[lbo-talk] The Falcon and Pharaoh, was art something...

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Tue Oct 10 20:52:38 PDT 2006


How to approach this? First, I don't think we disagree in many broad respects. However, I don't think you have given the narrative arts sufficient powers, their full range of attributes, nor have you quite grasp how much their forms and concepts dominant our thinking. (more below)

You say Sapir-Whorf is bogus, but you provide no concrete alternative, except to say that S-W is itself equivalent to a mythological system. I am not sure I disagree with that either, because I actually don't believe in any truth value system of appraisal when these are applied to the vast array of symbolic systems in which the narrative arts, history, language, and other forms dominate. This more or less absolute relativity, gets a little sticky with math and some of the physical sciences, but I wouldn't hold on too hard for or against any position in those realms.

See, my problem is that I am not sure I can ever extend my consciousness beyond its purely culturally determined concept formation processes in language, even the sciences, or the far more intimate worlds of purely lyrical/poetic creations.

So let's return to narrative arts, which I would expand to include histories, novels, stories, obviously film, and various visual arts that are more or less devoted to narrative forms, where their pictorial renditions take on a secondary role.

I take your main point to be that explanations and narratives are pretty much delusional and that there is probably no coherent system, for example, of cause and effect that is `really' out there moving human histories along their trajectories. Instead, we impose these narrative forms on a sequence of events in order to make sense of our lives and the world.

I don't disagree, and in fact that is the reason for supposing that while S-W might be bogus or not in terms of linguistics, I think it definitely applies to these narrative systems. However, I would not call such applications, delusions. After all, the delusional, presumes there is a non-delusional world out there. Instead, I would propose that the only way we can understand the world is precisely by creating these narrative forms. In that sense they are not delusions, but rather the way we think about the world. It's not that we could think in some other way. I don't think we can think in any other way. We can try to make our narratives more plausible, better renditions of events we have seen or lived through, but that's about all. This is a slight step up from the purely mythically conceived movers of traditional human histories, which were considered the result of the activities of the gods, but that is about all that can be said.

Consider that most people have learned a certain narrative of their country's history. This usually forms and informs their conceptual grasp of such imaginary entities as The People, Civilization, Power, Birth Right, even Human Rights, (certainly good art and bad art..) and so forth. These sorts of narrative constructions have taken the place of the older narrative forms that place responsibility for the structure and direction of human history squarely in the realm of the gods. Nevertheless, from a certain perspective the former entities are no more or less than newer gods. Certainly I prefer them to older ones, but then I am also not under any illusion that these are any more physical processes of the world than Zeus. On the other hand, while these entities may not be any more concrete than the Olympiad, it is precisely because people believe them, that people act as they do, and therefore form and creat the world they inhabit. This observation goes to the point that in the cultural domain, S-W might be a whole lot more applicable that you and many others are willing to grant.

You can abolish S-W if you wish, but consider where you are left stranded without it. The most obvious alternative is the idea that there are universal forms, structures, and concepts that somehow account for the general morphology of human thoughts, languages, societies, and cultures. Maybe there are such entities. But how do we distinguish these from the vagaries of S-W social constructions? See, what you are left with is attempting to creat a `science' of sorts with some set of universal principles. (My main critique of S-W was that it was followed by the structuralists who actually tried to do just that. So, I agree, the Structuralists were lousy astrologers)

The rational key to this debate we are having comes down to the status of linguistics and its ability to come up with universals that account for the various structures of thousands of languages. If that can be done, then it seems plausible that these linguistic universals can be made into more generally applicable ideas that deconstruct other symbolic systems, and ultimately the large scale features of social systems and cultures.

CG



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