From: Matt the Enraged Endorphin (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Mar 31 2003 - 19:15:42 BST
Sam,
Sam said:
Hmm. I don't think 'meta-narratives' have to be essentialist, although
obviously the dominant one precisely IS. How would you relate
'meta-narratives' and 'final vocabularies'? I would say they are different
aspects of the same thing, although, because we are fundamentally
story-telling creatures (that is how we discern meaning) I prefer
'meta-narrative'. The vocabulary is, of course, the words making up the
story. So for me, the meta-narrative is the bedrock of your perspective,
beyond which you cannot go. (What Wittgenstein calls the 'inherited
background against which you judge true and false' - the full quote was in a
post a couple of days ago). That bedrock is bound up with all sorts of
pre-conscious and pre-rational perspectives, language-games, mythologies
etc. We can mine into it to gain a deeper awareness, but I don't think we
can escape from it (occasionally Wittgenstein talks about language as a
prison or a cage, that's what he means, I think).
Matt:
As Fredric Jameson put it, the "prison-house of language." On
metanarratives, I think we're on the same page, we're just calling what
we're referring to different things. As I'm seeing it, a "final
vocabulary" are those words that populate a person's narrative, the story
they tell about their lives. Wittgenstein is exactly right, the final
vocabulary is the "background against which you judge true and false." As
I think Lyotard and Rorty have it, the move from local narratives to
metanarratives is exactly the move towards essentialism. It's when you
take a particular local narrative and final vocabulary and say that that
narrative and vocabulary are what sits behind all other narratives and
vocabularies. If you don't make that move, then you can still say you are
an historicist and are dealing with local narratives. For instance, an
historicist could still look for similarities between vocabularies and
narratives and maybe even reduce them to the lowest common denominator for
such and such a purpose. It's only when you say that all vocabularies
reduce to this or that denominator that you are making an essentialist
move. So, I think we are on the same page, particularly when you say, "we
are fundamentally story-telling creatures."
I've got both the Postmodern Condition and On Certainty on my shelf. I've
read part of Lyotard's book and it's certainly a good read. With
Wittgenstein I keep hoping for a class to appear that I could read his
books with. Something to help along my understanding of him so I don't
accidently gloss over a difference between him and pragmatists. If I'm
gonna' gloss, it might as well be purposeful ;-)
Matt
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