Post Reality
Sep. 7th, 2003 10:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
richardf8I've been mulling over a post in rain_luong's journal, that struck closer to home for me than I suspected its like still could:
"I wonder if I am in the wrong field. Or the wrong place. Of course, I always second-guess anything I happen to be doing at the time. It's just, having had to argue with a prof who apparently believes 2+2=4 only because humans arbitrarily invented the idea (and a friend who thinks the same, although we were both sort of drunk), and had to listen repeatedly to words like "paradigm," "post-positivist," and "semiotic" being spoken seriously by very somber people, I kind of think I will get through grad school only by focusing and not taking anything all that seriously."
First, my heart goes out to rain, I've been there, done that, and got the rag to hang on my wall.
One of the major shortcomings of contemporary philosophy, which is driving both literary criticism and, apparently, communications theory, is that it dismisses reality as irrelevant, or worse yet, an invention. The way this is achieved is by granting primacy to the signifier while dismissing the signified out of hand. Or put another way "Image is Reality." This trend has completely and utterly destroyed American culture. It has robbed us of the ability to see that there is no sense in phrases like "Black is the new White," or "War is the new Peace." Indeed, it has turned reality into something so thoroughly malleable that it ceased to matter.
This leads to a morally bankrupt society. Now what do I mean by morally bankrupt? I mean a society so distanced from reality that it is incapable of making choices with reference to reality. Morality is not, as some would have us believe, adherence to an established set of norms. Morality is the ability to make ones choices based on an understanding of real harms and real goods. When the relationship between signifier and signified shatters, two things occur:
1) The emperor has no clothes.
2) The clothes have no emperor.
In this case the emperor represents reality, and the clothing represents language. The purpose of language is to couch reality in comprehensible terms, just as it is the purpose of clothing to let us know that the emperor is, in fact the emperor. But these days we worship the empty robes. This serves people who try to sell us things and ideas very well. But when we look for value, we are at a loss.
Deconstructing the tools we use to represent reality can be a useful exercise, but it is not an end in itself. The task that follows deconstruction is reconstruction. And I have yet to see anyone who is interested in taking up that particular yoke. After all deconstruction is the simple task of knocking something down. It's fun, its easy, and we can then point and laugh about how weak the structure was. But until we build a new structure, we are homeless.
And that is where we are right now. We have a president who became president by deconstructing the electoral process and dismissing the reality of the popular vote, who calls tyranny patriotism, and who happily destroys other nations and runs away when someone says "fix that." And what we call "Reality" these days is a genre of TV Programs based on sick power fantasies of superficial competition. Our obsession with signifiers is a type of idolatry. And when signifiers are all we pay attention to, fascism finds fertile ground.
As a final note to rain, who does not watch my journal, and is therefore probably going to find this post in his inbox, you are in the right field. You are in the field where a David Craig Simpson is most necessary. Grad school is not something to enjoy. It is a rite of passage, a hazing ritual, and vocational training all rolled up in one. Do not assume you are there to learn anything. You are there to survive long enough to pick up the qualifications to join the profession. If you should happen to learn anything along the way, that is an unintended consequence. But once you are through it, you have the capacity to put your own theories out there, to contribute to the field. And what the field needs, more than anything else, is scholarship that is willing to reassert the link between signifier and signified, to heal the disconnects, to demonstrate, by counting on your fingers, that 2+2=4, and that to argue otherwise is to cripple our intellectual faculties by denying them the tools with which to describe reality.
"I wonder if I am in the wrong field. Or the wrong place. Of course, I always second-guess anything I happen to be doing at the time. It's just, having had to argue with a prof who apparently believes 2+2=4 only because humans arbitrarily invented the idea (and a friend who thinks the same, although we were both sort of drunk), and had to listen repeatedly to words like "paradigm," "post-positivist," and "semiotic" being spoken seriously by very somber people, I kind of think I will get through grad school only by focusing and not taking anything all that seriously."
First, my heart goes out to rain, I've been there, done that, and got the rag to hang on my wall.
One of the major shortcomings of contemporary philosophy, which is driving both literary criticism and, apparently, communications theory, is that it dismisses reality as irrelevant, or worse yet, an invention. The way this is achieved is by granting primacy to the signifier while dismissing the signified out of hand. Or put another way "Image is Reality." This trend has completely and utterly destroyed American culture. It has robbed us of the ability to see that there is no sense in phrases like "Black is the new White," or "War is the new Peace." Indeed, it has turned reality into something so thoroughly malleable that it ceased to matter.
This leads to a morally bankrupt society. Now what do I mean by morally bankrupt? I mean a society so distanced from reality that it is incapable of making choices with reference to reality. Morality is not, as some would have us believe, adherence to an established set of norms. Morality is the ability to make ones choices based on an understanding of real harms and real goods. When the relationship between signifier and signified shatters, two things occur:
1) The emperor has no clothes.
2) The clothes have no emperor.
In this case the emperor represents reality, and the clothing represents language. The purpose of language is to couch reality in comprehensible terms, just as it is the purpose of clothing to let us know that the emperor is, in fact the emperor. But these days we worship the empty robes. This serves people who try to sell us things and ideas very well. But when we look for value, we are at a loss.
Deconstructing the tools we use to represent reality can be a useful exercise, but it is not an end in itself. The task that follows deconstruction is reconstruction. And I have yet to see anyone who is interested in taking up that particular yoke. After all deconstruction is the simple task of knocking something down. It's fun, its easy, and we can then point and laugh about how weak the structure was. But until we build a new structure, we are homeless.
And that is where we are right now. We have a president who became president by deconstructing the electoral process and dismissing the reality of the popular vote, who calls tyranny patriotism, and who happily destroys other nations and runs away when someone says "fix that." And what we call "Reality" these days is a genre of TV Programs based on sick power fantasies of superficial competition. Our obsession with signifiers is a type of idolatry. And when signifiers are all we pay attention to, fascism finds fertile ground.
As a final note to rain, who does not watch my journal, and is therefore probably going to find this post in his inbox, you are in the right field. You are in the field where a David Craig Simpson is most necessary. Grad school is not something to enjoy. It is a rite of passage, a hazing ritual, and vocational training all rolled up in one. Do not assume you are there to learn anything. You are there to survive long enough to pick up the qualifications to join the profession. If you should happen to learn anything along the way, that is an unintended consequence. But once you are through it, you have the capacity to put your own theories out there, to contribute to the field. And what the field needs, more than anything else, is scholarship that is willing to reassert the link between signifier and signified, to heal the disconnects, to demonstrate, by counting on your fingers, that 2+2=4, and that to argue otherwise is to cripple our intellectual faculties by denying them the tools with which to describe reality.
