File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1998/lyotard.9811, message 53


From: "Eric  Salstrand" <eric_and_mary-AT-email.msn.com>
Subject: Re: Eagleton
Date: Thu, 19 Nov 1998 23:00:53 -0600


Don Smith


>Browsing the web I ran across this quote from Terry Eagleton:
>
>"We are now in the process of wakening from the nightmare of modernity,
with
>its manipulative reason and fetish of the totality, into the laid-back
>["joyful," as Nietzsche would say] pluralism of the postmodern, that
>heterogeneous range of life-styles and language games which has renounced
>the nostalgic urge to totalize and legitimate itself....Science and
>philosophy must jettison their grandiose metaphysical claims and view
>themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives."

>It sums up the way I feel much better than I could say it. Although I might
>add religion along with science and philosophy.


Thanks for the quote.  I admit I haven't really read much Eagleton and
always thought of him as a Marxian who was critical of the postmodern.  So,
I am a little surprized by this quote.  Has anyone out there read Eagleton
and can they give us more details?

I also have to disagree with the notion that science is just a narrative and
I think Lyotard would have disagreed as well.  Science does not simply tell
us stories.  It plays a quite different language game than that.  It does
use narratives to legitimize itself as a project or to explain itself in
layperson's terms, but this does not allow us to make the move that science
is merely a social construct.  I personally believe it possible to be
postmodern without being either relativistic or positivistic in this regard.
(I also believe that Kuhn's theories of the structure of scientific
revolutions (pardigm theory) is overrated.)

Can one be a postmodern popperian? (just asking)





   

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