Important Postmodernist Thesis!

[Helm]

http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/

If you do not understand what's going on (shame, what a PMist are you, anyway?)

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html

and then:

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/community/postmodern.html

[theapportioner]

Ahh, yes, I understand. Profound.

[theapportioner]

While amusing, I think Sokal's fairly off the mark.

[Helm]

Well yes obviously this mostly oppinion but it is amusing nonetheless, no?

[theapportioner]

I decided to look up this guy sum'ore, and it's really ironic that some of the French folks he's aiming at took it so seriously. I mean, isn't irony part of what they're all about??

Seems like he's just using that article as an excuse to get on the soapbox, cos it doesn't prove all that much by itself. But he is dead on about a few things.

[The One and Only...]

So I'm not the only person with a brain left?

[theapportioner]

How witty.

[Cosmo Electrolux]

So I'm not the only person with a brain left?

too bad you choose to ignore it.

[theapportioner]

Well, duhhh :rollseyes

---

The cultural paradigm of context and the constructivist paradigm of consensus

Agnes O. V. Pickett
Department of Politics, Cambridge University

1. Consensuses of failure
"Class is meaningless," says Marx; however, according to McElwaine[1] , it is not so much class that is meaningless, but rather the dialectic, and some would say the rubicon, of class. However, Debord suggests the use of the constructivist paradigm of consensus to attack art. Humphrey[2] suggests that we have to choose between the cultural paradigm of context and the neotextual paradigm of narrative.

It could be said that the subject is contextualised into a constructivist sublimation that includes language as a whole. If the constructivist paradigm of consensus holds, we have to choose between constructivist sublimation and Batailleist `powerful communication'.

But the primary theme of the works of Smith is not discourse per se, but prediscourse. In Clerks, Smith deconstructs neomodern nihilism; in Dogma he analyses constructivist sublimation. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a Debordist image that includes reality as a paradox. The premise of constructivist sublimation states that culture serves to entrench archaic perceptions of society, but only if language is interchangeable with consciousness.

2. Smith and the constructivist paradigm of consensus
The characteristic theme of de Selby's[3] model of constructivist sublimation is the bridge between sexuality and sexual identity. However, the subject is contextualised into a constructivist paradigm of consensus that includes art as a totality. Geoffrey[4] holds that the works of Smith are not postmodern.

It could be said that the primary theme of the works of Smith is the role of the writer as poet. Many theories concerning Sartreist absurdity exist.

But the characteristic theme of Long's[5] critique of constructivist sublimation is not, in fact, narrative, but neonarrative. Lacan uses the term 'postpatriarchialist discourse' to denote the economy, and subsequent failure, of cultural sexual identity.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. McElwaine, P. V. J. ed. (1974) The Circular Sky: The cultural paradigm of context in the works of Mapplethorpe. University of North Carolina Press
2. Humphrey, W. (1996) The constructivist paradigm of consensus and the cultural paradigm of context. University of Michigan Press

3. de Selby, O. V. C. ed. (1972) Textual Narratives: The cultural paradigm of context in the works of Smith. Loompanics

4. Geoffrey, N. (1985) The cultural paradigm of context and the constructivist paradigm of consensus. Schlangekraft

5. Long, W. O. ed. (1976) The Stasis of Society: The constructivist paradigm of consensus and the cultural paradigm of context. Yale University Press

[Helm]

You thought that was a particularily good one? I like how Marx says that 'class is meaningless'

[da blob]

No shit it reminds me of some of the teachers I had at the art school (Paris fine arts school). Not only did we have to learn to understand their postmod bogus, but then to be able to vomit back the same kind of bullshit.
Oh lord have mercy on me, for I have sinned.

[derrida]

I think Sokal's chief criticism of pomo is the misuse of science by some of its representative authors. While Lacan is the only target of his that I've read, it seemed to me at the time that the most important aspect of his invocation of scientific knowledge was its use as metaphor. As Freud and his predecessors drew upon euclidean or mechanistic metaphors, Lacan employs knot topology to reveal more about subjectivity of experience and the creation of the self. Whether or not his math checks out is mostly irrelevant.

The fact that Sokal's books on pomo have probably sold more than the texts he references is understandable- after all, most people would rather the experts do all the heavy thinking for them, rather than risk cognitive dissonance.

[theapportioner]

Yup. "Math" for Lacan is employed in an entirely different context than the usual context. It's moot whether or not he gets those rules "right".

I think Sokal's after more than nitpicking - he's objecting to the entire movement, especially its application to science. He and a mathematician co-wrote a book (which I haven't read, and don't intend to) in which he criticizes the epistemological attacks made by Kuhn, Feyeraband, etc. It's really a quite separate issue from that parody article tho' - which makes me think he did it just to promote himself.

[derrida]

http://www.shef.ac.uk/inclusive-education/research/researchprojects/selfadvocacy2.htm

It's interesting how most opponents of pomo/poststructuralism completely ignore the very real impact it has had on methods qualitative analysis in the social sciences, instead preferring to attack it for "obfuscation." The above paper, for instance, is deeply indebted to the works of Michel Foucault, another one of those much-derided French intellectuals.