Muse: Shelf Life: The Dying Elephant in The Book Room?
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Islander, in reply to
How interesting -you're proposing yourself, Stephen?
Because Elizabeth Caffin, Paul Diamond, Tony Fisk and Brian Flaherty arnt- -
Sacha, in reply to
Dude, step away from the Post-Modernism!
Yeah, it's what those new bourge-wah lefties are using to undermine clothcap modernism, don't you know.
See, the Left, or at least the socialist Left, is very much a modernist project. We’re materialists – we’re interested in government and the political-economic system for the real impacts it has on people’s lives. We’re not much interested in the symbols except as they relate to the real world.
Post-modernists care very much about symbols and little about the material world. Perhaps that’s mostly because they tend to be well-off and well-educated, so don’t have much in the way of material concerns themselves.
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Anonymous Author, in reply to
Not J.D Salinger, but interests include synesthesia and its close association with competitive pig-calling and favourite colour is the shade of taupe that signifies the high tide mark in a well-used bathtub.
From the linked article: "...refusal to play the publicity game, or to appear to swim in the same water as their readers, can signify everything -- or nothing at all..."
As Ferdinand de Saussure once said. "No word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a 'signifier,' or the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the 'signified,' or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued 'sign.' In dismantling 'signs' we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesise physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts." I agree.
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I sense a drift towards a discussion of semiotics here..The study of signs can be taken to excess but I reckon it can also be an exciting and fresh way of regarding the world and the making of meaning... I use the example of traffic lights with my students and the encoded meaning of red (in both Western and other societies) eg how the dominant meaning of the amber light in the sequence of the traffic lights signifies "Slow Down and get ready to stop" (the dominant reading) but for some drivers it also means "Speed up and get through the intersection before it turns read" (an aberrant reading?).
Barthes is probably the most accessible and readable in the pantheon of French theorists (read his piece on the meaning of pro wrestling, for example) and I think he would have appreciated the cause of his death, when he was run over by a laundry truck? Why a truck? Why a laundry truck?
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recordari, in reply to
“No word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a ‘signifier,’ or the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the ‘signified,’ or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued ‘sign.’ In dismantling ‘signs’ we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesise physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts.” I agree.
Semiotics. I agree also.
PS: I wrote this before reading Geoff’s post. Honest.
Not J.D Salinger
I meant no offence by the way. When you wrote this;
Dear reader, is it your voice or mine you’re hearing as you read this?
I thought, and said to myself, 'bravo!'
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I sense a drift towards a discussion of semiotics here..The study of signs can be taken to excess but I reckon it can also be an exciting and fresh way of regarding the world and the making of meaning
I recently read an interview with Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, which is unfortunately locked behind the New Scientist paywall.
I don't have synesthesia, and neither does Ramachandran, but he points out to me the strangeness of asking why, say, the cheddar cheese in your sandwich is 'sharp'. It's true , cheese isn't sharp, it's soft. So why use a tactile adjective to describe a gustatory sensation?
"It means our brains are already replete with synesthesic metaphors" he says. "Your loud shirt isn't making any noise, it's because the same genes that can predispose you to synesthesia also predispose you to make links betweeen seemingly unrelated ideas, which is the basis of creativity".
I'll be hunting out more of his work, I reckon.
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..and why are wines described as dry? Shouldn’t that be sour?
All those words that get used and abused, such as natural or authentic
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recordari, in reply to
Post-modernists care very much about symbols and little about the material world. Perhaps that’s mostly because they tend to be well-off and well-educated, so don’t have much in the way of material concerns themselves.
"If you like it then you shoulda put a ring on it."
It's the cymbals I like. Can I get a hi-hat?
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It's apropos of nothing in particular, but this is a lovely piece by Dave Armstrong in today's DomPost.
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I meant no offence
None taken; it was a good question.
can be taken to excess but I reckon it can also be an exciting and fresh way of regarding the world and the making of meaning
Yes. And sometimes simultaneously, especially when combined with deconstructionism. Derrida was partially correct when he suggested nothing exists outside the text. Not only does nothing exist outside the text, but more than that, the text actively creates this author. Paradoxically, if it were not for the benevolence of words and language I would not exist as a literary voice, and yet I constructed this text that is written to describe my existence. All authors are artificial constructs to some extent. On more than one occasion I’ve needed to stand in front of the mirror and remind myself that: ‘Hey! Yeah you with your counterfeit Ph.D. in postmodern literary theory. You don’t have a monopoly on hubris.’ And that usually prevents me taking it to excess. Usually.
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recordari, in reply to
I am humbled to be even having this conversation. Am I having this conversation? This seems wholly more existential than any other aforementioned philosophical construct. It all comes down to sensations of the numena in the end.
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Derrida was partially correct when he suggested nothing exists outside the text.
This one's confounded me for around 15 years. Not that partial to postmodernism (perhaps mainly through lack of exposure), it strikes me as a proposition which could go either way. Maybe there is only text. Or maybe the text hooks to a meaning which does exist outside the text. If it does exist outside the text, where is it? In human minds? Or could it exist even outside them? I think especially of ideas like numbers, which undoubtedly humans invented. But having invented them, we continue to "discover" things about them. If we are merely inventing, creating fabrications, surely there is nothing to discover. And yet even people who have had no communication at all have hit upon the same truths in numbers. I find it hard to think of numbers as mere text. And once you find one ontological object outside the human mind, it opens floodgates....are there more? Isn't the text scrabbling (often in vain) to catch something deeper than the text?
I don't know the answer, but it strikes me as something it's not a good idea to be doctrinaire about. I'm probably misinterpreting the statement, which no doubt requires a whole lot more text to get a shadowy understanding of.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
..and why are wines described as dry? Shouldn’t that be sour?
A dry wine is an empty bottle, I keep saying that.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
Derrida was partially correct when he suggested nothing exists outside the text.
Except for the fact that he never said that. What he said was that there is no outside-text, that is to say, there is nothing outside context.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
Numbers are excellent examples. They are symbols with which you can do operations according to a self-contained set of non-arbitrary rules. However, numbers are signifiers without an actual world signified. You can't point to two. You can point to two things, but not to two itself.
Likewise, just as you can't have a text or an author without a reader to construct them, so you can't have space, time, or causality without an observer to likewise construct them.
'Not only does nothing exist outside the text' but the text itself does not exist. Nor does the reader.
The text is constructed by the reader, and the reader is constructed by the act of constructing the text.
Nothing is real! Nothing is true! Nothing exists!
Nothing like a bit of nihilism on a sunny afternoon, eh?
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
Nothing is real! Nothing is true! Nothing exists!
Nothing like a bit of nihilism on a sunny afternoon, eh?
Again, if only Derrida had actually said that... I do hope you are enjoying your strawman.
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recordari, in reply to
Nothing is real! Nothing is true! Nothing exists!
You are entering the Matrix.
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BenWilson, in reply to
You can point to two things, but not to two itself.
Again, I'm not so sure, and wary of buying a doctrine. Maybe there is a 2 in some abstract idea-space. Certainly 2 is a very powerful idea, with extremely wide applicability. It would seem to have captured some very important thing about the world, completely devoid of any mind to interpret it. There were, for example, more than two atoms in the universe billions of years before life began on Earth.
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
Never did I say he had.
I am not discussing Derrida.
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I'd also note that postmodernists/poststructuralists are using "text" in a broad way.
I like "we're all born into language" as a paraphrase of Derrida's otherwise waffly French academic prose.
And I reject the assertion I quoted above that we can only care about either symbol or object, politics or culture, economics or pretty much everything else.
Smart humans are better weavers of meaning and action than that.
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Sacha, in reply to
The text is constructed by the reader, and the reader is constructed by the act of constructing the text.
Nothing is real! Nothing is true! Nothing exists!
You're missing any connecting logic between those two statements
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DCBCauchi, in reply to
That you need to consider such a thing as an 'abstract idea-space' for it to exist in shows what a deeply strange thing two is.
No longer can you have a strictly material conception of what exists.
Down the rabbit hole we go.
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giovanni tiso, in reply to
That you need to consider such a thing as an 'abstract idea-space' for it to exist in shows what a deeply strange thing two is.
Bertrand Russell had to do quite a bit of work in Principia Mathematica to demonstrate that one plus one equals to, as I recall.
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James Butler, in reply to
It’s apropos of nothing in particular, but this is a lovely piece by Dave Armstrong in today’s DomPost.
+1
I am forever thankful for going through through WHS in the 90's, while I saw friends crash and burn at Wellington College down the road.
My son will start college in a few years - I hope we can find somewhere half as enlightened in Auckland.
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Sacha, in reply to
No longer can you have a strictly material conception of what exists.
Most human cultures never did have that - it's a more recent abberation
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