It's been my habit to look for the metanarrative which is a way of locating a story within a greater context such as the Enlightenment or Feminism or the American Dream etc... To the post-modernists this is nothing more than a triumph of logos over mythos. They might say that my reading of the tapestry is weighted with certain pre-digested beliefs and expectations. What if I went to the other side of the tapestry and read the dis-embroided and absurd tangle. What if......
Well-suited said Marx of Hart & Schaffner to which Marx of Engels added, manifestly so, whose threads proclaim your class, at which time Marx, of many brothers, waved his cigar and with his eyebrows overthrew the order to the great dismay of Marx, the clothier, whose vested interest was seen as dialectical by Marx the bearded and seconded by Marx the mustachioed who declared whatever it was, he's against it while Harpo harped, communing with the down-trodden, as Chico fast-talked Hart & Schaffner selling them his Tuttsie-Fruitsie as Engels was installing Captain Spaulding, the African explorer, to head the dictatorship of proletarian Fredonia and that may be a wise-crack but I doubt it.
The problem with meta-narrative in history or geo-politics is that it assumes a single point of view, usually the one of the dominant culture. Brits are taught a different history from the French or Germans. Texans re-wrote their textbooks which have little resemblance to New Yorkers. We are in a prismatic world with everyone bearing witness. Twitter, Twitter!
However with competing small narratives, objective reality has been dismissed. Truth, drummed out of our vocabulary. We are becoming a nation with an erased past. History has been consigned to the revisionists who now oversee a growth industry. All this has tragic consequences. Global warming is relegated to just one of several opinions. Evolutionists are made to compete with the Bible-thumpers. Even vaccinations have been called into question. And then we have the Holocaust deniers.
I would argue that Science makes room for skepticism and pursues an evidence-based truth which is as close to objective fact as we can get. History happens in real-time to real people. To be sure, events are often clouded, even deliberately obscured but a measure of objectivity can be achieved. Even in literature the choice of words or their omission can reveal layers of meaning. There is room for all this in a pluralistic society and a reasonable place exists between relativism and the absolute.
Groucho is not Karl even if they both took aim at the upper class. But neither a Day at the Races nor a Night at the Opera compares to a year in the Gulag.
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Philosophy. Show all posts
Saturday, December 25, 2010
Tuesday, October 5, 2010
Marxism And The Maltese Falcon
If zealotry is in your life script it's best to have it come in youth and get it over with. I've come to this conclusion after watching a film on Dashiell Hammett whose trajectory included membership in the Communist Party in mid-life and a jail term twenty years later.
Hammett started as a Pinkerton detective, an agency famous for strike-breaking tactics. In the thirties he reversed himself and joined in left-wing action groups. I don't mean to disparage the work of these causes. However, along with labor organizing and civil rights advocacy came rigid ideology and a blind defense of the U.S.S.R.
My own parents were communists and I inherited some of their zeal and dogma. I regard their membership as political romanticism, a benign identification with the down-trodden. Partisan politics became part of my adolescence. It offered me a simplistic entrée into adult life and an outlet for my passions and occasional vehemence. At the same time it gave me a distant perch once-removed from the conventions of society.
It also marked me with some rigidity and limited my imagination. I took Marxism seriously. Not as an activist at the barricades but as a template for approaching social and historical events and as a lens through which to see my life ahead.
On balance I don't think I fared too badly. I haven't lost my radical persuasion or historical perspective. I've come to my senses about the Soviet Union without turning that embrace inside out. I recognize those early days as being close to a religious catechism in my apologetic for Russian repression. What, me religious? God forbid.
Hammett was a complex man and aren’t we all; reason enough not to think in doctrinaire terms. His writing went from hard-boiled to soft-boiled; from Sam Spade to the Thin Man. It's hard to imagine these two detectives springing from the same creator. As tough as Bogey in 1933 and la-de-dah as William Powell in 1936.
In a scene in which Spade turns his ferocity up a notch with particular menace he leaves the room and then his hand starts shaking. We are led to believe that his tantrum was an act he put on to cover his soft side as if Nick Charles lay in waiting beneath that veneer.
Fifteen years later Hammett was teaching a course at the Jefferson School in N.Y.C., devoted to Marxism. I was across the hall steeping myself in Dialectical Materialism. It took me many years to find my Maltese Falcon and a few more than that to fix a martini. But in the end the black bird is hollow. We're all detectives trailing our own shadow down a dead-end street,
Hammett started as a Pinkerton detective, an agency famous for strike-breaking tactics. In the thirties he reversed himself and joined in left-wing action groups. I don't mean to disparage the work of these causes. However, along with labor organizing and civil rights advocacy came rigid ideology and a blind defense of the U.S.S.R.
My own parents were communists and I inherited some of their zeal and dogma. I regard their membership as political romanticism, a benign identification with the down-trodden. Partisan politics became part of my adolescence. It offered me a simplistic entrée into adult life and an outlet for my passions and occasional vehemence. At the same time it gave me a distant perch once-removed from the conventions of society.
It also marked me with some rigidity and limited my imagination. I took Marxism seriously. Not as an activist at the barricades but as a template for approaching social and historical events and as a lens through which to see my life ahead.
On balance I don't think I fared too badly. I haven't lost my radical persuasion or historical perspective. I've come to my senses about the Soviet Union without turning that embrace inside out. I recognize those early days as being close to a religious catechism in my apologetic for Russian repression. What, me religious? God forbid.
Hammett was a complex man and aren’t we all; reason enough not to think in doctrinaire terms. His writing went from hard-boiled to soft-boiled; from Sam Spade to the Thin Man. It's hard to imagine these two detectives springing from the same creator. As tough as Bogey in 1933 and la-de-dah as William Powell in 1936.
In a scene in which Spade turns his ferocity up a notch with particular menace he leaves the room and then his hand starts shaking. We are led to believe that his tantrum was an act he put on to cover his soft side as if Nick Charles lay in waiting beneath that veneer.
Fifteen years later Hammett was teaching a course at the Jefferson School in N.Y.C., devoted to Marxism. I was across the hall steeping myself in Dialectical Materialism. It took me many years to find my Maltese Falcon and a few more than that to fix a martini. But in the end the black bird is hollow. We're all detectives trailing our own shadow down a dead-end street,
Monday, July 20, 2009
Umps Versus Imps
John Keats would have made a terrible umpire.
Umpires live in a world of absolutes. You're either safe or you're out, it's fair or foul, ball or strike. It is either raining or it isn't. It can't be both and it can't be neither.There is no time for indecision, nor the inclination.
The imp is full of mischief. He's the trickster,the elf and as such, the poet. Keats encouraged "Negative Capability"; being comfortable with doubt and ambiguity. The poet's trade is nuance, ellipsis, even irresolution.
If the umpire is the reigning patriarch the imp is the misbehaved child.
One umpire famously declared, "I don't call them as I see them, I call them as they are." This a triumph of objective reality over the subjective; as if the umpire, as a supreme being,is more than an expert observer, he is the teller of truth itself.
It is a declaration that truth exists independent of us; he is merely reporting what already exists.In his formidable black suit he signals his decree and walks away.
My rational mind also believes that the tree in forest needs no witness to fall. However I have found that this sort of thinking doesn't serve the imagination, the imp. The now archaic meaning of "imp" was one who furnishes wings. It is those wings that the poet insists upon. While the umpire defines the box and makes it his address the imp/poet/artist finds portals through the box walls.
In baseball we cede that power to his authority in order to get through the innings. In the real world we reject infallibility unless you have assigned your autonomy to one Ayatollah or another.
The closest we come to such irrefutable decision-making is our Supreme Court justices and we all know how astigmatic their lens can be. They are our umpires with a touch of the imp.
A book I am reading describes the fraternity of umpires as generallly conservative Republican, misogynist, WASP and homophobic. Pray that our high court is comprised of no more than four of such in their black robes.
Umpires live in a world of absolutes. You're either safe or you're out, it's fair or foul, ball or strike. It is either raining or it isn't. It can't be both and it can't be neither.There is no time for indecision, nor the inclination.
The imp is full of mischief. He's the trickster,the elf and as such, the poet. Keats encouraged "Negative Capability"; being comfortable with doubt and ambiguity. The poet's trade is nuance, ellipsis, even irresolution.
If the umpire is the reigning patriarch the imp is the misbehaved child.
One umpire famously declared, "I don't call them as I see them, I call them as they are." This a triumph of objective reality over the subjective; as if the umpire, as a supreme being,is more than an expert observer, he is the teller of truth itself.
It is a declaration that truth exists independent of us; he is merely reporting what already exists.In his formidable black suit he signals his decree and walks away.
My rational mind also believes that the tree in forest needs no witness to fall. However I have found that this sort of thinking doesn't serve the imagination, the imp. The now archaic meaning of "imp" was one who furnishes wings. It is those wings that the poet insists upon. While the umpire defines the box and makes it his address the imp/poet/artist finds portals through the box walls.
In baseball we cede that power to his authority in order to get through the innings. In the real world we reject infallibility unless you have assigned your autonomy to one Ayatollah or another.
The closest we come to such irrefutable decision-making is our Supreme Court justices and we all know how astigmatic their lens can be. They are our umpires with a touch of the imp.
A book I am reading describes the fraternity of umpires as generallly conservative Republican, misogynist, WASP and homophobic. Pray that our high court is comprised of no more than four of such in their black robes.
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