Norris: What's Wrong With Postmodernism? (1990)

This book is like a time machine, effectively taking you back into the middle of the vitriolic debate about "postmodernism" that raged the decade before and after its publication.

Its author, Christopher Norris, is a no-nonsense, British literary critic with a somewhat odd set of allegiances: He admires Jacques Derrida, but hates Richard Rorty; respects Paul de Man but has no patience with Jean Baudrillard; and, more broadly, he is all for deconstruction, but completely antagonistic to most of its American practitioners.

I've read two and a half chapter, and I think I'll move on to some other books in the pile now. But let me just give a couple of quotes from chapter 4, the one about the Searle/Derrida exchange.

First, Norris notes that Derrida is methodologically more in line with Austin's spirit than are his contemporaries in analytical philosophy. Taking distinctions like performative/declaritive or illocutionary/perlocutionary to the extremes to see how much weight they can take is exactly what he was all about:

For if there is one thing that Austin should have taught them – so Derrida implies – is is the need to press these cardinal distinctions as far as they will go, but also to keep and open mind when dealing with instances, anecdotes, off-beat usages, anomalous cases, and so forth which might seem to 'play Old Harry' (Austin's own phrase) with all such tidy categorical schemes. (p. 146)

OK, a second comment which is kind of nicely put: Derrida's point, he says, is to draw attention to

problematic factors in language (catchphrases, slippages between 'literal' and 'figural' sense, sublimated metaphors mistaken for determinate concepts) whose effect […] is to complicate the passage from what the text manifestly means to say to what it actually says when read with an eye to its latent of covert signifying structures. (p. 151)

I think a different way of looking at the same phenomenon is this: When you're trying make your text produce something that it can't really produce (e.g., eternal truths), your rhetoric is going to be leaky somewhere. This does mean that we can't see what you "mean to say," but it does mean that you will always in the process have said something which, strictly speaking, is complete bogus.

Gibbs: The Poetics of Mind, overview of ch. 5 (1994)

Chapter 5 of Gibbs' book, "Understanding metaphorical expressions,"  surveys various theories of meaning which apply directly to metaphor.

This involves the usual list of authors that cognitive metaphor theorists refer to when they need to stick a name to a straw man position: Aristotle, Max Black, Richard Rorty, John Searle, etc.

The chapter contains the following sections:

1. An untitled introduction (pp. 208-210)
2. Aristotle on metaphor (pp. 210-211)
3. I. A. Richard's contribution (pp. 211-212)
4. The metaphor-as-comparison view (pp. 212-218)
5. The metaphors-without-meaning view (pp. 218-222)
6. Metaphor as anomaly (pp. 222-225)
7. Metaphor and speech acts (pp. 225-230)
8. The metaphor-as-loose-talk view (pp. 230-232)
9. The interactive view (pp. 232-239)
10. Psycholinguistics and the interactive view (pp. 239-248)
11. Metaphor as conceptual structure (pp. 248-260)
12. Metaphor and literature (pp. 260-261)
13. Conclusion (pp. 261-264)

Note that sections 10 and 11 are longer than the rest. Together, these two sections constitute almost two fifths of the chapter.

Gendlin: "How Philosophy Cannot Appeal to Experience, and How It Can" (1997)

I've read Gendlin's opening essay in the anthology dedicated to his philosophy. I find it fascinating, but also quite wrong-headed in some ways.

Gendlin's point is that we have something like a bodily intuition about phenomena that is well articulated by some words and not so well articulated by others. His claim is that by attending closely to this intuition, we can become more acute observers of our life-world, or so I read him, at least.

Looking For Words
His favorite example of this phenomenon is the poet searching for a suitable line to continue a poem (p. 17). He also cites the practice of rephrasing your point when someone doesn't understand you as evidence that there is "a . . . ." that we can succeed or fail at making other people appreciate (p. 13).

In other words, the point seems to be a call to "return to the phenomena themselves," as the phenomenologists said. "Any text or theory," he explains, "becomes more valuable when it is taken experientially in this way" (p. 40).


He illustrates this kind of thinking with an example from Wittgenstein, not about poetry-writing, but about letter-writing:

I surrender to a mood and the expression comes. Or a picture occurs to me and I try to describe it. Or an English expressions occurs to me and I try to hit on the corresponding German one. Or I make a gesture, and I ask myself: What words correspond to this gesture? And so on. (PI 335; quoted by Gendlin on p. 37)

His conclusion is, with explicit reference to the "postmodernism" in general (pp. 3, 6, 9, 19, 34-35), and Derrida (pp. 8, 35-36) in particular:

People's lives include a great deal that they cannot say in the existing language, but can become able to say. As philosophers, let us stop telling people that they cannot possibly have anything to say that is not already in the public language. (p. 34)

Trying To Succeed
I am skeptical about Gendlin's flirtation with the concept of authentic language for the reasons that Richard Rorty has explained in his wonderful essay on Heidegger's mysticism. Even though there truly is some experience of looking for and finding the right words, it is not clear how serious we should take this experience.

A different way to conceptualize the situation would be in terms of skill. Just like looking for a word, the attempt to accomplish some bodily action can be associated with immense frustration and satisfaction. This is obviously not because the action was there all along in some non-realized form, and we should look at linguistic skill and success the same way.

This also clears up another confusion Gendlin's story, namely: Why would we even want to explicate our intuitions in the first place? Is it for the sake of "truth"? "Authenticity"? "Correspondence"? He touches on the answer with his example of rephrasing your explanations: This is an attempt to bring your hearer into a different state, not an attempt to create a good fit.

This communicative purpose could in principle be achieved with the most ridiculous or outlandish effect imaginable; a completely "wrong" word, a gesture, a cartoon. The success criterion is here change in the state of the hearer, not a relation between words and bodily knowledge.

Another way to say the same thing is that a seller who puts a price tag on a commodity chooses a certain "word" that may or may not have the right effect. This is not because it does not "fit" the commodity, but because it would create the wrong effect in the hearer, such as the belief that the commodity was of a cheap quality, or that it is too expensive.

Yet another similar example occurs when you speak a foreign language. In that situation, you have a gold standard for ease of communication---communication in your native language---and that association can produce a whole lot of frustration as you try to achieve as fine-grained distinctions and precise effects with your impoverished skills in the foreign language.

Heidegger on Heraclitus' fragment 7

I spent most of yesterday reading Heidegger's lecture notes from the winter semester 1941/42. Besides being extremely explicit in their nazi sympathies, the lecture notes are interesting because they give an exceptionally clear picture of what Heidegger thought philosophy was good for and how it was supposed to be done.

There's a remarkable focus on meditative thought and mental exercises in his instructions to the new students. He tells them to be patient, to concentrate, to keep their attention on the subject matter, to continually return and retrace ("walk the same path over and over," quoting from memory), and not prioritize process over product ("we will not move, but remain at the same spot").

Taken together, these recommendations on method are strikingly similar to buddhist meditation practices, as Michael Zimmerman and others have also pointed out.

They are also extremely naive, in a sense. Heidegger clearly thinks that his speculative practice can somehow help students reach "deeper" levels of understanding of being or of particular pieces of text by Heraclitus or Nietzsche.

On this matter, I have to agree with Richard Rorty; replacing the metaphysics of seeing the truth with a metaphysics of hearing the call of being does not improve the situation. Any language that claims to be transparent and authentic is producing contradiction and marginalization.