HITALTCAASHR, Part 1.2: Annie Dillard on modernist fiction · 2:21am May 4th, 2017
(Continued from Part 1.)
In my last post I wrote only about literary fiction. "Literary" means "the right university professors and journal and newspaper editors say this is a good book." Literary fiction matters not because people actually read literary fiction--they don't; Man Booker Award finalists sell 3,000-25,000 copies or so--than because of the cultural importance of those books. The professors and publishers get to say what "our culture" values by stamping it "literary", and the values endorsed by literary fiction slowly work their way down the cultural food chain to pundits, politicians, bloggers, artists, genre novelists, musicians, filmmakers, and TV shows, and finally into the public at large.
American English in 1967
Today's post is a digression in fairness. I was beginning a story of how leftist ideologists took over English departments and journals in the US, starting in the late 1960s, and turned them into industrial radical-leftist factories which operate by enforcing ideological purity and by teaching a philosophy designed to destroy peoples' ability to think.
If I leave it at that, it sounds like a crime against humanity. But the thing is, nobody was really using America's English departments at the time anyway.
What follows is my own hypothetical reconstruction of events I did not witness, based mostly on written and oral accounts of the times.
The only literary theory journal I know of that was publishing in the 1960s and is still publishing today is College English. If you look through its archives at the titles of papers published in the 1960s, you'll see that they seldom printed papers on any literature written since 1930. College classes were at the time dominated by New Criticism, or at least they thought they were. (Nearly everyone misinterpreted New Criticism--a topic for some other post.) New Criticism was difficult and rigorous, and students didn't like it. It did not indulge in emotional endorsement or rejection of literary works, which are mostly what college sophomores want to do.
And students wanted to talk about contemporary fiction. College classes in the 1960s forced students to do "dry" (their words) technical analysis of old, canonical poems and novels. IMHO New Criticism would have been great training for would-be novelists, but colleges didn't see that as their purpose at the time the way MFA and Creative Writing programs do today. Publishing for money was at the time (even more) disreputable, something that smacked of Charles Dickens.
In any case, the sort of fiction one could learn to write from New Criticism was already not the sort one could publish. 1960s literary fiction was late modernism being taken over by postmodernism. Leftists didn't turn publishing "literary" fiction into an exercise in ideological conformity; the modernists had already done that. But college classes were taught by old people, and university chairs were held by older people, many of whom resisted Modernism, at least the stuff after Joyce and Eliot.
So when the big push to politicize English departments came in 1967 and 1968, there was already an army of modernists and post-modernists struggling to get their views onto campus. At the same time, Marxist economics professors and Freudian psychology professors were looking for work, as both were then being kicked out of their departments for not being sufficiently scientific. The resulting alliance between radical student leftists, post-modernists, and Marxist and Freudian professors was inevitable, and the New Critics were soon gone.
Living by Fiction
To get an idea what modernist fiction was like before leftists added multiculturalism to the mix, I'm going to quote from Annie Dillard, who wrote about that type of fiction 35 years ago, in Living by Fiction (1982).
Dillard is a famous novelist who didn't write any famous novels. Her best-known work is non-fiction, such as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It's a fair guess that she wrote so much non-fiction because she knew she couldn't get her uplifting, sentimental passages published as literary fiction at the time.
It's a wonderful, insightful book, so don't take this as a review. Dillard loved much modernist fiction, and did not write Living by Fiction to denounce it, not quite. But she was growing tired of it by the 1980s, and felt very constrained as an author. The book is her analysis of the problem, and how authors can cope with it. What I'm going to do, unfairly to Dillard, but quite fairly to the fiction she was criticizing, is quote bits where she talks about the problems with late modernist fiction. I'll boldface the most-important parts. Notice none of this has any obvious connection to leftist politics.
Nothing is more typical of modernist fiction than its shattering of narrative line. Just as Cubism can take a room full of furniture and iron it onto nine square feet of canvas, so fiction can take 50 years of human life, chop it to bits, and piece those bits together so that… we can consider them all at once. This is narrative collage. The world is a warehouse of forms which the writer raids: this is a stickup. [p. 20-21]
If and when the arrow of time shatters, cause and effect may vanish, and reason crumble. This may be the point. [p. 22]
Narrative collage, and the shifting points of view which accompany it, enable fiction to make a rough literature of physics, a better "science fiction" which acknowledges the quality of all relative positions… One extreme of this kind of fiction is an art without center. The world is an undirected energy; it is an infinite series of random possibilities. (Barthelme ends "Views of My Father Weeping" with a section which reads only "Etc.") The world's coherence derives not from a universal order but from any individual stance…. It is not really physics but ordinary relativism. [p. 23]
Our contemporary questioning of why we are here find a fitting objective correlated in the worst of the new fictions, whose artistic recreation of our anomie, confusion, and meaninglessness elicits from us the new question, Why am I reading this? … Some contemporary modernist fiction can claim, Yes, it does mean; it re-creates in all its details the meaninglessness of the modern world. And I cry foul. When is a work "about" meaninglessness and when is it simply meaningless?
… The question is, what is negative art? … What can a writer do when his intention is to depict seriously a boring conversation? Must he bore everybody? How should he handle a dull character, a hateful scene? … How can a writer show, as a harmonious, artistic whole, times out of joint, materials clashing, effects without cause, life without depth, and all history without meaning? [p. 26-27]Contemporary modernist writers flatten their characters by handling them at a great distance, as if with tongs. They flatten them narratively. They flatten them, as Robbe-Grillet does, by treating them as sense objects alone, as features of landscape. A writer may show his characters' speeches and actions without the faintest trace of motivation, so that we watch the scenes as strangers, as if we were freshly air-dropped into Highland, New Guinea. The speeches and actions of such characters seem random, unwilled, or absurdist. [p. 37] … Such characters tend to be less human simulacra, less rounded complexities of deep-seated ties and wishes, than focal points for action or idea. Pynchon people are lines of force. Some Nabokov characters are literally chessmen. Borges characters may be ideas. [p. 39-40]
[Speaking of the modernist dictum that art must create an aesthetic distance between the work and its viewer:] If telling a good story engages readers, then it stands to reason that you can effectively distance readers by telling a bad story. Say what you will of Finnegans Wake, it is a lousy story. [p. 45]
Narration, then, in the name of purity, can go the way of character. It is optional. It is suspect: recently Richard Lingeman, writing in The New York Times, accused the ending of a novel of being "plotty." … Telling a story is not at all impossible if the writer wants to; but for contemporary modernist writers, it is getting increasingly impossible to want to. At any rate, there are forms of fiction in which no story is told at all. …
In the contemporary modernist view, a work of art is above all a chunk in the hand. It is a self lighted opacity, not a window and not a mirror. It is a painted sphere, not a crystal ball. The reader, then, must not wholly enter such a work of fiction; if he enters it emotionally, he will be lost, and miss the work's surface, where the framework of its meaning as art is spread. So the contemporary modernist fiction writer deliberately flattens the depth elements of his art. He replaces emotional strengths with intellectual ones. He makes his characters into interesting objects. He flattens narrative space time by breaking it into bits; he flattens his story by fragmenting its parts and juxtaposing disparate elements on the page. He writes in sections; he interrupts himself by a hundred devices. In so doing, he keeps his readers fully conscious [of] his work's surface. Finally, he may wish to distance readers so thoroughly that he dispenses with character and narration altogether.
In The Voices of Silence, Andre Malraux likens storytelling in literature to representation in painting. Telling a story and painting a likeness of a face or a tree are sure-fire crowd-pleasers. (And for the idea of crowd-pleasing Malraux displays a fine Gallic contempt, in which he illogically does not include either storytelling or representation themselves.) … The more interesting comparison between storytelling in literature and representation in painting is this: that each was considered for centuries the irreducible nub of its art, and is no longer. [p. 46-47]This, then, is contemporary modernist fiction. Its themes are its own artfulness and pattern, and the nature of a world newly elusive and material, and a mind newly aware of its limits, and an imagination newly loosed. Technically as well as thematically it has taught us to admire the surfacing of structure and device. It prizes subtlety more than drama, concision more than expansion, irony more than earnestness, artfulness more than versatility, intellection more than entertainment. It concerns itself less with social classes than with individuals, and, structurally, less with individual growth than with pattern of idea. It is not a statement but an artifact. Instead of social, moral, or religious piety or certainty, and emotional depth, it offers humor, irony, intellectual complexity, technical beauty, and a catalog of the forms of unknowing. … The modernist direction in all the arts is a movement from what might be called the organic to the inorganic. [p. 61-62]
The Modernists — Kafka, Proust, Faulkner, Joyce — were interested in society, deepened time, verisimilitude, complex character, and authorial austerity. They were a sincere lot. They wrote big books. Contemporary modernists alter their aims by isolating them.
In fact, on a very gloomy day one could say this: that contemporary modernism accurately puts its finger upon, and claims, every quality of Modernist fiction that is not essential. It throws out the baby and proclaims the bath. Joyce wrote parodies and made puns and allusions on his way to elaborating a full and deep fictional world called Dublin. Now people write little parodies full of puns and allusions. … Joyce and Woolf made their characters think on the page to deepen the characters… Proust and Faulkner fiddled with time to create an artful simulacrum of our experience of time and also our knowledge of the world; now some contemporary writing may fiddle with time to keep us awake, the way television commercials splice scenes to keep us awake, or they may fiddle with time to distract us from the absence of narration, or even just to fiddle…. In short, [the early] Modernist writers expanded fictional techniques in the service of traditional ends… And those ends have been lost. [p. 63-64]This is a good century for writers like the contemporary modernists who wish to make their works' aesthetic structures plainly visible… Writers whose vision is almost wholly formalized, and not referential or interpretive, have free rein. And writers who are sitting on a story absolutely great in its own right have no problem either; it they have little extra to say, they also have little to hide. The paradox hurts only frankly interpretive thinkers, who have a theory or two about the world, as well as an art; their sort of thinking is frowned upon in fiction. [p. 159] … Insofar as a writer is interested in interpretation, then, he is stuck in this paradox. His role is like that of a scout whose job it is to blaze a new trail, all traces of which he must carefully obliterate. [p. 156]
This sort of fiction, though, was not the only kind you could publish as literary fiction in the 1970s. (John Steinbeck won his Nobel in 1962.) Lamott writes:
The [original] Modernists themselves, I say, begin to look semi-traditional in the light of contemporary practice. It is not unreasonable to place The Castle, Ulysses, or Light in August near the center of a spectrum on which we place Great Expectations … at one end and Pale Fire, Hopscotch, and Ficciones at the other. And given these extremes, it is easy to see that most living writers also belong somewhere in the middle. Most often these writers, like the Modernists themselves, turn sophisticated techniques towards traditional ends. Here are the many writers of serious fiction — including the majority of writers in the Americas, Britain, and Europe whose work is widely known… — who are writing novels and stories of depth and power, novels and stories which penetrate the world and order it, which engage us intellectually and move us emotionally, which render complex characters in depth, treat moral concerns and issues, make free use of Modernist techniques, and astonish us by the fullness and coherence of their artifice. This is still, if only by volume, the mainstream. [p. 64-65]
So cutting-edge literary fiction was already boring when the leftists got to it. Under the leftists, stricter conformity to doctrine has been required, but they have at least added multicultural novels to the list of allowable novel types. Today you can buy stacks of good literary novels written by authors from India and China. "Ethnic" books by Americans began to be popular in the late 1960s, but they focused on discrimination within America. In the 1990s, publishers began looking for foreign-born authors writing about their own countries or their immigration experience, and the category became a genre. They're still usually dismal and sloppily-structured, in my experience, but they're readable, interesting, and about something.
NEXT: HITALTCAASHR, Part 2: What are English departments teaching?
So, what I got from a large part of that quote.. is just wanting to scream a version of Pinkie's line from Spice up Your Life
"What kind of person doesn't want a plot in their story!? THAT'S INSANE!"
Yeah..... see again my comment from last time about why I have nearly nothing but contempt for the idiocy that is 'literary Criticism."
Also... ohhhh, can't wait for that post on New Criticism.. that does seem to be the take the most aligns with how I look at stories, but that's only from a basic look at it.
I feel like, at this point, you've got a pretty solid manifesto built for writing a heartbreaking work of staggering literary genius.
I like the painting metaphors. They're one of the first times I've found modernist literary sensibilities at all intelligible: that representation doesn't necessarily need to be the goal. But I've gotten the impression that visual artists tend to build their skills up from representation into less and less representative styles. It's like my old saw about free verse: it only works correctly when you understand poetics well enough to break the right rules in the right places. I'm not sure this holds for literary writers—I don't have a lot of reason to believe that a writer who eschews plot and character must, at some deeper level, have a profound command of those skills.
This, though, leads me to the interesting thought I had at the start. You do have a command of those skills, as do a number of other people here. I wonder how well Fimfiction Writers could do at producing literary fiction, using simple heuristics like: any time it's obvious what a good story should do, make sure you do something else that mocks good stories. "Drink Cider, Learn Nothing" as an artistic imperative.
My strong suspicion is that the resulting products would look very modernist, not at all post-modernist, and would probably be both "artistically challenging" and fairly entertaining. To wit, categorically better than modern literary fiction.
4519268
It would be interesting if a group of ponyfic writers could get (separately) published in leading literary journals. It could generate some good publicity, for them and for fanfic.
4519268
I think it does hold across art forms. It's something I've claimed about music for a long time, too--that you can tell when pop music is written by someone with a extensive musical background, and when it's not.
4519268
4519407
Absolutely. Consider dance music, ye old 'thump thump thump' stuff. So much of it that I hear (and indeed like) is drones on a single note, the creativity going into sound mixing. And then you get something like the recent Deadmau5 track 'Cat Thruster':
…which goes into a series of key changes (in the second minute) reminiscent of the heyday of bebop. The chords and melodies absolutely require understanding of music theory to get 'em to go those places without clashing, but it doesn't require theory to listen because it doesn't clash, it just flows in unexpected directions.
Not only that, a lot of the stuff I like that seems weird and inaccessible isn't modernist either. You can listen to some really violently weird Zappa or Beefheart music but it's still obviously there to grab and rattle ya. Aesthetic distance is a really weird goal to have.
4519286
The way you describe these journals, no one outside of the clique would even be considered.
And besides, I think trying to do that would just be playing the game on their terms. Even if you succeed, they'll just change the rules.
4519469
It goes back to when René Magritte painted “The Treachery of Images”, the painting of a pipe that says “This is not a pipe”. One of the axioms of modernism is that you're not supposed to represent reality accurately; you're supposed to tell the reader or viewer that art can never represent reality accurately. This is part of why I keep saying that modernism / pomo is just a return to Platonism.
Bertolt Brecht wrote an explanation of it in his notes for performing the Threepenny Opera saying that the interruptions are to make sure the viewers remember they're watching a show, not reality. Actually there are lots of discussions of this in different modernist texts. They are very afraid of people forgetting that what they're reading isn't real. Kind of arrogant, if you ask me.
I think the real reasons are:
1. They were reacting against realism. Yet another reason why I call them Platonists. They wanted to say realistic fiction was bad. Realism immerses; unrealism creates distance. (BTW, inb4 someone mentions magic realism; it's very unrealistic.)
2. They wanted to show off. That's what Lamott was getting at in those quotes above about them wanting to top the reader on the surface. When Joyce or Faulkner wrote a 2-page sentence, they wanted the reader to stop and say, "Damn, you sure can write them big sentences!"
I'd dispute that. The problem is piecing out the story, and recognizing what type of story it is. That said, it does seem to be more character study than actual narrative.
I would agree with this to an extent; but I'd say things differently. The Modernists, those who effectively founded the movement, were working with the limits of traditional narrative, testing the margins, and determining just how much of it was truly necessary to telling what they wanted to tell. Joyce was more concerned with the internal narrative, the stories that occur within our own heads, than the external narratives that were the final expression of those internal sources. The current crop, who are much better designated Post-Modernists than true Modernists, are no longer concerned even with that, and have denied the validity of narrative altogether. Modernism played with the boundaries of objective reality vs. subjective experience, while placing greater emphasis on the latter; Post-Modernism, by contrast, denies the very existence of objective reality, or at best denies that we are able to experience it in any way that is relevant to anyone else. Modernism still created a universal experience that could be shared. Post-Modernism atomizes experience.
That's a rather naive and superficial way of looking at it. The Realism movement had some serious issues, and did not immerse so much as enforce. Realism held that anything subjective, fantastical, or philosophical was bad. It was heavily rooted in a primitive version of Materialism, and to a great extent Functionalism. Art existed entirely as propaganda. It was supposed to only depict real-world situations and experiences, rejecting the symbolism, spiritualism, and high drama of the Romantics, with an emphasis on the "common man". It was every bit as Platonic and utopian in its way, art in the service of society and the social order; to force a flattening of social class. As it went on, more and more emphasis was placed on depicting the "street level" aspects of life, the dark, sordid underbelly. It saw it's full flowering in Soviet Brutalism and British Kitchen Sink Drama.
Modernism was in large part a reaction against that, against the enforced grimness of much of the Realism schools, particularly Social Tealism.
4519491 Like the Nebula awards, for example.
"The more interesting comparison between storytelling in literature and representation in painting is this: that each was considered for centuries the irreducible nub of its art, and is no longer. "
Much like a roadmap is for finding your way, I suppose. When the roadmap is replaced by an odd digital photo of brightly colored machine tools and a giraffe, we more practical people nod politely at the insanity and quietly reference our old and folded, tattered and torn, reliable paper maps.
4519724
That is the usual interpretation now. Remember Dillard was writing this in the 1970s. (Copyright 1982 = probably finished ~1979.) She didn't use the word postmodern.
I don't think it makes sense chronologically, though. Like I pointed out before, all the basic pomo principles are in the Dada manifesto of 1917. Gertrude Stein was effectively a post-modernist. TS Eliot's doctoral dissertation, written in, I think, 1915, concluded that there is no objective truth. The shattered narrative timeline, location, and POV, which are key techniques for atomizing experience, was used in early modernist novels like Faulkner's. There's a distinction between modernism and pomo thought, but you can't draw it at a point in time, or even between people. Joyce wrote some modernist and some post-modern books, and Borges wrote "The South".
4519724
Where are you getting this from? Especially "Art existed entirely as propaganda." I'd say that's less true of realists than of anyone else.
If by Social Realism you mean Socialist Realism, that wasn't until 30 years after Modernism. It has an exact beginning in a Soviet proclamation; 1936, I think.
4519208
There are some good stories without plots, or with very minimal plots, and usually they have no real character development either. All the stories in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities and Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones are like that. Those are great stories, but they present ideas, not action or externally-induced emotion. They create internally-generated emotion.
Like how some very short mystery stories are just mystery and puzzle-solving, with no character development. Or like how most porn has no real plot or character.
4519867
Art History classes at college. It was fairly well-covered. Plenty of info online as well.
And no, I meant Social Realism, which was predominantly an American movement, pre-dating WWI.
Variations of socialism/communalism have been darlings of artists and philosophers of many schools going back long before Marx ever put pen to paper; many of them inspired by Rousseau and Ricardo.
4519872 True, but it is a far cry from specific cases where things get around it simply because, yeah nothing is absolute, and just outright saying having a coherent plot is a bad thing.
4519724
Ah! Are you one of those people who actually read the damned thing? Because I've been trying to find someone who has who can tell me what it is for. Would you?
4519867
Yeah, but socialist realism was really the codification of a certain type of literature already present. I contend that Balzac's Le Père Goriot was, in 1835, essentially socialist realist in the ways it is written.
4519872
D'you know, riffing on what you wrote above, it would perhaps not be incorrect to say that Postmodernism is really cargo-cult modernism. Or, rather, it is the end result of the replacement of madmen by poseurs: Some writers saw a place to create where none can and so you have Borges and his elaborate literary forgeries[1], you have Calvino writing puzzle-box novels[2], and Eliot writing protracted hyperintellectual fever dreams, and so on and so forth. Seeing the world from so oblique an angle is rare and wielding the art of writing in such bizarre circumstances is ungodly difficult and so in their wake they spawned untold scores of pseudo-imitators. They couldn't do what their inspirations did but they could (as you note above) copy the superficial bits. Borges didn't have a plot not because plots are icky but because he saw something, a vision of alternate realities grasped momentarily in a second-hand bookshop and in connections between scattered texts. But you can't write like Borges (I know! I've tried!) and so some just copied what could be copied easily.
It's the same thing with the weirder types of art. Putting a solid block of color in an art gallery for the first time is a shock and an artform in itself. But you can't make that happen twice. But what you can do is simply copy the outward appearance of it and go "Form is boring, symmetry is obsolete, let us make nothing but primal blotches and be True Artists."
Once everyone wanted this, you immediately got an arms race as to who can make a less story-like story and a less painting-like painting because, suddenly, that's what we are optimizing for. The end result? Martin Creed can make a light flicker and get the Turner prize for it. Signaling death-spirals are never pretty.
[1] Whose inheritors are, above all else, to be found online today in the realms of consciously ergodic chaotic fiction.
[2] Everyone! If On A Winter's Night A Traveler is sublime and everyone should read it. Twice.
Jesus, Horse, it's like you're in an abusive relationship with a celebrity.
And you think if you can just understand him enough, he'll stop beating you.
And we're all crowding around to see what scandalous new welts and bruises he's given you.
4520093
As I've said in other venues, one does not so much read Finnegans Wake, as one studies it. I myself have only managed about a quarter of it so far, in fits and starts. Although I'm currently two-thirds of the way through Ulysses and have been reading it rather steadily. There is quite a bit of controversy still regarding what the actual story is, ultimately, about; but what it is is essentially a multilayered character study, focusing predominantly in a single Irish family, as viewed in dreams. The structure of the book is essentially dream logic, with the underlying story told through symbolism, allusion, elaborate word play and onomatopoeia, free association, religious and mythological references, and so on; in a non-linear narrative that loops back on itself. I read it predominantly for the exploration of language and linguistics, which in some cases strongly resemble the results of some types of mental illness. He had a certain fascination with mental illness, as his wife was herself schizophrenic, and that informed a lot of his experimentation with language.
I've found that the best way to approach it is to find a good audio recording of it, and experience first as a sort of soundscape, don't try to wrestle too much meaning out of the words, just experience the poetry of it. Then go back and dig through all the various bits of it.
Joyce referred to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as two parts of a diptych, with the former his "day book", and the latter his "night book". His critics typically referred to the former as "inventive" and "divine". Those same critics often referred to the latter as "pretentious nonsense" and "a joke taken much too far". That last comment is probably the best description I can think of to explain what it is "for". And overwrought, cryptic, beautiful, intensely-private joke.
It's definitely on my list, and I'll probably start in on it once I've completed my current writing project, which is taking up far too much of my brainmeats at the moment.
4519864
I think they're easier to classify by their underlying philosophy, how they address their audience, than by any chronological or individual categorization.
Modernism is essentially addressing the way people think, the limits of rational thought, the influence of the irrational, and the contrast and juxtaposition between them. In a large part it was concerned with changing the way people thought, a reaction against the cold materialism and iron boundaries underlying the Realism movement. It is at it's heart an intellectual movement, one which sought to extend the boundaries of art and literature.
Post-Modernism is a complete jettisoning of rational thought, and enshrining of the irrational and subjective. Despite its anti-intellectualism, it's even more elitist than even the Modernists or Romantics; but puts on a great show of anti-elitism and trendy populism. It reached its full flowering in Deconstructionism, which denies even the validity of subjective meaning, and assaults the very concept of meaning itself. Or, to put it more succinctly "Post-Modernism is the refusal to think. Deconstructionism is the refusal to believe anyone else can either." -Ron Carrier.
4520397
That seems like a great summary of post-modernism.
The thing that really butters my baguette, though, is this: the notion that there's no such thing as objective reality isn't even all that bonkers. Ask the holographic universe folks, or the folks who say evolution selects against veridical perception. I feel like philosophy has been drifting that way for decades (and vast swathes of it have probably already made the leap).
But the pomo reaction seems to be to throw up your hands and say, "Vell then, vhat iz to be done! Ve are living ze lie. Let us burn our cloths on ze bonfire of unreason, and dance in zeir ashes." Basically, pomo is the teenage goth who wants everybody to think he's edgy; the Lebowskian nihilist.
I mean, you could react by adopting probabilistic epistemology. You could react by recognizing the crucial role of storytelling in the formation of identity and culture. But deciding that truth is unattainable, so the pursuit of truth has no value? That's such a lazy, cowardly solution that I can't bring myself to find any value in it.
4520647
Intellectual laziness is at the heart of Post-Modern philosophy. That, combined with a great deal of egotism.
As for objective reality not existing, the entire history of the sciences demonstrates against that idea, hence the reason PoMo thought is far more common amongst those involved with the humanities, to a lesser extent in the "soft sciences", and vanishingly small in the hard sciences. The fact that we can reliably observe, test, and predict phenomena shows that there is an immutable, objective reality; and that our understanding of it is only limited by our ability to observe it. As our observational tools improve, and our ability to test predictions based on those observations improves, so also does our proximity to bedrock "truth". We may not understand everything about the universe, but we do understand a great deal, and that understanding grows increasingly complete by the day.
The "holographic universe" is an interesting model; but has a number of problems, including a lack of empirical support, and a violation of some observable qualities of the universe. In any case, it does not in any way exclude objective reality, but merely creates an (at this time mostly unfalsifiable) claim about the nature of that reality.
4520397 I mostly agree, but must comment:
Platonism and the belief in the soul are cold, because they do not love or honor the world, but only phantasms that don't exist.
Realism, and materialism, are warm, not cold, because they teach people to look at and love the world and the people in the world.
I don't know what you mean by "iron boundaries" in Realism. Iron boundaries are a property of Platonism, idealism, abstraction. Modern art is usually drawn with black or at least sharp boundaries between objects; in realistic art, there are no boundaries. Again I think you're attributing things to Realism that realism fights against.
images.freecreatives.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Female-face-modern-art.jpg
Post-modernism is not entitled to talk about subjectivity, because it has thrown away the tools of thought necessary to say what subjectivity is. From within a post-modern framework, we would have to say that mass is a subjective property of objects, because if Jim can lift a 200-lb weight, but John can't, then a post-modernist would conclude that the heaviness of the weight isn't objective but subjective. A similar lack of categories of thought explains why post-modernists interpret the theory of relativity as being relativistic. They lack the ability to conceive of objective subjectivity, or as I would say, functions. John's subjective perception of the weight of an object is a function of the object's mass and of John's strength. It will give the same result every time given the same values of mass and strength, but the result is "subjective" in that it depends on being measured by John rather than by Jim.
4520919
I think you're getting beyond the realm of Post-Modernism there, and into the philosophy of Deconstructionism at that point. Post-Modernism still acknowledges the existence of a reality outside of individual impression, at least on the level of "shared experience" or "mutual expectation". It doesn't outright deny objective reality, but sees it as impossible to experience or understand. It's "agnostic" on the subject, rather than strictly denialist.
4520924 How do you decide which part of post-modern epistemology to call deconstructionism?
4521505
A lot of study.
4521506 Yeah, but I mean specifically. It's something I've wondered about. Do you say "deconstructionism is all French post-modernist epistemology written after 1965", or what?
4521920
I'd say more since the '70s, with the big peak in the '80s; both with the rise of Critical Theory. Essentially, (and this is, of course, an oversimplification), when the emphasis on content and context shifted to an emphasis on structure, particularly the structure of opposition. A rejection of the Hegelian dialectic so beloved of Marxists and other Post-Modernists, and therefore a rejection of reconciliation, and through that ultimately a rejection of the possibility of meaning.
Post-Modernism accepts the possibility of meaning derived through shared experience, and collective reality construction. Deconstructionism denies even this, and further atomizes individuals, and rejects the idea that reality and truth can ever be anything but individual, ephemeral, and mutable.
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To get back to this, I need a citation to believe that anyone claimed that realists said art existed entirely as propaganda, let alone that the position is at all plausible. All through history, it has been the transcendentalists who said art is and should be propaganda: Plato, Christians, neo-classicists, French Revolutionaries, modernists, communists, fascists. The realists, in whom I'd include the Greek tragedians, Shakespeare, and a lot of 19th & early 20th-century fiction, directly oppose the transcendentalists, and specifically on this issue.
This is a critical point to my way of thinking, so I would appreciate it considerably if you could dig up your references.
It may be that you're using the term "realist" differently. All philosophers consider themselves realists; the word means that they study the real world. The problem is that transcendentalists believe their imaginary transcendental world IS the real world. So for instance "philosophical realism" is used to denote philosophical transcendentalism.