I was involved earlier today in a panel discussion at my local cinema of the film Chinatown. If you have not seen this film, you should be ashamed of yourself. Anyway, I showed up prepared to defend at length my reading of the film, according to which it is primarily an epistemological film: it is about the gap between truth and (even very high levels of) justification.
But I didn't get the chance to develop this reading, because one of the other panelists asserted something truly absurd, namely, that the famous line at the end of the film, "forget about it Jake, it's Chinatown...," signals that unless Jake and his associates leave the scene, the police will arrest them. WTF????
This same person also went on to claim that Chinatown tries to prove to us that "there is no good and evil," because... brace yourself... "whatever Jake does, he hurts the innocent and makes things worse." My rejoinder that it's contradictory to read the film as denying that there is good and evil while at the same time holding that it's possible for Jake to make things worse and it's possible for people to be innocent, was entirely lost on this guy.
Never bothering to do that again.
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9 comments:
I had a debate with a professor of English that, though not about Chinatown, spiraled into the same intellectual black hole.
Was your interlocutor a professional harebrain? If so, was your interlocutor U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon?
Yes-- a professional harebrain. And a particularly dim-witted one at that (viz., from comp lit).
A serious question: how do you explain the overwhelming prevalence of this kind of error (viz., using normative language in the conclusion of an argument against all normativity) in the academy? It seems a Freshman error, and so easily dispelled. But it prevails among people who surely should know better....
The serious question is one thought about a lot and have made little to no satisfactory progress on. However, one line of thought I find appealing is from Quine's essay, "Paradoxes of plenty" in which he blames the increase of dreck in the acadamy on an increase of funding.
Another line of thought I find appealing is that the kind of crap we make fun of issuing forth under labels such as pomo and critical theory are what happen when you have departments of people studying stuff that was never really about anything in the first place (e.g. fiction, poetry) being pressured to do "research" in a manner that approximates the modes of productivity in the sciences (articles in peer "reviewed" journals, etc).
(Holy shit, that was a long sentence.)
I think there's something linking both the Quine thought and the additional one you mention: Universities have more funding, which means that there are more *super highly paid* positions out there, while also there's an increase of persons trying to get into the academic profession (let's face it: it's a pretty good gig). People compete for these positions by trying to increase their visibility and productivity. This encourages the creation of support networks (putting it euphemistically), in which people tacitly agree to support each other's work. So mediocre people wind up looking great to overworked and uninformed Deans.
Yeah...I see this kind of error all the time, too. It happens, I think, because people acquire their "methodologies" outside the hard sciences and philosophy (and, very hard social sciences like economics), without really being trained very explicitly about what methodology (if much) they are utilizing. The whole "machine" or "support network" (nice euphemism) won't catch this shit, and neither will administrators. I don't really have a problem in principle with studying cultural phenomena, but it takes some pretty rigorous work to make sensible claims about it. We're looking at some lit crit stuff right now in one of my courses, but in light of some pretty ancient problems set up by Plato and Aristotle.
Isn't it "fun" to be "the philosopher" on these sorts of panels? Be careful...your head can explode at these things!
Plato? Aristotle? Don't you know that Rorty has shown that all those guys were just wrong? They were asking the wrong questions, question bound up with Cartesian dualisms, logical positivism, and other bad stuff!
MRS. R: (pounds on locked bathroom door) Dick? Dick! What's taking so long, Dick?
DICK: I'm...um...polishing the mirror of nature.
NICE!
Now that he's no longer with us, can we begin a new genre of joke based on his philosophy? Or is his philosophy itself the joke?
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