gurugeorge

Oh come off it, you know as well as I do that Postmodernists were constantly "discovering" Hegel and Marx - as if it was any surprise. Reminds me of Breughel's peasants gawping at the magician. Where's Marx, where's Hegel? - is he under this cup? No! He's under this one!

That kind of waffle has a long history. In the hands of its best practitioners it's good waffle, thought provoking waffle, but as I said in my previous post, it's not the kind of waffle that lends itself very well to imitation in the context of learning institutions with fundamentally mediaeval structures. Under those circumstances, when the discipline of truth-seeking is given up, all you've got left are people being paid good public money to parrot waffle as best they can in order to impress their superiors.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Gurugeorge,

You give Marx amazing prophetic power that he foresaw the postmodernist world of 2007 in 1844. In 1848 he did foresee that the bourgeoisie were no longer a progressive force in human history and that the workingclass would need to take charge if any progress was to be made. However, it is hard to believe that Marx could have foreseen how ridiculously reactionary capitalism would become. Here we are in 2007 with a Twelfth century, torture-loving Christian theocracy, leading a crusade against suicidal Eight century Moslem theocracies in order to reconstruct the world on the basis of a Fourth century Constantinian Roman Theocracy.

Anyways, I think we can easily see through the postmodern lens that Karl Marx was, in fact, the historical model for the gospel writers of old when they wrote about Jesus Christ. Like the ancient Jewish prophets they looked into the future, and naturally, reported it in terms that the people of their own time could understand. How else could they report the persecution and crucifixion of Karl Marx and his twelve apostles, Frederick Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Karl Kautsky, Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Joseph Stalin, Mao Tse Tung, Ho Chi Min, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Herbert Marcuse, and Louis Althuser.


Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

gurugeorge

Where did I say he was a successful prophet?

In fact, the burden of my point was that his theory failed to predict reality with any degree of accuracy, mainly in terms of the notion of the "immiseration of the proletariat heralding the death knell" and all that nonsense (despite Lenin's changing of the goalposts with his "Imperialism", and sundry inflationary copiers of Lenin's neat trick ever since, including no doubt people today who will equate the long lost European Moloch-feeding proletariat of Marx's prediction with sundry disenfranchised brown peasants of an Islamic persuasion nowadays). Marx was notorious in his day for seeing revolution around the corner and being constantly disappointed. Must have made his carbuncles even worse!

Nah, what I mean by the 1844 manuscripts is that I actually kind of like them, and I actually think they're a vague heralding of the far future - he just underestimated how soon his vision would come to pass, by several orders of magnitude. In fact, it would take a literal deus ex machina, an AI of humungous and at-present impossible capacity, to even duplicate the rough and ready job of resource allocation that capitalism does today, never mind create the Cockaigne of socialist daydreams - that would require something so far beyond what we understand as intelligence now that it's actually unthinkable at levels of technological development that can be extrapolated today at all. (Cf. the most attractive socialist vision to date IMHO, the science fiction works of Iain Banks, in which Banks, poor fellow, doesn't seem to realise how he's just debunked the socialism he loves, by positing such an unthinkably great, yet unaccountably benign ordering central/distributed intelligence in charge of his attractive socialist utopia.)

Anyway, this is definitely straying too far from the subject of the thread: the main point I'm trying to make is just that Postmodernism, as all the other "isms" that Left and Left leaning academic thinkers have come up with since Khruschev, are all, at root, attempts to justify continuing using that (1844 economic and philosophical manuscripts) style of analysis ("looking at the skull beneath the skin", one might say), despite the failure of Marx's pride and joy, his extension of those early essays into a vast, pseudo-scientific but moderately internally consistent system, to predict anything real in the real world - despite the stinking, monumental failure of Communism to be anything other than another disgusting slave cult, and of democratic socialism to provide anything more attractive (in terms of the greater abundance of material goods that was scientific socialisms hardcore economic promise at the end of the 19th century), to the plebs who "vote with their feet", than capitalism.

And the point of saying that (... *GG breathes* ...) is to make the analogy between "saving Christianity" and "saving Marxoid theory". It's not a tight analogy, but you'd have to be lying to yourself not to see something in it.

Disappointed by the immiseration of the proletarat being postponed indefinitely by the cunning of capitalism? Actually existing Communism getting you down? Change the game rules by damning objective truth to hell.

Can't find a historical Jesus? Change the game rules so a historical Jesus doesn't matter.

aChristian

The key words are 'in the past'. That makes it history. Your invocation of physical laws is just some evidence you are presenting about what happened in the past. Another piece of evidence could be an eyewitness account.

Sitting across a table and talking to someone can provide excellent evidence. That is why eyewitness testimony is so valuable. However, you can probably learn more about a surf contest by reading an article written by a professional surfer who attended the event than an eskimo, who knows nothing about surfing, would know while he witnessed the event in person. In this case, the text (magazine article) gives you a better understanding of the event than the person who experienced it (the eskimo). Texts can describe reality. They can be fact or fiction, depending on their reliability.

While it is true that experiencing something yourself can give you more information often times, you can also learn about what happened (history) from someone else's description in a text.

Gamera

Nope, Socrates exists only as words on a paper. Those words aren't living things, have no mass, and don't die. That's what historicity means -- it's a relationship to texts, a meaning, and no, meaning is not subject to physical laws. Thoughts literally are transcendant from time and space.

I didn't say archaeology wasn't incredibly useful in understanding material and social culture of past societies. But that has nothing to do with the historicity of a person. Only a text can create historicy. If there's a plaque on a house saying, Chez Socrates, then we may have some construction of the man's historicity. But without the text, it's just a house.

This is true of every intellectual movement. So why pick on postmodernism?


I really can't think of two modes of theorizing that could be more different than Marxism and postmodernism. Marxism tells a grand narrative from the beginning of man to the present, and extends to the future, with a theme organizing every step of the way. Are you actually arguing the post modernism aspires to that? If you do, you missed the postmodern method by 180 degrees.

Gamera

What "happened' is never the narrative describing it. That's the insight of postmodernism that you are missing, and that's why I think you don't understand historicity, as opposed to factuality. Historicity is never a fact, but a relationship to texts that we happen to have, and which relate a narrative that by defintion is not the actual person narrated in the narrative.

Gamera

The whole thesis of The Content of the Form is that narrative historiography produces a relationship with the past that is determined by the form. Historiography could have been in the form of a chronicle (which he discusses at length in the COTF). Or a meditation. But that's not how western historiography developed. As a result we experience history as a story, which is an artifact of the form history takes. Empirical reality isn't a story -- but that's how we experience history.

I agree that White isn't discounting empirical reality. What he is disclosing (and it's genius!) is that our experience of that reality is determined by the form of the historiography.

DCHindley

I dunno. I just don't pick up the same message from that book of White's essays that you seem to. Brilliant as he is, sometimes I feel like I'm reading one of those crazy ersatz pomo essays generated by a random essay generator.

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Unlike a random generator, though, everything he says is linked to very real ideas developed to some length by specific real life authors. It's sort of like reading a commentarty by Ernst Kasemann, who knows everything there is to know about every single Greek word in every NT book. He confidently and quite casually refers to the opinions of others on these matters without feeling any need to give exact citations of his sources, but you better believe what he says is really a fact and not his opinion. White has worked exclusively with graduate students for so many years now that he just assumes his readers are thoroughly familiar with all authors, in English, french, german, italian and several other languages, who have written since the Renaissance.

That was why I liked his 40 page intro to _Metahistory_, where he spells out his method exactly, and explains in great detal who he got the ideas from, and in which works they stated them. Anyone who wants to take a close look at a good solid poststructural critic's theory of the role of narrative in historical accounts, _Metahistory_ is the place to go. White considers himself a reconstructionist, because he is attempting to understand sources with the help of narrative throry, but others place him squarely in the deconstructionist camp.

DCH

aChristian

What happened may not be the narrative (one is an occurence in the past and the other is a description of it), but that does not mean that you can't get a very good understanding of what happened in the past from a narrative. To me this 'insight of postmodernism' is being used as a silly little game to avoid coming to grips with certain uncomfortable facts. It's like saying you can't absolutely prove anything exists (which is true), including cars, but yet I don't see these people strolling about on the freeway.

Gamera

No it's nothing like that. Cars can run into you. Historicity can't. Historicity is a relationship to a text. Noting more. You will never get any closer to a person you claim existed than the text that relates his story. That's all that historicity means.

You can call rigorous thinking about history "silly games" if you want, but it does you no credit. It just suggests naivety.