In her recent post on the postmodern sublime in comics, Marguerite Van Cook paraphrases Frederic Jameson on our crazed cultural landscape.
Jameson points out that the sublime of postmodern is not the dark and brooding place of the high romantics; it is not the depressed world of brooding heroes. Somewhere along the line, all of that angst and personal introspection has been replaced by another world of bright shiny surfaces, replicas and fragmented visions in a world now experiencing another kind of psychic onslaught. Jameson talks about the postmodern sublime as a type of container for all this madness, which he describes as a type of schizophrenia.
Marguerite goes on to look at various comic-book chroniclers of the post-modern sublime, concluding with Al Columbia.
Al Columbia’s Pim and Francie perhaps sums it all up. They run not walk to the sanatorium. Columbia’s characters are no longer in revolt, they are beyond that cognitive choice. Rather they live in a world that does not differentiate morality and feelings. Columbia draws snatches from various artists styles. They hover ghostlike, pulled back from our collective memory as they sit on pages that are torn, fragmented and abused in a confrontation of what it means to be a new product. Jameson suggest that nothing is left to shock us, but I’d suggest that Al Columbia does just that. In this final image the boy takes a straight razor to Bambi. He eschews the choice of Mickey and assaults us in the soft spot. Bambi, the sacred lamb, the sacred cow, the holy sanctified symbol of innocence, is offered to the madness of the postpostmodern. Bambi’s limbs lie dismembered in the grass and we are oh so close by, to see them.
Jameson, Marguerite, and Columbia are all presenting us with a postmodernism as hell; a shiny, emotionless strobing of patterns whose only meaning is an ersatz copy of meaninglessness. The real has vanished utterly, and all that’s left are images of images, a cardboard graveyard of stale tropes through which wander wayward consumers, robbed of even the dignity of despair.
That is certainly one face of postmodernism…but I wonder if it’s really the most insidious one. To me, anyway, the focus on the postmodern schizophrenic apocalypse can obscure maybe the most obvious thing about our current cultural moment — which is that postmodernism is really pleasurable. Gliding out on those ever-shifting shallows, with the real and its hierarchy of earnestness vanishing like the afterimage of that web page you just left, while every song in the world is simultaneously uploaded to your cortex — who can resist such blithely excessive dreams?
Comics is so rooted in nostalgia that it maybe makes sense that it sees the post-post-everything as an impetus mostly to gnash and mourn and re-reject decades old funny animals and the now irrelevant sentiments they inspired. Other cultural forms, though, have embraced the zeitgeist with more eagerness.
Electronica is perhaps a too-obvious example. Listening to the recent release Tipped Bowls by Taragana Pyjarama, you aren’t dumped into a schizophrenic void. On the contrary, the first track, “Four Legged,” orchestrates the future-synth automatons of our overdetermined dreams into a rising symphonic rush of exaltation, panning and swooping over digitized fijords like tiny joyful digitized tourists. “Growing Forehead” takes that most human of sounds, an inhaled breath, and cuts and reiterates it until it’s just another computerized meme afloat in ecstatic programmable melody; transcendence as binary conversion. “Pinned (Part 1),” is a staggering agglomeration of beats and bloops, like a video game caught in a spin cycle, while “Pinned (Part 2) is a funkier but still inner-ear-disturbed strut, stochastic patter resolving and threatening to dissipate, resolving and threatening to dissipate, all with a catchy tunefulness, as if we’ve wandered into a world where even the busted appliances spit out pop.
That world is our world, of course; high culture and low culture and random furniture and passing cats (especially passing cats!) all sliding across one endless screen. It’s nauseating and soul-destroying, certainly. But it’s also vertiginous and, in a song like “Ballibat,” such a lovely, smoothed-out mash-up of timeless futurism that you wonder if, in this post-present, you even need a soul.
Endless violence and post-human porn are one aspect of, on the one hand, this cultural moment called postmodernism, and, on the other hand, this rather more temporally nonspecific entity some people have called the unconscious. And the same goes for nostalgia. There have been lurid provocations as well as soothing soporifics certainly since the dawn of mass culture, and attendant specters of the magically man-made all-too-visible unseen. It certainly seems that lurid and palliative fantasies exist to complement one another, in some respects. What may be most depressing about comics is how it makes Marshall McLuhan’s assertion that the medium is the message (or massage or frisson or whatever) seem incontrovertible. We police ourselves through pleasure.
Could you expand on the comics/McLuhan comparison? I’m not sure I’m following that.
Policing ourselves through pleasure is definitely what I’m talking about. And I’d say part of the pleasure can be in lamenting/spitting at the policing; thus the black comic as uberfather.
What is post-human porn?
Comics say, insistently and unceasingly, “I am a printed artifact! A living fossil, if you will, diverting you from your alienation with images of an archaic heroic time of physical action, handicraft, and/or auteurish film! Remember your imaginary childhood? Of course you don’t, let us invent it for you!” Yearning for charismatic domination, no matter how you slice it.
What is post-human porn? Well, tentacle penetration could be one example, or reality shows, or or Lady Gaga. In my mind it’s a bit redundant, since porn is never properly humanist, which is what makes the “erotica” category so troubled, not to mention the homoerotica of classical statuary in superhero outfits.
Ah, okay. Yes, I agree with that. The controlling emotion/meme of comics is nostaliga, which can be expressed in various ways, but which can always be summed up by the cultural marginalization of popular illustration.
I was just reading a pretty great book about the history of homosexual art which talked about the rampant performative pornography in 19th century Japan…which he explicitly linked to Japan’s capitalism, which was not unlike our own current post-modern version. Though, of course, much of it was accomplished through popular illustration, which wasn’t then a subject of nostalgia…though talking about it now is….
No, I think pornography is in fact a form of both relieving and provoking the anxiety of mass-culture dislocation and instrumentalization. Satire, utopia, and apocalypse are always viable modern modes of address, but all printed objects (fiction and poetry included) seem to be anchored to this unfortunate humanist mode of nostalgic purity, no matter how they try to escape.
Post-human … post-modern … has our culture been reduced to post-it notes®? Heck, I’m nostalgic for fifteen minutes ago …
Re “post-human porn,” Harlan Ellison wrote a story about someone having sex with a computer, all manner of strange mental impressions of sensations and textured transmitted into the human’s brain.
A similar scene in the outstanding film of Dean R. Koontz’s “Demon Seed” involves Proteus, the AI who wishes to escape its destruction via incarnation, stimulates Julie Christie’s brain electrically (since “I cannot touch you as a man would touch you”), producing psychedelic visions.
Alas, the mechanical way by which he impregnates her is “robot rape”; the creepy scene starting 6 minutes in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tG8EBQXWbb4&feature=related .
“AIKO female robot – robogirlfriend or robowife”: http://www.dipity.com/timeline/Aiko_Robot/
http://wordsinjapanese.com/japanese-actroid-robot-latest-human-robots.php
There’s Shel Silverstein’s “She’s My Ever-Lovin’ Machine”:
I’m seeing some slippage here as to the meaning of post-human as it relates to the post-modern and critical theory. In the context of the humanities it really just mean a break with the renaissance and enlightenment conceptions of the human that inflected modernism. In a nutshell, these earlier conception located agency (artistic, intellectual, productive), and therefor power, in the individual. The human was the center of all things. The post-human position is basically an argument that we can’t think that way, since we now understand power to be a function of discourses (Foucault, Derrida, Althusser) and networks of association between people and technologies (Hayles, Haraway) where it’s difficult to see where a person’s responsibility for an outcome begins or ends. The reason cyborgs and computers come up so often in these conversations is that they’re emblematic of this shift away from traditional conceptions of agency.
For example, when does my capacity to see end and that of my microscope begin… how does the microscope contribute to an outcome I want because its design is oriented to a particular way of seeing, and how do the computer programs designed to crunch the data affect all this? Maybe they cause me to adjust the microscope? It gets complicated fast, but the upshot is that my discovery isn’t precisely mine anymore. Or as Latour would probably never say, adios Newton, hello Pasteur.
As for post-human porn, that would be any porn where power is so diffuse as to make it secondary to pot raying its outcomes. My experience with porn is pretty limited, and most of what I’ve seen is intensely modern, as in power and agency are clearly located between the navel and the kneecaps.
As for post-human comics, I sometimes think that comics are in the weird position of having never been seen as modern. This is for reasons already alluded to here. They haven’t enjoyed the status of fine art, which would put them in the tradition of Romanticism, which follows through in the heroic narratives of the modern artist (this is compounded by the fact that many comics have been group efforts). It also lacks the rhetorics of objectivity and capture associated with photography, and as such never basked in the glow of science that the moderns inherited from the Enlightenment. So maybe comics have always been post human, never been modern.
What this means to comics theory/scholarship/criticism I’m not sure.
I agree that comics are problematic, however one might look at certain characters as romantic types, for example Batman is Byron’s alienated brooding hero and alienation was/is a consist theme in comics, so in this respect the content has been modern. I get where Nate is coming from, but I’m not sure, because I keep thinking of Hearst, the newspaper and comic publisher, as a modern man.
As regards never being considered as Fine art, while comics are still not folded into fine art, the world of fine art world is itself under great stress, as more and more it has become a commodity market (post modern effect of course.)Discussions about private versus public institutions are all over the art news. Tim Burton at MOMA reflects a slackening of modern values as the postmodern gets a foothold.
I forgot to add that porn is probably the biggest waste of time, drainer of resources and all round best method of both dumbing down and containing hormonally driven humans, particularly when they are at their strongest and so in that respect we do police society through pleasure, primarily men through porn. As the mechanics of our own bodies are better understood, so are its weaknesses,which can then be exploited, particularly if one wants a passive society.
There are a lot of sex-positive feminists though who argue that the desexualization of women is a primary means of control, right?
In general, I think limiting the mechanisms of control and pleasure to pornography is kind of shortsighted. Fashion magazines and romance novels are certainly about pleasure and control, even though they’re aimed mostly at women. So is any kind of genre…and indeed any kind of art. Porn is continuous with aesthetics, not opposed to them. I think this is kind of where the porn debates go badly awry on both sides, with anti-porn activists claiming that porn is worse than everything else, and pro-porn feminists tending to treat it like it’s better than everything else. I don’t think it’s either; it’s just another genre, with it’s own tropes and interests and functions, but not radically different in its manipulation of pleasure and power than other bits of our culture (whether superhero comics or Twilight or art museums or whatever.)
When I brought up the comics/modernism thing I was focussing more on the form and less on the content, which is a problem for precisely the reason Marguerite points out; namely, the content of comics is often hyper-modern, evincing tremendous faith in/fear of technology, heroic archetypes and narratives, etc. Hatfield gets at this in “Hand of Fire” when he talks about Kirby and the technological sublime. But to all this I would counter that as a genre/form it was, during the heyday of modernism, perceived as neither capital “L” literature, nor capital “A” art. As such, comic book portrayals of technology and heroism probably did more to undercut the narratives they reflected than anything else. Superman is in a lot of ways a reductio-ad-absurdum of modernisms best and worst tendencies, which depending on one’s politics might be the same tendencies with different values attached. In fact, part of the pomo pleasure of reading Silver Age comics is their apparently irony-free embrace of this stuff, which is itself a form of nostalgia.
Clement Greenberg does not get to be the final authority on what counts as true modernism, although he provides a fine object lesson on objectivity as ideology (perhaps, for our era, refigured as contingency as ideology). Comics are Wagnerian and Art Nouveau and Surrealist, and sort of pornographic, which Greenberg, Adorno, and tons of other folks would perhaps agree with and then reject all of those as decadent middlebrow modes of mass culture production. But fine art covers up its own dependence on mass-culture image-making by projecting a materialist ground of authenticity, just as superhero comics project a mythic substrate.
Truth is, abstract art wishes it had the immediacy of pornography (or music). Genesis P. Orridge invented the idea of the “brown note” (a sound that makes you crap your pants), as far as I’m concerned, as a commentary on modernism. In no case is the irony made irrelevant by naivete, but it is deliberately resisted and painted over.
I’m reading this awesome book by Christopher Reed about called Art and Homosexuality, which argues that because of its reliance on ideas of avant-garde individuality, art has been very chary of embracing homosexual iconography associated with group identity. He says that despite the association of fine art and homosexuality, fine art tends to lag behind mass culture in representations of gay sexuality, and only to borrow them when they’ve become safer.
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Marguerite says:
I forgot to add that porn is probably the biggest…drainer of resources…
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Heh! Who says feminists have no sense of humor? (Uh, that was supposed to be funny, right?)
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I think this is kind of where the porn debates go badly awry on both sides, with anti-porn activists claiming that porn is worse than everything else, and pro-porn feminists tending to treat it like it’s better than everything else.
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Yes; when one evaluates something through ideological filters, a skewed perspective is the result.
Nah; everyone has ideological filters. The difference is just that mine are the right ones, and yours are wrong.
Belated observation on Al Columbia– looks sort of like a Mad-magazine parody of Arturo Herrera, a reputable postmodern fine artist. But the pleasure of endless violence was there for Homer (not Simpson), quite a while before photocopiers.
Also just wanted to say that the Christopher Reed book sounds great, as does the Shel Silverstein poem. In both cases, idols don’t always do what ou expect them to.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…everyone has ideological filters.
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It’s certainly a widely-spread, if not wholly universal, phenomenon.
With people so “into” their particular set of all-explaining ideologies that anything that doesn’t fit is dismissed. Where facts are considered utterly empty, unimportant bits of meaninglessness, until they’re slotted into an ideology or Theory. Which will then give those trivial pieces of mere factuality meaning.
Anything that might fit the all-encompassing explanation is nipped of inconvenient details, twisted and stretched, then brandished high as proving one’s particular “brand” of The Way Things Are. Anything which goes against dismissed, ignored, Silly-Puttied into a nonsensical shape.
Consider the latest massacre perpetrated by a gun-wielding loner.
A Freudian would say this tragedy was totally the result of unresolved Oedipal Complexes; a vegetarian blame it on the killer eating meat; a coach, that he wasn’t into sports, which “builds character”; a right-winger, that he was one of those pointy-headed, ivory-tower intellectuals, whose father didn’t beat him enough; a Christian, that he was a Secular Humanist who didn’t go to church; a feminist would proclaim this murder spree as clearly the result of the Patriarchy instilling Male Privilege…
…And the guy with the “right ideological filters” would say, here’s proof that science and scientists Are evil! Why, look at his background:
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Investigators spent a day and a half working to gain access to the booby-trapped Aurora, Colo., apartment of James Holmes, hoping to discover there clues to what would make a young man recognized as one of the nation’s “outstanding neuroscientists and academicians” unleash a storm of terror in a packed movie theater.
…Holmes was apparently a gifted scientist who had received a federal grant to work on his Ph.D. at one of the most competitive neuroscience programs in the country…
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http://abcnews.go.com/US/colorado-movie-shooting-james-holmes/story?id=16829552
BTW, how about an HU thread devoted to the mostly mediocre-to-abysmal, cliché-ridden (weeping Batmans! Comic-book superhero contrasted to the real heroes, cops!) editorial cartoons devoted to that subject?
Check out a gathering, if you dare. Keep a barf-bag handy: http://www.cagle.com/news/batman-shooting-2/ (Keep hitting the “older” arrows…)
Mike, we were having a pretty interesting conversation…I really don’t want to go off into talking about the shootings. Let’s try to stay vaguely on topic, maybe.
Leaving cops and ideology aside, to whatever extent that’s possible… I am, after consideration, willing to extend “post-human pornography” to include all forms of techno-fetishization (qua Shel Silverstein) and commodity worship. Which certainly ties into the way comics propagate themselves.
Bert,
I’m not sure if the Clement Greenberg was a response to my comment on the question of comics as modernist, but I didn’t mean to suggest that Greenberg’s definition of modernism is the definition, or even a particularly important one. Frankly, I’ve always felt Greenberg’s influence to be a little overstated w/r/t modernism writ large,
Anyway, I can see where the confusion came from. I wrote “modernism” because I was talking about art and literature, but my chief concern was with modernity as an “era” defined in part by art and literature, but also by a certain line of thinking. My point was that a post-war Superman comic would play right into the hands of a committed modernist who would see it as a vulgar expression of false consciousness perpetrated by the culture industry (though maybe Krakauer would have had something more interesting to say, he usually did). The post-modern, on the other hand, can laugh at how the comic clumsily subverts the very ideology its perpetuating. It’s the difference between one grand theory or narrative vs another (marxism vs. capitalism) and a recognition that ideology is inherently unstable, and taking pleasure from that.
And Mike, almost nobody buys that one can be free of ideology. Even scientists recognize the importance of understanding and acknowledging one’s ideological biases rather than trying to step outside of them. Because, dude, that is simply not possible. You need an ideology to operate in the world. Otherwise you’d have to start from scratch every time you asked a question, jettisoning all knowledge.
Nate, I don’t think I disagree with you. Or at least I like your points. I was just intending to emphasize that modernism was never really a singular entity, which you get at nicely by sort of saying “comics have modernist concerns, but modernists didn’t consider them art, but maybe they were right since comics were postmodern in their self-deconstruction.” Like, I mention Surrealism, Art Nouveau, and Wagner because the avant-garde types saw those movements, like comics, as retrograde, whereas, without imputing “false consciousness” (a concept I dislike), their self-annihilation actually comes off as far less deluded than that of, say, utopian abstraction.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, we were having a pretty interesting conversation…I really don’t want to go off into talking about the shootings. Let’s try to stay vaguely on topic, maybe.
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OK!
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Nate says:
….Mike, almost nobody buys that one can be free of ideology. Even scientists recognize the importance of understanding and acknowledging one’s ideological biases rather than trying to step outside of them. Because, dude, that is simply not possible. You need an ideology to operate in the world. Otherwise you’d have to start from scratch every time you asked a question, jettisoning all knowledge.
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So if you’re not an utterly committed Christian/Communist/Freudian/Anarchist/Black Liberationist/Libertarian/Pacifism/Whatever, you have no way of comprehending the world or assimilating knowledge?
And I think what those scientists are referring to are psychological and emotional biases, rather than the more complicated, calculatedly-wrought thing known as “ideology.”
From dictionary.com:
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i·de·ol·o·gy
1. the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.
2. such a body of doctrine, myth, etc., with reference to some political and social plan, as that of fascism, along with the devices for putting it into operation.
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Having grown up under Communism in Cuba, and (propaganda being what it is) believing it was the Best of All Possible Systems, moving to the U.S., learning of the vileness of Castro…
(Good thing I didn’t know it was “simply not possible” to step outside of those ideological biases; that by rejecting Communism I’d thereby be ” jettisoning all knowledge,” and turning myself into a drooling newborn with a tabula rasa brain.)
…and then believing Capitalism was the Best of All Possible Systems; being pro-Vietnam War then learning more and being against it; being a fervent supporter of feminism since 1970, then watching the once-admirable and reasonable movement significantly taken over by “all men are rapists” types and marginalizing itself…
Well, let’s say I’ve grown mightily wary of swallowing hook-line-and-sinker any all-encompassing “body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc.” and being one of the good little sheep that unquestioningly toes the line.
And am aware that ideologies that are thoroughly fine in many ways can have fatal flaws, not be suited for use in every situation (i.e., pacifism versus Nazism), or the occasional less-than-admirable qualities.
Rather than “need[ing] an ideology to operate in the world,” what ideologies do is narrow our thinking; encourage us to reject what doesn’t fit that set of biases and conceptions.
“Gee, the Guru praises chastity, and is the epitome of holy self-denial and enlightenment. Therefore, all those beautiful young female disciples who go into his rooms at night must be undergoing…intensive spiritual training!”
“Since Capitalism is so great and this is the Land of Opportunity, I guess all those impoverished people must just be…lazy!”
A group of ancient Aztecs, drawing and comments by Tim Kreider, one championing their ideology to a dubious-looking fellow: http://www.thepaincomics.com/weekly011212a.htm
From an interview with Seven Pinker, author of “The Better Angels of our Nature”, whom Noah devoted an appreciative article at HU a while back:
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Q. You equate Marxist ideology with violence in the book. Do you think that capitalist values have contributed to the decline of violence?
A. I think that communism was a major force for violence for more than 100 years, because it was built into its ideology—that progress comes through class struggle, often violent. It led to the widespread belief that the only way to achieve justice was to hurry this dialectical process along, and allow the oppressed working classes to carry out their struggle against their bourgeois oppressors…
Q. You cite ideology as the main cause for violence in the 20th century. Why is that?
A. There are a number of things that make particular ideologies dangerous. One of them is the prospect of a utopia: since utopias are infinitely good forever, and can justify any amount of violence to pursue that utopia, the costs are still outweighed by the benefits. Utopias also tend to demonise certain people as obstacles to a perfect world, whoever they are: the ruling classes, the bourgeois, the Jews or the infidels and heretics. As long as your ideology identifies the main source of the world’s ills as a definable group, it opens the world up to genocide.
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http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2011/11/qa-steven-pinker-0
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An ideology is a rigid set of beliefs that defines what an individual or community thinks. In the Puritan theocracy of Massachusetts, a government run by religious authorities, the dominant ideology held that the Puritans were a chosen people that the devil would do anything to destroy. Since religious men ran their government, the Puritans considered all government actions to be necessarily “good,” or sanctioned by Heaven. This meant that any attempt to question, obstruct, or otherwise resist any of the government’s actions, no matter how ludicrous, destructive, or ill-informed, was considered by the government and other Puritans to be an attempt to overthrow God.
Governments fueled by such rigid and absolute ideological convictions often fall into corruption and tyranny without even realizing it…
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http://www.litcharts.com/lit/thecrucible/themes
And no, I’m not advocating a simplistically reactive chucking of the whole thing; more like a cafeteria approach, keeping and appreciating the better parts of some ideologies, rejecting others.
Which of course, to any ideological True Believer, is the worst type of outrage…
“And no, I’m not advocating a simplistically reactive chucking of the whole thing; more like a cafeteria approach, keeping and appreciating the better parts of some ideologies, rejecting others. ”
That’s an ideology. A very modernist one, too; you’re claiming that you can pick and choose what you like from different ideologies, which presumes that you have a view from nowhere — that is, you’re somehow standing outside ideology, which allows you to evaluate all other ideologies. It’s basic enlightenment individualism. It’s the dominant ideology at the moment — which is probably why you’re not able to see it as an ideology.
Bert, weren’t Art Nouveau, Wagner, and surrealism all part of the avant-garde before they were rejected by it? That’s kind of the thing about the avant-garde, right; it’s always rejecting its forbears. Very Freudian (to mention another major modernist.)
Mike,
Noah’s answer is the short answer, and probably the best answer. But I want to add some stuff, because I’m like that today.
Biases flow out of ideologies. For an object lesson in how ideology becomes apparent to scientists read any history of the atomic scientists movement. The atomic scientists, being scientists, considered nationalism and secrecy an anathema to what it meant to be a scientist. This ideology, which was a variety of interwar intellectual cosmopolitanism, didn’t fit well within the framework of the emerging national security state. I won’t bore you with the details, but some scientists went with their ideology and went on to do different things, and others adapted to the new Cold War internationalism. Their research reflected their choice.
But the point is no scientist ever stepped outside their ideology, and neither does anyone else. You seem to think that such a view makes people dupes, but it doesn’t. Good feminists, good communists, and good capitalists can be reflexive about their ideology, acknowledging it, testing it, etc. And if they’re really good they’ll recognize that the faith they place in reflexivity is likewise ideological.
Bert,
Oh, I think I understand what you’re getting at now. And you’re right, most people agree that when we talk about modernity we really mean modernities (some people like to frame the heterogeneity of modernity in terms of flows). All of this makes things more confusing. I usually get a little lost when I try to talk about modernism (as in the aesthetic) within the context modernity (as in the ideological framework from which it emerged).
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Nate says:
….Mike, almost nobody buys that one can be free of ideology. Even scientists recognize the importance of understanding and acknowledging one’s ideological biases rather than trying to step outside of them.
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The problem with that is, what you get:
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Nah; everyone has ideological filters. The difference is just that mine are the right ones, and yours are wrong.
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A painfully typical reaction. In a study some 20-something years ago, a group of people were asked to rate their driving abilities. 99% thought they were “above average.” Of those who’d previously been arrested for drunken/reckless driving, 100% thought they were “above average.”
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[Mike quote] “And no, I’m not advocating a simplistically reactive chucking of the whole thing; more like a cafeteria approach, keeping and appreciating the better parts of some ideologies, rejecting others. ”
That’s an ideology. A very modernist one, too…
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Oooh, yes, everything’s an ideology! Same tactic used by the Creationists to rhetorically drag scientists down to their level.
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…..you’re claiming that you can pick and choose what you like from different ideologies…
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Did you take a “manipulative rhetoric” course? As should be obvious (but I guess those ideological filters screened out inconvenient details that don’t fit) from my hundreds of previous posts, and recent description of my passages through Communism/Capitalism/Feminism/etc., I actually HAVE ‘picked and chosen” bits which I found solidly worthy (which you change to “like,” as if it were preferring Rocky Road to Vanilla ice cream).
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…which presumes that you have a view from nowhere — that is, you’re somehow standing outside ideology, which allows you to evaluate all other ideologies.
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When you look at the grandiose claims of, say, Capitalism and Communism, compare them to the sorry results, and find them lacking — better in some areas, crappy in others — that hardly requires an incredible intellectual exercise. Much less “a view from nowhere…somehow standing outside ideology, which allows you to evaluate all other ideologies.”
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It’s basic enlightenment individualism. It’s the dominant ideology at the moment — which is probably why you’re not able to see it as an ideology.
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Well, if you see reality and facts as empty, amorphously meaningless without some Theory or ideology to Explain It All, that would be the predictable mindset. Just like to a religious True Believer, a universe without some frothing old man in the sky is just a bunch of wandering molecules.
Mike, I was joking. J.o.k.i.n.g. Joking. For fuck’s sake.
“Did you take a “manipulative rhetoric” course?”
Yes. I’ve taken several. And I also teach them.
Here’s the thing, you’re not engaging with the central argument, which is that once you’ve acknowledged that ideologies exist, assuming you aren’t relying on dictionary definitions of ideology and are actually reading stuff by people who, you know, study ideology, then you realize you are always in an ideology.
The only thing your self-reportage tells me is that you’re mistaking the reasoned consideration of ideology with the ability to step outside your own. You’re operating on the assumption that you were able to set aside all schooling, all church, the city you live in, the parents who raised, and what you ate for lunch that day in order to cast a cold, unfiltered gaze on these systems and assemble a perspective that is uninflected by the social world. If you want to claim that, fine, I guess. But you’re going to have trouble making others buy into it.
By the way, what we now conceive as a “fact” can be traced back to Boyle’s experiments with the air-pump. Prior to that facts were the sole province of mathematics. Everything else was speculation. And once you have a set of facts, you need to arrange them. Which is what you do when you go to sources, pick the ones that meet your selection criteria, and arrange them in a comment. So even if the facts are hard kernels of truth, once arranged they become an argument. An argument that, as Noah points out, reflects a pretty clear ideology.
Boyle? I’d go back to Francis Bacon and the first stirrings of experimental science.
He also was one of the first to warn against warping perception by ideology — his famous Idol of the Theatre.
There’s a great book called Leviathan and the Air Pump about Boyle’s experiments…and how deeply they were inflected by ideology. Among other things, Boyle and his assistant were the only ones who could create a vacuum with pump; it was completely unreproducible by anyone else. And yet, those experiments, which absolutely violated the principle of falsifiability, are the basis of modern science. If Boyle hadn’t held to his ideology in the face of “facts,” who knows how much scientific progress would have been delayed?
Although vacuum had been previously created by other means– cf Pascal’s barometer.
AB-
Yes,experimental science was accepted prior to Boyle. What wasn’t accepted was that it was productive of facts.
As for ideology, Boyle was deeply concerned about it, which was why he took pains to establish that facts were the outcome of multiple, reasonable men agreeing on the existence of a phenomenon. But if you read Boyle’s definitions of reasonableness (or even witnessing), as Shapin and Schaffer do in Leviathan and the Air Pump, it becomes clear that the standards for reasonableness were shaped by the ideology of the time, and have since evolved.
Back to Bacon… you’re right to note his emphasis on falsification over time is the foundation of western science, and that he saw this as a bulwark against the idols of the marketplace. But that assumed that scientific research could take place outside the marketplace. It seems safe to say that even if this could happen, it doesn’t. Certain lines of research are valued more than others by society at large, and by people and agencies that fund scientific work. Science takes place in, and is part of, the marketplace of ideas.
Science has defined the way in which ideology functions in our time, in fact. There was in the semi-recent past a story (say, religion) put forward by an institutional authority (say, some branch of the church and/or aristocracy)– and there are and have been more local and folkloric elements too. But the educated citizen of today knows to eschew all narratives and claim autonomous objectivity. And so this becomes the way in which nations and churches propagate hatred to educated people– not with stories but with documentation, not with restrictions but with promises of freedom, not with punishment but with controlled and orderly pleasure.
Word. The thing that’s really most upsetting about creationism isn’t that it undermines the scientific paradigm, but that it doesn’t. What on earth are believers doing trying to find evidence of the flood in rock formations, or building creation museums instead of churches? Creationism doesn’t demonstrate Christianity’s obtuse refusal to bow to science; on the contrary, it shows the extent to which Christianity has been utterly co-opted by the current hegemony.
Or you could argue that the church is doing science one better, skipping modernity entirely and using the tools of post-modernism (pointing to the science as a social construction shot through with values) without heeding post-modernism’s admonitions to reflexivity, or the understanding from social studies of science that just because facts are constructed and provisional does not mean that all facts are created equal. In short, they’re having modernity’s cake and eating it too.
Oh sure, try to cheer me up.
What can I say… They’re good.
Forbidden Archaeology, published by a press named Bakhtivedanta Book Publishing, is a Hindu (!) creationist book with a foreword written by a postmodernist philosopher type.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, I was joking. J.o.k.i.n.g. Joking. For fuck’s sake.
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I had wondered if that was the case; but when everything before and after was so utterly deadpan…
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Nate says:
“Did you take a “manipulative rhetoric” course?”
Yes. I’ve taken several. And I also teach them.
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Uh, I was talking to Noah:
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[Noah quote] …..you’re claiming that you can pick and choose what you like from different ideologies…
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Did you take a “manipulative rhetoric” course?
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Nate says:
….once you’ve acknowledged that ideologies exist, assuming you aren’t relying on dictionary definitions of ideology and are actually reading stuff by people who, you know, study ideology…
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The advantage that dictionary definitions have is that they are pared-down, devoid of theorizings, conjectures, and ideological slants which would go into works by people “who, you know, study ideology”; thereby making them a valuable lingua franca for debate.
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…then you realize you are always in an ideology.
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Somebody’s got ideology in the brain!
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The only thing your self-reportage tells me is that you’re mistaking the reasoned consideration of ideology with the ability to step outside your own. You’re operating on the assumption that you were able to set aside all schooling, all church, the city you live in, the parents who raised, and what you ate for lunch that day in order to cast a cold, unfiltered gaze on these systems and assemble a perspective that is uninflected by the social world.
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Balderdash. You don’t need to do all that in order to figure out that various ideologies have fatal flaws, are loaded with hypocrisies and inconsistencies. You’re like a fervent Christian claiming that, without believing in God, it’s not possible to be moral.
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If you want to claim that, fine, I guess. But you’re going to have trouble making others buy into it.
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I am painfully aware that the world is full of “none are so blind, as those who will not see” types. I take it for granted that, no matter the mountains of evidence I can accumulate, an awful lot of people will persist on “staying the course” of their pet beliefs.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
The thing that’s really most upsetting about creationism isn’t that it undermines the scientific paradigm, but that it doesn’t. What on earth are believers doing trying to find evidence of the flood in rock formations, or building creation museums instead of churches? Creationism doesn’t demonstrate Christianity’s obtuse refusal to bow to science; on the contrary, it shows the extent to which Christianity has been utterly co-opted by the current hegemony.
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It is awfully self-defeating (as I’ve argued elsewhere) for the religious to try to be “scientific.”
Or, as Tim Kreider has written:
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It’s always both cute and pathetic listening Fundamentalists try to use the language of empiricism to try to defend their wonky myths and superstitions, sort of like seeing chimpanzees wear little human clothes or very young children trying to use polite etiquette. They can approximate the form, but they just don’t get the content. They don’t understand what the word “theory” means; they confuse correlation with causality; they argue by analogy; they can’t keep a grip on logic. I’m not going to waste any space…explaining or arguing for the theory of evolution; it’s like having to argue for the theory of gravity or electricity. And anyway, there’s no point in engaging advocates of Creationism or Intelligent Design in debate as though they really accepted enlightenment values or could be convinced by evidence or persuaded by rational discourse…
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Oh man…don’t try to argue with him about dictionary definitions Nate. Been there; it makes no one happy….
Delightful repartee. What if creationism is the last (pathetically homophobic, etc.) bulwark that some communities can erect against having their entire worldview annexed and engulfed by the global marketplace? Almost like Boyle and his pneumatic friends trying to stave off capitalism by manufacturing a technoscientific elite that still ended up persisting at the behest of mammon….
Mammon eats the technocratic elite and the technocratic elite eat the church. I can see that.
I guess the point for me (contra Nate, but in line with Bert) is that religion embracing modernity or post-modernity isn’t subversive…or if it is subversive that just means that they’re post-modern, and further interenmeshed with the machine they claim to want to undermine.
Creationism sure is not rendering unto caesar, is I guess the point, though it’s perhaps an object lesson as to why you want to render unto, because if you take what’s caesar’s, caesar is going to take you.
And now in that Christopher Reed book I’m reading about Clement Greenberg initially endorsing Mark Tobey before deciding he was too gay (Greenberg compared him to Emily Dickinson) and therefore Jackson Pollack was better.
Creationism at least has the glory of being luridly hybridiized– doomed but defiantly absurd. Unlike the mainstream of Christian self-help, which owes its pedigree to ancient Greek “self-care” philosophy, according to Foucault.
And re: Greenberg– talk about your homosociality. For someone who hates pulp culture, it is interesting that his aesthetic hero-ideal is the Hulk.
Oh, I never meant to suggest the new creationism was subversive. It’s just a good short term rhetorical maneuver. That said, over the long term it probably strengthens the appropriated ideology by appropriating it.
I agree on the rhetorical maneuver.
Bert, Reed also argues that some of Pollack’s hyper-masculinized (self-)destructive behavior may have been linked to widespread nervousness among artists about the associations of art and homosexuality. He actually has a quote form one of Pollack’s friends after his death saying that Pollack was always afraid of being seen as gay because of the art scene. He also argues that abstraction was a way of moving away from figurative work which could have dangerous homoerotic connotations, and points to some evidence that Pollack felt constrained there as well (a couple of notes where he sounds nostalgic for figurative work…) There’s apparently been some murmuring about Pollack’s possible homosexuality…though can’t find anything definite online.
Reed’s really good at tracing the homophobia in a lot of the anti-Pop-art backlash too.