Monday, July 18, 2005
Four Challenges to Postcolonial Theory:
As I've said before, I don't "follow" any particular philospher of science (Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, etc.), but, as I note in the comments, I assumed that literary folk were familiar with them. When I read that passage I was rather disoriented. It seems to imply that:
1 - Even my interactions with friends who do graduate work in mathematics does not suggest to me that they are automatons at the service of axioms, inexorably ground down by the "logic" of their work. The finish product is certainly clean, but the process is filled with intuitional leaps and hunches from what I can gather. 2 - It is through testing and reproducibility that we get through the slop of misimpression and error. The problem that I have with many Literary Theorists and other assorted humanistic scholars who employ "Theory" is that I don't get a strong sense that they are studying anything aside from their own circular suppositions. In other words, it resembles pure mathematics, but without formal rigor or felicitous applicability in modeling the universe we see around us. I do not think it necessary that humanists should all strike the perfectly rationalistic pose that some analytic philosophers do, I simply wish, for lack of a precise phrase, that people like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would help us engage the world transparently and learn to love life with innocence, rather than being tied down by tangled ropes of faux-verbal unmeaning. If they so often did not have the title "Ph.D." their words would indicate to me that they abominate sincere cognition altogether. They strike me as modern day analogs to the fakirs and ascetics who the Buddha initially sought wisdom from, before realizing that their self-denial and flagellation was futile. |