Ian:
”I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.” – Umberto Eco
Greg:
Or as Steve Martin says in Roxanne:
“Words are all used up, they are hard to say, they have all been wasted on the shampoo commercials and the ads and the flavorings. Hollow, beautiful words. How can you love a floor wax? How can you love a …diaper? How can I use the same word about you that is used about a stuffing? I am exploding with love, but cannot use the word.
Christine:
Oh for Christs sake, Boys. Tell a woman you love her madly, and say it with conviction, and she WILL melt. Ads be damned. The conviction BEHIND the words is what matters, and she’ll hopefully recognise that conviction.
If she’s not an idiot.
James:
As long as the conviction can be appealed.
Ian:
This was really more about the intrinsically referential nature of post-modernism…
Christine:
See, there, Ian, whispering in her ear about the intrinsically referential nature of post-modernism takes too long.
Christine: . . . which could arguably also be said of the experience of reading a book by Umberto Eco.
Daniel:
Cartland and Eco. For once I am at a loss for words.
Hi aword,
I don’t offer any classes! But thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. It’s nice to offer things occasionally on the PW Blog. Keep up with your own contributions – it is good to see you so involved and embracing the spirit of this space.
Half
Half. Can I take your class? (I’m dead serious). I have only “intuit” for that which you discuss; you take my breath away with your clarity. Oh but to be a scholar and clear of mind re: this (very large piece of the current) human condition.
So great. Thank you, thank you.
So – is our perceived “overload” of “information” a myth?
————————-
Hi aword,
Both computers and brains have architecture. “Overload” is a great word to use with respect to both. One could envisage a direct bombardment strategy of conscious intention designed to short circuits with information overload. That would be a direct strategy. An indirect, decoying strategy, would be to use emotional overdrive techniques – these are used constantly within the media – reducing issues to emotive topics that flood the brain with emotion reflexes, thus destroying the capacity for reasoned and critical awareness. Both approaches violate brain architecture. This goes on rampantly in all areas of public life and interpersonal relationship and has a huge impact upon personal and collective mental health.
These factors inhibit not only problem-solving abilities but our problem-defining abilities get turned upside down. Consequently, the epithet of “too much information” is an experientially-driven, false conclusion about complexity and its too-much-to-take-on-board gravitas. In fact, the problem is being defined diametrically to the reality which is rather “not enough information” or more specifically “not enough information of sufficient quality”. When a brain, an excellent problem solving device, lacks the key datum/data to sense-make a presenting reality it will attempt to keep solving the problem (in an endless loop) and fail for lack of said crux interpretum. Said addled brain, worn out, will easily be led into a whirl of “too much information” when it is quite the opposite.
So, not merely a myth, but a category error, engaged in due to mis-ascription of the correct organising principle. Brains find it easiest to deal with similarities between things or striking differences. Subtle differences and shades of grey are tougher.
When overwhelmed, the primitive brain is conditioned to react and most problem solving is poorly suited to such reactivity – the brain struggles to recognise what is missing, instead finding it easier to ‘recognise’ the pattern of its own incomplete resolutions as overload – leading to shut down.
“IF we are prepared to shift (maybe radically deconstruct and reconstruct?) our own starting/base presuppositions about the human condition and our own scope for growth.”
Bingo, Half. Totally.
There was a time we considered the world as flat and then we expanded our horizons.
This is a time when we perceive that all we can consume/understand information-wise is a fairly small and finite amount.
Perhaps 1) we can injest more than we ‘think’ and 2) what constitutes “understanding”?
So – is our perceived “overload” of “information” a myth?
However, because the level of complexity (attributable scientific discoveries?) increases in stages, with large leaps followed by periods of consolidation and then.. further large leaps in time, adjustments need to be made in order to keep the narrative quality relevant (or, if you like, up to speed).
Consequently, one may go Occam-esque in a postmodern turn and suggest that astrologers are at liberty to work with whatever level of complexity works best FOR THEM.
On the other hand, as Eric points out (the ironies) in terms of who determines what is construed as scientific, in what contexts, with what significance and for whom – which all implies human choice – we are nonetheless left with the choice of “if extra data is now available, even to exponential levels, can I hand on heart honestly invoke the caveat that I choose the level of complexity that works for me?”
Especially once we fully take on board that science itself is expanding (itself a narrative datum) what we know, and how that ramifies that which grounds us, must we not open up to accepting this new complexity and working with it? – Understanding indeed that the human psyche is not so much an increasingly confusing jungle but a massively expanded playground of opportunities – IF we are prepared to shift (maybe radically deconstruct and reconstruct?) our own starting/base presuppositions about the human condition and our own scope for growth.
Daunting or inspiring? You be the judge.. 😉
“At its heart, astrology is about narrative..”
Has the hero’s journey changed?
Here at PW we are also studying Tarot which is also a “valid model of the psyche” – and a card-based system of the Hero’s Journey aka the Fool’s Journey – which is everywo/man’s story in essence (literally intended).
So I ask as conversation to your point “what is this saying about us?’ : if this quantity of data then is chaos? And are we in turmoil from Chaos because of lack of Discernment? or supression of Creativity?
being given greater perception of the All That Is has never come easily to humankind. Once we get over the hump we think that we always knew what we know (apples falling from trees and ships not tumbling over edges and such).
Anyway, I have no answers – only more questions to your questions.
– ah! must be a water conversation. Love lolling around in the stuff.
We need a theory.
Here is an example. Astronomers can come along and say to astrology fans, “Your system is wrong, there’s a 13th constellation,” and people fall for it.
Or you can say: there are 264,258 known bodies orbiting our Sun other than the eight planets. And nobody “falls for” that. There are so many, they must be meaningless. One of them is Pluto. Another is Eris. Another is Chiron. Another is Vesta. Most astrologers will say, “Oh really? I once read a book on asteroids. I should do more with them.”
Most of our readers have never heard of this at all. Most astrologers have no clue whatsoever how to handle this amount of data, or the fact that it exists. And it is true, we need a different approach to this kind of exponential increase.
Here, we consider astrology a valid model of the psyche. What is this saying about us?
Modernism embraced Industrialism whether by (statements of) integration say with nature aka Wright’s Waterfall House – a truly elitist structure – or destruction (Picaso’s Guernica).
Either way the statement is solidly grounded in the Industrial Era.
It seems the Post of Modernism carries no name of its own not because it is no different than Modernism (then it would still be Modernism, eh?) but rather it takes the expressions of the Industrial Era further into where I suppose we are now? The Atomic Age when the world is fragmented (and the rules are unclear)? An Era of Chaos, of Question not Answers. Of Dis-integration not Integration. Post-Modernism gives us Chaos without the Theory.
Thanks all, good discussion.
The photo is a self portrait. It was taken in 2005 in Montreal, at a polyamorous coffee clatch at a local cafe. I took it on my first digital SLR camera, a Canon Digital Rebel. I didn’t come back to the concept of postmodernism until Eris.
That said, astrology is distinctly and literally pre-modern, or perhaps one of the first modern things of the ancient world. At its heart, astrology is about narrative — not science.
And my dear Mystes, just to tease you further, the fact that you 1. raised the question “whose thumb is it anyway? and 2. on an astrology blog suggests that you are yourself employing a ‘postmodernist’ approach to looking at things…
There’s hope for you yet my friend…
😉 Indrani
PS: Thanks Eric for taking and posting the photo – I haven’t had this much fun for a long time!
Mystes – yes, the Postmodern movement itself took shape as a critique of Modernism, but the methodology, or rather the thinking behind the methodology is not exclusive to a critique of Modernism. Did eggs not exist before we named them eggs? Of course not. They were always the things we now know as (because that’s the name we gave to them) ‘the egg’. But back to po-mo – the thinking has always been there, then name and the application, yes, they’re ‘new’, but to attempt to place the fundamentals behind po-mo in a doctrinarian, linear framework and claim that this ‘crazy new way of looking at things’ has suddenly been discovered – that’s historically inaccurate, but that is unfortunately the Modernist approach to things – very much linear, doctrinarian, “my way or the highway”. There’s no doubt the concepts behind postmoderism are difficult to get one’s head around, but it is a very different way of looking at things, but in my opinion, the postmodern approach, whilst more time-consuming, offers a far more subtle, nuanced, and I would argue, realistic approach to the relationship between things, and to the way we understand them. Not that different fom astrology or tarot actually.
And I believe the word I used was ‘scholar’, not ‘academic’ – again, two very different things.
Indrani… Your explanations hark back to Featherstone’s critique. Is there a difference? I say yes, but the difference is a question of belief. Modernists had a certain utopic (or atopic) orientation. PM can be said to be a) more comfortable with undecideability of ‘reality’ or b) laughing like hyenas at the very idea of “meaning.”
And listen, Postmodern isn’t misnamed, it *is* a radical critique of Modernism, and arguably started out as an archectural movement. But, and here’s the rub, that Modernism critiqued by PM? it is the one *imagined* by PMism. Not the experience itself, which is every bit as open, fluid, relativistic, situational (French ethics, anyone?) as PM claims to be.
You don’t have to be an academic to weigh in on this. I mean, whose thumb is that, anyway?
As a scholar who employs postmodernist technique, may I weigh in on the argument? I see ‘postmodernism’ as a tool which enables one to see below the surface of things. It’s an unfortunate name as it implies that this methodology somehow came after ‘modernism’. ‘Postmodern’ methodology was indeed so-named because it was a counter to ‘modernist’ thinking which monadic and suggested there was only one way (eg, capitalism was the only way, or industrialism was the only way etc). What we call “Postmodern methodology” can however be seen in texts as ancient as the Hindu Rig Veda, and indeed throughout Hindu texts in general. It could be argued that Marx himself employed postmodern techniques in his work Das Kapital. Similarly, feminism, in looking beyond the surface of things, employed postmodern technique.
Even Dickens, in his novel ‘Hard Times’, employed ‘postmodernist’ techniques when critiquing the stance of Mr Gradgrind. Monadists (under the guise of ‘Modernists’) argue that postmodernism is too ‘relative’, that it doesn’t “take a stance”. My reply to that is that postmodernism is not about “taking a stance”, it is about the relationship between things (hence the title of Foucault’s great work, ‘The Order of Things’), and is inherently a relatavistic approach to society (and indeed every ‘thing’). The “stance” a person takes is relative to their own experiences and belief systems. Postmodernism doesn’t deny anyone the opportunity to adopt a particular position, all it does is explain why, and what factors may have led to that particular position being adopted.
Thanks and regards,
Indrani
Umm… Word, I agree – sorta – except for my experience of all four architectonics. (Going from the general to the specific here) Wright and Renzo Piano’s spaces are still some of the most ‘open’ I’ve ever experienced, and Gehry’s are beautiful, but in terms of corporeality, something of a shambles. So *I* would say that the Modernist space is quite open, and PM is more self-satisfied, even smug in its certainty of the irrational math of space.
Might just be an acquired taste. I love me some Ornette Coleman, but I actually listen to Coltrane.
M
Nice!
Wright and Piano posed questions and gave their answer.
Gehry and Venturi ask new questions but do not suppose the answer.
As Modernism became less art and more a statement of “fact” post-modernism moved like a bubble to hold an opening – space so the void would not close and leave no room for the artist to dwell.
The difference between ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ is the seriousness with which each project takes itself. Modernism had/has an underlying utopian current that is wholly absent in PM.
Think Frank Lloyd Wright (Modernist) or Renzo Piano (contemporary Modernist) vs. Frank Gehry or Robert Venturi.
and then there’s PM as discussed on FB tonight:
Ian:
”I think of the postmodern attitude as that of a man who loves a very cultivated woman and knows that he cannot say to her “I love you madly”, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows he knows) that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland. Still there is a solution. He can say “As Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly”. At this point, having avoided false innocence, having said clearly it is no longer possible to talk innocently, he will nevertheless say what he wanted to say to the woman: that he loves her in an age of lost innocence.” – Umberto Eco
Greg:
Or as Steve Martin says in Roxanne:
“Words are all used up, they are hard to say, they have all been wasted on the shampoo commercials and the ads and the flavorings. Hollow, beautiful words. How can you love a floor wax? How can you love a …diaper? How can I use the same word about you that is used about a stuffing? I am exploding with love, but cannot use the word.
Christine:
Oh for Christs sake, Boys. Tell a woman you love her madly, and say it with conviction, and she WILL melt. Ads be damned. The conviction BEHIND the words is what matters, and she’ll hopefully recognise that conviction.
If she’s not an idiot.
James:
As long as the conviction can be appealed.
Ian:
This was really more about the intrinsically referential nature of post-modernism…
Christine:
See, there, Ian, whispering in her ear about the intrinsically referential nature of post-modernism takes too long.
Christine: . . . which could arguably also be said of the experience of reading a book by Umberto Eco.
Daniel:
Cartland and Eco. For once I am at a loss for words.
Hi aword,
I don’t offer any classes! But thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it. It’s nice to offer things occasionally on the PW Blog. Keep up with your own contributions – it is good to see you so involved and embracing the spirit of this space.
Half
Half. Can I take your class? (I’m dead serious). I have only “intuit” for that which you discuss; you take my breath away with your clarity. Oh but to be a scholar and clear of mind re: this (very large piece of the current) human condition.
So great. Thank you, thank you.
So – is our perceived “overload” of “information” a myth?
————————-
Hi aword,
Both computers and brains have architecture. “Overload” is a great word to use with respect to both. One could envisage a direct bombardment strategy of conscious intention designed to short circuits with information overload. That would be a direct strategy. An indirect, decoying strategy, would be to use emotional overdrive techniques – these are used constantly within the media – reducing issues to emotive topics that flood the brain with emotion reflexes, thus destroying the capacity for reasoned and critical awareness. Both approaches violate brain architecture. This goes on rampantly in all areas of public life and interpersonal relationship and has a huge impact upon personal and collective mental health.
These factors inhibit not only problem-solving abilities but our problem-defining abilities get turned upside down. Consequently, the epithet of “too much information” is an experientially-driven, false conclusion about complexity and its too-much-to-take-on-board gravitas. In fact, the problem is being defined diametrically to the reality which is rather “not enough information” or more specifically “not enough information of sufficient quality”. When a brain, an excellent problem solving device, lacks the key datum/data to sense-make a presenting reality it will attempt to keep solving the problem (in an endless loop) and fail for lack of said crux interpretum. Said addled brain, worn out, will easily be led into a whirl of “too much information” when it is quite the opposite.
So, not merely a myth, but a category error, engaged in due to mis-ascription of the correct organising principle. Brains find it easiest to deal with similarities between things or striking differences. Subtle differences and shades of grey are tougher.
When overwhelmed, the primitive brain is conditioned to react and most problem solving is poorly suited to such reactivity – the brain struggles to recognise what is missing, instead finding it easier to ‘recognise’ the pattern of its own incomplete resolutions as overload – leading to shut down.
“IF we are prepared to shift (maybe radically deconstruct and reconstruct?) our own starting/base presuppositions about the human condition and our own scope for growth.”
Bingo, Half. Totally.
There was a time we considered the world as flat and then we expanded our horizons.
This is a time when we perceive that all we can consume/understand information-wise is a fairly small and finite amount.
Perhaps 1) we can injest more than we ‘think’ and 2) what constitutes “understanding”?
So – is our perceived “overload” of “information” a myth?
Regarding the asteroids, we seem to be in Occam’s razor territory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
However, because the level of complexity (attributable scientific discoveries?) increases in stages, with large leaps followed by periods of consolidation and then.. further large leaps in time, adjustments need to be made in order to keep the narrative quality relevant (or, if you like, up to speed).
Consequently, one may go Occam-esque in a postmodern turn and suggest that astrologers are at liberty to work with whatever level of complexity works best FOR THEM.
On the other hand, as Eric points out (the ironies) in terms of who determines what is construed as scientific, in what contexts, with what significance and for whom – which all implies human choice – we are nonetheless left with the choice of “if extra data is now available, even to exponential levels, can I hand on heart honestly invoke the caveat that I choose the level of complexity that works for me?”
Especially once we fully take on board that science itself is expanding (itself a narrative datum) what we know, and how that ramifies that which grounds us, must we not open up to accepting this new complexity and working with it? – Understanding indeed that the human psyche is not so much an increasingly confusing jungle but a massively expanded playground of opportunities – IF we are prepared to shift (maybe radically deconstruct and reconstruct?) our own starting/base presuppositions about the human condition and our own scope for growth.
Daunting or inspiring? You be the judge.. 😉
“At its heart, astrology is about narrative..”
Has the hero’s journey changed?
Here at PW we are also studying Tarot which is also a “valid model of the psyche” – and a card-based system of the Hero’s Journey aka the Fool’s Journey – which is everywo/man’s story in essence (literally intended).
So I ask as conversation to your point “what is this saying about us?’ : if this quantity of data then is chaos? And are we in turmoil from Chaos because of lack of Discernment? or supression of Creativity?
being given greater perception of the All That Is has never come easily to humankind. Once we get over the hump we think that we always knew what we know (apples falling from trees and ships not tumbling over edges and such).
Anyway, I have no answers – only more questions to your questions.
– ah! must be a water conversation. Love lolling around in the stuff.
We need a theory.
Here is an example. Astronomers can come along and say to astrology fans, “Your system is wrong, there’s a 13th constellation,” and people fall for it.
Or you can say: there are 264,258 known bodies orbiting our Sun other than the eight planets. And nobody “falls for” that. There are so many, they must be meaningless. One of them is Pluto. Another is Eris. Another is Chiron. Another is Vesta. Most astrologers will say, “Oh really? I once read a book on asteroids. I should do more with them.”
Most of our readers have never heard of this at all. Most astrologers have no clue whatsoever how to handle this amount of data, or the fact that it exists. And it is true, we need a different approach to this kind of exponential increase.
Consider the curve:
1801 (1) Ceres
1807 (4) Vesta
1930 (unnumbered) Pluto
1977 (2060) Chiron
1992 (15760) 1992 QB1,
2000 (20000) Varuna
2002 (50000) Quaoar
2005 (134340) Pluto designated minor planet
2005 (136199) Eris
2011 264258 numbered minor planets plus 268308 unnumbered minor planets.
Here, we consider astrology a valid model of the psyche. What is this saying about us?
Modernism embraced Industrialism whether by (statements of) integration say with nature aka Wright’s Waterfall House – a truly elitist structure – or destruction (Picaso’s Guernica).
Either way the statement is solidly grounded in the Industrial Era.
It seems the Post of Modernism carries no name of its own not because it is no different than Modernism (then it would still be Modernism, eh?) but rather it takes the expressions of the Industrial Era further into where I suppose we are now? The Atomic Age when the world is fragmented (and the rules are unclear)? An Era of Chaos, of Question not Answers. Of Dis-integration not Integration. Post-Modernism gives us Chaos without the Theory.
Thanks all, good discussion.
The photo is a self portrait. It was taken in 2005 in Montreal, at a polyamorous coffee clatch at a local cafe. I took it on my first digital SLR camera, a Canon Digital Rebel. I didn’t come back to the concept of postmodernism until Eris.
That said, astrology is distinctly and literally pre-modern, or perhaps one of the first modern things of the ancient world. At its heart, astrology is about narrative — not science.
ef
http://cyber.eserver.org/cybrsoma.txt
And my dear Mystes, just to tease you further, the fact that you 1. raised the question “whose thumb is it anyway? and 2. on an astrology blog suggests that you are yourself employing a ‘postmodernist’ approach to looking at things…
There’s hope for you yet my friend…
😉 Indrani
PS: Thanks Eric for taking and posting the photo – I haven’t had this much fun for a long time!
Mystes – yes, the Postmodern movement itself took shape as a critique of Modernism, but the methodology, or rather the thinking behind the methodology is not exclusive to a critique of Modernism. Did eggs not exist before we named them eggs? Of course not. They were always the things we now know as (because that’s the name we gave to them) ‘the egg’. But back to po-mo – the thinking has always been there, then name and the application, yes, they’re ‘new’, but to attempt to place the fundamentals behind po-mo in a doctrinarian, linear framework and claim that this ‘crazy new way of looking at things’ has suddenly been discovered – that’s historically inaccurate, but that is unfortunately the Modernist approach to things – very much linear, doctrinarian, “my way or the highway”. There’s no doubt the concepts behind postmoderism are difficult to get one’s head around, but it is a very different way of looking at things, but in my opinion, the postmodern approach, whilst more time-consuming, offers a far more subtle, nuanced, and I would argue, realistic approach to the relationship between things, and to the way we understand them. Not that different fom astrology or tarot actually.
And I believe the word I used was ‘scholar’, not ‘academic’ – again, two very different things.
Indrani… Your explanations hark back to Featherstone’s critique. Is there a difference? I say yes, but the difference is a question of belief. Modernists had a certain utopic (or atopic) orientation. PM can be said to be a) more comfortable with undecideability of ‘reality’ or b) laughing like hyenas at the very idea of “meaning.”
And listen, Postmodern isn’t misnamed, it *is* a radical critique of Modernism, and arguably started out as an archectural movement. But, and here’s the rub, that Modernism critiqued by PM? it is the one *imagined* by PMism. Not the experience itself, which is every bit as open, fluid, relativistic, situational (French ethics, anyone?) as PM claims to be.
You don’t have to be an academic to weigh in on this. I mean, whose thumb is that, anyway?
As a scholar who employs postmodernist technique, may I weigh in on the argument? I see ‘postmodernism’ as a tool which enables one to see below the surface of things. It’s an unfortunate name as it implies that this methodology somehow came after ‘modernism’. ‘Postmodern’ methodology was indeed so-named because it was a counter to ‘modernist’ thinking which monadic and suggested there was only one way (eg, capitalism was the only way, or industrialism was the only way etc). What we call “Postmodern methodology” can however be seen in texts as ancient as the Hindu Rig Veda, and indeed throughout Hindu texts in general. It could be argued that Marx himself employed postmodern techniques in his work Das Kapital. Similarly, feminism, in looking beyond the surface of things, employed postmodern technique.
Even Dickens, in his novel ‘Hard Times’, employed ‘postmodernist’ techniques when critiquing the stance of Mr Gradgrind. Monadists (under the guise of ‘Modernists’) argue that postmodernism is too ‘relative’, that it doesn’t “take a stance”. My reply to that is that postmodernism is not about “taking a stance”, it is about the relationship between things (hence the title of Foucault’s great work, ‘The Order of Things’), and is inherently a relatavistic approach to society (and indeed every ‘thing’). The “stance” a person takes is relative to their own experiences and belief systems. Postmodernism doesn’t deny anyone the opportunity to adopt a particular position, all it does is explain why, and what factors may have led to that particular position being adopted.
Thanks and regards,
Indrani
Umm… Word, I agree – sorta – except for my experience of all four architectonics. (Going from the general to the specific here) Wright and Renzo Piano’s spaces are still some of the most ‘open’ I’ve ever experienced, and Gehry’s are beautiful, but in terms of corporeality, something of a shambles. So *I* would say that the Modernist space is quite open, and PM is more self-satisfied, even smug in its certainty of the irrational math of space.
Might just be an acquired taste. I love me some Ornette Coleman, but I actually listen to Coltrane.
M
Nice!
Wright and Piano posed questions and gave their answer.
Gehry and Venturi ask new questions but do not suppose the answer.
As Modernism became less art and more a statement of “fact” post-modernism moved like a bubble to hold an opening – space so the void would not close and leave no room for the artist to dwell.
The difference between ‘modernism’ and ‘postmodernism’ is the seriousness with which each project takes itself. Modernism had/has an underlying utopian current that is wholly absent in PM.
Think Frank Lloyd Wright (Modernist) or Renzo Piano (contemporary Modernist) vs. Frank Gehry or Robert Venturi.