Maureen Therese Anderson wrote:
> Paul Rosenberg writes:
> > (Maureen said:)
> >> Likewise, the FMs were anti-religious and secular, all the
> >> while bringing preoccupation with hierarchized rituals and
> >> "mysteries" to new heights, and fetishizing secrecy for the
> >> sake of secrecy more than their Renaissance alchemist
> >> ancecedents ever did. It seems pretty clear these masonic
> >> paradoxes inevitably flow from all those Enlightenment paradoxes
> >> we know so well: Science and Reason (Europe, men, etc.) vs.
> >> religion and superstition (non-European others, the masses,
> >> women, etc.), constituting self and other in such dichotomous
> >> ways that the repressed inevitably returns, etc.
> >
> >It doesn't seem the least bit clear to me, except in the sense that
> >you've got your pre-fab theory, and the Freemasons pop out as part of a
> >conceptual bonus pack.
>
> And where, precisely, is my description prefab? I'm basing my
> understanding of Freemasonry and its paradoxical transformations on very
> mainstream, what you would call *empiricist* and decidedly un-pomo, social
> historians like Margaret Jacobs and Frances Yates. If you have some more
> informed sources on Freemasonry and politics in Enlightenment Europe, I
> would be grateful if you would pass them on to me.
I was unclear.
I thought your description of Freemasons was just fine. It was the glib transition to the standard PoMo meta-narrative on the Enlightenment I was objecting to. I don't buy the PoMo meta-narrative. I accept as self-evident that the Enlightenment was riven with contradictions, I just don't think the PoMos are all that helpful in elucidating them. They are way too rationalist (as opposed to empiricist) themselves, way too much involved in the Oedipal struggle as it were.
> >And I find Gar's suggestion a whole lot kinkier than what follows from
> >Maureen, which is pretty much a standard read from the PoMo
> >meta-narrative.
>
> Well I don't see my points as necessarily contradicting Gil's. More to the
> point, again: please tell me why you feel entitled to simply dismiss this
> as a cookie-cutter "standard PoMo" read.
I like what you wrote about the Freemasons. But when you got around to looking at Buffy it seemed that the formulaic PoMo presumptions crept to the fore. As you're not really familiar with the show, perhaps this is just to be expected. I didn't mean to snear at you, but simply wanted to point out how you slipped into a common practice that I'm trying to highlight, which I think gets in the way of specific understanding.
And that's what I meant with my remark about theorizing on autopilot:
> >> ...But though the program may contradict itself, Buffy is large and
> >> contains multitudes--that much seems clear from recent postings. I've seen
> >> it twice in the past year,
> >Which is the problem. Once again, theorizing on autopilot.
>
> Theorizing on autopilot? I was open about my limited exposure to the show,
> and why. (An openness that I wish you would reciprocate regarding your
> exposure to European social history.)
I'm not totally ignorant of it! I do know a good deal more about the history of science than the history of manners, tho, I will admit. And that's part of my big beef with PoMo theory: it doesn't at all get the nature of the contradictions between early science practice and the contemporary philosophy of science, as well as the contradictions within each.
> Based on the rave review of friends
> like David, I genuinely wanted to liek watching Buffy. I didn't stop
> watching for some pomo ideological reasons but because, like any consumer
> of popular culture, when I didn't "enjoy" it enough after a couple tries,
> it didn't find its way into my schedule.
Fine wit me. I was only saying that with just two episodes under your belt you couldn't possibly be reading its specificity as predominant over its generity. Since what I like about it is largely the way rubs against genre constructions, this means your not speaking to what I'm speaking to. Thus, we can't even fruitfully disagree.
> I'm all for Buffy's utopian anarchist potential as explored in DG's ITT
> article. All that can be true, while the program still, simultaneously,
> can play into aspects of Enlightenment dichotomies that trouble me more
> than they trouble you.
Enlightenment dichotomies trouble me. PoMo theory troubles me more because I see it as both confusing an understanding of those dichotomies, and continuing them in other ways in its practice. (But, as I noted, simply by making its science-and-technology-saavy characters women, Buffy tips its hand that it's going to play WITH some of those dichotomies -- which it further does by having those same characters work magic as well.)
Put it this way (in cartoon form): PoMo accepts the after-the-fact positivist reconstruction of the Enlightenment as a TRUE PICTURE, and fashions it's opposition on that grounds. I reject both positivism AND the positivism reconconstruction of the Enlightenment. I take a pragmatist stand (which, BTW, Willow and Ms. Callander both did in treating magic as another form of technology, rather than a dichotomous other to rational science).
This leads directly to the meta-narrative issue:
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Gar wrote:
> >Everybody seems to miss my last point. So once more, no irony. What is
> >the objection to Meta-narrative? As I've said to a couple of people
> >off list: Agreed, the map is not the territory. Still if you are
> >planning a trip around the world someone (you, the pilot, the airline,
> >someone) had better have a pretty extensive map or set of maps. Maybe
> >I'm misunderstanding what people mean when they criticize
> >meta-narratives -- but if it is an attack on all large theories, it
> >seems to me misplaced.
>
> And everyone--including Paul, given his analysis of Buffy--has a map or two
> in his or her head, even though it is not expressed in what Paul probably
> thinks of as grad-school-speak.
>
> Some of the objections to meta-narratives (or theories, maps, whatever you
> call them) may come from what listers think of postmodernism (some of which
> are on the mark, others way off).
As a pragmatist, first off, my interest in a metanarrative is simply this: what's it good for? What does it help us understand? What does it get in the way of us understanding?
Also as a pragmatist, I tend to think of ideas as tools, things one actively uses as extensions of ones being, rather than as maps (which, admittedly, are a sort of tool, but NOT a prototypical one), which serve as relatively passive objects and have the appearance of simulating a reality unto themselves.
This distinction has particular salience when dealing with the way that econometric models are employed. True believers see them as maps of economic behavior, which facilitiates their immersion in the models, and the subsequent obliteration of the real world. But if one sees them as tools, then the assumptions and purposes for which the tools were created are much more naturally foregrounded.
I like maps enormously, but I'm always conscious that they are a form of tool, and are themselves the products of many other tools. Keeping tool-consciousness foremost in my mind helps me keep my maps in perspective.
> Others may stem from an idea that trying to look at a given piece of art
> (be it Buffy or Shakespeare) using, for instance, a feminist theory does
> violence to the specificities of the work that distinguish it from all
> others and/or takes away pleasure and enjoyment.
>
> About the former, such a close reading (of, say, Buffy) surely reveals
> something that cannot be seen through an analysis of a genre (of, for
> instance, Vampire films in particular and horror films in general and how
> race tends to figure in them) alone; on the other hand, many fans (as well
> as critics) recognize some things about genre conventions (as well as
> larger cultural narratives of race, class, sex/gender/sexuality, etc.), and
> recognition of specificities has a lot to do with that of differences from
> (or reworkings of) genre conventions. Otherwise, Paul, for example, would
> not be able to say X stands out among cop shows, Y is brilliant while all
> other teen shows suck, etc.
True. But I'd just add that what most interests me about Buffy is the ways it messes with genre expectations. What got me first was that the whole vampire-slaying reality did NOT obliterate, or even flatten out the "normal life" moral problematic. Most of those still doing the generic-analysis approach to Buffy still don't get this basic aspect of the show. Among other things, this means that WHATEVER one may theorize about the WHO ARE THE VAMPIRES, it can't tell you nearly as much about Buffy as it would about some other work in which the vampire/human dichotomy is pretty much the whole shebang.
This might also be a good place to freely admit, nay to loudly proclaim that in some instances I just LOVE works that completely fulfill genre expecations. Great soul music, for example. Various forms of formal poetry -- "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" is a marvelous example. I feel not the slightest need to choose between genre fulfillment vs. subversion. I just like to understand why I like what I like, because I find it enhances my enjoyment.
In short, I think that in theory Maureen and Yoshie and I have a lot in common. Whether or not they like Buffy is unimportant to me. I'd be thrilled if they did, but some part of taste is irreducibly individual (gasp! that horrid bourgoise word!), and it's pointless to argue over beyond the point where one has dealt with misconceptions. I don't like Western opera, for example. But its sheerly a matter of taste. I wouldn't dream of arguing over it. I just don't like that approach to the human voice.
What I want to clear up is the ways that I see PoMo presumptions intruding to make things murkier in the always tricky process of relating the specific to the multiple contexts in which it appears. Hopefully this post has created fewer new messes than old ones it has cleared up. Or maybe just created more interesting ones.
Finally, I do want to make things perfectly clear. In fact, I'd like to apologize. I don't think ill of EITHER Maureen or Yoshie (in fact, I'm very happy to have met them here). I should have taken more care to make that clear in the first place. Such as saying, for example, "In an otherwise quite thoughtful post, Yoshie casually tossed out Yet another pseudo-hip-left reductionist attack". Obviously, as already stated, I needed to be much clearer in criticizing what I didn't like in Maureen's post, and this could certainly have been helped by saying quite clearly that I liked what she had to say about the Freemasons, and liked that she wanted to relate it to Buffy.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"