New Sophists' Almanac

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I'm convinced there's something deep and slightly disturbing in today's Get Fuzzy....

Gord,

Here I am, still culling the blog for unanswered questions from which to make new posts. One in particular needs attention. At Reconciliation you ask,

I'll have more to say about this later, but I am curious to see what kind of room for reconciliation you see between these two movements? I get from your sense that science is a more reliable starting point, a better neutral ground, and a more sensible side to take, and sometimes, believe me, I would express this opinion too. But you also seem profoundly more realist than me, likelier to simply accept the state of affairs being that the two are separated and it's unlikely any great unification is going to happen any time soon. So then, what kind of rehabilitation or improvement do you see as possible? And what are the likely results of that?

Questions like these are the ones that make me look at the books in the library catalog, on my therapist's^* shelves, and even the unread ones on my own shelves, and despair of ever finding the time and will to read sufficiently even to approach the subject.

But that hasn't stopped me so far, so why balk now? As I see it, two big things separate (good) science from theory—literary or social or critical or postmodern—as understood in the liberal arts.

1. Repeatable experiments
2. Mathematical and logical languages for distilling observations to succinct laws concerning the behavior of definable (even if only statistically) objects

This is not the "fault" of postmodernism or of the various liberal arts fields: they are dealing with concepts like human motivation, literary meaning, social structures, and so on, objects that science has not yet to my knowledge been able to reduce to well-defined and unambiguous objects of study. Sociology, anthropology, psychology, neurology, and other -ologies are working on these problems; but they are sufficiently intractable, and sufficiently vulnerable to the effects of cultural and emotional bias, that their theories and postmodern theories are destined to overlap and come in to conflict.

But if this is the case, and if one also assumes that both postmodernism and science have something worthwhile to offer, then the conflict that arises from their overlapping fields of study ought to be a constructive one, right? It seems to me that PoMo and literary theory movements are obliged to amass large amounts of correlations in the hope that patterns of causation will emerge. But once you get a theory of causation—for instance, showing how and why writers in one era influenced the writers and culture and mindset of another—one's ability to prove it is about on a par with trying to prove a difficult court case. You can't run tests or experiments, any concepts of human or social nature you invoke to connects facts A and B will be arguable, and so on; so mostly you're left trying to argue why your theory is more plausible than another. This happens in science, too, but it seems that once a topic is raised, the physical sciences at least tend to rush with ever-increasing speed towards the kernel of an issue until it is very well defined, mathematically modeled, and so on. But for the liberal arts the crux of an issue tends to end up being some facet of human nature itself—hard to get a bead on without succumbing to an ideology. Which then feeds the next round of critical and literary theory.

To borrow a metaphor from astrophysics: there seems to be an event horizon around human phenomena beyond which liberal arts can't go without getting sucked into a black hole of impenetrable theory. We see this in existentialism and postmodernism when the concept of human nature is written off as a non-starter. Existence precedes essence, but that essence only emerges as a sum of one's actions; discourse trumps agency to the point of determining it. From a scientific perspective it's as if the existentialists and postmodernists decided that the thing which can't be observed using their preferred methods of phenomenology and textual analysis must not exist except as a footnote or a shrug of the shoulders. And it might be true that the concepts of self and agency that we acquire from our culture are myths and no more. Does that mean we're utterly free or utterly passive beings, however, or does it just mean that we don't yet understand ourselves?

Is there a place for the scientific method in such a context? I think the answer is yes and no. Yes, because even literary theory has to respect rules of evidence, deduction, and inference if it wants to be plausible, and it may very well point to a field of ideas subject to a more scientific treatment. Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained seems a fairly good example of this. His concept of inference systems offers a way to start connecting discourse to biology (I say this as a person who's only read 2/3 of the book, mind you). If the behavior of these posited systems can actually be measured and delimited by statistical means, double-blind studies, and so on, as he seems to be suggesting, then we can start building a model of the thing that processes the discourses and memes we're obliged as members of society to absorb.

No, because some of the subjects which PoMo and other kinds of theory address may never be measurable by purely analytic methods. Issues involving values and pure subjectivities (if these aren't also myths) and goals for the individual, society, & species may always require a degree of creative speculation that science isn't equipped to provide except to assist in the making of predictions. But I'm saying "may" a lot because I really have no idea—the answer will depend on how big an unobservable "black hole" exists between theory and neurology, I think. If any.

What postmodernism can offer science is a both more and less straightforward. The culture in which science is done and from which goals and methods are chosen will always beg analysis so that we can better know if we're doing what we're doing for the right reasons or even for the reasons we happen to think are motivating us at the time. Assumptions that go into the fashioning and execution of studies of human beings will always need to be questioned and understood.

But how well postmodernism can do this will depend on what kind of "-ism" postmodernism represents. It is a set of methods to be employed? Is it simply a freedom from certain classical and modernist assumptions that infused the ideas that preceded it? Is it a form of entrenched institutional conservatism (albeit a quasi-neo-Marxist multicultural one) whose chief purpose is to give tenured professors job security? I'm pretty sure that when most people hear the word "postmodern" the last is the thing that leaps to mind. I suspect that if postmodernist theorists want to contribute to science, then they are going to have to approach science with combination of ambition and humility that characterizes a young physicist or chemist: not just a desire to explain and succeed, but also a willingness to brutally abandon any theory that doesn't work, and a willingness to formulate theories as defeasible expressions, statements that are admissible to some kind of proof. Or failing proof (in questions of values, say) then at least analysis in terms that can be defined and understood and shown to be relevant to scientists' work. It will have to pass a "so what" test. Scientists and lay persons must formulate their so what tests in a fair and definable way in turn, however.

-----
^* Is mentioning one's therapist in a blog a sure sign of ghastly self-absorption? Even if it is...I think my therapist is a great guy: an ex-philosophy grad student (way into Heidegger) who decided that academia wasn't for him and switched to psychology on the theory that he would learn more and do more good working in the "real world." Grad students the world over who long for a sympathetic thesis adviser should weep in envy.

Gord,

Here I am, still culling the blog for unanswered questions from which to make new posts. One in particular needs attention. At Reconciliation you ask,

I'll have more to say about this later, but I am curious to see what kind of room for reconciliation you see between these two movements? I get from your sense that science is a more reliable starting point, a better neutral ground, and a more sensible side to take, and sometimes, believe me, I would express this opinion too. But you also seem profoundly more realist than me, likelier to simply accept the state of affairs being that the two are separated and it's unlikely any great unification is going to happen any time soon. So then, what kind of rehabilitation or improvement do you see as possible? And what are the likely results of that?

Questions like these are the ones that make me look at the books in the library catalog, on my therapist's^* shelves, and even the unread ones on my own shelves, and despair of ever finding the time and will to read sufficiently even to approach the subject.

But that hasn't stopped me so far, so why balk now? As I see it, two big things separate (good) science from theory—literary or social or critical or postmodern—as understood in the liberal arts.

1. Repeatable experiments
2. Mathematical and logical languages for distilling observations to succinct laws concerning the behavior of definable (even if only statistically) objects

This is not the "fault" of postmodernism or of the various liberal arts fields: they are dealing with concepts like human motivation, literary meaning, social structures, and so on, objects that science has not yet to my knowledge been able to reduce to well-defined and unambiguous objects of study. Sociology, anthropology, psychology, neurology, and other -ologies are working on these problems; but they are sufficiently intractable, and sufficiently vulnerable to the effects of cultural and emotional bias, that their theories and postmodern theories are destined to overlap and come in to conflict.

But if this is the case, and if one also assumes that both postmodernism and science have something worthwhile to offer, then the conflict that arises from their overlapping fields of study ought to be a constructive one, right? It seems to me that PoMo and literary theory movements are obliged to amass large amounts of correlations in the hope that patterns of causation will emerge. But once you get a theory of causation—for instance, showing how and why writers in one era influenced the writers and culture and mindset of another—one's ability to prove it is about on a par with trying to prove a difficult court case. You can't run tests or experiments, any concepts of human or social nature you invoke to connects facts A and B will be arguable, and so on; so mostly you're left trying to argue why your theory is more plausible than another. This happens in science, too, but it seems that once a topic is raised, the physical sciences at least tend to rush with ever-increasing speed towards the kernel of an issue until it is very well defined, mathematically modeled, and so on. But for the liberal arts the crux of an issue tends to end up being some facet of human nature itself—hard to get a bead on without succumbing to an ideology. Which then feeds the next round of critical and literary theory.

To borrow a metaphor from astrophysics: there seems to be an event horizon around human phenomena beyond which liberal arts can't go without getting sucked into a black hole of impenetrable theory. We see this in existentialism and postmodernism when the concept of human nature is written off as a non-starter. Existence precedes essence, but that essence only emerges as a sum of one's actions; discourse trumps agency to the point of determining it. From a scientific perspective it's as if the existentialists and postmodernists decided that the thing which can't be observed using their preferred methods of phenomenology and textual analysis must not exist except as a footnote or a shrug of the shoulders. And it might be true that the concepts of self and agency that we acquire from our culture are myths and no more. Does that mean we're utterly free or utterly passive beings, however, or does it just mean that we don't yet understand ourselves?

Is there a place for the scientific method in such a context? I think the answer is yes and no. Yes, because even literary theory has to respect rules of evidence, deduction, and inference if it wants to be plausible, and it may very well point to a field of ideas subject to a more scientific treatment. Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained seems a fairly good example of this. His concept of inference systems offers a way to start connecting discourse to biology (I say this as a person who's only read 2/3 of the book, mind you). If the behavior of these posited systems can actually be measured and delimited by statistical means, double-blind studies, and so on, as he seems to be suggesting, then we can start building a model of the thing that processes the discourses and memes we're obliged as members of society to absorb.

No, because some of the subjects which PoMo and other kinds of theory address may never be measurable by purely analytic methods. Issues involving values and pure subjectivities (if these aren't also myths) and goals for the individual, society, & species may always require a degree of creative speculation that science isn't equipped to provide except to assist in the making of predictions. But I'm saying "may" a lot because I really have no idea—the answer will depend on how big an unobservable "black hole" exists between theory and neurology, I think. If any.

What postmodernism can offer science is a both more and less straightforward. The culture in which science is done and from which goals and methods are chosen will always beg analysis so that we can better know if we're doing what we're doing for the right reasons or even for the reasons we happen to think are motivating us at the time. Assumptions that go into the fashioning and execution of studies of human beings will always need to be questioned and understood.

But how well postmodernism can do this will depend on what kind of "-ism" postmodernism represents. It is a set of methods to be employed? Is it simply a freedom from certain classical and modernist assumptions that infused the ideas that preceded it? Is it a form of entrenched institutional conservatism (albeit a quasi-neo-Marxist multicultural one) whose chief purpose is to give tenured professors job security? I'm pretty sure that when most people hear the word "postmodern" the last is the thing that leaps to mind. I suspect that if postmodernist theorists want to contribute to science, then they are going to have to approach science with combination of ambition and humility that characterizes a young physicist or chemist: not just a desire to explain and succeed, but also a willingness to brutally abandon any theory that doesn't work, and a willingness to formulate theories as defeasible expressions, statements that are admissible to some kind of proof. Or failing proof (in questions of values, say) then at least analysis in terms that can be defined and understood and shown to be relevant to scientists' work. It will have to pass a "so what" test. Scientists and lay persons must formulate their so what tests in a fair and definable way in turn, however.

-----
^* Is mentioning one's therapist in a blog a sure sign of ghastly self-absorption? Even if it is...I think my therapist is a great guy: an ex-philosophy grad student (way into Heidegger) who decided that academia wasn't for him and switched to psychology on the theory that he would learn more and do more good working in the "real world." Grad students the world over who long for a sympathetic thesis adviser should weep in envy.

Remember the 2blowhards discussion of Postmodernism for Beginners? Curiosity drove me to see if the discussion had continued in the comments since the last time I had looked. It has, and I particularly like a comment left by one Justin Blank.

Dear Gord,

Something you said a while ago...

We were chatting earlier about whether there is or ought to be some etiquette restricting religious people from telling nonreligious people that they prayed for them. For the atheist, being prayed for can come across as profoundly presumptuous, or flattering, or just plain annoying. For the religious, it can be an act of compassion or (as I am sure C.S. Lewis would be quick to remind us) a prideful act as well, especially when announced to the object of one's prayers.

...has been tickling a lobe of my brain. I finally figured out why.

From Cyrano de Bergerac, Act Five, by Edmond Rostand (Brian Hooker, trans.):

Cyrano.  Why, now I think of it, that is so—
You, bursting with holiness,
and yet you never preach! Astonishing
I call it...

Ah, now I'll astonish you—
I'm going to let you—
—let you pray for me
To-night, at vespers!

Roxanne.  Aha!

Cyrano.  Look at her—
Absolutely struck dumb!

Sister Marthe (Gently).  I did not wait
For you to say I might.

Is the skeptic and freethinker cowed at the last by his impending death, or is he simply seizing a last opportunity to make a gallant, gracious, and theatrical gesture? I fell in love with Jose Ferrer's 1950 movie adaptation of the play and have an English edition of one of de Bergerac's books that I've never managed to finish. The literary persona that Nietzsche creates for himself often reminds me of Rostand's Cyrano.

Gord!

I'm back from the convention and the subsequent week (including the weekend) of frenzied preparation to release the product upgrade we promised everyone at convention. Now I can take time to blog. I just read about your flu...my sympathies! What an unpleasant way to spend one's time.

I love the bit about the stone meditation toilet. In the well-plumbed western world, we take it for granted that the toilet-seat is an excellent place to ponder life's eternal verities. But there are lots of places in the world where sitting down comfortably is not the norm for doing one's business, so I can imagine that toilet-meditation would seem surprising in such a context. Especially if the construction standards aren't up to code (i.e., if you live in a grass house, don't stone thrones). I know that lots of places in Japan, especially rural areas, still use the "hole in the floor" method of plumbing. Good for practicing your Sumo stance; not so good for clearing the mind. (I have been told, however, that wearing heels actually makes this task a little easier.)

I wonder if Buddhist monks have ever been frustrated by the sense that they'd be able to achieve enlightenment if only they could sit a little longer, a little longer...damn! Gotta go to the bathroom. Maybe next time.

Anyway, I have a lot of catching up to do, so let's get to it...

  Postmodernist Moral Judgments

I agree that we can't dismiss a philosophy or religion simply because its human proponents fail to live up to its ideals. The tendency to pull moral judgments out of our backsides is certainly a common human trait, and the postmodernist is no more to be faulted for it than the preacher or politician. However I think there's a difference between a postmodernist riding a moralistic high-horse and religious leader who does so. It seems to me that in the latter case the religious leader usually doing something consistent with his basic worldview, no matter whether I agree with him or not. The worldview itself may be riddled with contradictions, the leader may be a base hypocrite, but at least it follows from the idea of "God as universal legislator of values" that one can make absolute moral assertions.

The postmodernist needs to be a little more careful, I think. He needs to predicate his judgments explicitly on the moral premises he intends to follow. It's not enough to say something like, "Bush is wrong to invade Iraq because it's a neocolonialist act." Instead, the postmodernist needs to say something like, "If your goals are the preservation of human life, the fostering of international peace, etc., then such and such actions in Iraq are contrary to these goals in principle and in fact for these specific reasons." If he doesn't, then he's in the position of saying, "There are no universal moral values, but by they way...if you do X you're wrong." If you're going to criticize, you have to be able to explain why you're right and the other guy is wrong; but for the postmodernist as postmodernist there is no "why" except the influence of some discourse or text which is neither good nor bad in itself, right? The preacher, by contrast, is in the position of saying, "I believe in universal moral values, and here's one of 'em." He may not be very credible either, but at least his conclusion doesn't contradict on its face the premise of his profession.

Also, if we're going to talk about a postmodernist "school," then is it valid to say that the "school" is characterized by a tendency to make sweeping moral pronouncements that seem not to follow from the movements' premises? Or is that simply political correctness at work in academia, and we shouldn't hold postmodernism at fault for it? Or should we, but only in a vague and not very useful sense? Again, the so-what problem rears its head: if you're going to criticize an action or a belief, one should be prepared to offer an alternative. If you want nonacademics to take you seriously, anyway.

Which is not to say one should refrain from deconstructing or analyzing beliefs and actions; only, that one should realize that moral criticism only has content in the context of some set of beliefs or goals. One can do the former without having any particular moral scheme or goal in mind, but offering such analysis as the equivalent of meaningful ethical criticism is rather useless, it seems to me. Such analysis might be a source of superb cultural insight, but by its very nature it would be the kind of insight that could be used towards diverse ends

I'm thinking I should stop worrying about postmodernism as a school and instead think about this writer and that idea. Unless I want to reform the academy, that is.

  Nietzsche

Thanks for posting that bit about Nietzsche's sister. I knew the story, but the suggestion in the article that Nietzsche might have been autistic would seem to explain an awful lot about his temperament. For me Nietzsche's a fascinating combination of intellectual beacon in the night and psychological train wreck; something from which the eyes just can't seem to disengage. What's especially fascinating is that he knows he is something of a train wreck; he knows that his own philosophy is as influenced by personal factors as the ideologies he seeks to discredit; and it seems to me that his version of the "will to truth" is an effort to make his struggle transparent without falsely simplifying it. That's why there's Zarathustra always prowling around the margins of his other books. I don't read Nietzsche as a prescriptive philosopher so much as an object of study: here's a guy who, in a sense, heard the word "evolution" and immediately leapt to the broadest implications of the concept for the human species, at a time when everyone else was trying to minimize the shock introduced by the concept.

  Secret Agency, Man

'Way down yonder you asked, "Does at least my assertion make sense that there's not necessarily a value judgment against agency involved in the Foucauldian worldview?" To which I am happy to answer, Yes. Explaining how things work doesn't necessarily constitute a value judgment, nor does deconstructing the idiosyncratic myths of agency that various cultures hold dear.

But it seems to me that if we're going to look at agency in terms of "...a system that is delimited by a huge and distributed power process that is comprised of competing, cooperating, clashing, and fusing discourses," then you have to admit the study of what goes on inside heads and not just between them. If it's all in the discourse, then how did human society ever get from one discourse to another? To explain how things change without accounting for individual agency is to say that new ideas appear out of nowhere, I suspect.

Mutations in genes are caused by known physical processes, cosmic rays and DNA transcription errors and so on, but what causes mutations in memes? Is it just the random degradation of information as it is passed from one person to another until a new and successful meme is accidentally born? Even if it is, what causes the degradation and why? Earwax? Individual will to power, interpreting and distorting everything received? But according to fixed rules, or is something less predictable going on?

Reading what you've written about postmodernism in general and Foucault in particular, I get the feeling that the big project afoot is something akin to Asimov's psychohistory, but based on literary theory rather than statistics. (Maybe statistics would come later, after the theory produces something for the statistics to be about.)

I really like your statement that,

I also think I could add a fourth [reason to be interested in postmodern analysis]: desire to be as self-reflexive as possible. One wishes to understand why one is fighting in the way one is, and how one's assumptions came into place; one wishes to avoid the kinds of unexamined assertions of truth and reality that one sees all over the place.

But of course this makes me think of Buddhist meditation. And thinking of Buddhism makes me think that Buddhism and postmodernism have similar problems when it comes to the question of human agency.

Buddhism posits karma, laws of cause and effect that govern human behavior and perception even down to the granularity of emotions and thoughts, but seems to have a hard time explaining how a person might choose to turn away from material things and devote himself to sitting. Postmodernism seems to suggest complex laws of cause and effect governing the way discourse shapes perception and belief which in turn shapes discourse. Individual agency is dissolved in a labyrinth of language and forces.

But then, if you meditate or do therapy, you discover that it's possible to learn to perceive forces and language at play in your consciousness that have been influencing your feelings and behavior without you quite realizing it; and after you perceive the forces you can act on them in some way. This suggests that the scope of one's agency is defined first by one's range of perceptions of outer and inward phenomena. Buddhism, postmodernism, cognitive science, and evolutionary biology all suggest, however, that what we take to be inward can be treated as "outward"—that is, as objects of study that are not me. Those thoughts and feelings that pass through my mind during meditation don't define me; they just adhere to an ego-concept that is a false form of self-identification. The issues I discover in therapy can be released. Postmodernism can help me understand where some of these ideas came from and why they seem "natural" when in fact they are anything but. Cognitive science and evolutionary biology can perhaps explain why some ideas and inferences and habits arise very quickly and easily while others are hard to grasp.

About all that's left for agency is that sense of decision-making in the moment of deciding, I guess. But is there anything wrong with that? What of the romantic idea of an authentic self, when there is no self as such? One focuses instead on authenticity, I suppose, the quality of always striving for the true perception which then (if we're lucky) will guide an "authentic" action.

Maybe. I'm getting sleepy and I'm rambling. Are there any particular questions you want me to answer that I've failed to get to in the last month? I suspect there are several from past posts that I'm overlooking...

Again, I'm glad you're feeling better. And I agree with you and Adam.

Ciao,

Marvin

Marvin!

The genius of spent fever washed over my mind... I finally well-and-truly awoke this morning with the worst of my fever behind me (though when I eat anything even a little spicy, as I've just discovered, I reactly very strongly), and something had come into my mind.

You stated in an earlier post that you think

people do believe in magic bathrooms, but for such a belief to take off it needs a more well-established religious background tom give it oomph. Like the water of Lourdes or the healing properties of kissing the image of Jesus that appeared in a tortilla. A bathroom that's magic for no reason at all is a bad meme. A bathroom that's magic because the Pope once shat there is, on the other hand, a perfectly acceptable meme for many, I think.

I've never heard of an example of the latter, but the former makes sense... though, it usually requires the sacralization of the site by an agent, does it not?

I remembered an example I heard about in Korea. There is a temple one of my students told me about, where there is a stone toilet. People go to this temple to sit in a big room upon the toilet and meditate. It is a meditation toilet. Unlike some temples I've heard of, which were on ground sanctified by one or another sacred being (such as the one near which I lived, Mireuk Mountain Temple, which was blessed by the Mireuksamjong: I know the sam means 3, and that it means there were three beings, but I don't know if they were three angels (bodhisattvas, gods) or three buddhas); this place seems to be the place for toilet meditation because toilet meditation is a good idea, and they built it there. (At least, I can't seem to find anything indicating any other reason.)

Good afternoon,

I'll tell you what those terms meant, and then explain what I found interesting in my impromptu experiment.

aegae - You assume a lot, yes. It's actually just the formal address used in a letter, just as we say (or, rather, write), "Dear Marvin" in English. It's the polite form, while there is a less polite form used in speech (hantae). It's also used to describe something being said or given to a person.

Kkaddugi - Mafioso was the correct guess. Policeman and politician may or may not be the same thing depending on where in Korea you live.

shibal saeki - While you didn't know what it meant, you know it gave offense. It means fucking baby, by the way. (I've also heard someone claim it means "fuck baby", which supposedly implies one's mom conceived one while inelegantly, perhaps wantonly, fucking).

joji - male genitalia (I corrected myself in my explanation, ever so long ago). Which in context makes more sense.

hyeongnim - "some kind of honorific" is correct. It means Elder Brother.

Moshiseumnida - this is a courtesy; it means "You are handsome!" There is no implied insult here.

bballi-bballi - is indeed an idiomatic phrase equivalent to "posthaste" or "lickety-split"

What I found interesting was how, in large measure, given the context, you did very well guessing the meanings of the words. It surprised me not just how well you did (for I think that the context was a great help) but also how very close you were in many cases to the actual meanings. You could tell that bballi-bballi was an idiom (many Korean idioms use doubles), and when you were wrong about joji it was because you were remembering part of my own explanation elsewhere, instead of guessing what was likelier from the context. (It's probably normal worldwide to insult a man abouthis penis size, but rarely would a man insult another man about his vagina size.)

Anyway, I'm too hepped up on fever right now to go further into it, but I have an idea about a quiz I'm going to create online to test linguistic inference, I think. We'll see. Maybe when the fever passes I'll think it was a silly idea.

---

PS Why fasting? I hadn't eaten in about 24 hours when I wrote that post. And later paid the price for letting my strength get down, it seems, when this flu hijacked my body.

This is probably old news to you, but I found it interesting: an article on Nietzsche and his sister.

I just spent most of the last 36 hours sleeping through a horrible fever/chills episode. My head is clearer but also hurts, and I can only move very slowly. Hmmm. I wish the church people across the road would transpose this song they're singing down a few steps... when people can't hit a note, they can't hit it. They consistently sing the note a half-step flat, and it's ugly! The whole neighborhood has to hear these damn sour notes every week. It's obnoxious. Not very loving to their neighbors, if you ask me.

Marvin,

Are you still at the convention? I am at my office right now. I've started swimming, and I've been having a few things going on that have kept me busy, but I don't want to get into them now. Anyway, I am ruminating your questions. One of them I'd answer this way...

We must be very careful to judge the philosophy on the grounds of its own consistency. We can't dismiss Christian morality on the grounds that Catholics used to use it to justify slavery or that the rigid pursuit of one reading's injunctions caused a lot of suffering in Europe (and perhaps worldwide). However, we can reject certain uses and readings of it.

I agree that the elements in the postmodernist school who take it upon themselves to make moral judgments have some serious questions to answer. I'm not totally convinced that one cannot fuse postmodernist investigation with a form of moral philosophy, and perhaps the provisionality (and lack of absolutism that it necessitates) would make for a more sophisticated and workable morality than reflects real human capacities. Still, I think when profs get on their postmodernist high-horse, they're only as bad as religious, scientistic, or other people who get onto the high horse and dictate truth about things beyond the range of their knowledge or understanding. It's just embarrassing.

But I think the postmodernists you're talking about are not worse or better than religious leaders pulling the truth out of their backsides, or others doing the same. It's a pretty human tendency.

I'm thinking about how much within the movement's philosophy itself is given to working against the formulation of this sort of postmodernism. This is something I shall have to chew on for a while. (I will say the question has come up a few times—in my mind anyway—in a discussion I have had off and on with my friend Myoung Jae, who's writing about the Death of the Author these days. How much Postmodernist academia may have severed itself from the world and from any ability it once had to affect or matter in that world seems to me to have tremendous significance for academia in general, especially given the alternative, which seems to me to be the scientific, and essentially (because funding-dependent) pro-business (and subservient to business) model of morality and priority.

I'll think about this for a while. More on the other post later!
Fondly,
Gord

Good morning,

It's the calm of Sunday morning in the exhibit hall, the calm that precedes the torpor of attendees dragging themselves in after a Saturday night of eating and drinking too much downtown. I'm going to try to respond to your experiment, Gord...

aegae - I'm going to guess that this is a kind of affectionate diminutive, like "little brother." Or it could be a more macho variant on the theme, something that drinking buddies or comrades might use to refer to each other. Akin to "dude," maybe. (Assuming a lot, ain't I? vbg)

Kkaddugi - Mafioso is my first guess; maybe politician or policeman

shibal saeki - I have no idea. There are so many possible ways of giving offense, and the context for this depends on the definition of the former.

joji - I think you've explained this one before to me: female genitalia

hyeongnim - Some kind of honorific that will seem flattering at first but which, in combination with ...

Moshiseumnida - a greeting of otherwise considerable courtesy, will turn out to be an insult. Hence ...

bballi-bballi - an idiomatic phrase equivalent to "posthaste" or "lickety-split"

On other topics, I hope I'm coming somewhere near making my point clearly with respect to postmodernism below. I want to draw a categorical distinction between deconstructing moral beliefs and making moral judgements. It seems to me that a lot of folks in the PoMo community do the former and, if the conclusion fits nicely into a pleasing presupposition about ethics or political correctness, automatically assume they've also achieved the latter. I think this is not the case. Once you reach the point of deconstructing morality as though it were just another idea-set, then you're intellectually somewhat obliged -- if you feel the need to be consistent (a case in point for this example) -- to make your moral judgements in a conditional form, i.e., "If you believe in X values and Y goals, than Z means are inappropriate because they clash with X and Y in certain ways."

Marvin

Hi Gord!

All is well, but the last week has been a very busy one. Preparing for the annual convention hosted by my employer, doing new product testing and writing user documentation, etc. I haven't had the mental energy to think deep thoughts. (Not that this stopped my from buying Jedi Academy, the latest Star Wars game devoted to achieving enlightenment via mass-murder, mind you...total lightsaber-whore that I am.) I am not offended, but in fact have been devoting many process cycles of my subconscious to the problems you presented in your last post.

I think one point of clarification on my part might be in order, however. I'm not poo-poo'ing postmodernism on the basis that it fails to provide a grounds for hope or ethics or agency along the model of an atomistic soul or whatever. As an enthusiatic fan of Nietzsche, I haven't much business criticizing postmodernism on those grounds. My so-whats are directed towards a particular facet of the postmodernist school—and perhaps it is only that aspect which one tends to see in the American media—that presents itself as qualified to deliver moral verdicts out of a discipline for which moral concepts of right and wrong have no special or universal priority.

Foucault may indeed say "grow your own," which I take to mean, "figure out your own moral stance." But today's academia is quite happy to use its PoMo lingo to assert its moral authority on a wide variety of topics. And of course postmodernists have every right to their opinions. But I'm not convinced that postmodernism as such provides grounds for assuming such moral authority. In other words, a reductionist view of how moral opinions originate and disperse through a society doesn't necessarily provide support for any particular moral point of view. It might provide the conceptual means for connecting a moral point of view to a situation and working towards a particular outcome, but that's not the same as defining a desirable outcome or ethically legitimate means.

So it makes sense to me to imagine a postmodern theory that would help Dr. King understand his desires, goals, and the context in which he must strive to meet them; but I have trouble imagining a PoMo theory that would be able to tell Dr. King whether or not he ought to proceed. But that doesn't stop PoMo academia from doing just that sort of thing.

Marvin

PS - I should note that I'm in an exhibit hall in Dallas, taking a break from my booth at the Apple kiosk, where they kindly provide iMacs for people to use for checking e-mail, news, and so on. I must go back to work soon, alas...

Marbinaegae,

Just checking that you weren't somehow unfortunate enough to piss off Cheong's cousin the Korean Kkaddugi. If you were, don't call him a shibal saeki. That would be a very bad idea. And don't talk about George Bush, he'll think you're implying he is less than gifted in terms of the size of his joji.

You may wish you call him "hyeongnim" and declare, "Moshiseumnida!" whenever you see him. While he is gazing in a mirror happily, you should get out of there, bballi-bballi!


***
This is not just a silly post, but also an off-the cuff experiment of sorts, a test of the idea that human inferential systems are as powerful as Boyer and Pinker imply. With the given context, what do you infer the italicized parts of the above post mean? (By the way, all of those phrases are in grammatically correct, but possibly badly-anglicized, Korean)

I have a second text I'd like to perform, but I won't do it now. I'll wait to see the results of this one first. I may even created a nice poll to test it. It could be interesting to get a wider sample of responses. Hmmm.

I also am writing just to make sure that the blog's still taking posts, and to make sure I've not tossed out something offensive on the blog in the mad frenzy of posting. I remember something about calling "dimwitted" some claim you didn't make, but I think you knew I didn't mean your question was dimwitted.

Hope all's well.
Gord

Marvin,

Nope, the problem with the first screenful thing was, as I later suspected, linked to bad code in the tag for the Invisible Pink Unicorn image. Fixed now and behaving well. And today I also finished a MAJOR renovation over at my site. Looks quite different. The technical stuff needs some changing, of course, but the look is much improved and it loads a lot more easily with the thumbnails I created for the scripted image slideshow and the new slideshow script itself (which also looks a lot nicer). Anyway...

Back to the discussion of Postmodernism... I reply to you, another: So what?

Wait, let me backtrack. It took me a bit of thinking, to no avail, to try and really understand why you felt that the Foucauldian understanding of the world is so problematic. But your recent post makes it clear: it's because for you the notion that all human action is bounded and delimited by discourse seems to suggest futility, meaninglessness.

I think that you're right, of course, in saying that understanding it as such is a big problem. If people use postmodernist notions of agency and the way agency is shaped to stifle active work to better society (however subjectively that "betterment" can be and is understood), it's a rotten thing.

But I see nothing implicit in understanding that our modes of thinking and acting (and reacting) are primarily shaped, delimited, and to a large degree even determined by our social situation. For example: in ancient Greece, would-be philosophes like you and I would be expected to have young boyfriends of a sort with whom we engaged in a very special relationship quite unlike modern gay relationships... and yet in our society, we're not. And I would suggest that if we'd been born in a society that sanctioned and expected us to have multiple wives, we would at the least probably desire it, and if it were affordable to us we'd probably have them. Similarly, if we were born into societies where younger males were made into men by rites of passage that to us seem brutal and horrifying, we'd probably be a hell of a lot more comfortable with the idea. Or, if we were Koreans, living with our parents for decades after the age of 20 wouldn't seem odd to us.

And yet, we inexorably, irresistably, accord with a great deal of the normative assumptions of our society. And the fact of the matter is that so much of what we think is neutrally right or wrong or is "just the way it is" is that way because of a number of complexly interacting idea-systems in conflict and cooperation and interaction. And that distributes power in specific ways.

I think there is a role for agency in Foucault's worldview, and that the key to it is implicit in the fact that he wrote all the texts that he did. What did he write? He wrote failing, crippled (in his own opinion, according to the introductory sections of The Archeology of Knowledge) analyses of this fabled "way things are". He thought about it a lot and tried to understand it and while acting within it (for certainly his own work is driven by the very Will to Truth that he discusses), he seeks to understand the system as best he can from within.

That's not to say I think he's the key, the way, the truth, and the light. I just think that he was well aware that all attempts to change the system are not things that are fully bound by agency... that the agencies that act upon the system are also, before they ever act, shaped by and acted upon by the system of discourses and the process of power.

What I am suggesting is that for Foucault, the normative and the cause-and-effect analyses by which you tell good power-processes and bad ones make no sense universally. People come up with them on their own, based on their experiences, and no matter what you demand of others, we're all living within these subjectivities that all contribute to a larger process. It's as power is what happens at the friction point where distributed discontinuous subjectivities meet.

Given that, I suppose Foucault would advise you not to ask him for his sense of what makes this or that segment of a given discourse good or bad; he might likely tell you the ideas good and bad are subjective, not as a way of dissuading you of thinking in these terms, but to remind you that asking him for such criteria is simply requesting his version of the discourse so that it may act upon you. He may tell you, "Go grow your own, young man."

I want to note I don't think your question is stupid, and I think Foucault might not think so either. But that it makes no sense given the larger governing forces of discourse that Foucault outlines is, as you say, to ask for something "outside the purview of the discipline."

I see now why you write the following:

And yet, you've said that you'd expect postmodernism as a school of thought to react to attempts to reform or improve the "situation" (by which I read the social status quo or some part thereof) by arguing that such attempts are likely to be "simply be a part of the same power process that created the situation in the first place." A foolish and naive waste of time, in other words.

And yet, I don't think refraining is what is called for. I think highly critical self-interrogation analyses of one's goals, motivations, and notions of good, bad, improvement, and what exactly the status quo is, are in order. But I don't think, except for the way that lazy tenured professors and their ilk use it, that this kind of conceited attitude is something implicit in postmodern theory. I do think there are other dangers inherent in postmodernist thought, such as the ones I mentioned elsewhere. But I don't think this is necessarily (or rightfully) natural to the thinking of this theoretical movement, the political economies of academia aside. (And that is a huge aside that I'm even considering might deserve a whole book someday.)

For what it's worth, I think Foucault would probably answer to an activist such as Dr. King that postmodernist thinking doesn't so much endanger his enterprise as an agent delimited and largely determined by the system he inhabits, but rather that being this kind of agent (as we all are) interestingly determines how one resists and changes the status quo, and that this being true, close scrutiny of one's goals, ideals, desires, and assumptions is warranted.

What I am suggesting is that there may not necessarily be a value judgment in saying that all action occurs within a system that is delimited by a huge and distributed power process that is comprised of competing, cooperating, clashing, and fusing discourses.

The grounds for looking at them are therefore not simply to discredit any and all action, but simply to understand how things change the way they do. Why do they change slowly so often? Why do notions form and take hold as they do? How do so many subjectivities give rise to a falsely objective-appearing general sense of the world in a given society? I don't know that there is any implicit objection in the postmodernist conception of how agency is acted upon by forces in the power process.

I think that of the reasons for interest that you list, curiosity is the best one. I also think I could add a fourth one: desire to be as self-reflexive as possible. One wishes to understand why one is fighting in the way one is, and how one's assumptions came into place; one wishes to avoid the kinds of unexamined assertions of truth and reality that one sees all over the place. And I think, when one looks at movements like the current "Anti-Globalization" movement, there is a lot need for this sort of thing.

The only thing I wish is that more postmodernists would apply the same critical processes on their own assumptions. There'd be a lot fewer dumbass professors in the world if they did. But, worldview-complacency is the plague of academia, and the very infection which Foucault's work seems to me designed to attack.

But I'm trying to tie this up before class starts and I have a feeling I'm talking out my bottom now. Does at least my assertion make sense that there's not necessarily a value judgment against agency involved in the Foucauldian worldview?

Gord!

This one's going to be kind of short, so I didn't think it deserved a full-blown "II." While I've been spending the weekend trying to get my computer to work (I think I finally have things going again, hence this post), I see you've been very busy writing and redecorating. Sweet! I too have run into the "first screenful" problem, but I think it might just be lag from Blogspot's database or something. Usually if I look away for a minute, then look back, the whole page mysteriously appears. Maybe it's just taking a moment to load?

I think I can afford to be brief with this one because you've done me the convenience of asking a very specific question with respect to number 2 of "Postmodern Prelude" below.

Not that the question of, "Why should I care?" is as addle-brained as my literary example above... it's not. But the idea of caring on grounds that something is a (normatively, or absolutely) good or bad process, well, perhaps it may well be. I'm not sure. Can you not find other grounds for caring about a particular power-process, which doesn't rely on an appeal to ostensible universals?

Now, as you my recall, my original question was in response to the following statement of yours in an earlier post:

I know however that postmodernism as a philosophical school would be profoundly skeptical with regards to anything presented (even implicitly, as I suggested Foucault might have been doing in his work), and would probably argue (with somewhat good historical support) that most attempts as improving a situation actually tend to simply be a part of the same power process that created the situation in the first place.

To which I replied, "So what? Provide me with criteria for distinguishing a good power process from a bad power process, both normatively and in terms of cause-and-effect, and the postmodernists might then actually be saying something."

In my opinion, this still isn't a stupid question at all, or an irrelevant one. Here's why.

As you've described it, "power process" is a concept designed to help us look at the forces that shape human society, history, beliefs...human everything, really...in an impersonal, reductionist sort of way. To ask whether a power process is good or bad is like asking if the quadratic formula is good or bad in a moral sense: the question is outside the purview of the discipline.

And yet, you've said that you'd expect postmodernism as a school of thought to react to attempts to reform or improve the "situation" (by which I read the social status quo or some part thereof) by arguing that such attempts are likely to be "simply be a part of the same power process that created the situation in the first place." A foolish and naive waste of time, in other words. The implication is that one should refrain from doing a given thing because as an action it must inevitably arise in some greater or lesser degree—probably greater—from the complex interweaving of forces that brought the unwelcome situation to be in the first place. Which raises a big question: whence the "ought?"

Our hypothetical postmodernist is issuing a value judgment. But based on what? Postmodernism doesn't yield fodder for value judgments, rather it yields fodder for descriptions about how those judgments by and large are made. The postmodernist objection amounts to nothing more than, "Your decisions can't help but be subject to the forces at play in the greater social milieu! Dr. King must inevitably rely on the same Bible that was used to justify slavery in the first place!" To which Dr. King will reply, "So what? If I can turn these forces and discourses to my advantage, why not use them? I'm not proud."

What are the grounds for the postmodernist caring about how and why Dr. King affects any particular power process, or vice versa? The postmodernist has issued an objection. On what grounds? Dr. King is relying on a set of ostensible universals to guide his thinking, true—one of which will be the utter falseness of the ostensible universals arrayed against him—and one can describe how he came to ascribe to these universals in such and such a way. But he has a reason for wanting what he wants. What reason has the postmodernist for issuing an objection to *his* reasons?

You ask, "Can you not find other grounds for caring about a particular power-process, which doesn't rely on an appeal to ostensible universals?" Offhand I can think of three reasons for caring about a power-process.

1. Self interest. The existing process doesn't give me what I want, so I'll try to change it.
2. Curiosity. My "will to power" manifests as a "will to truth" so strongly that I'm willing to philosophize with tweezers (Nietzsche philosophizes with a hammer; Foucault philosophizes with tweezers.) that I actually care to understand how broader power-processes work.
3. Ostensible universal values (which may or may not dovetail with a concept of self-interest, though they probably will). I'm convinced that the status quo forces people into certain circumstances in a way that is fundamentally wrong; because of X it is my duty to try to rectify the situation.

As far as I can tell, postmodernism provides no conceptual tools or principles that can serve to invalidate any of these modes of thought. At best it can argue that my ostensible universal is only the product of years of discourse that has evolved under the pressure of various power-processes, etc. Ok, say that it is.

So what?

As an analogy, take the surfer. The surfer is a happy, blissed out dude. His favorite place to be is on a board on top of a big, gnarly wave. The wave, and the ocean behind it, is pure power. Left to its own devices it is likely to kill you or crush you or deliver you to Teeth in the deep. The surfer, however, understands the power-process, and his own tools and innate capacities, well enough to employ that power-process to the ends of achieving a major rush, dude. Cowabunga!

The fisherman for his part feeds his family, or his village.

Material self-interest at work. Aesthetic interest at work. The pleasure of achieving a goal; the pleasure of feeling oneself in control of a (localized) process; the pleasure of knowing oneself to have done some good according to one's standards, however ostensible their universality may be. Ok, maybe my motives can be analyzed until they are just the effects of so many power-process causes. Knowing this, what standard have I produced by which I can judge that I ought not to act on my sentiments? Knowing how a car works isn't an argument not to drive to Memphis, or Selma.

As for ostensible universals, once must ask again, what are the grounds of the postmodernist's objection? That the attempt at reform won't succeed? Why does that matter? Without criteria, universal or otherwise, for making judgments of some kind of value, what content does the postmodernist's objection contain? What reason? Why should I not simply regard the power-process as a thing implicit in human affairs and resolve to master it as best I can towards my own ends, which may not be universal but are at least my own?

It is fine for the postmodernist to observe that most attempts at reform stem from the same power-process that created the thing defined as the problem. Perhaps that is an inevitable aspect of the human condition. But when he uses that observation to argue against taking an action that I've justified in the realm of my own subjectivity, he has to provide a reason that has force within that realm. He has left the domain of description and entered the domain of ethics.

If he is not willing to provide criteria for explaining why interacting with the power process is a particular way is undesirable, then what can anybody say in response? Except, "So what?"

Marvin!

I am finally getting down to answering (to the best of my middling abilities) your various questions about Power and Postmodernism. I will set out to answer the following questions:

What the hell is a process of power? Or power process? Or whatever the hell it is these postmodern authors go on about?

How can we tell a "good" power process from a "bad" one, either normatively or in terms of cause-and-effect?

Given the universality of power processes and their inevitable taint by human foibles, why should one actually care about the particularities of a given power process in a given context?

What grounds are there for comparing the Nietzschean notion of The Will to Power with Postmodernist conceptions of "power"?

There is also one point I will not address, which is the following (which can be examined at some later date, perhaps):

How worthwhile is the comparison of Foucault's criticism of power processes in Discipline and Punish to standard Republican arguments against Big Government?

But before I turn to these questions, it's important to note where I am coming from. I will try therefore to first give you the answer as I understand the Postmodernist Academic Mainstream's thinking, and then explicitly note when I am filling in my own theories. As a general rule, I should note I am hardly well-versed in postmodernism, beyond what your average M.A. student in literature manages to pick up on the street.

1. What the hell is a process of power? Or power process? Or whatever the hell it is these postmodern authors go on about?

I think the notion of a power process could be described as follows: How the hell did the world come to be as it is? For the status quo of the world involves specific distributions of privileged truth (and points of view from which this truth can be surveyed and confirmed or resisted). Privilege determines economic, political, and ideological wealth. (Ideological wealth being, in my own weird jargon, the luxury of not having to fight to have one's ideas heard, understood, or accepted.)

Now, there are points of obvious privilege. But no point of view is absolutely privileged, and none escapes from the scrutiny of the overall ideological system (which includes both the mainstream and the sum total of all the resistances to it). The whole of the context is constantly in flux, shifting one way and then the other. As the shifts occur, massive changes in the status quo, and in the fates of millions, occur.

Foucault answers this question of how things came to be as they are by very selectively but also very closely looking at the history of ideas, and how older ideas were changed or superceded by newer ones. Now, this kind of history is necessarily complex. It's not a case purely of human agency acting upon historica backdrops, as we've often been instructed to see things by our teachers in high school looking at the histories of "Great Men (and Women)". And yet agency does sometimes come into play, or rather certain intiatives are originally agency-driven but later do become part of the process.

And while Foucault does show some sympathy to questions of class struggle, as are clear in the end of Discipline and Punish, he knows that class is no more in control than specific individuals. Class is another set of cogs in the complex reality machine, interacting with individual acts and with the tides of reality-formation that whole societies seem to create.

And I think a tremendous amount of the power that is generated in a society is generated at its frail spots, rather like the force that we find in action at the fault lines where tectonic plates meet. These forces move so slowly as to be imperceptible, and yet they unleash a host of powerful effects upon the surrounding environment. (The environment in this case would be human minds and the society that they collectively generate.)

2. How can we tell a "good" power process from a "bad" one, either normatively or in terms of cause-and-effect?

I don't know that we can, really. I mean, you and I can, in saying for example that the power process in, say, pre-World War II German or Japanese society is one we think of as bad. But good and evil seem difficult to apply to something as wide as a whole society's consensus reality. For a consensus reality is, as you well know, a very uncertain, self-conflicted thing. Not all Germans hated Jews or wished their slaughter. Very few opposed it. Here, agency and resistance are strange questions.

Can a society be bad? This is a question that people like Jesuit priests asked themselves when they were aiding in the (ideological, if not political) colonization of much of the world. And I think the nature of the question betrays an assumption: that a society can be "good", and that if any society is good, it's likely that one's own is the best. It seems to me that Foucault asks instead, How do societies go about deciding what about themselves is good, and hiding from themselves what they feel is bad? How do discontents manage to endanger this process, and how are they combatted? Good and bad here are tools of rhetoric, not really useful because they cannot but apply to one's opinion.

And I think the thing is, postmodernism stays away from opinion one subjects like this because opinion is inevitable, but deep exploration of ideas is not. Best to push the hard work when pushing any work, and let people do alone what they would anyways do alone.

Which raises the question of agency. I don't think Foucault had a generally negative view of agency, nor do I think most postmodernists do, once you really talk to them. Hell, postmodernist theory is a body of work that has been produced by people exercising their agency. However, the myth that one individual's (or class's) agency shapes the world is too simple. That's why this notion of power process becomes important.

(Note that I am referring to Foucault a lot. These are my limits. Derrida to me reads like horseshit, and Deleuze & Guattari wrote such pablum as not to be worth my time.)

Knowing the power process suggests that one can find a way to adapt within it, yes, but more importantly, Foucault is always talking about what led up to the present. The impetus, it seems to me, isn't to illuminate something to draw millions of war-hungry followers. Rather, it seems to me a wish to illuminate previously unsaid things about reality, about the processes by which the apparent world is conjured up by us as a group.

I don't know, therefore, how Foucault would relate to something like interference in a given situation after reading Foucault, or attempts to exercise agency on the current power process. I don't know whether, in his official formulation, something can be considered more or less bad. He would say that in societies there is a complex play of forces that are tied to different discourses... and that power, rather than something to be exercised by individuals or classes, is something that can be detected by the orderings of knowledge and of the human world that arise from what he calls "verbal performances". (I'm thinking here of the concluding sections of The Archeology of Knowledge... of which I have read only the concluding sections, I am sheepish to admit.

In fact, I am sheepish also to admit this: that answering this question is difficult. It is an idea that I kind of soaked up from various short readings (the texts of which are all lost to me now, and in most cases the even authors' names are forgotten) and from professors' and guest lecturers' discussions. It was a sense of power as a kind of ubiquitous force that somehow was connected to, but not directly acting upon, the ordering of the world in which we live (or our ideas about the world in which we live, which is where that ordering after all takes place).
Analyzing the idea doesn't rob it of force to me, but I do see the following problems with it:

• It sounds a like like other "mysterious forces" at work, ranging from divine omnipotence to the idea of the Holy Spirit, or karma, or other notions such as the Invisible Hand of the Market. Of course, one could raise this objection to the notion of gravity or of magnetism, but unlike with gravity and magnetism, this idea of "power" is not necessarily isolatable or testable. Or is it? Is the kind of exploration Foucault doing something we could regard as experimental? I think this is where postmodernists shy away from, or make an enemy of science. They don't know how to answer this question.
  
  For my own part I think they could turn profitably to science for models of humans, and of other primates (for comparison) in seeing how social reality is formed... for even in chimpanzee social groups there are elements of "consensus reality" of the kind in which Foucault's "power" seems to operate.


• It focuses on the play of verbal performance, when I think there are possibly deeper congitive functions that delimit the range of firstly humanly possible and secondly human-normative verbal performances. Which is to say that perhaps a lot of our sense of normativity and in fact a lot of what we say arise from our wiring, rather than some logogenerative ordering of knowledge.


• It doesn't adequately explain how new discourses arise, the significance of that point of origin (which unlike Foucault I think does, probably complexly, exist).


• It doesn't give us a sense of where agency is located, or whether agency can affect these larger governing processes of power at all.


• It's kind of depressing. Not really a strike against it, but it does kind of open the door to those types who are all "more postmodern than thou, cant you hack the meaninglessness"... the pomo posers, if you will. Who are absolutely useless almost all of the time. It does seem to open the door to dismissive types who don't want to try make things better, and in a way encourages them to do so. And those people really suck.

I think therefore that the Foucauldian idea of "power" (which it seems to me is basically what my professors and classmates talked about when they talked about "power") is worthwhile in that it complexifies things, makes us have to think hard about avoiding simple notions of causality... but it also is not a complete recipe. It's kind of like people who would found a religion on physics. Physics is a very valuable way of understanding part of the world; but it's no key to how to live. It seems to me Foucault's useful in teasing apart the elements that make up a worldview, but he's worthless for those who ask the question, "What to do about this?" Except, of course, as an impetus to self-examine one's own desire to do something... which, to a certain point is very commendable, and after a certain point is absolutely crippling.

The difficulty for Foucault would be that asserting anything as good or bad is to enter into a very simplistic discourse-formation. He can see it and retreats into analyzing how that formation occurs. So it's kind of like asking a literature student a question about a given novel like, "Is such-and-such a person smart?" Of course, they will explain to you that the author depicts the character as intelligent in the following ways, for these reasons... the original question makes no sense for the context in which they're working. Not that the question of, "Why should I care?" is as addle-brained as my literary example above... it's not. But the idea of caring on grounds that something is a (normatively, or absolutely) good or bad process, well, perhaps it may well be. I'm not sure. Can you not find other grounds for caring about a particular power-process, which doesn't rely on an appeal to ostensible universals?

3. Given the universality of power processes and their inevitable taint by human foibles, why should one actually care about the particularities of a given power process in a given context?

When I read Discipline and Punish I came away with the feeling that Foucault did a good job of describing some of the unintended consequences of the movement to reform punishment and prevent crime in Western civilization; and, that he did a plausible job of suggesting that these consequences emerge in large part from a desire to exert power and control on the part of the reformer that is not so different on some level from the desire to exert power and control on the part of the old aristocracies. So far so good, although in some ways it sounds an awful lot like the standard conservative American argument against big government and excessive state regulation of public institutions. I was left thinking, "Ok Foucault, these are good insights but the culture is going to produce something and no matter what it is it will be tainted by the selfish motives of puny humans. Would you rather live under Louis XIV or Jimmy Carter? Or Ronald Reagan, for that matter?"

Well, ultimately, agency is not possible for Foucault. As he writes in the Conclusion of The Archeology of Knowledge:

I can understand the unease of all such people. They have probably found it difficult enough to recognize that their history, their economics, their social practices, the language that they speak, the mythology of their ancestors, even the stories tat they were told in childhood, are governed by rules that are not all given to their consciousness; they can hardly agree to being dispossessed in addition of that discourse in which they wish to be able to say immediately and directly what they think, believe, or imagine; they prefer to deny that discourse is a complex, differentiated practice, governed by analysable rules and transformations, rather than being deprived of that tender, consoling certainty of b eing able to change, if not the world, if not life, at least their 'meaning', simply with a fresh word that can come only from themselves, and remain for ever close to the source.

It seems here that agency is out the window. And that, it seems to me, is the rub for Foucault. He's looking at the rules underlying what we say and how we say it. Any question of, "So what do we do about this?" would bring him not to answer the question, but of course to cleverly analyze it, looking at the history of such questions, and looking at where this desire to "save" the world, to change it, comes from.

Which of course is a sensible way of looking at the world in books. Discovering governing rules that make people say most of what they say, make us think how we do, is an important and attractive task to us. Especially to you and I, I would propose, because we tend not to think like the people who surround us... am I correct? In Foucault, we find a different suggestion from the instinctive sense we have, which is, "Well, I am just different from the people around me," a kind of essentialist impulse which, though evolutionary psychologists usually discuss it in relation to racial groupings, also can apply to other human coalitions, like geeks and jocks and band kids or philosophy geeks and goths or whatever other social grouping you can think of. In Foucault, we're different because of the different discourses we have encountered and the effects that these verbal performances have had on us.

And yet, that's the question. Cannot profoundly alien verbal performances have some calculated effect? Certainly, societies develop mechanisms to deal with this, yet I can say from my own experience here that some Koreans I know do get exposed to discourses they have never encountered before when speaking with foreigners. Not the dumb hockey punks or the young Republicans, of course; those types are rather stereotypical in the Korean mind, alongside the ravenous businessman and the leering boorish American soldier. But someone who can actually criticise Confucian practice while being intimate with at least some core Confucian texts, or who can point out how Korean readings of Christian scripture are very different (and, notably, more Confucian) than Western ones... when I have had conversations like these, I've seen people thinking about the strangeness of their ideas. It's also rendered elements of my own culture less transparent to me, such as that Western readings of the Bible are also readings coming from a culture alien to that of the original culture that produced those scriptures, or what kinds of orderings in my own society safeguard things like patriarchy (as opposed to those in Confucianism).

Cannot action have a profound effect? As my friend John Wendel often reminds me, the choice by Martin Luther King Jr. (and many other black activists, among them many Christian preachers or adherents) to use essentially Christian discourses of morality, brotherhood, and peace, were extremely important to the kind of civil rights movement that he participated in. It also has a history stretching at least as far back as Frederick Douglass's Narrative where Christian virtues are demanded of whites who call themselves adherents.

Yes, action can have a profound effect... it is true. But how, and why? Certainly, we cannot credit only King with whatever advances the American civil rights movement achieved in its heyday. Certainly we must also credit those who heard his words, and who were effectively "infected" with his message, living it and spreading it to others. We must credit those who resisted and yet resisted shamefully, poorly and ineffectively, harming their own agendas in the process. We must credit the dozens and dozens of other people who, all in their own "verbal performances", helped push the rock up the hill. But what of those who spoke out with the attractive suggestion that things didn't need to change? What of the Klansmen, the good old boys, what of those black people who as much as the whites feared integration and who took advantage in their own communities of the marginalization that was imposed on them as a group? (For, certainly, those individuals did and still do exist in every marginalized community.)

This is the key, I think. Action is possible, but action is almost always in the form of discourse-formation. Discourses do not result in changes; they result in shifts in the larger discursive field of the society. Discourses are, like those thusly-named particles in physics, complexly-interacting. The complexity is such that when one seeks governable rules, one must reduce away all of this. It is known (from his own words) that Foucault was quite aware of the limits of his project, and it seems to me that agency falls quite outside those limits. It would be as if one asked a doctor specializing in cancer, how is it that we can know when someone is beautiful? Asking a plastic surgeon might get you a sensible answer, rooted either in some prescribed aesthetics, or studies of the apprehension of human attractiveness, but while these are linked to the overall project of medicine (as much as plastic surgery is, anyway, and as much as the very techniques of medical practice rely on the doctor's ability to perceive health in patients, which is often the same as perceiving that kind of attractiveness we're asking about), the oncologist is going to look at you funny if you ask this question, and say, "Uh, I dunno. I guess, well, uh..." and then either disavow making any statement, or give you something off the cuff. I think it's like that with Foucault... he doesn't want either to bullshit, or to spill out his own agendas, so he refrains from addressing action and agency.

And yet, there it is. He wrote all these books. He engages in his own long, complex, and provocative verbal performance. It's undeniable. What he hopes to achieve, I'm not sure... and yet I am also certain it's implicit in the texts. And I am also certain it's more than Mr. Freidrich von Blowhard suggests, as in some sort of attempt to salvage French cultural superiority after the messes France has gotten into and the loss of, well, pretty much all of its power and importance in the world. I think, though, I won't be able to answer this further until I have read a great deal more of Foucault. I am, at this moment, working from having read a few short excerpts in undergraduate classes, plus Discipline and Punish, the first text in the History of Sexuality series, and about a third each of The Archaeology of Knowledge, Madness and Civilization and The Birth of the Clinic. I've been lazy and peckish since arriving in Korea, at least with regard to the works of Uncle Michel. I'll try get onto it in good time. (Though for now I need to finish my book on the Boxers' Rebellion, and also to get through some texts loaned to me by friends.)

4. What grounds are there for comparing the Nietzschean notion of The Will to Power with Postmodernist conceptions of "power"?

You write:

I think this is different from Nietzsche's Will to Power, which I think bears a greater resemblence to the Freudian trio of id, ego, and superego, depending on which mode it's operating in. The Will to Power is a defining and motivating quality of personal agency; whereas the power process seems to be about something above and beyond the possibility of personal agency to affect.

I would not go so far as to assert that. I think that agency does have a role in Foucauldian notions of power, but agency is never clearly running the show. The fact is that agency is in more instances shaped by the power process than those instances in which it manages to shape it.

Nietzschean notions of the Will to Power are, perhaps, reasonable for a model of the individual as a romantic self, a self where there is an essential, authentic self. But selfhood for postmodernists is a mediated thing, a shaped thing, and the things that shape it are generally external.

(I think it's erroneous to assert this, but it could be a question of semantics. I think instincts and basic cognitive functions are internal, and part of the self, but then again they are the wellspring of our society, and they proceed from evolution... so on the larger timescale, internal and external become difficult to pick apart.)

Nietzsche-via-Freud (a la this model of yours linking id, ego, and superego to Nietzschean Will to Power) presents a self interacting with a world. They are discrete, are they not? The discreteness of the individual from the mediating texts and contexts of the world is not so clear for a postmodernist. "I" no longer can be used as the subject of unproblematic declarative sentences.

(I feel there's clearly some room for connections between memetics and evolutionary psychology of the type people like Pinker and Boyer talk about, here. I think a good hard look at the underlying universal basements of human consciousness's design would do postmodernist theory some good. But its practitioners are likely to avoid this like the plague for reasons of politics and agenda, where text-mediated identity seems to be a kind of holy relic to be defended at all costs.)

I also am thinking I shall have to read The Archeology of Knowledge soon because there seems to be a lot related to Nietzsche. The Will to Knowledge (sometimes also called the Will to Truth) that is mentioned at the end is likely one connection. The very last paragraph seems to connect to Nietzsche as well, referring to words killing God; and finally, he mentions Nietzsche in the concluding chapter. As you have read this text already, you're in a better position to say, and I remember you mentioning other connections to Nietzsche, such as to his own text of Genealogy of Morals. (Wasn't it? I have also been lax about reading Nietzsche even though you put most of his work right in my hands... bad Gord, bad Gord!)

A personal note: I saw a pretty funny movie the other day with Mi Seok... called My Wife is a Gangster 2. I think if you could get your hands on part 1 of this movie, we could find a great deal of room for comparison of religious language and thought to cultural forms. I think we might even find them contiguous and inseparable. The name in Korea is Jobok Manura. Maybe you could ask Cheong if she knows where you could rent it?

Today we're having another band practice... we have a gig in Seoul next Saturday, one that may land us a recording contract if we are good boys and play well. So I should go get some breakfast and get on over to the practice space. Oh, and Myoung Jae, our fearless leader, just called and asked me to bring the concertina he loaned me, that I am apparently playing on our new song. I can't play concertina. This should be interesting.

Off I go. I look forward to whatever responses you may have, especially to my final question in the response to point number 2 above.

Finally, off-and-on when I view this page I only see the first screenful. I wonder if there's a problem with the template? I don't think I changed anything that would cause this. Maybe you know more about HTML than me? If you have any ideas, let me know.

Cheers!
Gord

Okay, no post about power yet, but I was sick today. And, I did manage to add an RSS feed via the good people at Blogmatrix. I think it will work, once it actually shows up on the site. We'll see soon enough.
(update)
It looks like the RSS feed is technically working, but won't probably kick in for a few days. I've also added a traffic tracker, eXTReMe tracking, to see just how much (or how little) traffic this site gets.

Wow, that was weird. The mp3s weren't playing, so in the process of testing it and getting sorted out, I got 2 streams running at once, Ockeghem and Reich (Electric Counterpoint) at the same time. Maybe only I would think this was pretty, but... it was.

Marvin,

I shan't attempt an answer at the question of what power processes are for now... I have much of the week off (appointments and other such things nonwithstanding), so I'm going to try put something sensible together to answer that question over a couple of days. For now, I'll turn instead to your True Confessions.

It's very interesting to me to see what you choose to categorize under "religious" in your own life. My own "religious" behaviours are somewhat different, and this suggests to me that when we say "religious" we mean different things from before even the get-go. Perhaps it's a case of my more firmly committed sense of the divine: that there is none, and that even if there were, it wouldn't matter much to our moral philosophy or daily ethics... or our need to find stable ways to go about living with one another. I call this atheist although I suppose that's because think it's undignified to having a strong opinion about a question which, either way doesn't change what I'm doing or how I am living. Personally I would rather it be called skeptical agnostic, but agnostic seems to mean, "We cannot know," or, "I don't know." I want the category that suggests, "Knowing either way shouldn't bloody well change how you live and conduct yourself, damn it!"

Maybe some of it is also upbringing, because my ways of being "religious" without being explicitly so seem to me to be more Catholic somehow. In any case, here are a list of things that I feel would fit into the (say, Boyerian) category of religious or related to religious tendencies:

• I tend to think of things as either worthwhile or not worthwhile by judging them on internal consistency, sophistication of argument, and distance from plebian appeal. I am more comfortable discussing Big Topics with an intellectual Catholic who works squarely within the Catholic tradition than with New Age hodgepodgists, or the sorts of Christians who speak in tongues or handle snakes. That's how I have arrive at my tastes in music and art, partly because of my own need for extreme complexity, but also out of a vague intuition that whatever everyone else likes is mostly simplistic, mindless crap.And then there is also the sense that aesthetics is of absolutely crucial importance, that things and constructions of beauty matter absolutely.


• I do tend to prefer complicated and detailed moral arguments to arguments that reason that something is right or wrong on the basis of some given scripture; I think I thus fit with the Catholic approach, moreso than other approaches.


• I do get moved by religious music, but it's usually Medieval or early Renaissance music... my favorite composers in this vein being Ockeghem (listen to a Kyrie) and Josquin, especially the former. But Bach is also extremely beautiful. However, for me it's not so much whether music is programmatically religious or not that matters for this sense of how I mean religious: for example, Steve Reich's treatment of psalmic cantillations (here's a sample from Tehillim) and his treatment of the electric guitar (here's a sample from Electric Counterpoint) seem to me to be equally moving, uplifting, and awakening. I basically find that it's the musical material itself that calls me to feel that it's sacred or secular. I share Joseph Campbell's feeling that most of the crappy folk-song singalong with an acoustic guitar that you hear in Churches these days is so profoundly secular as to be depressing, rather than uplifting.


• I am convinced that ethics is profoundly important to human life. This shouldn't be something I think is religious, and I note it only because it's a kind of proof that things that exist in every human culture (ethical systems, not specific ones but ethical systems) have a way of appearing to us to be religious when they're just plain human.


• I tend to try to remember to look at things around me and try to see through it to the truth of that thing. For example, when I see soccer players on the field, it strikes me how it is the particular physics of our universe that they're playing within, the rules of the game encompass that too; and I marvel at the particularities of human evolution that made it possible for such a balletic competition to occur. This reminds me of how medieval faithflul were often asked to try to see God behind the veil of the secular world, and so the attitude (and the struggle, against lethargy, to maintain it) seems to me to be religious.


• I tend, when I slip into bouts of self-torture and misery, to conceive of myself as doomed and perhaps being [unished for past misdeeds, or for some fundamental flaw... this all smacks of the notion of corruption tied to the idea of Original Sin, not that I credit it for my problems, but I think the type of ideas that these are, are at least comparable to one another.


• I tend to think of value in life as derived primarily (and sometimes, unhealthily, even exclusively) from external things beyond myself. It never seems to me that my mere personal happiness could be a justification for any given action or attitude. Failing the presence of things I designate signs of worth, I too cry out for explanation, and since none is ever offered I often concoct my own (rather compassionless, toward myself) explanations.


• I tend to be quite judgmental of my own wrongdoing and of others'; I think I learned this in Church, not from the sermons as much as the scriptures and the hypocrisy I saw all around me, among the unfaithful faithful.


• I am also, as you described, prone to superstition in the form of imagining causalities that are mysterious or unknowable to me, but somehow tied to some essential trait of my nature, some characteristic, or to my behaviour.

You ask:

Even if religion isn't literally true, it's still as real as any other idea and more powerful than most. The power of ideas being determined in large part by the predispositions of our brains, of course.

But what does this mean? The last part is clear to me but what does it mean for religion (or anything else) to be figuratively (or otherwise non-literally) true? Your comment seems to suggest that the "reality" of religious ideas, and their power, seems to give them a non-literal "truth" element. I am, I suppose, slipping into the postmodernist stream to ask why we use a word like "truth" to describe things we know cannot literally be true? I'll admit I am now less concerned with the idea of "truth" and what it means for religion to "be true" than I am with what the practice and experience of religion seems to tell us about ourselves. It seems to me that things which are not literally true aren't so much "figuratively true" as they are simply the kinds of things we tend to feel to be true in ways we cannot logically explain; that they carry an emotional weight and so we feel we must afford them some benefit of the doubt.

Our feeling of figurative truth doesn't, I am trying to say, impart a kind of special (or higher order of) truth to the idea. Which is not obvious to everyone, but that's not why I am saying it. I think I am taking the long road to asking whether the "truth" we give these ideas is something we grant just out of a universal human mental quirk? Or is it something about universal human needs? I don't know quite how to answer that, though I think the difference between quirk and need are big enough to make this question's answer important.

Enough of my blather. You wrote:

...I feel I have a personal stake in the fate of Christianity as an institution... rather odd for an atheist, wouldn't you say?

Not at all. I do rather keenly understand that kind of attitude and, in fact, I share it. Maybe it's because, well, for the bulk of people it's in our religious leaders that humans, at least publicly, direct their faith and moral thinking towards. They are meant to be moralized by their religion, to be awakened to right and wrong and to be guided to the path that a moral and loving deity would guide them to. Religion's supposed to be about good and bad, in other words, and we trust that even if it's flawed or misrepresenting itself or whatever, the people involved are doing the damned best to get at good and bad and do right by those who put their faith in them. It only makes sense.

It's kind of like when I come across ESL (English as a Second Language) teachers here in Korea who don't know grammar at all... I mean, don't know what an adjective is. You may think this is rare, but I have met several. Or, consider the doctor who can't remember the name of that organ that pumps blood. You know, the one in your chest. That would be outright ridiculous. Equally ridiculous to, say, a moral teacher and religious leader who bangs hookers in roadside motels or steals money from his flock, but also one who can engage in any old kind of bigotry, hate talk, or even the perennial sin of snobbishness. It's just ludicrous. And so are some of the moral stances taken by people who are supposed to be exemplars and teachers of moral aspiration. I hate to say it, but any preacher who sleeps with hookers has no place in his job. I have been very lonely for a long time in my life and I have never slept with a hooker. I have been so poor I had to borrow money to buy rice and lentils so I could eat that every day for two weeks, and I never stole from anyone. There's no excuse for having such weak moral convictions that one commits such obvious "sins". And, I would argue, there is also no excuse for continuing to receive moral teachings from the morally bankrupt.

I think your image of the unbelieving human as a kind of Sisyphian figure is an apt one. However, remember Camus's injunction (I do hope that I remember it, in fact, correctly): we must imagine Sisyphus as happy. There are many things in life which also follow this pattern, don't they? We always, in our hearts, imagine ourselves young, even when we most certainly are not. We struggle to get healthy but time and age will take that away too. We read and read and talk with people but forget more than we ever remember. Everything in life is Sisyphian. It's just that we never notice so much of it, or just accept it.

It's a question of human nature, and I've been reading John Stuart Mill lately. In On Liberty, he described human nature thus:

Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces that make it a living thing.

Being a religious person is a kind of programming, and being an atheist is also a kind of programming. Mill would probably approve of that metaphor, of programming, because it is a kind of mechanistic thing. The Christian machine is a machine of faith, and the atheist machine is also a machine of faith that all the Christian mumbo jumbo is false. (I think atheism requires much less faith but it takes that tiny step of saying, "No there isn't!")

The tree, I think, doesn't engage with the silly questions of philosophers and atheists and the faithful. The tree just shuts up and grows, partly as a result of its inner forces and partly because of external influences. The tree doesn't engage in affirmation or in negation, as much as it just develops as an organic being. Trees aren't worried about their species, they just are whatever they are and that's that. To be a good theist requires certain human tendencies to be suppressed, and to be a good atheist usually requires of one the sheepish denial of certain of their own private tendencies and feelings. I think it doesn't have to be that way, especially not for the atheist. An atheist need not feel sheepish about his crying out for help, since it's a very human thing to do.

And I suppose that's my answer to this question of yours, about what's better, accepting religion while knowing it's "false" (whatever that means) or rejecting it and buying a sense of intellectual honesty at the cost of a perpetual weight of loss. I think that both atheism and theism as practiced these days seem to require a certain degree of intellectual dishonesty, denial of something about oneself. I think both come with a perpetual weight. However, I think for most people the dishonesty never quite becomes conscious... instead it's a kind of sense of obligation to be more faithful, a rhetoric that is promulgated by churches; or to forget experiences where you fail in your atheism and cry out, wonder if maybe, imagine an afterlife, or whatever. I think, in the end, people do as my friend Jack suggested: they mostly do what comes easiest to them. To people who walk away from religions, it may be hard but even living with that weight is easier than living with a sense that one is engaged in a sham. And since I think most other people simply never get around to asking questions about what they're taught, being a somewhat frustrated and inexplicably unserious adherent to very serious ideas is what comes easiest to most people. You ask, "is it better to accept religion with misgivings or reject it in the name of honesty, with the understanding that one can never wholly be free of it?" and as usual, I want to suggest that our options number more than two.

I am not five-ten, but an even six feet tall. And these days, about 220 pounds (100 kilograms), down from about 280 pounds when I first arrive in Korea. Rather shocking change. But I kind of do have thin legs, for my body. They're less thin since I started swimming, but not quite what I think they probably should be if I am to have the proper harmony of proportions. But... my feet are size 13 which means I can only ever buy shoes in Seoul. The man in the shoe shop I went to last time saw me come in and looked at my feet and said, "Ahhhhh. I like you..."

As for bat bulges, yes, probably about the same. Sometimes my little students used to point at me and shriek, "Teacher, JUJU!" which means, "Boobs!" And I mean, not just the time I was in drag for Halloween.

Okay, I need to go buy some groceries. It's the Harvest Moon Festival (a week of ancestor worship and pigging out on delicious Korean food) so all the shops will be closed after today, until maybe Saturday. Yikes. So I need groceries, and a bunch of them at that, as I'm cooking for two friends this week.

More on postmodernism and power later, Batman,
Gord

In all sincerity I ask you, Gord:

What the hell is a process of power? Or power process? Or whatever the hell it is these postmodern authors go on about?

The best understanding I seem to be able to glean is that all cultural actions are processes of power and that being a process of power somehow morally or intellectually invalidates cultural actions with respect to their morality, authenticity, sincerity, or all of the above. You say below that

Once, I was content to simply suggest that knowing the situation would be the first step, and the one that Foucault attempts illustratively to act upon. I know however that postmodernism as a philosophical school would be profoundly skeptical with regards to anything presented (even implicitly, as I suggested Foucault might have been doing in his work), and would probably argue (with somewhat good historical support) that most attempts as improving a situation actually tend to simply be a part of the same power process that created the situation in the first place.

To which I respond, "So what?" Provide me with criteria for distinguishing a good power process from a bad power process, both normatively and in terms of cause-and-effect, and the postmodernists might then actually be saying something.

When I read Discipline and Punish I came away with the feeling that Foucault did a good job of describing some of the unintended consequences of the movement to reform punishment and prevent crime in Western civilization; and, that he did a plausible job of suggesting that these consequences emerge in large part from a desire to exert power and control on the part of the reformer that is not so different on some level from the desire to exert power and control on the part of the old aristocracies. So far so good, although in some ways it sounds an awful lot like the standard conservative American argument against big government and excessive state regulation of public institutions. I was left thinking, "Ok Foucault, these are good insights but the culture is going to produce something and no matter what it is it will be tainted by the selfish motives of puny humans. Would you rather live under Louis XIV or Jimmy Carter? Or Ronald Reagan, for that matter?"

So...what's a power process that I should care that one is ongoing in any given context?

And I think this is different from Nietzsche's Will to Power, which I think bears a greater resemblence to the Freudian trio of id, ego, and superego, depending on which mode it's operating in. The Will to Power is a defining and motivating quality of personal agency; whereas the power process seems to be about something above and beyond the possibility of personal agency to affect.

Any thoughts? (Like I have to ask!)

Marvin

Gord,

I expect to spend the better part of this weekend testing and documenting new software stuff for my job, but before I do that I'll try to answer a few questions here. I'll address stuff more personal than theoretical...maybe it will help provide context for later discussions. I'll also ask a question about PoMo theory, but in a separate post with a more relevant header.

Below under "Religious Barbershops" you ask:

I shall end this with a question and resolve to answer it myself later, but also invite you to try answer it: what elements of your life would you characterize as "religious" despite your atheism? How much of your secularized commentary do you actually believe, and how much of it must you admit is explanation for some basically mysterious human experience?

As a rule I'd say my secularized commentary isn't to explain some basically mysterious human experience but rather to explain banal, repetitive human experiences that we see going on all over the place. That said, I'm certainly not immune in any way to religious impulses. I was raised Episcopalian and was in some ways the kind of overeager kid who believes so intently that soon the church itself can't measure up to his standards. Around the time I began to believe that most people's motives for churchgoing were social and and not "pure" or "holy" I also got into science, SF, and that lovely TV show Cosmos. As some point during my adolescence I read Musashi's A Book of Five Rings and picked up on some of the Zen Buddhism therein...not really recognizing it as such at the time...and turned from religion to martial arts. Same maddening perfectionism, different field of action.

Then came college and philosophy classes and Angst with a capital A and what-not...but I still remain highly succeptible to religious ideas, and I'm not even sure "atheist" is a really good name for what I am; maybe it's just the default choice since "believer" doesn't seem to apply either. I don't know if I can explain it neatly, so maybe a laundry-list of experiences is better. And incidentally, your experience of spontaneously praying when lost and penniless in a foreign land certainly feels familiar. I'm not above offering, silently and with a sense of embarrassed chagrin, prayers when I perceive myself or a loved one to be in danger. But that's how I was raised, and it doesn't seem realistic to expect such impulses to vanish from my character just because I've read some books to the contrary.

• Take for instance a poem by Francis Thompson called "The Hound of Heaven." I've never read it, but I've seen illustrated editions in bookstores. It compares the attempt to evade God to running away from a large dog that forever pursues you, fearful and crazed, through the streets until you give up in exhaustion and terror, only to find that the dog--though large and scary and irresistable--is actually kind and loving and willing to help you up and on your way once you accept his affection and return it with your own. I have had moments when for whatever reason life seemed so heavy that I must cry out to God for aid. Moments when for some reason I would begin to weep silently while driving to work or physically collapse to my knees in inexplicable grief when nobody was looking. My mind would cry out, usually asking God for help or an explanation and promising some kind of good behavior in return. Long after I had stopped accepting the essential truth of church doctrine.
• Therapy is gooood, by the way.
• I love church music: hymns, chorales, Christmas carols. I'm not so fond of the public recitation of psalms...they tend to make me feel like I'm among monotonously chanting pod-people, stereotyped cult members like you'd see worshipping the bad-guy in a cheesy B fantasy movie. But they can be very moving if taken as a window into the souls of people who have had experiences like the one I described above. "O Come O Come, Emmanuel," "We Three Kings," and "O Holy Night" are my favorite Christmas songs, I think. Especially when sung by Jessye Norman, say, or Aaron Neville or the Robert Shaw Chorale