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 ?

sounds a bit paranoid - could it be more along the lines of "unsound methods" - 
i look at the fuss made over deconstruction and think of how everyone thought 
psychoanalysis would solve all our problems, and then we find out that freud was 
writing more about himself than about anything which might actually help cure 
his patients - i mean look at lacan's thing about women being without language 
and not existing; baudrillard saying there was no war in iraq (something like 
hussein saying he won same?)...
	does lacan really exist? objectively speaking, or...?
	sure, i agree that we have to critically reexamine our assumptions r.e. 
science and damned well everything every now and then, but just how critically 
have derrida, foucault et al been examined? i sort of get the impression they're 
all just making a big pile of noise for their own sakes, 15-minutes of 
fame-wise, by just essentially junking everything because it was all written by 
dead white males or some equally irrelevent reason; i'm not a philosopher, but i 
figure there must be some reason why aristotle endured and most of his 
contemporaries didn't; i'm sure there were also a lot of other thinkers around 
during descartes' time, but their hogwash wasn't worth reprinting; think of all 
the "classic" music from the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s, which you still like to 
listen to, vs all that stuff which sort of appeared, disappeared and sank 
(perhaps rightfully) without a trace -
	i really don't know how to define it, although i've been going through 
the debate with various people at various times for the past several years - but 
it almost seems like the whole po-mo thing seems to be an attack on established 
thinking/knowledge (which can be alright in/of itself) which tries to replace 
the accepted "good" (based on years and/or centuries of critical examination) 
with an acritical relativistic generality which i find quite simply 
terrifying... if my text is as good as yours, what's to prevent me from deciding 
to practice surgery or start building atomic reactors in my back yard? why 
should anyone study archaeology when everyone's interpretation is equally valid? 
hey: i'd rather read erich von daniken than colin renfrew cuz his books are 
funnier and have better pictures...

  But unfortunately for the critics, the ideas
>  are out there,
> escaped, at liberty, virulent, infecting innocent minds, and cannot ever be
>  eradicated.  
>
pretty pessimistic: suggesting we can't ever hope to somehow eradicate racism, 
sexism, incest, war, etc.?

> 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. 
>
not sure if i would agree with that as a valid metaphor: would think of several 
groups of "knowledge spheres" not necessarily a spectrum - 

> 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.
>
too simplistic: take into account the biography of the artist involved, his/her 
influences, environment, times, background, etc. - you're taking too limited a 
view of barthes, otherwise you're basically ruling out a place for literary, 
artistic, and any other criticism (putting barthes, et al out of business?)

> Now, the postmodern critique has swept throught the arts and humanities
>  without much 
> opposition, a tide of deconstruction.

just as freudian psychoanalysis swept thru, and marxism, stalinist 
agriculture and german (vs jewish) physix, and... so? study your history to see 
just how valid this might be in the long run

 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 

nasty, perhaps, but not necessarily bewildering...?

> ideas that washes around their ankles, with derisory sneers. 

can it be we have a little more training in critical thinking? isn't that what 
we are supposed to "learn" at universities anyway: critical thought?
>
> 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 ?

think you mean "canons" in this sense, but then you'd be mixing metaphors (or 
are you taking barthes too much to heart?)
>
> 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.
>
just recently we had the debate about the end of history but seem to be 
suffering a hell of a lot of it lately anyway

> The tide of postmodern 'no-objective-truth' has flooded in from the soft end
>  of the spectrum.

yeah, well: fuzzy thinking, fuzzy thought; soft (prezel?) logic...

> 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. 
>
no comment necessary?

> 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 ? 

NO: if this has been going on since berkeley, then it ain't new; pomos only 
declare it is something new because they're too lazy to go through all the hard 
work of starting way back there with aristotle, working through descartes and 
everyone else, to get to where we are today - not sure if anyone actually 
believes in a 100% objective recordable reality; we just function as though 
there is, so we can go about our daily lives of building bridges instead of 
questioning whether bridges even exist, and leaving the fine-tuning for the 
quantum physicists and phenomenologists and whoever it is who counts the 
angels on the head of a pin these days... think the problem is that you're 
arguing from the fuzzy humanities bits out to the hard sciences, whereas you 
should be going from something hard and tangible and work back to your fuzzies: 
you got your nice little physics experiment, repeat it 10 or 20 or 100,000 
times, discount errors due to malfunction or other external influence, and what 
you end up with is probably about as objective as you're going to get - compare 
that with the methodology and/or standards for like history or sociology or 
literary criticism and...
>
> 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......
>
but like i said: if you'd bothered to read bishop berkeley, or even looked 
seriously at descartes without taking everything he wrote as gospel (can he 
prove that cogito? just how does this lead to and/or imply ergo sum? sounds 
suspiciously like the argument that there is no existence without language: 
ask the lowly amoebas...), then the words might be something more along the 
lines of robin williams' "reality: what a concept"

> Chris. 
> http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~chrislees/tao.index.html
>


geoff carver
http://home.t-online.de/home/gcarver/
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