The Philosophy of Bojack Horseman
Constructivism and Relativism in Oakeshott
I’ve been thinking and writing about social constructivism for nigh on 20 years which was one of the primary motivations behind the setting up of EPISTEME to take on the tripe that was being peddled in philosophy departments, but had already well and truly infected departments with no philosophical culture, i.e. English, sociology, anthropology, gender and so on. So I thought I’d repost this piece despite the fact that it takes to task one of my intellectual heroes. Constructivism-relativism was thoroughly dubious then; now it is as vulgar as it gets.
Southern Comfort
Another insightful review of Deltaphonic by Wilson Koewing in the Nola Defender.
To listen to the band’s catalogue straight through feels like a backseat ride in an out-of-control burning muscle car through a backdrop of vast southern landscapes, occasionally stopping in this small town or that, to go inside a bar, or strip club, or seedy motel room to sit down and listen to captivating, nostalgia-tinged, smoky back table, yarns spun by singer/songwriter Andrew T. Weekes over Deltaphonic’s driving, dusty musical tapestry.
Walker Percy Wednesday 141
The naming of the predicament of the self by art is its reversal. Hence the salvific effect of art. Through art, the predicament of self becomes not only speakable but laughable. Helen Keller and any two-year-old and Kafka’s friends laughed when the unnameable was named. Kafka and his friends laughed when he read his stories to them.
The community of art is not the elect community of science but the community of the artist and all who share his predicament and who can understand his signs.
The impoverishment? It comes from the transience of the salvation of art, both for the maker of the sign (the artist) and for the receiver of the sign.
The self in its predicament is exhilarated in both the making and the receiving of a sign—for a while.
After a while, both the artist and the self which receives the sign are back in the same fix or worse—because both have had a taste of transcendence and community.
If poets often commit suicide, it is not because their poems are bad but because they are good. Whoever heard of a bad poet committing suicide? The reader is only a little better off. The exhilaration of a good poem lasts twenty minutes, an hour at most.
Unlike the scientist, the artist has reentry problems that are frequent and catastrophic.
In fact, a catalogue of the spectacular reentries and flameouts of the artist is nothing other than a pathology of the self in the twentieth century, much as the fits and frenzies of Saint Vitus’s Dance were signs of the ills of an earlier age.
What account, then, can a semiotic give of the paradoxical impoverishments and enrichments of the self in the present age?
Why do people often feel bad in good environments and good in bad environments? Why did Mother Teresa think that affluent Westerners often seemed poorer than the Calcutta poor, the poorest of the poor?
The paradox comes to pass because the impoverishments and enrichments of a self in a world are not necessarily the same as the impoverishments and enrichments of an organism in an environment.
A Closer Walk
WWOZ have just launched a website A Closer Walk to “highlight, contextualize and advocate” for the future of these locales. It’s a bit late in the day for this: such a damn shame that so much has already been destroyed. Here are some of the locales that are meaningful to me.
University of Buffalo slide show of Barry’s festschrift
Robert Musil’s Flypaper
Looking forward to reading this little book I’ve just acquired: Nachlass zu Lebzeiten (The posthumerous papers of a living author), 1936. I haven’t come across much commentary on it, but it is mentioned in the NYT:
In these ”Posthumous Papers,” Musil’s pleasure is to start small. The first essay, ”Flypaper,” begins with an almost pedantic description of the sticky substance. It proceeds to focus on trapped insects, briefly comparing them to a woman fighting off a strong man’s grip, and ends with the image of a fly’s moribund twitching, compared to ”a minuscule human eye that ceaselessly opens and shuts.” This is the patented Musilian cadence. An immensely sensuous and concrete prose carries us from the ordinary to the almost-surreal and near-apocalyptic, a progression that appears logical, if not methodical.
