Today's a good day for duality. I know what you're thinking: any paragraph that opens like that is grounds for a fast exit, and since you're an erudite reader with exceptional taste I would assume that you've learned that lesson the hard way. Well you can relax, because we're going easy on the complex "up and down," "hot and cold" kind of dichotomies in favor of the more earthy and basic questions everyone can relate to, like whether postmodernism is a failed enterprise or if decontextualized voices recast "knowing" as a matter of subjective interpretation. But first, the news:

Dangling Participles

We're thinking here of the 250 men who stripped down yesterday in Byron Bay, Australia, to lay on a rugby field and spell out "Peace Man" with their bodies. At the time of this story, no photos from the protest organized by Cameron Sparkes-Carroll were available, but there is a fairly comprehensive archive of nude etch-a-sketchers at Baring Witness, where I found a few examples of guys letting it all hang out, like this bunch in Gainseville, Florida.

When women do this sort of thing, it's a beautiful expression of feminine energy and the inner goddess spirit that resides in every daughter of Astarte that wills life to exist and nurtures all living things in the glorious rays of unquestioning love and empathetic care. When guys do it, it's just kinda gross.

Serbian Justice

As you can imagine, it's pretty rough. We're sad to report that the officials at a prison in Sombor, north Serbia, sentenced two guard dogs to death and summarily executed them.

The dogs of the famous Serbian breed Sarplaninac were "found guilty" as they failed to raise prison guards' attention by not barking during the getaway of five prisoners who had dug a hole in a wall and climbed down, the report said.

Twofer Sunday

Sunday's always a good day to catch up on reading. If you're looking for some general articles of interest, there's an in-depth look at what those night-club fire survivors are dealing with in the burn ward at Mass. General. "It takes some period of time to get them prepared for what their faces look like." Ouchimus maximus.

Also, a focus piece at the Orlando Sentinel examines criminal restitution. As you'd imagine, not many crooks pay money back to their victims.

The Antithesis of Knowledge

A discussion of the meaning of Postmodernism over at Jan's page got me thinking about why this term came into existence and, more importantly, why we should always be highly suspicious of anyone who uses the adjectival form of the word with a straight face.

Briefly, Postmodernism claims to be an artistic movement that challenges Modernism in the arenas of philosophy, modern arts, and literature. It could be termed a reaction or a rejection, or more benignly a perspective, but we might well characterize it as an attitude. It's a very hard term to pin down, admittedly, since it questions the act of definition as being an evaluative process, and postmodern theory holds that valuation is judgementally subjective and, hence, meaningless. For example, with respect to literature, postmodern approaches tend to question the validity of the idea of a text having a fixed meaning. The deconstructionist strategies proposed by Jacques Derrida lead to analyzing works of literature in terms of identifying tensions and instabilities stemming from the presentation of key terms, motifs, and characters. The postmodernist view searches for binary oppositions concealed in text, and establishes hierarchies to demonstrate that oppositions are unstable, reversible, and mutually interdependent.

Remember that today's theme concerns duality? This is what I was getting at: Postmodernism establishes nothing novel in terms of inquiry, but in rediscovering the property of duality believes it has stumbled upon an original concept when, obviously, it has done nothing of the sort.

When postmodernism "reacts" to modernism, it begs the question of whether there is such a thing as modernism at all. I would argue that there is not. Ever since we've been talking about the meaning of Michelangelo's Pieta or Shakespeare's Hamlet, scholars beyond numbering have forwarded critical questions regarding the inherent cultural biases of an interpreter's experience with a work of art—because that's what criticism is. Postmodernism claims to have something new here and, setting up that straw man, has a field day tearing it down. Symbolism is alleged to have given way to Dadaism, when Dadaism was itself a deconstructive reaction to formalism that predates postmodernism by at least 30 years.

If anything can be said to be "new" with respect to postmodern theory, we should ask what, exactly, is being brought to the table. In most cases we find concepts or memes arranged in some sort of tablular format, with "knowing" on one side and "anti-knowing" on the other. Over here we've got "logos" and over there we have "silence." These oppositions are artificial, however, in that no one has ever forwarded a convincing statement that there is a generally accepted perspective toward works of art that requires refutation. As Sidney points out in his "Apology for Poetry," poets cannot be accused of advancing false ideas because they've never upheld their work as being factually true in the first place.

The single largest error contained in the idea of postmodernism is that it is a "development," that it represents a kind of progress or logical step proceeding from some place we have been, that there is an "old" theory of meaning that's so shopworn as to require an overhaul. In every case I can identify, the postmodern is a refusal to continue the criticism of culture, which is what art is, in favor of reducing the complexity of the task to a simple exercise in political identification; the terrible beauty of art becomes the flat determination of power relationships. The security of a less amorphous reality must be deeply compelling to some, but strength of character demands we wrestle with the long-standing questions of meaning that have yet to be answered: What is truth? What is beauty? Derailing that quest by bracketing the questions in terms of "to whom?" and "for what purpose?" is only part of the larger answer, not the answer itself.

4:02:36 PM