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"If you've seen that bumper sticker, you've seen what our culture has made of one of the central ideas in Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, published 50 years and 1.4 million copies ago. For the marketers and boosters of personal transformation who casually talk about paradigm shifts, the phrase designates not just a gestalt switch that casts things in a new light, but a world so insubstantial that it can be thoroughly transformed by a single idea. Tomorrow there may be another paradigm shift, and another after that. There is thus no real progress, just a new bubble as good as the old bubble."
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Kuhn rejected our old metaphysics—consciousness consists of an inner representation of an outer reality—as incoherent, impossible, and fundamentally inhuman. That's why he begins SSR by invoking history not as a discipline that can be applied to science, but as a necessary part of scientific understanding. All understanding is historical, and no human project escapes the characteristics of history-based humanity: fallible, limited, impure of motive, social, and always situated in a culture, a language, and a time. Not even science with its method and its formulas. Our very words have meaning not because of a set of definitional rules, Kuhn thought, but because they are based on ostensive exemplars, paradigms. Our age, characterized by a Network that refuses to keep ideas, communication, and sociality apart, is making manifest the messy, inescapable humanness of all of our endeavors.
The problems that dominated Kuhn's life after his great moment of insight arose not because Kuhn wasn't brilliant enough. Rather, they arose and persist because while we increasingly understand that the old metaphysical paradigm has failed, for several generations now we have not found our new paradigm. Our culture has inappropriately latched on to Kuhn's message as an exaltation of the rootless disconnection of our ideas from the world because we were ready to hear that knowledge is not apart from our knowing of it. But he and we have not yet come to a new shared understanding about what it means to live truthfully as humans.
"As you can see from the chart, the percentage of Americans who had a “great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the news media has declined from over 70 percent shortly after Watergate to about 44 percent today.
Why? That is my question in this post."
"In addition to ambiguity, Age of Fracture exudes ambivalence, a moral position neither for nor against our age. Like the modernists, Rodgers sees no point pretending we can go back to the way it was. But like the antimodernists, Rodgers is unsettled by the present condition."
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Coase’s Noble-prize winning argument went as follows: since social efficiency is best achieved when two parties are left alone to bargain their way out of their conflicting positions, civil litigation need not be weighed down by such quaint considerations as justice. Rodgers’s concise critique then follows as such: “The social good was a maximization problem in aggregate market value: crops and cattle, property values and pollution-abatement costs, not, he had been candid enough to say, any close assessment of who stood best to bear the pain of the compromise or how unequally matched their resources might have been at the outset.” The precision with which Rodgers implicitly unmasks the most significant problem with Coase’s crude brand of utilitarianism, that in failing to account for historically-rooted power imbalances it empowers those best positioned to benefit from the “free market,” works in microcosm as an argument against the microeconomic impulses that define the age of fracture: the seemingly neutral application of microeconomics, the prototypical weak reading of society, to theretofore macro-problems, is anything but neutral.
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In making his devastating critique of conservative anti-structuralist thought, Rodgers shows that structural notions of power mattered where weak readings of society led to conservative conclusions. Coarse could only make the case that aggregate social efficiency should be the judicial system’s core objective by deflecting structural inequality, the consideration of which required giving thought to concepts infused with history, such as justice. Murray could only argue that welfare destroyed incentives for poor people to find jobs by ignoring the structural causes of unemployment, such as the trade policies that decimated the urban-industrial job sector, thus impoverishing large pockets of inhabitants in cities across the nation. Hand could only contend that the Constitution did not stipulate for incorporation by thinking of the document as devoid of history, by erasing two centuries of American jurisprudence that had ineluctably given constitutional law new meaning.
"In The Age of Fracture, Daniel Rodgers offers an elegant, often eloquent, history of intellectual life in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Primarily interested in the construction of ideas that shaped conceptions of history, society, and responsibility, he analyzes texts from an eclectic array of academic thinkers across the political spectrum. Rodgers argues that in the 1940s and 1950s, social scientists and political philosophers established the terms of the debate on a range of issues concerning the self and society, obligations and justice, morality and destiny. To these postwar intellectuals, ideas had severe consequences, contexts and nature constricted human action, and history loomed very large indeed. While the turmoil and chaos of the 1960s caused tremors, it was not until the quakes of oil embargoes, unemployment, and inflation in the 1970s, that fault lines in this ideological consensus emerged. Into this breach, a lexicon of microeconomic principles, which had been forming for decades in libertarian circles that stressed agency, contingency, and reason emerged, promising solutions to seemingly intractable problems of disco-era stagflation. Instead of focusing on property and production, workers and owners, these economists celebrated instead the slight of (an invisible) hand that produced wealth and fostered the virtues of competition."
Internationally renowned artist Robert Irwin, an environmental artist and sculptor who launched the light and space movement, speaks on abstraction, perception and reality. His lecture was the Dominique de Menil Lecture of the 1999-2000 President's Lecture Series.
in list: Modern Art
Mark Greif’s piece on the “big, ambitious novel” is a great article—ambitious, inventive, and important. Greif begins:
Criticism works by criteria it is willing to name and others it disowns. The “big, ambitious novel” is one of those categories used by nearly everyone to sift and sort new work. Yet it is not respectable. It is more common to conversation than to professional discourse…
The category of the "big, ambitious novel," circumscribing works by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, and William Vollmann, has come to constitute one of the major forms through which postwar U.S. fiction is sorted and evaluated. A history of this form must not start in the 1970s, however, nor with distant forerunners such as James Joyce's Ulysses, but from 1945. After the Second World War, critics and novelists negotiated the sort of literature that would count as great after the end of high modernism, in service of a new humanism. The novels Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison and The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow succeeded stylistically and thematically where Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and William Faulkner's A Fable did not. They offered a new vitality to overcome critics' discourse of the "death of the novel" and probed new forms of human peculiarity that managed fears of the decline of the will of "man." This long history helps to extend our understanding of the origins and significance of interminable and system-centered fictions denounced by critics such as James Wood as mere "hysterical realism." It reorients contemporary criticism of these books to the shared, credible subjects of enforced liveliness and endlessness in narration, and a longer-term questioning of the human in a wider range of American fictions. It also shows how the novelists' apparent betrayal of humanist concerns actually emerged from earlier stages of interaction between novelists and mistrustful critics.
State governments are shutting down interstate rest-stops because of money woes and competition from KwikMats and McDonalds.
Note by contrast that the period of gung-ho globalization, which we may date from the early 1990s on, presented no improvement over the preceding post-war arrangements.
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