Before I take that train to Texas
Howdy pardners-
I leave tomorrow for the great Western frontier, spurred on by economic necessity (my family's just not makin it in Kentucky, and little Mary Sue died of a snakebite last month, bless her heart), a sense of adventure and moving on, and a longing to fulfill my manifest destiny. Before I go, though, I wanted to contribute to our swell blog!
First, I wanna wish everyone a happy new year and tell you all the ways you made 2005 my best year ever.
Next, I'm actually gonna extend my middle finger to AL Daily cuz I've been scoopin' those bitches for weeks now. First of all, there was Jeffrey Hart's provacative piece on contemporary conservatism in the WSJ's Opinion Journal. Read it hya. It's launched a whole debate among conservatives, specifically those over at National Review's blog the Corner. A nice summary can be found hya. This is a fascinating exchange and speaks volumes about people who actually think about their political positions. I rarely see liberal discourse this thorough and self-critical.
Then, to continue my one-upping of our friends at Arts and Letters, I caught on to this series by Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie about the annual MLA conference way back when it was indie. This is extremely fair coverage, unlike the usual anti-intellectualism that makes fun of the (admittedly silly) paper titles. (Ex: "'Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!' Patterns of Semantic Widening in 'Dude'") My proposal for a title: "Gargoyles and Psychics: Towards the reconceptualization of the discourse of religionist imageries in late capitalist 'reality' media."
Finally, I've been reading Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics by Habermas. I've often admired old Jurgy's steady allegiance to Enlightenment and call for political activism and thoughtfulness in an era of postmodern playfulness. But discourse ethics just be weird. First of all, I think I'm just peeved by the idea of a purely procedural ethics, mostly because the ideal procedures outlined by Habermas have roughly a .00001% chance of happening in the real world between philosophers, much less nation states or interest groups.
The other oddball aspect of discourse ethics is that "truth" or "normative ethics claims" can only be defined as whatever arises from the "noise-free" discourse, whatever can be agreed upon by all participants in a general ethos of compromise. All it takes is a few pages of Stanley Fish to realize that this is pure fantasy. There are some things that many people, not only religious adherents or ideologues, just won't give up. And even besides this fact, sometimes it's just a fact that one person in the dialogue knows the truth, and the other doesn't. Or one person knows the truth in the face of very many who are ignorant.
In this way Habermas seems almost like Foucault to me, a very anti-Enlightenment philosopher, who thinks that truth is largely a matter of procedure and the conditions under which statements are declared true or false. If you think this is a pretty weak version of "truth," holla at meeeeee. Anyway, just some intellectual poking and prodding before I go. I know many of you know much more about the Frankfurt School and postmodern ethics than I do, so I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.
I leave tomorrow for the great Western frontier, spurred on by economic necessity (my family's just not makin it in Kentucky, and little Mary Sue died of a snakebite last month, bless her heart), a sense of adventure and moving on, and a longing to fulfill my manifest destiny. Before I go, though, I wanted to contribute to our swell blog!
First, I wanna wish everyone a happy new year and tell you all the ways you made 2005 my best year ever.
Next, I'm actually gonna extend my middle finger to AL Daily cuz I've been scoopin' those bitches for weeks now. First of all, there was Jeffrey Hart's provacative piece on contemporary conservatism in the WSJ's Opinion Journal. Read it hya. It's launched a whole debate among conservatives, specifically those over at National Review's blog the Corner. A nice summary can be found hya. This is a fascinating exchange and speaks volumes about people who actually think about their political positions. I rarely see liberal discourse this thorough and self-critical.
Then, to continue my one-upping of our friends at Arts and Letters, I caught on to this series by Reason Magazine's Nick Gillespie about the annual MLA conference way back when it was indie. This is extremely fair coverage, unlike the usual anti-intellectualism that makes fun of the (admittedly silly) paper titles. (Ex: "'Dude! Your Dress Is So Cute!' Patterns of Semantic Widening in 'Dude'") My proposal for a title: "Gargoyles and Psychics: Towards the reconceptualization of the discourse of religionist imageries in late capitalist 'reality' media."
Finally, I've been reading Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics by Habermas. I've often admired old Jurgy's steady allegiance to Enlightenment and call for political activism and thoughtfulness in an era of postmodern playfulness. But discourse ethics just be weird. First of all, I think I'm just peeved by the idea of a purely procedural ethics, mostly because the ideal procedures outlined by Habermas have roughly a .00001% chance of happening in the real world between philosophers, much less nation states or interest groups.
The other oddball aspect of discourse ethics is that "truth" or "normative ethics claims" can only be defined as whatever arises from the "noise-free" discourse, whatever can be agreed upon by all participants in a general ethos of compromise. All it takes is a few pages of Stanley Fish to realize that this is pure fantasy. There are some things that many people, not only religious adherents or ideologues, just won't give up. And even besides this fact, sometimes it's just a fact that one person in the dialogue knows the truth, and the other doesn't. Or one person knows the truth in the face of very many who are ignorant.
In this way Habermas seems almost like Foucault to me, a very anti-Enlightenment philosopher, who thinks that truth is largely a matter of procedure and the conditions under which statements are declared true or false. If you think this is a pretty weak version of "truth," holla at meeeeee. Anyway, just some intellectual poking and prodding before I go. I know many of you know much more about the Frankfurt School and postmodern ethics than I do, so I'd be glad to hear your thoughts.
posted by to scranton at 1:32 AM
8 Comments:
Thanks for the links. I've felt quite out of the blogosphere/online zine loop for a while now. Also, what's the status of the book club everyone? I read "Saturday" and think it would make for a very nice little conversation. It's fairly short, too, and I would certainly recommend it. Also, it turned out my grandmother gave my dad an Orhan Pamuk book ("Snow") for Christmas, which I've been moving my way through slowly. The book tackles the Western/Enlightenment vs. Tradition/Islamist debate in some neat ways. If anything, it seems worth it just because it's one of the few things I've read that gives "political Islam" a voice--a somewhat sympathetic one, moreover.
Regardless, the literature break has been nice. Besides big Jurgen, any other good preliminary thoughts on Books from the Break?
To redeem Habermas a bit:
Think of it this way. Truth arises from the noise free discourse of consensual politics. OK, when we take this into account, it would seem that the irrationalist and perhaps 'crazy' elements of the fundamentalists, ideologues &c. might be considered the noise. It's still truth even if these particular groups disagree with it, because they're not engaged in the type of discourse that's good for finding out truth. Its not about everyone everywhere being engaged in agreeing, but for everyone who's engaged on the proper level of rationalism &c. to agree. These other people are wrong, they're not looking for or telling the truth; do with them what we will.
This is not a complete response, and may not represent the opinions of the author, but I think its a decent one.
Now, In defense of ridiculing paper titles (don't be upset if you don't really hold too hard to that characterization):
I don't think that making fun of paper titles is anti-intellectualism, unless humor in general is impermissible in academia; on the contrary, it takes a great deal of knowledge of the topics being discussed in the (silly) paper and of the various neologisms and terms-of-art. We make fun of these titles out of a certain intellectualism, one which sees on the one hand the seriousness of the discipline, and on the other the strange/esoteric/supercillious/absurd applications of writing for the sake of novelty. The latter is the truly dangerous anti-intellectualism, the perpetual overemphasis on novelty and avante-garde that has caused alot of poor scholarship on allready impoverished subject matter. Maybe this is some vestigal modernism in me driving me towards the 'beautiful and the true' as opposed to 'degenerate arts', but I like to think I'm more open than _that_.
who are you, loplop? im guessing danny or sarah....
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Going back to the western frontier theme and even farther back to Brokeback Mountain.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/opinion/01david.html
Wild Schild has arrived.
As much as I love Larry David, I find his op-ed's (the one following Deep Throat's disclosure especially) to be excruciatingly unfunny. This one is no different.
Does Larry David's funniness depend on a relative degree of Jewness? I'm thinking some sort of logarithmic graph.
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