thought on pomo

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Post-modernism is essentially, talking about talking about,
people. It is somewhat like taking the Nth derivitive in
calculus, trying to pin down the rate of change of the rate of
change of the rate of change, etc... trying to get down to the
rate of change of of the rate of change of the way we talk about
people.
Why is this talking about talking about people so important
in the social sciences? In anthropology? Well, in essence, it
is because we cannot put people into cyclotrons and accelerate
them to near the speed of light and smash them into little bits
and see what they are made of. We can only talk about what might
happen to to them if we could.
We cannot do controlled experiments on whole populations of
people, we have to rely on people to do the experiments on
themselves. As a result we, as social scientists, cannot
establish the controls on such experiments according to some
agreed upon standard. We have to rely on the people to do that,
and as a result, we debate the nature of the controls. Hence,
more talking about talking about people, more debate on what Nth
derivative rate of change is a control and what Nth derivative is
a result.
Take sex, as many people do, including Foucalt. Is the way
we talk about sex determinate of the way we behave sexually, or
the other way around? Which is going to be the control and which
is going to be the result, the way we talk about sex or the way
we behave sexually? Neither, you might say, the two are so
inextricably linked that they cannot be seperated, thus we are
left with only talking about talking about sex, or the
arbitrariness of our decision where the rate of change in the way
we talk about sex is kept in pace with the rate of change in the
way we behave sexually, neither (apparently) determining the
other.
Is this an aceptable way to do social science? Hell no! If
all the people we study did was talk about the way they talk
about sex, pretty soon there would be no people to study.
Obviously people are doing a lot more than talking about talking
about sex, they are having a lot of sex and a lot of children to
go along with it. There may be a good question in there about
why people talk about sex the way they do and why we talk about
the way people talk about sex, but I doubt the answers to such
questions will actually get down to the bare essentials.

vance geiger
vance@ufcc.ufl.edu

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