Failure!

Sometimes I have this uncontrollable urge to get my write on. And rather than torture friends and aquiantences with my blabber, my usual MO, I'll dump it here. Because...nobody reads this shit if they are in their right minds!

I was hoping to use this new blog for strictly content. Edited updates of the prior blog. Less bullshit more bull!!!!

So, failure:

Don't we all feel a touch manic at times? Don't we all feel crazy? I know I do. But what does that mean? So many subjective experiences out there. So much hard science.

I wrote something for a List recently about the essence of pomo bullshit. They told me to make it falsifiable. I don't know how you'd create a falsifiable test for people having different views about things and acting upon their views of those things. Isn't that....dead obvious?

But...You could falsify it by making the statement "Everybody perceives the same truth and operates under that absolute observation" and that would be demonstrably false right? So then "Everybody perceives a different truth and operates under their own observations, which are often flawed or incomplete", would be....?

Nobody know everything. Besides perhaps God, and even he's a tad sketchy. So then flawed observation can be seen to be "true". You can know everything relevant tho I think.

The part of Quantum Mechanics that everybody knows is the "know the exact position or know the exact speed, pick one" part. Much like Creationists saying "Well Evolution is just a "theory" it's even called "The theory of evolution" so it's a theory" and being totally wrong...due to what? CONTEXT! There is the QM thing about "the observer effects the event" that folks take to mean "Like dude man dude if like dude you WATCH something man then dude like you can totally effect it man....dude....". Which is totally wrong. Due to what? CONTEXT!

PoMo...first of all, pomo isn't. Pomo isn't anything. Seriously. It's like saying "Christianity". It's a vague collection of weird shit that kinda fits in the same bag. And the size of the bag and what's inside it is determined by the person holding the bag and we've all got our own bags. Some folks which created concepts central to Pomo do not like it to be called Pomo and do not consider it to be Pomo.

Pomo is drawn from literary criticism. That's important to note I think. Because occasionally it seems to cross the line in to other things. Semiotics the study of signs and signifiers is kinda Pomo. But it's broader than that in some ways. But since Pomo doesn't exist, it could include Semiotics if you wanted to put that in your Pomo bag.

Literary Cric. LitCrit. Pomo. From them we get the idea of a book, story, etc, as a "text". Meaning a set of words (signs) that contain meaning. But, I think this is clear, the signs mean subtly different things to different folks.

Frodo does not look like Elijah Wood, nor does Bilbo look like...that actor that played him. Read the books and tell me what they look like to you. Case, the main character from Neuromancer, looks like an idealized Billy Gibson. He's never described in detail in the book, but that's clearly who he looks like. I think his hair is described as "dark" at one point. Brown? Black? Some grey streaks? Dyed a dark color?

Additionally back to the imperfections of perception, I might skip a line by accident. Or misread something and never notice it. I've read Neuromancer several times now. I can remember most of the parts of it. But do I remember all of it? You know the scene where Case walks by a bank of phones and they all ring in turn? Where was that? What did the background to that scene look like? I think it's an airport, maybe Orly, but that might not appear until Count Zero. If I'd not read Count Zero I'd be unlikely to make that assumption.

The Pomo types then extend the interpretation of a text to include...basically anything as text. Additionally while there is a "death of the author" effect. Such that the author is not the definitive arbiter of meaning for the book anymore, once we've read it, we own it, our version of it. That becomes ours and not his. Yay us. Even still, the text then can also be looked at AS the author. What they chose to note or write about, same diff right? What you include in the text is all the text is, so what you chose to put in there is an expression of yourself.

So it can be used to stand in (a sign) for the author and their ideas. Or, rather, you can deconstruct the text, according to your own dumbass ideas, as being different than what it is.

Interesting point here of course is that since you do this deconstruction as a text itself (text doesn't really have to be a set of words frex: it could be the movie Independence Day, terrible movie, wherein Will Smiths character talks trash to a crazy alien after he makes him crash land. This could be an indicator of American Imperialism and our lack of respect for those of other cultures and races. Or this could be an indicator that The Fresh Prince's character is all riled up on adrenaline. Or it could be a throw-away "comedy" line in a movie script. So the movie can be a "text" in Pomo world)then your deconstruction also undergoes the same effect and becomes nothing but another text.

For instance I can rant about how terribly terrible that movie was and lay out the long form bad-ass strict Pomo orthodox style deconstruction and then somebody can come along and say "You're a fucking idiot. It's a "popcorn movie" and doesn't deserve this level of attention." and they'll be right as well. Or at least, they'll have created another text, which is it's own thing. And therefore correct.

This is all very nice and good for blabbering about when using the sort of drugs that are fashionable at the time, but it has serious limitations and those are less addressed.

First is the lie behind the lie. Pomo is about interpreting events in a subjective fashion. It's not about the event itself you see. This is glossed over.

It breaks down like this:
Reality, such as it is, is unknowable to us in it's entirety (us = humans).
This can be debated, but it is generally true. Simple things we can understand, but the more complex they become (this is your "view" essentially, how much you are looking at) the less we can "understand" (meaning integrate functionally).

Example:
Traffic jams occur because people are fucking stupid. This is true.
But did this particular jam right here happen because of...A stupid person? Multiple stupid people? Inattention? Deliberate dumbness? Define traffic Jam anyway. Define stupid.

From there we proceed to this:
Our imperfect knowledge is transmitted to others using imperfect language.

Example:
I love her. Does this convey the ache in my chest that I feel when thinking of her? Would it be more accurate to say "I hurt in my chest when I think of her"? Or would that be less meaningful?
The red car hit the blue car. The red car rolled down the hill, I suspect it's parking brake was not set, backwards, and collided with the blue car as it crossed the intersection, it impacted the passenger side door.


From there we proceed back to basically point 1: Even if you know what they are saying, do you know what they really mean?

Where is all this going you might ask? Straight to HELL jerkface!

The thing then is that the physical world is not the pomo babble world. I know I love her. I feel it. Just because I can't perceive that she doesn't love me. That she's cheating on me. Doesn't make the truth of it any different. I DO love her. Just because I can't explain how that feels to you, doesn't make it less real.

The car hit the other car. We can calc the physics on that. Tho...interestingly, we can't simulate the physics in such a way that we'd duplicate, exactly, the result. To do so would probably require that we destroy the car to fully understand it's structure.

Like that silly chaos theory demo from J Park. We get 3 red cars, 3 blue cars, do the collision 3 times. Always different. Maybe in small ways. But always different. And each unique event is unpredictable in those ways in which it is specifically different.

But, that doesn't mean it's not happening. In fact it means the reverse, by not being like other things it becomes real and unique. We don't go see "an action movie" we go see "Rambo: First Blood: Part One Million" which is distinctly NOT "300".

Pomo is good for certain things. For looking at literature and media phenomenon in particular. Things which are vague and fuzzy already. Things which are already being looked at in many ways by many people.

Pomo only really "looks" at real things. Things which exist regardless of if or how a Pomo-ist has deconstruction-ized it.

Pomo is a tool\toolset for examining view points. It's not real and does not really relate to reality.