I agree that pomobabble provides an excellent camouflage for those
who have little of worth to say. It provides a veil of verbiage, behind
which they can hide, and there mimic the more arduous and demanding intellectual
work of sincere profound thought. All style but no content. Form but no substance.
But just because some writing is difficult to penetrate, it does not follow that
it is therefore always meaningless, valueless or fraudulent.
Consider,
> The role of hypersensitivity vs. true infection in the pathogenesis of AFS
> is still controversial. Clinical, histologic and serologic support for
> allergic causes include the incidence of AFS in young immunocompetent atopic
> patients, allergic mucin and lack of invasion on histology, serologic and
> skin test evidence of IgE mediated fungal hypersensitivity, and the presence
> of IgG and precipitating antibodies to fungal antigens. Mabry and Manning
> recently showed not only elevated total IgE levels in patients with AFS but
> also a significant degree of allergen-specific IgE for other inhalants such
> as grasses, weeds, trees, and dust mite.
This is medical jargonese, and could easily be churned out by a randomising
dadaesque babble-machine.
The critics and opponents of postmodernism do not pour scorn and vitriol upon medical
researchers, do they ? Why do they feel so threatened by by Derrida, Foucault,
Lacan, Lyotard, et alia ? Perhaps they hope to denigrate the messenger and
thus neutralise the message ? But unfortunately for the critics, the ideas are out there,
escaped, at liberty, virulent, infecting innocent minds, and cannot ever be eradicated.
Imagine the traditional foci of human endeavour spread across a spectrum, with
the arts and humanities on the left and the sciences on the right. Each discipline
jealously guards its jurisdiction. On the extreme left, we have poetry, science fiction,
fine art, literary criticism, dance, religious studies, etc.
Archaeology probably sits most comfortably somewhere near the centre. Along with
anthropology, geography, psychology, it is just a little too soft and fuzzy to be 'real
hard science', but a little too disciplined and solid to belong with drama, cinema, or
counselling.
To its right we have biology, chemistry, and then at the extremity of the sciences, physics.
Along this gradient from soft to hard, there is also, running in parallel, a variety of
conceptions of what 'truth' means, and what 'objective truth' means, and what 'realiy' means.
Everybody agrees that the response to a Picasso, or music by Berlioz, is subjective.
People may claim to find 'a truth' in such work, but it is their own, personal, and cannot be
isolated for empirical analysis.
So there is no problem about 'objective truth' at the arts' end of the spectrum. Poems
can contain truths, but they belong to the individual who reads them.
Now, the postmodern critique has swept throught the arts and humanities without much
opposition, a tide of deconstruction. As it reaches the centre, it meets greater
resistance. The economists, the historians, the students of agriculture, sociology,
linguistics, political science, and forestry, dismiss this oily slick of nasty bewildering
ideas that washes around their ankles, with derisory sneers.
Up on the high ramparts of academe, the chemists, geneticists, molecular biologists,
engineers, and mathematicians are much too busy to pay any heed to postmodernism.
What's that ? The ranting Hakim Bey, Feyerabend, Baudrillard, cannot touch the truths,
the objective truths, the imperial ultimate supreme truths, delineated for all eternity
in such sublime verities as 'the expansion coefficient for copper'. The high towers of
hard science are, forever more, impregnable. They have Descartes. They have Newton.
They have Darwin. What have they to fear, with such mighty cannons as these upon their
battlements ?
But we have been through this before. Approximately a century ago, scientists met to
discuss 'the end of science'. It seemed to them then, that all was known, almost all was
explained. They could recede into honourable retirement having accomplished their project.
But at the last minute, a mischiveous chap called Einstein turned up, muttering something
about 'Relativity', and ruined the party.
The tide of postmodern 'no-objective-truth' has flooded in from the soft end of the spectrum.
And now, so it seems to me, it is being met by its cosmic twin, its mirror image, springing
like molten lava from the fiery crevasse where the demonic quantum mechanics froths and
ferments.
As I contributed earlier:
> "Through the very act of observing, we thus actually define
> the physics of the thing measured," says Frieden. He adds
> that while unfamiliar, the idea that "reality"--or, at least,
> the laws of physics--are created by observation is not new.
> During the 18th century, empiricist philosophers such as
> Bishop Berkeley were raising similar ideas. Much more
> recently, John Wheeler, a physicist at Princeton University
> who is widely regarded as one of the deepest thinkers on the
> foundations of physics, has championed remarkably similar
> views. "Observer participancy gives rise to information and
> information gives rise to physics," he says.
What are these physicists saying to us ? We 'create' 'reality' by observing it ?
Isn't that what postmodernism first whispered when it began its insidious and
subversive revolution ?
The hardest subject, physics, and the softest subject, art, like twin sister sirens,
seem to be singing together in unison, and the song goes something like this :
" no-objective-reality-any-more, tee tum, tee tum, tee tum " und so weiter......
Chris.
http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~chrislees/tao.index.html
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