A lot of guides to living your life with values talk as if you should just have your values at the tip of your tongue, and all that’s needed is to write them down and refer to the list frequently. If your values really are that present, why wouldn’t you already be following them? I think that most people are not in touch with their values. The better guides have introspection exercises to reveal them.

Introspection is untrustworthy: a lot of crazy philosophy, psychology and religion has come out of very smart people doing introspection. I especially don’t trust introspection for this kind of thing. It will yield a combination of society’s values (the metanarrative), the unrealistic person you’d like to be (superman’s values) and values that other people are pushing on you (mom’s values).

I don’t believe that people have intrinsic, unchanging values, but introspection will not even give insight to your socially-constructed self. Postmodernism says that not only is the self not fixed, but it’s fuzzier and less solid than we think it is. (And we think that our selves are sharp and solid because of introspection.)

Instead, you need to observe yourself to reveal values in your behavior. Rather than identifying the values you’d like to live by, I think it’s better to identify the values you actually are living by. Observing yourself without falling into the trap of introspection is hard: it’s easier to observe other people and get other people to observe you.

I am quite interested in what I call “postmodern identity theory”. I’ve tried to define it a few times in blog posts (most recently) but I’m mostly just waving my hands around. Here’s another try:

Modernist identity theory says that people have fundamental attributes that they carry around with them throughout life. In early-modern theory these attributes were shared by a group, so Brits would act British rather than go native in the colonies. Late-modern theory says that fundamental attributes differ from person to person – they’re what make people unique.

Exactly how we characterize fundamental attributes has gone through a few changes over the years. From mission and principles to values in the most recent shift.

When you see someone do something, you can either say they’re reacting to their situation or acting according to their fundamental attributes. Your theory of mind says that sometimes people do stuff because they have consistent, internal attributes; and sometimes their behavior is dictated by a context-dependent, external situation. Psychologists have noted that, when in doubt, you’ll err on the side of fundamental attributes. You think Alice does X because Alice is the kind of person who does X not because X seemed like the best thing to do from Alice’s point of view.

Postmodernism says that modernist identity theory is just one big fundamental attribution error. People don’t have fundamental attributes. Alice does X because she’s socially constructed that way.

I have half a Baccalaureate in Philosophy. But since it’s a joint degree, there were low breadth requirements. So I know my Aristotle, Berkeley and Carnap, but not a whole lot about continental philosophy.

Since graduation, I’ve been trying to fill in those blanks. I don’t feel that I have the interest nor the time build a foundation of orthodox modernism* and modernist critical theory, and then apply the dialectic method to learn postmodernism from that, so I read postmodern stuff without the prerequisites.

I’m particularly interested in postmodern identity theory. It has been said that late modern and postmodern philosophy is all “footnotes to Kant“. It turns out that Kant laid the foundation for what I consider postmodern identity:

Kant says that things have a phenomenal nature, which you can perceive, and a noumenal nature that is unknowable. Your noumenal self is basically your “soul” or core self, but you can only perceive your phenomenal self, which is socially constructed. Morality rests on the rational free will of noumenal selves.

But Nietzsche says that noumenal things are a meaningless fiction: since they have no properties, the world can be entirely explained in terms of phenomenal things. So we are all just bundles of constructed identities and moral relativism is king.

Science is notoriously hard to read. When I feel like defending this, I say that scientists are not writing for you and me, they’re writing for their colleagues. The job of scientists is not to explain science, it’s to do science. It’d be nice if our society had someone whose job it was to explain science, but there’s no one who does that job adequately (especially people with journalism degrees).

Philosophy is also notoriously hard to read. The defence I usually give is that philosophy is hard to write about because the concepts are not intuitive, otherwise the reader would have already figured it out on their own. Most philosophy is actually written in the style of saying the same relatively-simple idea over and over again in different complicated ways, because philosophers can’t figure out how state it simply.

But unlike science, philosophy studies things that are important to everyone.* So it’s not just unfortunate if everyone can’t read it, it may not be useful to do philosophy if it can’t be widely communicated. I recently found a great statement of this argument in a review of an influential cultural studies book titled The Practice of Everyday Life:

De Certeau’s text claims to address the roles [of] “average people” yet his style creates a virtually impenetrable barrier to any “average people” ever benefiting from his ideas. His writing style consistently maintains this elitist and arrogant attitude in which he postures as the high priest: only those willing to pass the “trial by reading” which he poses are admitted into the sacred circle of his wisdom.

* Even metaphysics: if I need to follow certain rules or face eternal damnation, I’d like to know that sooner rather than later.

My friend Tara recently wrote an excellent summary of what a neo-Marxist revolutionary does. My summary is that neo-Marxists believe that the majority of us live under a false meta-narrative, believing that our alienation is either desirable or has no alternative. (This sounds a lot more like The Matrix than Baudrillard does, eh?) The neo-Marxists (and Tara uses the Situationist flavour of neo-Marxist jargon) attempt to raise our consciousness by doing stuff like avant-garde art.

I don’t really get neo-Marxism, while I do dig postmodernism, so I see the situation through a postmodern lens: The neo-Marxists are incredulous to the dominant meta-narrative (ie: work is good) but see their own meta-narrative (ie: wacky stuff is good) as more authentic. Postmodernism says that all meta-narratives are not credible and the craving for the authentic is part of the late-modern meta-narrative, so the neo-Marxists are part of the system they’re attempting to overthrow. (The highly accessible text that introduced me to this idea is The Rebel Sell.)

Like every other gynosexual man (and, I suspect, most if not all of everyone else) in my culture, when I look at a woman I employ The Male Gaze. This isn’t intentional, I don’t say “hey, look, it’s a woman: I’d better turn her into an object! shoop-da-whoop“, it’s just something I’ve been trained to do by being raised in this culture. On an intuitive level I consider it somewhat harmless (just because I briefly consider having sex with you doesn’t mean I don’t respect you), but rationally it’s rather repulsive.

This New York Times article titled What Do Women Want? has been widely circulated in the blogosphere. The first two-thirds of it are modernist science stuff that you’ve probably already heard: vaginal lubrication does not equal mental arousal, etc. The bottom section, though, summarizes a surprising theory from a Canadian (now teaching at the University of Nevada) social-constructionism psychologist named Marta Meana: women get turned on when they are regarded as sexual objects. In fact, women get turned on by observing other women being sexually objectified or when they themselves have the potential to be sexually objectified.

This says that womens’ eroticism is not primarily in the mind, as is commonly supposed. But it’s not in the body exactly, either. Instead, as the existentialists would say, woman’s erotic identity is in her relation to The Other. And because he is more different, the “best” Other is Man.

Artists and architects (or at least academics and historians thereof) have an insatiable need to label minute trends in their disciplines. As a result, the “postmodern period” in art took place during the summer of 1978 or something like that. In contrast, in philosophy and the social sciences, postmodernism started with/after Kant and is still slowly gathering steam. The (otherwise unremarkable) pop-architecture book The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of Cities has a nice line about the difference:

Postmodernism has now been given a rather different implication and weight by sociologists and geographers, who are concerned with the way categories of knowledge develop within late capitalist society in harness with power and privilege.

This is a Foucaultian view in its emphasis on the study of power-relations. I have only recently come across the idea that postmodernism is an ontological pursuit (what exists?) compared to modernism as an epistemological pursuit (what can we know?), so I can’t say more about that.

I’m sitting on the bus listening to politics grad students make fun of a researcher who compared Marx and Foucault using a scientific methodology. It’s called ideology: deconstruction is no better a source of truth than science in the eyes of postmodernism.

I often wonder if I’d be better off in school rather than trying to teach myself postmodern theory. These students have allayed my fears. Like all modernist institutions, academia is chiefly concerned with the accumulation and practice of power, not the pursuit of “truth”.

Karen snapped this today:

I love it for a couple of reasons.

First, it exists at several removes from any kind of reality. The box originally contained a ceramic coffee cup in the shape of a paper coffee cup, which is itself a proxy for a ceramic coffee mug. So we’ve replaced a mug with a proxy (paper cups) then made an ironic simulation of the proxy (ceramic “paper” cups) and replaced that proxy-simulation with a proxy purporting to be a simulation (the paper cup “speaking” through the text on the box — yes, it’s also anthropomorphic). Then we made an image of it in addition to the image on the box itself.

If you followed that, follow this:

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.

Karen was able to take that picture, therefore objective Truth does not exist and we are probably living in the Matrix[*].

Second, it reminded me of The Treachery of Images, but it’s a little more treacherous. Sure, the photographic image isn’t a paper cup, but if you think of it as sculpture it gets weirder. The box is not a paper cup, but what’s inside it actually is (though the box goes into detail about how it’s not). The work is telling us the truth and lying to us simultaneously.

Third, it’s all empty. What we’re looking at is packaged packaging. The box used to contain a cup, the cup used to contain coffee, but it’s actually all empty. In a sense nothing is there.

But by wrapping the wrapper in a wrapper the nothing becomes enough of a something that people were still looking at it after we left our copy of the Seattle simulation of an Italian coffeehouse. It made me wonder at the extent to which we ascribe meaning to packaging: It doesn’t look like garbage, does it? It’s lying to us again, semiotically.

Doesn’t the boxed cup look too important, too much like an “official” object to throw out? But we know the secret: It’s actually empty garbage appropriating the symbolism of Consumerism, which makes it politically ironic — Why did we fetishize the permanent masquerading as the disposable in the first place?

Symbol-stealing packaged empty packaging truth-lying to us about it’s contents: “I’m a simulated proxy! Or am I?”

A fantastic piece that has absolutely nothing to do with coffee.

[*: Re-reading this in the morning I realized how insane it sounds. Baudrillard was criticized, perhaps rightly, for saying "hyperbolic and declarative" things like that. On the surface I'm playing with hyperbole too -- that argument doesn't work, however I do believe that all of its components should be fiercely wrestled with.]