At the Digital Genres conference:
On an anthropological note, one of the interesting things about being in the U.S. is the fact that the academics I meet are completely different from what intellectual people in the rest of the world assume. Just about everybody I’ve talked to here is oppposed to the Bush administration, war on Iraq etc… and feels completely frustrated and powerless about it. Following Laura Trippi’s presentation, a long discussion on how to form a resistance against the current administration (in words). In case you weren’t aware, there is some disagreement over whether the U.S. administration is heavily inspired by Leo Strauss or not. Under that assumption that it is, it was suggested that the basic danger is that Leo Strauss was a neo-Platonist thinker (meaning: “the truth is out there”, I guess).
And this is the other interesting thing – a lot of people here seem to assume that being a poststructuralist (too broad a category!) is “progressive”, “political”, or at least makes the world a better place to be in. For my part, I really can’t ignore that at least philosophical & literary deconstruction was an apolitical reaction to the politicized 1970’s – it really was a shift from politics to culture and aesthetics, though this has somehow been lost in time. I completely agree that if we can make the world a better place by, for example, reconfiguring our notion of truth to be more localized and context-dependent, there is no reason to hesitate. But why is everybody so sure that it works? Isn’t this heaven-sent for anybody who wants to deny that some crime of humanity ever happened? What if it is just used by incompetent leaders as a reason not to take AIDS seriously? If we in a classical critical fashion assume for a moment that we should be wary of ways of thinking that have been used in problematic ways, how can we possibly not take this as a warning that poststructuralism isn’t everything it’s been cracked up to be? So why is most everybody here so damn sure that poststructuralism can save the world?
Skip to content
My name is Jesper Juul, and I am a Ludologist [researcher of the design, meaning, culture, and politics of games]. This is my blog on game research and other important things.
Hmmm. I get a bit lost in some of the academic jargon sometimes; it can be difficult to keep it all straight, but I get what you are saying. The article you linked about Strauss was very interesting because the characature of Strauss that he describes first and then discredits is what I fear is a somewhat accurate description of the deviant political philosophy driving some key players in Washington. The following descriptions of the real Strauss are very close to my own thinking. There is some interesting background on philosophical underpinnings of the truth in the S?derberg paper. There is a basic philisophical riddle where the objective program of science is always grounded in subjective experience, but in the end all this means is that there is a limit to scientific and objective knowledge, but it isn’t really problematic in practice.
The answer to your question is that there is no guarantee that it “works” as you say. It should be obvious by now that the battle for the future is a battle for the truth. Some optimism is justified because the truth is a powerful thing, but it can be manipulated by the powerful. I am basically optimistic because manipulating the truth can only work for so long. The danger is that it could be too late when it finally comes out.
Oh, and I forgot to mention. I don’t know anybody who supports the war, not even my father who is a Retired Captain of the Chicago PD, not a particularly liberal bunch. The support for Bush is razor thin, and I fully expect (hope) that he will lose the next election. I have a $10 bet with my brother in law on the election; he’s to cynical to think he will lose, but he hopes he does.
And finally, a friend that so far I only know on-line recently presented at OSCOM. He is Brittish and commented after about some of the attitudes he encountered, which was more like the link you had at the top. Depends on who you know and encounter.