Postmodernism

           

            Although I’m glad my fast is over for another year, one thing I miss about it is the deep sleeps I have when I’m fasting.

            I had time to fiddle a bit with my essay on Nietzsche before lecture Thursday morning. I invented a term for his idea of the “promise” and called it the “externalized proto conscience”.

            Naama didn’t come to class, even though her plan had been to show her essay to Sean afterwards. Later I saw that she’d sent me a message that she wouldn’t be able to make it.

            Once again, Professor Gibbs reminded us that he knows everything about us through Blackboard and that if we hand in our papers late there will appear for him a little flag with the message “late”.

            He began our first lecture on Emmanuel Levinas.

            Levinas was a Jewish thinker from Lithuania, with a background in the Polish, Yiddish and Russian languages, but who also spoke fluent French and became a French citizen. He attended the University of Strasbourg because Strasbourg was the closest French city to Lithuania. He studied Heidegger and Husserl and was the first to translate Husserl into French. It was his writings in French on Husserl and Heidegger that first introduced Jean Paul Sartre to these ideas on Being.

            There was one kind of Jewish intellectual at that time in France that got any acceptance, and that was the kind that didn’t look, act or sound Jewish. Levinas did not fall under this category and so he did not get any work until 1961. The professor commented here that this difficulty for Jews of that era was widespread and also included the University of Toronto. In the University of Frankfurt, one third of the faculty were kicked out.

            The only job Levinas could get was as a trainer of high school teachers.

            When France declared war on Germany, Levinas joined the French army. When Germany occupied France, he was captured and put into a concentration camp. But the Nazis treated uniformed Jews just like any other captured soldier, according to the Geneva Convention. Meanwhile though, his family were slaughtered.

            Levinas’s writings were a major influence on Jacques Derrida and many others, including the Polish Solidarity movement, Liberation Theology and phenomenology.

The professor commented that Levinas is not an easy writer to understand and that he makes much more sense in French.

Levinas broke with Heidegger but continued to consider him to be one of the great philosophers. His book “Is Ontology Fundamental?” is his critique of Heidegger.

Levinas’s philosophy is a testimony against the Holocaust. It’s hard to find real bystanders from eras of social genocide. Although very few people operated the machine, society itself was complicit. This is a thinking that explores how we miss responsibility. We may not have created the mess but it is still our job to clean it up.

From Heidegger’s standpoint, we are claimed by Being. We are not our own. Being destines us to be its agent and our thinking is bound to it.

For Levinas, when somebody tries to know they are in a factual situation.

Our minds are temporal and so our thinking is bound in time.

When I do fundamental ontology I take up the challenge of knowing Being. This given has a brutality about it and creates tension of a condition of thinking. To think is to be thrown into a context of living but also to know. To be human is to be in relation to the possibility of truth.

Heidegger refuses the philosophy of existence and Sartre’s brand of Existentialism. For Sartre, philosophy is a kind of holding onto life, but Heidegger is uncertain about this. Heideggerian ontology is not intellectualism. For him there is a tactile quality of manually grabbing things with our comprehension. Most of what we do in the world is like this. We don’t think about our computer. It just works, and amazingly well.

Levinas takes us down a different avenue. Comedy begins with the awkwardness of grasping and carrying things. In doing what I want I do many things that I don’t want to do. There are unintended consequences, also known as collateral damage. You can’t do anything without other stuff happening. Our actions are not pure because they leave traces. When we act there is EVIDENCE and TRACES. The sign that I was here is different from the note on the table. The thief leaves traces but wipes all trace of prints. Action trace of actor. Erase of trace of actor.

More importantly, we seem related to Being beyond the intention of our consciousness. The range of side effects and the complicity of interaction is not reducible to what we are conscious of. We are responsible beyond our intentions. We cause more than we intend. Our responsibility is not equal to our consciousness.

Heidegger understood this stuff about background but he was interested in openness. The human creates and inhabits then space where entities appear.

Phenomenality is the quality or state of being phenomenal.

Fundamental ontology will take us further than intellectualism because it is more about understanding than knowing.

Heidegger is Levinas’s background. For Heidegger it’s about grabbing comprehension. It’s about having access to and being open to Being. From the fact of entities comes intelligibility. Not personal choice. Thrown in entities and relation until ontology trumps metaphysics.

But for Levinas there is the “autrui” or “autre”: another one, another person, another being, other. What happens to ontology when there is an entity that doesn’t fit and when it appears it disturbs the structure of ontology?

Relating with other consists in wanting to comprehend it. Because of the relation with other, other as Being counts as a being. For Levinas the other is not a question of letting it be. The other person is not waiting to be let be or to be allowed to pass. Entities can be let be but the other calls and the person invokes.

When speaking with the other, speech delineates an original relation. This is a profoundly different view of language. Speech delineates being called and then responding. Language is not at the level of comprehension of things. Language as pragmatics. The function of language is not subordinate to the consciousness of the other. We are called to respond.  I don’t think other is. I speak to it. It is partner. The human is the sole being that I can’t encounter without expressing this encounter to him. My relation to him is not grasping, but more. In every attitude regarding the human are the salutation, the calling, the evocation, and the lines of pull. The impossibility of an encounter without speaking. Speech is not that which shows the world or houses. It is to another. Not about reference. About social relation. We know this from Socrates. Primacy of Being called sociality that can’t relate to ontology. Not healing but entreaty, prayer and sociality. Not reducible to knowledge or power. This is like Kant’s religion of reason. Religion is relationship.

The other doesn’t belong to me. It is not I the house.  The foundation of sociality is not a struggle between opposing wills.

A being as such can only be in relation where spoken to and accessible as a face. The other has a face. Encounter of face breaks Heidegger’s house and horizons.

A possibility for discourse. Power is set aside, not totally but there is a call to speak back.

The ethics of ethics are not regular ethics but an opening of Being. In our encounter with other we do not possess it. What escapes in other is other. That which escapes comprehension is other. The other is the sole being I can wish to kill, but this power is the contrary of power. I have the ability to kill the other but the other escapes me. I can’t kill the otherness of the other. I can achieve the goal but the goal is not in reach. A resistance to force without force and to power without power. Our condition as humans is social rather than ontological all the way down.

            After class I rode up to the Jackman Humanities building at Bloor and St George to show my thesis to Sean. There were four of us that came there for the same reason, and while we were waiting for him we discussed philosophy courses. It turns out that I will need to take either PHL245 or PHL246, which are both Logic courses for my Philosophy minor. I was advised by the others to choose PHL245, because it’s a little easier.

            When Sean came in, he looked at my essay first. He approved my thesis but advised me to cut it in half and to just focus on my intention to harmonize Nietzsche’s two apparently distinct explanations as to how the bad conscience came into existence. Now all I have to do is write the rest of the essay.

            I went home and took a siesta, and then I went back downtown for my Short Story class.

            Andrew Lesk began by talking about post modernism, which is now so much a part of our consciousness that we don’t even think of it any more as a category. Post modernism is a radical break from the modernism of James Joyce, Katherine Mansfield and others, just as modernism was a reaction to Victorian literature. There are many, including Andrew, that have the opinion that what passes for post modernism is really just late modernism.

            Some of the themes of post modernism are the emancipation of mankind, lives made better and the legitimization of technology. There is a concern about the outcomes of modernism.

            Yoshihiro Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man” stated that liberal democracies associated with modernism had been fulfilled and so there was no longer any improvement that needed to be made in terms of human government. In a subsequent book however, he revised this statement.

            Modernism favours certain people. For post modernism the centre of modernism does not hold because dead white males are the authors of the canon of English literature and the writers of world history. Women’s stories not being told.

            An example of the postmodern approach is a response to Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” by Jean Rhys, entitled “Wide Sargasso Sea”, which makes a minor character from Jane Eyre, namely the mad woman in the attic, and makes her the main character.

            In postmodernism there is incredulity towards metanarratives, the grand narratives of history, such as Shakespeare.

            In postmodern literature the self and history are problematized. The narrator often appears as a character in the story. The desire for one truth is made provisional. It doesn’t say that the truth can’t be found but that there are maybe other truths to be found. A proper ending is denied. It often takes the form of historiographic metafiction in which the historic is grounded in modern social realities.

            I asked if Tom Stoppard’s “Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” would be an example of postmodern literature and he answered that it would. I think I had read that to be the case but had forgotten.

            Postmodern literature is not coherent. It forces the reader into heightened participation. There are gaps that make the reader wonder if they have missed something. It is process rather than product and so it is never finished. All postmodern texts are conditioned by present social forces.

            Other examples of postmodern writers besides Donald Barthelme are Thomas Pynchon and Michael Ondaatje.

            The original story of Bluebeard plays on the stereotype of the curious woman.

            In Barthelme’s version, Bluebeard is convinced that his wife will act like every woman and she thinks that her husband will behave like every man. Neither of them know what the other expects of them and neither understands the myths perpetrated about their own sex. They are always second guessing one another. They are both disappointed at the result.

            The first person narration proves that she is alive to tell the story.

            They need one another to be predictable so they can manipulate each other.

            She has a counterfeit key for each of the stations of the cross in a counterfeit story. We’ve been had.

            I’ve been reading Donald Barthelme for twenty years and find him to be quirky and funny but with writing that’s sort of like a sophisticated Kurt Vonnegut. I had never heard his name pronounced and so I’d always assumed it was spoken as “Barthelm”, with the “th” sounded as in “theory”. But Andrew pronounced it like “Bar-tull-me”.

            That night I watched a little more of Rock Legends on the Ed Sullivan show. There was a bizarre performance by Liza Minelli of Laura Nyro’s “Sweet Blindness”. First of all, Minelli was a good performer but I never thought that either she or even her mother were such great singers. This Nyro song is essentially about getting drunk. Dancing beside her on the stage are two men dressed in minimal but recognizable Native American attire. They are wearing fringed buckskin vests and headbands with feathers sticking up. From time to time, according to the lyrics, they all behave as if they are drunk while they are dancing. It’s incredible that it never occurred to the producers that this might be inappropriate.