The Emperor's New Clothes

Poststructural Pub
1

For several years I have suspected that the soi-disant intelligentsia in society have been having enjoying a great belly laugh at my expense. I was loath to say anything about this because (like the people on the fable) I didn’t want to appear unsophisticated. Once I reached the highest tier of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (the one in which I NEED to point how silly some of this stuff really is), I set about to find the perfect forum in which to publish my modern version of the metaphorical silks which are too rich and fine for the unsophisticated to perceive. At long last I found it, here in the postructural pub of the postructural whistle website.



The modern novel (If it doesn’t have a plot, what’s the point?)

Modern poetry (If it has no meter, no rhyme scheme, no alliteration, in short: no discipline, isn’t it just…..prose?)

4:33 (He’s just SITTING there!..how much did I pay for these damn tickets, anyway?)

Modern Art (you’re right, your 5 year old COULD do that)

The Bauhaus (Honey, that damn flat roof is leaking, again!)

Deconstructionism (see comments for “the Modern Novel” above)

Total Quality Management (if quality could really improve continuously, how come we have so much crappy stuff?)

7 habits of highly effective people (how did the ALREADY effective people develop these habits without the book?)

Six Sigma (ok, I’ll stop with the business stuff, it’s just too easy)



Disclaimer: The use of the word “modern” above indicates compositions and creations of the current era (c early 20th century to the present). The author is fully cognizant of the fact that a clearly defined and chronologically bounded “modern” period can be ascribed to many these subjects, but has eschewed use of the term “post-modern” as belonging, in itself, on the list above and being just a little silly.

2

OHMYGAWD - that brings back nightmares!!! Remember the “thermometer”? “And where are you in your satisfaction on the job?” “Well, gee, this doesn’t GO to minus Kelvin!!!”

7 habits of highly effective people (how did the ALREADY people develop these habits without the book?)

And now there’s an EIGHTH one!!!

Six Sigma (ok, I’ll stop with the business stuff, it’s just too easy)

We only got to 5S - what the heck is 6S?


You worked at the same place I do, common, I know you did!!! :smiley:

3

:laughing:
I don’t know anything about business claptrap but with regard to Modern Poetry, 4:33 and Modern Art I am reminded of Louis Armstrongs famous remark about Jazz,

“Man, if you have to ask what it is, you’ll never know.”

Slan,
D. :wink:

who is now leaving for work and will be away from this thread for several hours.

4

Well I dash home from work expecting to step into a raging debate about the meaning and purpose of Art and find zilch..nada…nothing.

Very post structural I must say.

Slan,
D. :wink:

5

There’s much more to a novel than plot. In fact, I would say that plot is towards the bottom of the list of important things in a novel. By sometimes removing plot from a novel, a (good) writer is (sometimes) able to explore these other elements more thoroughly. They are less inhibited, if you will.

No.

Although I own a John Cage CD (and enjoy listening to it), I don’t think I’d go to a concert of 4:33. (:lol:)

Why must art be distinguished as something difficult to create? If it is beautiful, what does it matter how long it took the artist to make it?

Also, though a five-year-old may be able to create “modern art” as you see it, the five-year-old did not make it. This is why the artist gets the praise, as opposed to the five-year-old. If you’d like to sell your five-year-old’s creations as art, I’m sure the pure gimmick of it would make a great deal of money (because that’s what it’s all about, folks).

I cut out the rest because I had no comments on them.

6

I guess. Perhaps the fact that my postmodern body is apparently “bereft of spatial co-ordinates” is making it difficult for me to get a grip on this topic. My affect has seemingly waned to the point of not caring.

Traits of Postmodernity
Jameson highlights a number of phenomena which he views as distinguishing postmodernism from modernism. The first is “a new kind of superficiality” or “depthlessness”, in which models which once explained people and things in terms of an “inside” and an “outside” (such as hermeneutics, the dialectic, Freudian repression, the existentialist distinction between authenticity and inauthenticity, and the semiotic distinction of signifier and signified) have been rejected.

Second is a rejection of the modernist “Utopian gesture”, evident in Van Gogh, of the transformation through art of misery into beauty, whereas in postmodernism the object world has undergone a “fundamental mutation”, has “now become a set of texts or simulacra” (Jameson 1993: 38 ).

Whereas modernist art sought to redeem and sacralize the world, to give life to world, (we might say, following Graff, to give the world back the enchantment that science and the decline of religion had taken away from it), postmodernist art bestows upon the world a “deathly quality… whose glacéd X-ray elegance mortifies the reified eye of the viewer in a way that would seem to have nothing to do with death or the death obsession or the death anxiety on the level of content”. (ibid.)

Graff identifies the origins of this transformative mission of art in the attempted substitution of art for the social role of religion as giving meaning to the world. Art was supposed to re-imbue the world with the meaning, which the rise of science and Enlightenment rationality had removed. However, in the postmodern period this task is finally revealed as a futile one.

Thirdly, Jameson identifies a feature of the postmodern age as the “waning of affect”. He notes that not all emotion has disappeared from the postmodernist age, but that it lacks a particular kind of emotion such as that found in “Rimbaud’s magical flowers ‘that look back at you’”. He notes that “pastiche eclipses parody”, as “the increasing unavailability of the personal style” leads to pastiche becoming a universal practice.

Jameson argues that distance “has been abolished in the new space of postmodernism. We are submerged in its henceforth filled and suffused volumes to the point where our now postmodern bodies are bereft of spatial co-ordinates”. This “new global space” constitutes postmodernism’s “moment of truth”. The various other features of the postmodern which he identifies “can all now be seen as themselves partial (yet constitutive) aspects of the same general spatial object”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodern#Brief_Introduction_to_the_Uses_of_the_Term

7

When I use the term modern, I refer to mid-century modern from about the Bauhaus period through into the early 1970’s. I guess I’m thinking of a period of design.

Nancy

8

I don’t have any comments on “deconstructionism”, but deconstruction is undeniably both a special instance of the circular fallacy, and one of the most effective practical jokes ever played in academe–the french ‘got’ earnest american scholars with it fifty years ago, and many of them STILL haven’t caught on.

Deconstructing something is a fun party trick, but it’s beyond me to see why anyone would ever do it twice. All you ever find, using this method, is the rabbit you hid in step one. It’s the opposite of the shell-game, because there’s a pea under every shell.

It’s useless as a mode of argument, investigation or proof. It is a tolerable piece of rhetoric until your audience catches on.

And I feel for the generation of grad students who have, for the past couple of decades, been graduating with newly minted degrees in deconstruction or critical theory. They’re like the bright young soviets scholars who graduated with PhDs in Marxist-Leninist thought the day the wall came down.

9

I drove Bloomfield nuts by using the term “deconstruction” to refer to taking someone’s thread post apart, quote by quote, and inserting comments.
So its appearance today here gave me a laugh. BTW, I have quit using that term.
:laughing:

10

I’m with congrats here, and I wouldn’t say that lack of plot is a modern thing. Jane Austen, for example, had mighty thin plots in all her novels, and the “plot” in every single one was the same. Sinclair Lewis wrote some wonderful books that had very little if any plot.

[quote=“CHCBrown”]
Modern poetry (If it has no meter, no rhyme scheme, no alliteration, in short: no discipline, isn’t it just…..prose?
[/quote]

No.

I’m on the fence here. Yes, there’s some “poetry” that has no discipline that does come across as poetry, but most of what’s out there these days seems to me to be just short form prose.


[quote=“CHCBrown”]
Modern Art (you’re right, your 5 year old COULD do that)
[/quote]

Why must art be distinguished as something difficult to create? If it is beautiful, what does it matter how long it took the artist to make it?

Also, though a five-year-old may be able to create “modern art” as you see it, the five-year-old did not make it. This is why the artist gets the praise, as opposed to the five-year-old. If you’d like to sell your five-year-old’s creations as art, I’m sure the pure gimmick of it would make a great deal of money (because that’s what it’s all about, folks).

The other thing is, it all comes in context. Not every drip of paint that Jackson Pollock did made it into his commercial works. I had thought Piet Mondrian was a charlatan till I saw an exhibition of his work. This guy was a REALLY talented artist. He started out doing realism and impressionism, then started getting into cubism and finally squarism. There was an example of a building that he’d painted in a half-dozen different styles, and you could, with a little imagination, see how it turned into a few squares in primary colors.

Then again, there’s the guy with the TV’s playing static, and the guy with toilets and urinals. I still think they’re charlatans.

I think you’ve got some very good points, CH, and I agree with a lot of what you say, even if it’s not completely.

11

Absolutely right. It’s fun to do if you are Derrida—i.e., if you have his skill, his wit and his extraordinary erudition—but since almost nobody has any two of these, it’s hopeless trying to copy it. Many who try appear to be funny only because their earnestness brings to light associations that really are funny—if they knew what I was laughing at they’d be appalled.

What it could never be is a substitute for careful analysis in Academe yet whole facultires seem to have rushed to embrace it. A little questioning and you can tell that the theories of language they think they are reacting to are at least 50 years old and the one they are replacing it with can’t explain even the most basic aspects of commonplace communicatation. The official rules aren’t the rules Derrida plays by; they are just part of the joke.

It’s as though the whole departments in the Arts Faculty had decided to write like Joyce in their academic work. Ridiculous. Done badly it isn’t worth doing; done well it has a purpose that isn’t transferable wholesale to academic studies.

I enjoy baiting some of my colleagues with remarks like: still postmodernism eh, how quaintly 20th century.

12

Free verse needn’t be “undisciplined,” and good free verse isn’t. It’s a matter of making form, rather than of replicating a received form (not such a great distinction, since skilled writers of iambic pentameter have such a range of variations available that they’re not really replicating anything either). It’s possible to discuss free verse in technical terms, to look for patterns of repeated measure and variation, to see a relationship between a free verse poem and a formal one, to distinguish between skillful and amateurish handling of the lines in a free verse poem. (Anything I might have to say about this I owe to Donald Justice, who taught that tradtional meter and free verse could be seen as part of a continuum of increasing variation, not as opposing forces.) I don’t want to overload this discussion with examples, but here’s one. In class one day I was writing some lines from William Carlos Williams on the board to illustrate his handling of free verse, but as I said the phrases (ignoring the line breaks) I realized that the poem was actually in a regular iambic pattern that the line endings disguised. Pretty cool, I thought then, and still do.

Put more briefly, good free verse makes its own kind of music. But, as Dub said above, you’ve got to get it to be able to get it.

It’s also a generalization to suggest that contemporary poetry is solely the turf of the free versifiers–James Merrill is just one counter-example–and there are a good many poets whose work includes both free verse poems and poems in traditional forms (James Wright, Justice, Eliizbeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Thom Gunn for starters).

It’s ok with me if you don’t like the stuff. But I’m not sure where the “charlatan” thing comes in, since that seems to imply bad faith, an intent to deceive, and those are qualities I haven’t run into much in the poets I’ve met.

13

You can go back much furhter than that. Lawrence Sterne’s ‘The Life and Times of Trstram Shandy’ is one of the first novels and is almost bereft of plot which is one of its many endearing features. In the shaggy dog story, it’s not about the plot and to fail to get it is simply to be insensitive to all the other things narrative can be. That said, don’t try writing a book like this unless you are very very good. But, by the same token, the are those who can enthrall their children with stories and those who would be better off reading to them from a good book.

14

I’m sorry. I was with you until you started to make fun of the Bauhaus. That’s just not funny!

I personally think that it’s a bit of intellectual arrogance to name our own generation. Somewhere along the way we attached great importance to descriptive monikers and we feel that if we name ourselves we can control how history remembers us. But those who come later will see us for what we were… at least to the extent that an accurate record exists. I’m not so certain that the philosophy of this age differs as much (as rapidly) as we believe. Somewhere between Arts and Crafts and Modernism there was, perhaps, a shift. It is likely that our posterity will label Modernism, Post-Modernism and Decon as “The Age of Self”. Seriously, though, I can imagine all of the recent trends being treated as relatively homogenous by future generations even though we like to see vast distinctions between ourselves and those that came before us.

I suspect that future generations will likely lump us all into the post-industrial society where our free time grew to such an extent that we had nothing better to do than think “great” thoughts.

Erik

15

What’s most distressing is that for the past forty years or so, the face of deconstruction in english has scrunched up in fury like a baby just about to wail.

Derrida was having Fun. Paul DeMann less so, but ALL the north american adoptees of their ideas are in a constant fury–about colonialism, sexism, feminism, thisism and thatism. Or their opposites–deconstruction is just as useful for attacking either side.

But it’s NO FUN. They don’t get that it’s all a joke, and they’re well on the way to being consumed by rage.

It really is appalling behaviour, and what’s worse is that entire faculties have been infiltrated by their nonsense-heaving adherents.

16

Well, see, this statement disturbs me.

If I go to a museum and see something like this:

Robert Rauschenberg
White Painting
1951
collection of the artist

I really don’t have much to say about it. I don’t say it is bad nor do I say it is good. I don’t know what he is getting at. I don’t find it repellent, nor do I find it interesting although it seems sort of pleasantly calming. So I feel that the most intelligent response would be to ask what it is since I assume that knowing something more might enable me to respond in some way. If knowing more has nothing to do with it, then that is saying to me that I am inherently incapable of any sort of engagement in any postmodern, or whatever the right term is, art (painting, music, literature, whatever). Which is probably quite true :laughing: but is, nevertheless, somewhat disturbing. I suppose this painting is actually modern, not postmodern but I think my problem can still be discerned.

17

Two incidents brought home to me how damaging this is this academic year.

On the first occasion I was videoconferencing to campuses all over the south of New South Wales on the topic of meaning. One student who was close to finishing an English major said to me, ‘You talk as though communication is commonplace but surely meaning is indefinitely deferred.’ My reply was ‘Imagine you are crossing a road absent mindedly and I see a car speeding up on your right and shout, ‘Watch out to your right.’ How long do you think you have to defer meaning on this occasion?’ To my relief, the other students laughed. But she persisted, ‘So for the purposes of this course, we are to regard meaning as determinate.’ I replied ‘Disregarding clear respects in which it isn’t like vagueness and ambiguity, for 99% of your life you should regard meaning as more or less determinate except when people are talking nonsense.’ A tactful tutor stepped in and said ‘You’re learning the commonsense theory of meaning which postmodernism critiques, you really ought to know that is being critiqued before you learn that critique.’ I agreed, but pointed out that you should bring to the critique an equally critical attitude and ask yourself how often you can afford the luxury of abandoning commonsense notions of sense, reference and communicative speech acts.

On the second occasion, a student was sent to me from another subject to discuss dichotomies suggested by the notion of genetic engineering. (I’m the guy in the faculty who teaches this stuff.) After we chatted for a while quite pleasantly about genetic engineering, I asked her precisely what question she was trying to answer. She hummed and hawed and never really came up with anything at all focussed. I concluded that her task was the academic equivalent of ‘jam on this Dm7 chord for the next ten minutes.’ I really don’t get it. What’s the point of aggressively declining to teach or learn analytical and critical skills?

18

Because once you eliminate both, all contests come down to a matter of who’s louder.

As the advice to new lawyers goes: “If you’re strong on the facts and weak on the law, pound on the facts. If you’re weak on the facts and strong in the law, pound on the law. And if you’re weak on the facts and weak on the law, pound on the table.”

Deconstruction is the tactic for those who are weak on analysis and weak on critical thinking. It’s pounding on tables, and insisting that all utterance is nothing but a pounded table.

19

E.E. Cummings is the cat's pajamas! :slight_smile:
20

I’ve known a lot of quiet decon guys, though. :wink: