RE: Postmodernists have nothing useful to contribute (was: American education)

From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Mon Sep 02 2002 - 21:53:19 MDT


Damien writes

> At 04:10 PM 9/2/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>
> >Bruno
> >Latour, notorious arch-post-modernist, while discussing the
> >to him ridiculous contention of French scientists in 1976
> >that Ramses II died of tuberculosis, "How could Ramses II
> >die in 1213 B.C. from a bacillus discovered by Robert Koch
> >in 1882?". Post-modernism really can mess up some people's
> >thinking.
>
> I'd like to see the precise context of Bruno's comment; it certainly would
> not have been intended to imply that the bug didn't exist until a 19th C
> white guy gave it a name.

All I have is what's in Sokal and Bricmont's book "Fashionable
Nonsense". Here is the entire footnote, P. 96-97 to S & B's
remark:

"In this quote [not copied] and the previous one, Latour is playing
constantly on the confusion between facts and our knowledge of them.
[Footnote:] An even more extreme example of this confusion appears
in a recent article by Latour in "La Recherche", a French monthly
magazine devoted to the popularization of science (Latour 1998).
Here Latour discusses what he interprets as the discovery in 1976,
by French scientists working on the mummy of the pharaoh Ramses II,
that his death (circa 1213 BC) was due to tuberculosis. Latour asks,
"How could he pass away due to a bacillus discovered by Robert Koch
in 1882?" Latour notes, correctly, that it would be an anachronism
to assert that Ramses II was killed by machine-gun fire or died from
the stress provoked by a stock-market crash. But then, Latour
wonders, why isn't death from tuberculosis likewise an anachronism?
He goes so far as to assert that "Before Koch, the bacillus has no
real existence." He dismisses the common-sense notion that Koch
discovered a pre-existing bacillus as "having only the appearance
of common sense." Of course, in the rest of the article Latour
gives no argument to justify these radical claims and provides no
genuine alternative to the common-sense answer. He simply stresses
the obvious fact that, in order to discover the cause of Ramses'
death, a sophisticated analysis in Parisian laboratories was needed.
But unless Latour is putting forward the truly radical claim that
*nothing* we discover *ever* existed prior to its "discovery"---
in particular that no murderer is a murderer, in the sense that he
committed a crime *before* the police "discovered" him to be a
murderer---he needs to explain what is special about bacilli, and
this he has utterly failed to do. The result is that Latour is
saying nothing clear, and the article oscillates between extreme
banalities and blatant falsehoods."

That's all I've got. Actually, this happened to me too. One night
at a meeting at Stanford where we collected to discuss "System
Intelligence" this one guy showed up who said approximately the
same thing! Unlike you, I didn't quite run around the room (I was
a lot older), but the sheer panic in my voice as I denounced
that was visible to all in the room, and, unfortunately the
guy shut up (I really would have liked to hear him defend that,
but when people say things that are too crazy a part of me wonders
if I'm the one who's crazy, and I don't react well).

> But if he did (inexplicably), people were making
> that kind of stupid remark long before modernism
> was posted.

Well, surely you'll admit that modernism could *aggravate*
such a tendency? Too much focus on signifiers and not enough
on what is signified could result in confusion for some
people.

> In a second or third year English essay I submitted back at
> the dawn of history, I analyzed WUTHERING HEIGHTS in parlor
> Freudian terms. (We weren't taught that dirty sex stuff
> back then, of course, not in prim, realistic Orstrylya.)
> Heathcliff as rampant Id, that sort of thing. My prim,
> realistic tutor marked this piece of cod hermeneutics with
> bold red, explaining that this was impossible since Freud
> had not made his discoveries at the time the book was written.
> I screamed and ran around my room. But maybe she was telling
> me that Freud had made it all up and there was no such Thing
> in the real world as an Id, and so Bronte could not have been
> describing it out of her own self-knowledge, as I had implied.

Maybe your English teacher wanted you to think more about what
was in the author's mind than what was going on in Heathcliff's?

Actually, exactly the opposite thing happened to me. In 10th
grade our quite sharp English teacher was interpreting "Heart
of Darkness" for us, and getting us to reach for all the
symbolism. Then a dear girl (forgotten her name) asked
suddenly, "Mrs. Spaugh, do you really think that Conrad
intended all this?". "Why no, surely not!" said Mrs.
Spaugh, and at that point I (probably wrongly) considered
all the *symbolism* to be of even less value than I
had thought!

Lee



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