I like the version of this comment on his site better, so have copied it here in place my original:
Professor
This seemed to me to perhaps be a useful comment for some readers on some topics in this post. I posted it on my site, but here it is, only slightly revised, if you care to publish it here too:
"...Her essay, a serious piece of postmodernism, begins at the beginning and tries to distill the essence of Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida, with particular attention to their view of the relationship between language and reality. Language, they argued, did not and could not objectively reflect reality, but served as a tool to situate people of different kinds within a hierarchy of power. I would add, although she does not say this, that many postmodernists, consciously or unconsciously, have come to regard language as the only meaningful form of power, and indeed, to reduce real political events--up to and including the Second World War--to symbolic statements about power that resonate in people's memories (another favorite term.)..." DK
The relationship between language and reality or realities is not especially either close, synonymous, analogous, suggestive, isomorphic, etc., etc., etc.
It is certainly not tantamount solely to a tool to situate people of different kinds within a hierarchy of power, or as the only meaningful form of power,...
Wittgenstein, who had tried, among others, early in his life, to describe a very close logical and pictorial relationship between language, perception, and the factual world (not reality; and definitely not the world strictly of power), had later come to a very different description of the role of language. This view also has its limitations, but it is useful to counter a plain reductionist theory of language as reducible to power, or vice versa, power reducible to language:
"65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations.-For someone might object against me: "You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language."
And this is true.-Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,-but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language". I will try to explain this.
66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? -- Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games' "-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. -- For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! --"
Professor
This seemed to me to perhaps be a useful comment for some readers on some topics in this post. I posted it on my site, but here it is, only slightly revised, if you care to publish it here too:
"...Her essay, a serious piece of postmodernism, begins at the beginning and tries to distill the essence of Lyotard, Foucault, and Derrida, with particular attention to their view of the relationship between language and reality. Language, they argued, did not and could not objectively reflect reality, but served as a tool to situate people of different kinds within a hierarchy of power. I would add, although she does not say this, that many postmodernists, consciously or unconsciously, have come to regard language as the only meaningful form of power, and indeed, to reduce real political events--up to and including the Second World War--to symbolic statements about power that resonate in people's memories (another favorite term.)..." DK
The relationship between language and reality or realities is not especially either close, synonymous, analogous, suggestive, isomorphic, etc., etc., etc.
It is certainly not tantamount solely to a tool to situate people of different kinds within a hierarchy of power, or as the only meaningful form of power,...
Wittgenstein, who had tried, among others, early in his life, to describe a very close logical and pictorial relationship between language, perception, and the factual world (not reality; and definitely not the world strictly of power), had later come to a very different description of the role of language. This view also has its limitations, but it is useful to counter a plain reductionist theory of language as reducible to power, or vice versa, power reducible to language:
"65. Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations.-For someone might object against me: "You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language."
And this is true.-Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,-but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language". I will try to explain this.
66. Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all? -- Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not be called 'games' "-but look and see whether there is anything common to all. -- For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look! --"
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