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Burke is dead.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 9, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Navel Gazing, Philosophy and Politics
. 7 Comments

Freddie dissects me and comes up short:

…I was sure I had missed something: where was the resolution to Karras’s existential crisis? Where was the moment where she found her access to the truth that frees her from the spiritual emptiness that pure intellect had left her with? I couldn’t find it, and can’t. I find instead her (very understandable) sense of loss at the dissolution of real authority and real certainty, and the choice to embrace foundationalism and its political child, conservatism.

He couldn’t identify the moment where I found “access to the truth” because I didn’t. That is, in a way, the whole point. The problem with that rationalism was the human inability to grasp truth by itself. I spent my time looking for something that I could be sure was true, and I couldn’t find it. I still haven’t. I’m not certain. My realization was not of the truth of anything in particular, but in the fact that I could have meaning without the certainty of truth.

So yes, of course my “ethic is an ethic of necessity, not of truth.” Truth would be lovely. Truth would, I imagine, give me some objective meaning. But meaning also comes from the search.

This is a willed belief in tradition, a knowing choice of old institutions, the inherently meta rejection of the meta. “I had been drowning, and looking back I saw how easy it would have been to latch on to something murderous to save myself.” Not, “the life raft was the reality of Christ/community/tradition/etc”. Instead, the pure pragmatism at grasping at whatever piece of driftwood happened to float by. This is postmodern premodernism, and it has become kind of popular.

I may not have been clear, and in retrospect the whole drowning thing is a dubious analogy. Let me try to explain myself again: when we regard foundationalism as the best way to understand the world, we are desperate for some foundational principle. We will grasp at whatever driftwood floats by. When I thank my lucky stars, it isn’t for the fact that I happened to grab a particularly benign piece of driftwood but that I realized I didn’t have to grab one at all.

How does that work? It segues nicely into Freddie’s questions about tradition and postmodernity:

How can traditionalism survive, when you know that mere human subjectivity is the source of tradition? Conservatism has tradtionally been suspicious, even hateful, of postmodern skepticism towards meta-narratives. I think many of the pomocons believe that they can have the destabilizing nature of postmodernism and yet still knowingly choose the stability of classical forms, traditional mores. But the old school conservatives abhor the postmodern for a reason. They know the limits of willed obediance to the past, they recognize the fragility of any conservatism of choice.

I’m not one of the arbiters of Pomoconservatism, but I’ll give this a shot. My emphasis on tradition is not, God knows, because I discovered that tradition is objectively correct. It’s not even because I’ve decided to think that tradition is objectively correct. (The former is impossible; the latter is lame.) Rather, it’s because tradition does form us, because tradition does give us meaning. We have to examine it and search for truth within it, because if truth is the sort of thing that can be found, that’s the only place we’ll find it.

Freddie is right: you cannot choose to be premodern. Those who have eaten from the tree of knowledge cannot forget. There is something pathetic about the conservatives who try to pretend they missed the Enlightenment. But if a postmodern conservatism does not stick its fingers in its ears (”la la la la, William of Ockham, I can’t heeeeeear you…”), it also does not insist that I have chosen my choice and that’s that.

Postmodern conservatism is a reflection of the fact that the veils have already been stripped off; tradition has already lost its reflexive hold on us. It still shapes us, but we recognize that it is to some degree arbitrary. The values we want to see in the world are informed by our tradition, but because we know that, any attempt at change must be a reflective, self-conscious process.

So what is the project of postmodern conservatism? Is it, as I think Freddie understands it, to justify conservatism in the language of postmodernity? Or is it the first steps towards overcoming?

Happiness is a warm puppy.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 9, 2008
in Extemporanea
. 222 Comments

EDIT: Just to be clear, this is not a video of me. I’m touched by all the comments, but I found the video online and liked it; I’m not a soldier, though I do have two lovely dogs.

This video has made my week. (Title: “My Dogs greeting me after returning from 14 months in Iraq.”)

(Via.)

Elegy for October

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on October 9, 2008
in Media and Politics
. 2 Comments

The West at Yale has the most moving response I’ve seen yet to Tuesday’s Presidential Debate. It’s a lament for the dearth of serious philosophical commentary in this election cycle, in a world in which a Presidential candidate can declare healthcare “a right” and, instead of a public debate about the nature of Rights Language, be greeted with a resounding intellectual silence. It’s a loss that’s been particularly felt since Andrew Sullivan turned into a tabloid scandal hound. The money quote?

I just need some conservative intellectual commentary right now to save me from this election cycle’s demagoguery, and Sullivan is being as unquestioningly partisan as Hannity is for McCain.

Incidentally, the most official endorsement of loose rights terminology that I’ve ever seen was at the Museum of the Red Cross in Geneva. According to the stone inscriptions that greet visitors on entry, prisoners of war have natural rights to Water, Food and … Tobacco. Of course, if access to tobacco is a natural right, may the noble savage light up inside a New York restaurant?

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 8, 2008
in Navel Gazing, Philosophy and Politics
. 75 Comments

I mentioned this “political autobiography” project for class and a few people were interested. I am one of my favorite topics, so I’m happy to share it; find out All About Me after the jump. (I feel very silly about this.) This is more of an attempt to trace my development than the actual content of my thoughts — that’s a much more interesting story.

More…

Object Lesson

Published
by
Dara Lind
on October 6, 2008
in Arts and Extemporanea
. 2 Comments

Often I ask myself: what’s the “tipping point,” new-content-wise, that distinguishes a comment on another blog from a post on this one?

Today I figured out the answer.

Comment: wondering what Alicia Keys is doing in the new James Bond theme.

Post: realizing that — of course! — she’s there because she’s supposed to be Amy Winehouse.

The video makes so much more sense now. The lingering shots of eyelids and wrists. The excessive mic-seducing pouts. The retro-raunchy that keeps its edges so jagged that it turns out retro-pushy — but in a loose, tame way, like a girl lip-synching in front of her mirror.

Seriously, did the James Bond Theme Song Brain Trust rethink anything after jettisoning her? Or did they just try to find two musicians who, if morphed together, might approximate Amy Winehouse — and then, upon deciding that Jack White and Alicia Keys fit the bill reasonably, skip the crucial step of morphing them? (And don’t tell me that’s scientifically impossible. This is the Bond franchise, people.)

I mean, I like the song (almost despite myself), and I guess I appreciate their attempts to think ahead to the (likely near) day when we won’t have her around anymore. But if imitation can’t compare to the real thing, sometimes innovation can’t either.

UPDATE: Okay, so it problematizes my distinction just a little bit to point out that Poulos didn’t see this as worth posting on when he wrote his comment — before I wrote mine — on the original post…

The meta, it burns!

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 5, 2008
in Extemporanea and Yale
. 5 Comments

…and to tide you over until Iqra’i gets a collective handle on schoolwork, social lives, senior essays, jobs, and the increasing amounts of blood in our caffeine system, HuffPo has just posted speeches from September’s YPU debate.

Sadly, no one asked for mine. On the other hand, I have a blog, too, and what could be more democratic than blogging about a debate where I gave a speech about how blogging isn’t democratic?

Ten pages down, ten to go.

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on October 5, 2008
in Navel Gazing, Politics and Yale
. 7 Comments

“La Contre-Révolution ne sera pas une révolution contraire, mais le contraire de la Révolution.” — Maistre.

From the end of my “political autobiography” (for class):

More than anything else, I am concerned with how we think about things, and what that means to us in terms of living both virtuous and fulfilling lives. I’ve long since stopped caring about labels: call me a conservative, a libertarian, a reactionary — just don’t call me late for the counterrevolution.

Now to finish write the other two papers due tomorrow. (Note to my mother: just kidding!)

Coincidence? I think not!

Published
by
Nicola Karras
on September 30, 2008
in Politics
. 0 Comments

Intellectual history is in large part the geneaology of ideas. We try to understand the backdrop, the implicit assumptions, the unconscious past meanings that present use still carries. Sometimes it’s fun to do it to yourself.

Over at LadyBlog, through children’s books, I try.

But what would Sartre have thought of social networking?

Published
by
Dara Lind
on September 20, 2008
in Extemporanea and Media
. 3 Comments

Are you looking for something to add to your Google Reader that isn’t quite as taxing as “Diaries of the Greats: Commemorative Blog Edition” (Pepys; Orwell) but has a bit more intellectual meat to it than, say, that cluster of Mad-Men-character Tumblrs that was hot for about a minute and a half this summer?

I give you “Being and Nothingness: le weblog personnel de Jean-Paul Sartre.”

Mocking the misanthropy of genius hasn’t been this much fun since Strindberg and Helium.

The Pepys/Orwell phenomenon highlights something else, actually: even as the infinite capacity of the Internet has broken all rules regarding a certain kind of time-boundedness — eliminating the tendency of old information to get “buried” under new information, for example (much to the chagrin of Google News and United Airlines) — the rise of blogs has encouraged packaging information in a serialized manner for consumption. Pepys and Orwell aren’t just being reintroduced for the 21st century, but de-archived (in a manner of speaking). Sidestepping the question of whether or not we’d be able to handle reading their diaries at one go these days, it seems like a really solid marketing strategy for targeting people who are mature/stagnant enough in their Web use that they tend toward “checking” rather than “exploring”.

Breaking down is easy

Published
by
Kate Maltby
on September 19, 2008
in If You're Not Postmodern You're Not Paying Attention, Literary Factions, Navel Gazing and Yale
. 1 Comment

One of my new favorite professors, R. Howard Bloch, dropped a few sentences yesterday that overwhelmed me with happiness - suddenly made my ego felt justified in its hyperactivity. We were reading the self-justifying memoir of the great scholastic philosopher Abelard (’im what got ‘is bits chopped off for bonking Heloise) and discussing the spectacular arrogance of a man convinced he was constantly being persecuted by his jealous inferiors. And that’s when Professor Bloch dropped in this:

Paranoia is the purest form of literary criticism. It’s the product of an incessantly interpretive mind. Imposing patterns upon patterns of self reference, it places the self center and everything is filtered through its relationship with the interpreter. And the best thing about is that it’s totally incontrovertible. It’s based purely on a closed system, a set of subjective references set upon each each other.

Apologies if I’ve misworded it in remembrance. It should be obvious why this is great stuff, as a casual extension of work done by 20th century theorists on the ways in which patterns of literary expression manifest the patterns of our psychological processes. For the best examples, see the work of another much beloved professor, Peter Brooks, for whom the Freudian balance between repetition and teleology becomes a model for how narrative prevents a novel’s plot from foreclosing too quickly:

narrative must tend toward its end, seek illumination in its own death. Yet this must be the right death…Deviance, detour…these are characteristics of the narratable…Plot is a kind of arabesque or squiggle toward the end.

But the reason I’m excited about paranoid literary criticism today is that it relates the psychology of the literary critic to the psychology of the blogger. The blogger obsessively creates links upon links, tracing patterns of influence and tracking exactly whence everyone is getting their ideas. A hardcore blogger will find a way to relate every interesting new story back to her own obsessions. Such constantly linkage makes for closed self-referential communities riddled with extensive mutual analysis. Maybe that’s why the sharpest literary critics I’ve known are also the most successful bloggers. It’s all great fun, just like literary criticism and paranoia.