of a text is.
Candidate theories: In the mind of the author. Readers are constructing (whether consciously or not) models of what the author had in mind.
In the minds of readers. People have access to the mind of at most one reader.
But that’s limited fun for some kinds of analysis, so critics are apt to make guesses about the minds of a great many readers.
I have respect for a professor (sorry, name and university forgotten) who asked people what they loved about the Lord of the Rings, and why they read it repeatedly. The consensus answer was the moment when Sauron’s power fell.
Until I wrote this, I didn’t realize that this is an example of successful authorial intention—Tolkien thought eucatastrophe was crucial.
There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we’re interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn’t in the text, it’s in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you’re independent of the author’s context, you’re only getting out of it what you put in yourself.
For fictional texts, I’m not sure that extracting information from the text is really the best way of thinking about the text-reader interaction.
The “Wizard of Oz” movie is allegedly very influential in gay culture in America. Assuming this is true, I find it implausible that this was the intent of a movie made in 1939. Does that show that the movie can’t “mean” something about gay culture?
Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether there’s any value to be gotten from reading fiction, and if so what it is that one is getting of value.
Which might in turn raise the question of whether it’s possible to get that thing-of-value from nonfiction as well, in which case perhaps extracting information from the text is perhaps not the only way to engage with nonfiction, either.
It was useful at the time. Remember that postmodernisms are reactions against modernisms, and reactions date badly. There are few good ideas that can’t be made into bad ideas by overdoing them hard enough.
Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle provides a concrete example, useful for grounding a discussion of the “Death of the Author”. Stealing a paragraph from Wikipedia
In The Jungle (1906), Sinclair gave a scathing indictment of unregulated capitalism as exemplified in the meatpacking industry. His descriptions of both the unsanitary conditions and the inhumane conditions experienced by the workers shocked and galvanized readers. Sinclair had intended it as an attack upon capitalist enterprise, but readers reacted viscerally. Domestic and foreign purchases of American meat fell by half. Sinclair lamented: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” The novel was so influential that it spurred government regulation of the industry, as well as the passage of the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Author’s really do intend specific interpretations, and can notice, with disappointment, when readers impose a different interpretation by weight of numbers.
I have a hard time sympathizing with Upton Sinclair’s complaint about the specifics of how his resounding success was implemented. He thought unregulated capitalism was bad, and explained why; people agreed, and tore down the “unregulated” part.
Author’s really do intend specific interpretations, and can notice, with disappointment, when readers impose a different interpretation by weight of numbers.
Yep. Any writer of fiction needs to understand the concept of “death of the author”, even if they don’t call it that—the text as all the reader has to go on.
That’s because it’s late and I used a word with exactly the opposite meaning I was reaching for. The sentiment I was trying to get at was the author’s emphasis on debt as it impacts a doctoral candidate, (as opposed to, say, a blue collar worker who has to moonlight in a petrol station to cover their loan repayments), does not bode well for the idea of divorcing an author’s personal opinions and circumstances from the interpretations of their work.
The way my friend has always described Death of the Author (we lived together at University, so I’ve been treated to this for a while) suggests he has been subject to a much, much stronger form than the one you describe, in which an author’s motives, intentions and circumstances should be completely disregarded when interpreting their work.
(I recall he once wrote a poem which, in a pleasantly Godelian fashion, described his own motives and intentions while writing it. He hoped one day to become famous enough as a poet that English undergrads would be forced to try and analyse it without reference to his motives and intentions for the piece. There’s a reason we’ve remained friends for so long.)
Coming at it from an information theoretic perspective, Moby Dick is clearly not talking about the Soviet Union’s occupation of post-war East Germany. Part of my certainty in that statement involves facts about the knowledge and history of the author (most saliently that he wrote the book, and died, in the 19th Century). Any implementation of Death of the Author strong enough to say “that doesn’t matter: Ahab is totally Stalin” is not an implementation I can really get behind.
Well, I think you need to more rigidly designate “they,” but since neither debt nor literature-department-influenced frameworks are my actual bailiwick I can’t in confidence help you out here. I do find that some of the Big Inscrutable Names, like Foucault and Althusser, can be useful to think with.
(If it sounds as though I’m being a really poor defender of Critical Whatever it’s because I’m not, really; I’m more used to being typecast as the guy who thinks the cultural turn was bullshit. But it’s not as bullshit as most intelligent outsiders assume, is my incredibly modest claim.)
In a capitalist society, debt is not defined by relationship with the government, but is essentially unending because everything requires debt to acquire.
If we took fifty literature postgrads from across the English speaking world, and asked them to explain the sentence, would they give consistent answers?
If they were familiar with the way Deleuzians phrase things then about 80% would, is my guess. Mostly the quality of postgrads is pretty poor because lots of philosophy professors suck, which influences this.
I got the same interpretation as Tim S though. I’ve read some D(&G) stuff before.
“Infinite” is just Deleuzians being overdramatic and imprecise with language. Or, perhaps they’re not trying to convey the logic of the argument so much as the idea or feel of the argument. Deleuzians often have a hard time seeing the division between things like logic and persuasion and bias. They’re right insofar as there is no hard concrete division between those things, but it sometimes makes them lazy.
RE: Below comments: “flows” mean something specific within Deleuzian terminology. It implies interconnectedness and chains of causality with uncountable numbers of variables interacting with whatever it is that they’re talking about. It also has implications related to perceiving objects as dynamic rather than as static.
Once you understand the jargon and have read his arguments a bit it’s actually sort of pleasant to read Deleuze’s stuff. His frequent use of metaphors allows him to make subtle references to other comments and arguments that he’s made in the past. It’s like how jargon is useful, except the benefit is not precision but is rather the breadth of meaning which each phrase can convey. Also, it’s almost never that the associations of arguments invalidate the misinterpretation, but that the misinterpretation overlooks specific shades of meaning. It’s difficult to interpret on some rare occasions but once it’s interpreted there’s a lot of meaning in it.
Most of the Deleuzian secondary authors suck though. They give me headaches.
Even as a post-modernist, I wouldn’t say I’m impressed with the average post-modern thinker. In other words, I don’t know the answer to your question, and am not confident that it would reflect well on post-modern thought.
I will say that post-modern art theory (as opposed to political theory) is least impressive to me. It always seemed to me like art critics have already said all the interesting things that aren’t post-modern, so post-modern literary criticism is the only way to say something new. And if it isn’t new, it doesn’t get published. But this is an uninformed outsiders impression.
In my rock critic days I found it a useful tool in writing about and understanding pop culture. (’80s British pop music is what you’d get if you tried monetising postmodernism, and I don’t just mean ZTT.) It’s the sort of thing you really want to have a use for before you bother with it more than casually.
(I still think in terms of critical understanding of stuff all the time and read books of criticism for enjoyment, even of artistic fields I know nothing about. I realised a while ago that if I were doing for a job the thing I would be best at, I’d be a professor of critical theory and paid a lot less than I am as a sysadmin.)
I chose postgrads because the counterpoint would be asking, say, statistics postgrads what a moderately arcane piece of stats terminology means in context.
We then have the extra avenue of asking professors. The stats professors should give answers consistent with the postgrads, because stats terminology should be consistent in the public domain; the professors may know more about it, but they don’t have any normative influence as to what the terminology means.
Will the literature professors have answers consistent with, but more knowledgeable than, their postgrad students, or will they be something different altogether?
What? That’s not answering my question (at least, why ignore ‘cojoining flows’?). And I get what sovereign means in this context like I get what synergy means among management, but ‘synergy’ is still management jargon.
My bad, I confused TimS with thomblake (because their names are so similar). I wrongly thought TimS was only explaining what sovereign meant even though they interpreted ‘cojoining flows’ somehow. But even so, sovereign could still be jargon unless thom is familiar enough with pomo to say otherwise—it’s not enough that it’s used in other contexts as well (I thought it might be jargon because I’ve heard continental philosophers using it often enough before).
But post-modernism is a type of political theory. Therefore, it borrows some jargon from more mainstream political theory.
It’s also a type of literary criticism theory. As applied to literary criticism, it doesn’t impress me, but most literary criticism doesn’t impress me, so that’s not a very meaningful statement.
Has there been much cross pollination between post-modernism and competing or parallel schools of thought (in say the last couple decades)? (I’d think there would be a language and tribal barrier preventing or largely limiting that.) If not, do you think the latest and greatest of post-modern thought ought to have a significant impact in other areas?
Not really, but maybe. I think (could be a common misconception) you could have added that post-modern thought helped the sciences realize their prejudices (misogyny, ethnocentrism, and so on). And so when I take all those accomplishments together it starts look like post-modernism acts as a meta-critic for the practices or structure of various fields. Does this sound right? If so, has it had any recent accomplishments (i.e., is it decaying)?
And so when I take all those accomplishments together it starts look like post-modernism acts as a meta-critic for the practices or structure of various fields. Does this sound right?
It sounds like the ideal of what it should be. I think it’s got some usefulness in this direction. But even when I defend PM as not being 100% bullshit, I have to take care to note that it’s 99% bullshit. A lot of it is academic performance art.
And so when I take all those accomplishments together it starts look like post-modernism acts as a meta-critic for the practices or structure of various fields. Does this sound right?
I think that this is a very good first-pass definition of post-modernism, or at least of its goals.
I didn’t read the essay, but taking a swing at the sentence, it could be a reference to the lending and re-lending of fractional reserve banking creating a larger money supply than what was issued by the sovereign. I’m not sure where “infinite” enters into it, though… maybe it is meant to mean “unending” rather than “innumerable”?
“Back in the day, in Hanson’s farmer epoch, public morality was maintained in part by cultivating in people a sense of gratitude towards God/the universe/society/one’s parents/the resident nepotist with a sword; that their existence entailed debts that in principle couldn’t be repaid. Nowadays under liberalism we’ve in principle thrown that out but everybody’s still linked in a web of very explicit debts, and the web doesn’t in principle have a center.”
(You might say that this is a massive oversimplification to the extent that it’s true, and you’d be right, of course.)
The linked essay makes perfect sense to me; and I’m certain the only reason it doesn’t to you is indeed just the jargon. I don’t think it’s a particularly good analysis, ultimately, but for boring reasons that would make any essay weak, not because it’s saying nothing. It’s also not attempting to be a knock-down argument, not on account of its theoretical stance, but because it’s a short blog post firing off some impressions in a perhaps unjustifiably confident tone, which of course Manly Man Rational Economists(tm) do all the time.
That said, my acquired intuition is that within [the cluster of people/ideaspace that the typical LessWrong reader would ugh-field as “pomo”], as within many other clusters, the lack of clarity in language does certainly covary with lack of clarity in actual thought. But I can’t really say how much my own tribal academic loyalties (or desire to believe that I can understand anything that means anything) have helped produce that sensation.
I can read it, and I’m pretty sure I can see what it’s trying to say, but I can’t find a cogent structured argument in it. More pressingly, after I tease apart its wilfully impenetrable written style, so what?
It has a reasonably coherent central idea (albeit one that could have been conveyed in a fifth of the wordcount), but it doesn’t present a case for it. It just makes claims, occasionally referencing other people’s claims. I can make claims too. Brigitte Bardot has a birthmark on her ankle in the shape of a duck. Does she? I dunno; maybe. It’s not now your job to go away and research whether Brigitte Bardot has any birthmarks in the shape of waterfowl. It’s mine. It’s always mine.
It makes no effort to convince me it’s not just some random stuff some dude is saying (cf. timecube.com). Lots of dudes say lots of random stuff. Why should I care about this? Why should I put it in my head and allow it to influence my expectations of what’s going to happen? What’s the difference between a world where this is accurately describing something and a world where it isn’t?
If this structure, this mechanism for saying “here’s something, and here’s why” actually exists in there, please tell me where it is.
A world where this accurately describes reality, rather than one where it doesn’t, is one where 1) most people consent, more or less, to the idea that they should pay their debts, 2) indebtedness is stigmatized, 3) debt is seen primarily as a relationship between individuals, 4) the indebted are less likely to be politically active than they would if they were not indebted, …, &c. It’s intended to resonate with one’s phenomenal experience and background assumptions, and no, it doesn’t attempt much more than that, so like I said, it’s a bad argument.
This may sound like a glib remark, and it is, but it’s also a legitimate query: where are they hiding all the good arguments?
My lit-crit friend, a Ph.D. student herself, presumably provided this example in the misguided hope that it would offer an insight into the value of her way of thinking. Was it just a bad choice on her part? Is there some secret trove of critical theory observations on debt that I might look at and think “woah! This is knowledge worth having”?
It’s a reasonable question. First, I think that the linked example is not the best of post-modern thought.
More importantly, a lot of post-modern thought is co-opted and the label is forcibly excised. Here are some examples of what I think are good post-modern ideas.
There was a tendency for colonist-era Europeans to ascribe exotic virtues to Near and Far Easterners that had little relationship to the values of those communities. Orientalism is a discussion of this dynamic related to Near Eastern culture. I don’t think the dynamic can be well explained by reference to in-group/out-group, but post-modernism does a good job, in my view. Consider also the phenomena of the Magical Negro (warning: TVtropes)
Death of the Author (TVtropes), the view that the author’s opinions do not control a work’s interpretations, is also heavily influenced by post-modern thought (or so I understand—I’m not very interested in most lit crit of any flavor)
The slogan “The personal is political” is insightful because it highlights that “political” (i.e. partisan electioneering) is not really a natural kind in political-theory conceptspace. Issues of personal identity are just as mindkilling, for essentially the same reasons. Also, post-modern theory helps explain why the legal distinction between public action and private action is not well defined in practice.
Also, post-modernism is often intentionally filled with hyperbole. For example, I’m persuaded that Nietzsche was not anti-semetic or fascist, but reading Geneology of Morals literally can easily leave that impression. There are reasonable methodological arguments about whether hyperbole is a good idea, but post-modernism is usually on the side of more hyperbole (in part because colloquial usage often does not encompass a natural kind).
Finally, post-modernism is closely clustered with anti-capitalism and anti-empiricism. I can’t defend this association, but it exists. I think much of the perceived poor quality of post-modern thought is really disagreement with those other positions. I don’t think those positions are an essential part of post-modern thought—for example, I think Foucault is trying to be a high quality historian. If I were persuaded that his history was bad, that would necessarily cast doubt on his conclusions from the historical evidence.
Thank you for this.
It’s funny you should mention Death of the Author. I have another friend whose academic background is in literature, and he rants to the point of blind fury about how ridiculous a notion it is. I showed him the above link to get his opinion, and his most pointed comment was how the author’s emphasis on academia, student debt and being forced to work menial academic positions was not a shining indictment of Roland Barthes.
Barthes is good, comprehensible and generally on the ball. He’s actually not a waste of your life to read. Start with Mythologies like everyone does. (No-one who lives on the internet would find it radical these days, but it certainly was when it was published.)
He disagrees with “Death of the Author”? You’ve whetted my curiosity—I’ve always thought that it was a fairly reasonable position.
Also, I don’t know what you mean by “indictment of Roland Barthes”
Personally, I’ve long been of the opinion that Death of the Author is, if not exactly wrong, still an idea which has been more harmful than useful with respect to its effects on literary criticism.
The central idea of Death of the Author is to judge the text itself without limiting interpretation to that which is imposed by the author’s intentions. There are certainly cases where one can glean valuable information from a text which the author did not consciously choose to add to their work. For instance, the author might have views on race which will leak out into their writing, in such a way that a perceptive reader will gain insight about their views even though the author did not intend to make any sort of statement about race whatsoever. However, I think that to divorce the text entirely from the context of its creation is an invitation to abuse the basic principles of communication.
As Roland Barthes put it, “To give a text an Author” and assign a single, corresponding interpretation to it “is to impose a limit on that text.” But imposing limits on a text is necessary in order to extract any information from it at all. It’s only by narrowing down our space of the possible referents that we can distinguish the meaning of “an indictment of Roland Barthes” from “oogabooga.”
A text has no inherent meaning, so it makes no sense to judge “the text itself” divorced from the context that granted it meaning in the first place. Obviously, we didn’t need to wait for Barthes to come along in order to realize “hey, we can gain information about the social norms of the ancient Greeks by reading the Iliad which Homer never realized he was putting in there in the first place!” When we do this, information is being conveyed from the writers of the text to us, because the narrowness that we and the author mutually impose on the text carries more information than the author was conscious of. But if you decide, for example, “Hey, I can interpret “The Faerie Queene” as a narrative of the history of Communism!” information is not being conveyed. You might as well be spending your time deciding what clouds look like.
There are no limits at all on what meaning we can project onto a text, but if we’re interested in extracting information from a text, limiting our interpretations is necessary. Of course, the information we can extract from a text is not necessarily limited only to things the author consciously put in it, but since the information isn’t in the text, it’s in the text-in-context, then to the extent that you’re independent of the author’s context, you’re only getting out of it what you put in yourself.
This is at the notion level, but I’m wondering where the meaning of a text is.
Candidate theories: In the mind of the author. Readers are constructing (whether consciously or not) models of what the author had in mind.
In the minds of readers. People have access to the mind of at most one reader.
But that’s limited fun for some kinds of analysis, so critics are apt to make guesses about the minds of a great many readers.
I have respect for a professor (sorry, name and university forgotten) who asked people what they loved about the Lord of the Rings, and why they read it repeatedly. The consensus answer was the moment when Sauron’s power fell.
Until I wrote this, I didn’t realize that this is an example of successful authorial intention—Tolkien thought eucatastrophe was crucial.
For fictional texts, I’m not sure that extracting information from the text is really the best way of thinking about the text-reader interaction.
The “Wizard of Oz” movie is allegedly very influential in gay culture in America. Assuming this is true, I find it implausible that this was the intent of a movie made in 1939. Does that show that the movie can’t “mean” something about gay culture?
Could you taboo “mean?”
Which, I suppose, raises the question of whether there’s any value to be gotten from reading fiction, and if so what it is that one is getting of value.
Which might in turn raise the question of whether it’s possible to get that thing-of-value from nonfiction as well, in which case perhaps extracting information from the text is perhaps not the only way to engage with nonfiction, either.
It was useful at the time. Remember that postmodernisms are reactions against modernisms, and reactions date badly. There are few good ideas that can’t be made into bad ideas by overdoing them hard enough.
Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle provides a concrete example, useful for grounding a discussion of the “Death of the Author”. Stealing a paragraph from Wikipedia
Author’s really do intend specific interpretations, and can notice, with disappointment, when readers impose a different interpretation by weight of numbers.
I have a hard time sympathizing with Upton Sinclair’s complaint about the specifics of how his resounding success was implemented. He thought unregulated capitalism was bad, and explained why; people agreed, and tore down the “unregulated” part.
Yep. Any writer of fiction needs to understand the concept of “death of the author”, even if they don’t call it that—the text as all the reader has to go on.
That’s because it’s late and I used a word with exactly the opposite meaning I was reaching for. The sentiment I was trying to get at was the author’s emphasis on debt as it impacts a doctoral candidate, (as opposed to, say, a blue collar worker who has to moonlight in a petrol station to cover their loan repayments), does not bode well for the idea of divorcing an author’s personal opinions and circumstances from the interpretations of their work.
The way my friend has always described Death of the Author (we lived together at University, so I’ve been treated to this for a while) suggests he has been subject to a much, much stronger form than the one you describe, in which an author’s motives, intentions and circumstances should be completely disregarded when interpreting their work.
(I recall he once wrote a poem which, in a pleasantly Godelian fashion, described his own motives and intentions while writing it. He hoped one day to become famous enough as a poet that English undergrads would be forced to try and analyse it without reference to his motives and intentions for the piece. There’s a reason we’ve remained friends for so long.)
Coming at it from an information theoretic perspective, Moby Dick is clearly not talking about the Soviet Union’s occupation of post-war East Germany. Part of my certainty in that statement involves facts about the knowledge and history of the author (most saliently that he wrote the book, and died, in the 19th Century). Any implementation of Death of the Author strong enough to say “that doesn’t matter: Ahab is totally Stalin” is not an implementation I can really get behind.
I like this account of intentionalism.
Well, I think you need to more rigidly designate “they,” but since neither debt nor literature-department-influenced frameworks are my actual bailiwick I can’t in confidence help you out here. I do find that some of the Big Inscrutable Names, like Foucault and Althusser, can be useful to think with.
(If it sounds as though I’m being a really poor defender of Critical Whatever it’s because I’m not, really; I’m more used to being typecast as the guy who thinks the cultural turn was bullshit. But it’s not as bullshit as most intelligent outsiders assume, is my incredibly modest claim.)
If the linked essay make perfect sense to you, perhaps you can explain this sentence
If we took fifty literature postgrads from across the English speaking world, and asked them to explain the sentence, would they give consistent answers?
If they were familiar with the way Deleuzians phrase things then about 80% would, is my guess. Mostly the quality of postgrads is pretty poor because lots of philosophy professors suck, which influences this.
I got the same interpretation as Tim S though. I’ve read some D(&G) stuff before.
“Infinite” is just Deleuzians being overdramatic and imprecise with language. Or, perhaps they’re not trying to convey the logic of the argument so much as the idea or feel of the argument. Deleuzians often have a hard time seeing the division between things like logic and persuasion and bias. They’re right insofar as there is no hard concrete division between those things, but it sometimes makes them lazy.
RE: Below comments: “flows” mean something specific within Deleuzian terminology. It implies interconnectedness and chains of causality with uncountable numbers of variables interacting with whatever it is that they’re talking about. It also has implications related to perceiving objects as dynamic rather than as static.
Once you understand the jargon and have read his arguments a bit it’s actually sort of pleasant to read Deleuze’s stuff. His frequent use of metaphors allows him to make subtle references to other comments and arguments that he’s made in the past. It’s like how jargon is useful, except the benefit is not precision but is rather the breadth of meaning which each phrase can convey. Also, it’s almost never that the associations of arguments invalidate the misinterpretation, but that the misinterpretation overlooks specific shades of meaning. It’s difficult to interpret on some rare occasions but once it’s interpreted there’s a lot of meaning in it.
Most of the Deleuzian secondary authors suck though. They give me headaches.
Even as a post-modernist, I wouldn’t say I’m impressed with the average post-modern thinker. In other words, I don’t know the answer to your question, and am not confident that it would reflect well on post-modern thought.
I will say that post-modern art theory (as opposed to political theory) is least impressive to me. It always seemed to me like art critics have already said all the interesting things that aren’t post-modern, so post-modern literary criticism is the only way to say something new. And if it isn’t new, it doesn’t get published. But this is an uninformed outsiders impression.
In my rock critic days I found it a useful tool in writing about and understanding pop culture. (’80s British pop music is what you’d get if you tried monetising postmodernism, and I don’t just mean ZTT.) It’s the sort of thing you really want to have a use for before you bother with it more than casually.
(I still think in terms of critical understanding of stuff all the time and read books of criticism for enjoyment, even of artistic fields I know nothing about. I realised a while ago that if I were doing for a job the thing I would be best at, I’d be a professor of critical theory and paid a lot less than I am as a sysadmin.)
Should the test be done by asking postgrads or professors? Why one or the other?
I chose postgrads because the counterpoint would be asking, say, statistics postgrads what a moderately arcane piece of stats terminology means in context.
We then have the extra avenue of asking professors. The stats professors should give answers consistent with the postgrads, because stats terminology should be consistent in the public domain; the professors may know more about it, but they don’t have any normative influence as to what the terminology means.
Will the literature professors have answers consistent with, but more knowledgeable than, their postgrad students, or will they be something different altogether?
Is there a good pomo vocabulary guide somewhere? (I’m assuming ‘sovereign’ and ‘conjoining flows’ are pomo jargon)
I’m not aware of any special meaning for “conjoining flow.” I assumed it was a metaphor and interpreted it in light of the next sentence in the essay.
Post-modernism loves metaphor and hyperbole, for better or worse. I readily acknowledge that frequent use of those styles impedes readability.
Not pomo jargon. It just means the supreme authority, like the King or the State. Used extensively in Political Science.
What? That’s not answering my question (at least, why ignore ‘cojoining flows’?). And I get what sovereign means in this context like I get what synergy means among management, but ‘synergy’ is still management jargon.
If you ask two questions in one comment, and someone knows the answer to one of the questions, what would you like that person to do?
My bad, I confused TimS with thomblake (because their names are so similar). I wrongly thought TimS was only explaining what sovereign meant even though they interpreted ‘cojoining flows’ somehow. But even so, sovereign could still be jargon unless thom is familiar enough with pomo to say otherwise—it’s not enough that it’s used in other contexts as well (I thought it might be jargon because I’ve heard continental philosophers using it often enough before).
But post-modernism is a type of political theory. Therefore, it borrows some jargon from more mainstream political theory.
It’s also a type of literary criticism theory. As applied to literary criticism, it doesn’t impress me, but most literary criticism doesn’t impress me, so that’s not a very meaningful statement.
Has there been much cross pollination between post-modernism and competing or parallel schools of thought (in say the last couple decades)? (I’d think there would be a language and tribal barrier preventing or largely limiting that.) If not, do you think the latest and greatest of post-modern thought ought to have a significant impact in other areas?
Is this a partial answer to your question?
Not really, but maybe. I think (could be a common misconception) you could have added that post-modern thought helped the sciences realize their prejudices (misogyny, ethnocentrism, and so on). And so when I take all those accomplishments together it starts look like post-modernism acts as a meta-critic for the practices or structure of various fields. Does this sound right? If so, has it had any recent accomplishments (i.e., is it decaying)?
It sounds like the ideal of what it should be. I think it’s got some usefulness in this direction. But even when I defend PM as not being 100% bullshit, I have to take care to note that it’s 99% bullshit. A lot of it is academic performance art.
I think that this is a very good first-pass definition of post-modernism, or at least of its goals.
I didn’t read the essay, but taking a swing at the sentence, it could be a reference to the lending and re-lending of fractional reserve banking creating a larger money supply than what was issued by the sovereign. I’m not sure where “infinite” enters into it, though… maybe it is meant to mean “unending” rather than “innumerable”?
“Back in the day, in Hanson’s farmer epoch, public morality was maintained in part by cultivating in people a sense of gratitude towards God/the universe/society/one’s parents/the resident nepotist with a sword; that their existence entailed debts that in principle couldn’t be repaid. Nowadays under liberalism we’ve in principle thrown that out but everybody’s still linked in a web of very explicit debts, and the web doesn’t in principle have a center.”
(You might say that this is a massive oversimplification to the extent that it’s true, and you’d be right, of course.)