From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 08 2003 - 22:41:42 GMT
Joe,
Joe said:
I am disturbed by a flavor of futility in your post. I see an artist
painting a room. He paints it so beautifully. Finally he comes to the
last bit, and finds himself in a corner with no exit. He cannot get out of
the room without marring the beauty of his work. So he creates "floating
through the air" and leaves the room. Someone else will come and add to the
paint job so it doesn't matter. I can never complete anything. Whatever
happened to purpose?
Matt:
Very poetic, but I'm not sure I catch your drift. The futility you
reference might be the futility I feel when talking about post-modernism
with Platt. We just hold too few premises in common. This futility isn't
a bad thing, it just happens sometimes.
The "room painting" analogy leaves the impression at the end that you think
I've painted myself into a dialectical corner and I can't get out without
disturbing all the pretty arguments I've made. But if I may be permitted
to hijack your analogy, we can think of it as a person painting the room,
playing by all the rules the room has for her: gravity, it has to painted
in solid colors, only spray paint, etc. When she gets to the end, she
looks around and sees a good paint job, but she is unsatisfied. The room
has been constraining her imagination. It is at that point that she
creates "floating through the air" and flies out of the room.
The "creation" is the point of the post-modern turn. It is the point at
which we hand in our discovery metaphors and pick up creation ones. It is
the point that we realize that there is nothing "out there" forcing us to
play by any particular rule, no tribunal of Reason judging the moves we
make. It is the point that we realize that the only thing judging us is
our fellow human beings. They are the ones that constrain us. It is at
this point that we begin to realize that, with a little bit of imaginative
ingenuity, we can change the rules of the game. We leave the old room,
painted from the floor with spray point in bold colors, as a relic for
those who wish to see the road we have travelled and then move on to other,
more fruitful, rooms.
Matt
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