cheese it, the cops!

against humanity

i realize that charles taylor is sort of a relativist, sort of a post-modernist, sort of a 'we-are-the-stories-we-tell' linguistic constructivuist, and (this is getting bad, i know), sort of a hegelian. still i wouldn't necessarily regard these as war crimes, though possibly the designation 'crimes against humanity' makes sense.

one big glowing thingummy

watcha readin, crispy? (yo sorry for no watchareadins; i've been too busy reading, writing etc)

i've been sampling parfit's on what matters and dworkin's justice for hedgehogs. i think that the parfit is quite the little slog, and that's only volume one. 'best work in ethics since sidgwick,' said the times literary supplement (i think phillip petit was the reviewer). parfit sent out the manuscript to 250 philosophers (supposedly) and responded with revisions. perhaps that shows: it's bristling with replies to objections from offstage. the dworkin is written more engagingly, but dworkin's always half-lawyer, and this can't have the philosophical dimensions of parfit. on the other hand, dworkin is remarkably sharp: a good thinker.

at any rate, both these books, putting the thing at its most general, bring all human values together in one big glowing thingummy. parfit's argument is that all the major western moral theories (utilitarianism, kantianism, contractualism, and so on) are - despite what their proponents thought - basically compatible. and dworkin seeks to suggest the reconciliation of aesthetic and political values along with those. that's more like neo-platonism than postmodernism! we might not want to go quite so far in the opposite direction, and i'll just signal that the situation is a lot more fragmented and equivocal than they want to make it: we're still just muddling through.

popomo me baby.

let the post-post-modern era be here now. this is from a review by ingrid wassenaar of helene cixous' memoir hemlock, from the times literary supplement (it doesn't seem to be up on their site; it's from the september 9 issue).

One day, her mother misplaces a precious letter, and in her agitation becomes temporarily unable to read the word for whale (baleine). There follows an extended improvisation on the theme of being at sea. Cixous says that she would like to write about her mother's use of language: "This will be difficult, somewhere between onomatopoeia and epic, maybe we'll call it happ...showing the surprise the pounce of the happnimal upon life, or the sudden dive through the paws of death. Happ! there she goes! That sudden brutal movement of a pounce, that one also finds in the Germanic languages."

Happ, Cixous's comic neologism, goes straight to the heart of one of the tensions in European thought between the bodily and the spiritual. It recalls the sound of animals wolfing other animals, and has echoes in many European languages. Part of Ciixous's radicalism lies precisely in how she fossicks among the Indo-European roots of words that have acquired sedimented readings. Happ sums up in a word that observing her frail mother is not so different from stalking her.

please, please stop.

 

sweet home popomo

i was talking to a colleague yesterday about the 'theory' course we require of our art history majors. five years ago, when i started teaching in the art department at dickinson, she and i both knew that theory was essential: that you just couldn't send someone to a high-powered graduate program without it: that art history was merging with art theory. now she kind of shrugged and wasn't sure it was so necessary. people now are back in archives, back teasing out the tiniest details, worrying about attribution, reading all the contemporaneous documents, etc.

i bet that it's kind of like that in art schools too (i used to teach all the theory/philosophy at maryland institute college of art). in 2000, everyone understood that you could be a web designer without reading barthes or baudrillard, but also that if we were actually going to produce any downtown art stars, we'd better get them on barthes asap. now i bet they're a bit back to hand skills and stuff.

another sign of the post-postmodern era.