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Re: Dan Fan
Christopher Pound (pound@IS.RICE.EDU)
Fri, 8 Apr 1994 18:32:53 -0500
> What is the real intellectual value of the post-modern approach in all its
> variety, for the advancement of the human condition?
Perhaps that it ridicules such utopian or progressivist questions for having,
despite all "good intentions," provided all the justification needed to
sustain a perpetual cycle of crisis, conflict, and confrontation. Perhaps
that it hasn't forgotten the _ethos_ (character of the speaker) or the _pathos_
(character of the audience) and become lost in nothing but _logos_ (structure
of argument). Perhaps that it pushes aside that modernized, unhappy
consciousness that has been the product of Enlightenment and been left
miserable in that it simultaneously accepts all critiques of ideology but is
unaffected by any of them. Perhaps that it shouts to the world that academic
dialogue is nothing but a farce and rejects the politics of rebuttal as
nihilistic, favoring instead the discordant harmony of a good conversation.
But then, any of these things mainly asks only whether your question was ever
really a question at all.
--
Christopher Pound (pound@rice.edu) | They think they are Parisians, but
Department of Anthropology, Rice U. | they are nothing. -- Pierre Bourdieu
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