JMood...
JMood comments:
"......Flotsam: With regards to your idea about a giant digital library of pictures, I think it is a great idea and so did Bill Gates about two years ago. I can't remember what he called it, but he set out to buy the digital rights to a lot of famous pictures, scenes, paintings, etc. This doesn't mean we can't make it wave enabled and make $ from it."
Good luck to all, and to WAVX.
JMood
Hi JMood..
Gates beat us to it.. I think he's selling satellite photos of us naked in our backyards right about now. It's a rather popular site on MSN. Each photo costs about $7.50 I believe...
Marty
PS.. Philosophy Major are we?
Then do me a favor please..
This is my take on postmodernism.
Give me your opinion in private.
The rest of you need not bother to read the following.
Sincerely,
Marty
Eating Derrida for Breakfast...
Postmodernism is where you find it... and the French are the wags to whom we must look. Specifically to Michael Foucault with his 'archaeology of knowledge' and Jacques Derrida's 'deconstruction.' But, you may not want to read these gentlemen's works. Their writing may seem to border on obliquity. They took license to forget and abandon basic sentence structure and stylistic clarity. What's up with that? Academia's publish or perish pressures? Postmodernism stresses the relativity, instability and indeterminacy of meaning; it abandons all attempts to grasp totalities or constants that would construct Grand Theory.
Perhaps the easiest entry into this body of ideas (and prejudices) is to understand it as a negation - particularly as the negation of themes that have reigned in liberal intellectual life of the West since the Enlightenment. If we accept the notion that there is a generalized intellectual "project" of the Enlightenment, one that is intent upon building a sound body of knowledge about the world the human race confronts, then postmodernism defines itself, in large measure, as the antithetical doctrine: that such a project is: inherently futile, self-deceptive, and worst of all, oppressive. Contrasted to the Enlightenment ideal of a unified epistemology that discovers the foundational truths of physical and biological phenomena and unites them with an accurate understanding of humanity in its psychological, social, political, and aesthetic aspects, postmodern skepticism rejects the possibility of enduring universal knowledge in any area. It holds that all knowledge is local, or "situated," the product of interaction of a social class, rigidly circumscribed by its interests and prejudices, with the historical conditions of its existence. There is no knowledge, then; there are merely stories, "narratives," devised to satisfy the human need to make some sense of the world. In so doing, they track in unacknowledged ways the interests, prejudices, and conceits of their devisers. On this view, all knowledge projects are, like war, politics by other means.
It is fascinating that postmodernism, a point of view that must flirt continuously with nihilism, has become so conspicuously identified with radical scholarship and campus political activism on behalf of left-wing causes. As much as anything can be, postmodemism is the unifying doctrine of the academic left, having largely supplanted Marxism, except to the extent that the latter has been able to cover itself in postmodern dress. In a new and highly politicized area such as women's studies, for instance, virtually every scholar and student pays tribute to the supposed depth of postmodernist insight and the richness of postmodernist methodology. The realm of cultural studies, the virtual center of current left-wing theorizing, is to all intents the institutional embodiment of postmodernism. This is not to say that all feminists or all left academic cultural critics are committed to the most caustic forms of post- modern skepticism. Some such scholars are at pains to make clear their doubts and reservations. Nevertheless, and however reluctantly, they almost inevitably find themselves aping the language and style of postmodernist prototypes, and drawing upon the manifestos of noted postmodernist thinkers, to lend authority to their own musings.
Again, as I began, when all is said and done with the postmodern critique the world as given now appears rather more oblique. It isn't such a bad thing to find your mind a double bind of endless smoke and mirrors. Such that everything taken to its limits reveals our limits and leaves us in a state of aporia. Still, one must eat. And a "Free Will" would seem to work best when it feels compelled to avoid harms way - survival - and have the faculties of mind behind the Will to do the work that wires thought to say, "Hey! Maybe this isn't such a good idea." Just remember, many a philosopher of mind forgot that his liver was smarter than him too.
Here's to your health,
Marty |
