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... dy prejudices and imagine a world in which nature provides no constraints on human activity, suggesting that no crazy scheme should be abandoned. (7) In fact, he wants to eradicate nature as a category. The earth appears only in the repeated contemptuous references to the "beet fields" near the Orly airport where Aramis was being planned. And the novelist attempts to dissolve the barrier between the human being and the machine, the living and the manufactured. The author's purpose is to enlighten "our intellectual universe, from which we have in effect eradicated all technology. In this universe, people who are interested in the souls of machines are severely punished by being isolated in their own separate world, the world of engineers, technicians, and technocrats. " (Were I to decide the fate of people interested in the souls of machines, they would be isolated in a separate ward of the mental hospital. ) Latour suggests that machines are the basis of an alternative religion: "they are the scapegoats of a new religion of Silence, as complex and pious as our religion of Speech.
What exegesis will have to be invented to provide commentary on the Silence of machines?" He begs us to think of Aramis not as a plan for a machine, but as "an instituted object, quasi-object, quasi-subject, a thing that possesses body and soul indissolubly. " (8) This nonsense would not be worth discussing if I did not believe that Latour may provide clues to what I have always found the most difficult puzzle of the post structuralist phenomenon: why do people like it? Demons cannot enter the mind unbidden: even Count Dracula must ask his victims to enter his castle freely. Late in the novel Latour suggests some reasons for the appeal of post structuralism: "Thanks to computers, we now know that there are only differences of degree between matter and texts... In fact, ever since a literary happy few started talking about 'textual machines' in connection with novels, it has been perfectly natural for machines to become texts written by novelists who are as brilliant as they are anonymous. " Post structuralism has flattered the vanity of English professors, as Milton's Satan flattered the vanity of Eve, encouraging them to think of themselves as intellectual revolutionaries. (9) The essays in the second half of Beyond Post structuralism, which are supposed to reaffirm the value of reading literature, also display far too much willingness to compromise with post structuralism. Essayist after essayist avoids mentioning any particular work of literature, but attempts to establish, on purely theoretical grounds, the reasons why we might want to try taking literature seriously again. Only one of these is really moving, Virgil Nemoianu's "Literary History: Some Roads Not (Yet) Taken. " The echo of Frost's beloved poem tells us right away that this writer cares about literature; he also cares about history and wants to bring back genuine literary history like that of scholars in the past.
Like Searle, Nemoianu dares to use the word fact, derided by those who call everything a cultural construction; he also uses the forbidden words / ove , gratitude, and praise as he suggests that we once again embrace literature as a source of wisdom and joy. And like Searle he knows something about "intuitive and 'irrational' reactions... based upon thick and multifarious internal processing" the mind that is inseparable from our bodily selves. (10) The intuitive, irrational, imaginative, whole human being - another category dismissed by poststructuralist's - is the subject of the final and finest essay in the second half of the book, Martha Nussbaum's "The Literary Imagination in Public Life, " a beautiful reading of Hard Times as a lesson in the wisdom that no public servant should be allowed to forget. Unlike any of the other writers, Nussbaum repeatedly uses the word life as the standard of truth and value (try finding that word in any post structuralist text! ). Mr.
Gradgrind's educational theories are bad because they are false to life; Dickens's novel is good because it offers a vision of life that includes reason and imagination, soul and body. Nussbaum, like Searle, comes from a field outside English: she is a professor of law and philosophy. Unlike the English professors whose essays make up the majority of Beyond Post structuralism, these two have the courage to say that post structuralism is wrong and that literature is rooted in life. Too many English professors have been listening so respectfully to such people as Bruno Latour and such theories as "computer ergo sum" that they have lost their nerve and acquiesced in the refusal of post structuralism to acknowledge life as a meaningful term of value. Our whole profession should remember Paulina's words in The Winter's Tale: "Dear life redeems you. " Dear life, our biological life on earth, must become the standard of truth if we are to redeem literary studies from post structuralism without relying on blind faith and miracles. (7) Life is certainly a standard of value in Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club: Pulling the Plug on the Electronic Revolution, edited by Bill Henderson. This collection of essays, cartoons, poems, and snippets from newspapers is breezy and informal.
The forty essays are all short, and as far as I can tell, none is by a literary critic. Poets and essayists - Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry - contribute; so do the humorists Russell Baker and Dave Barry and the novelists E. Annie Proulx and John Updike. The book has one clear theme: enslavement to computers is taking us out of the natural world, away from face-to-face and voice-to-voice connections with our friends and our families.
Some of the essays also decry the expense of computers, the planned obsolescence that forces people to keep buying "upgrades" so that they will not be stuck with unusable machines. More clearly than anyone else Wendell Berry warns that computers are one more link between us and the power companies that are destroying the earth for their own profit. Mark Slouka's "Rapture and Redemption in the Virtual World" is about the mad millennialism of those devotees of computers who proudly announce their imminent freedom from the body. He does not mention Bruno Latour, but Latour is one of their number. Slouka includes horrifying quotations from other famous professors (Michael Benedikt, Bruce Mazlish) about the promise of freedom from "the ballast of materiality, " the possibility of being "angels, if not God" in virtual reality.
The recent mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult of computer programmers demonstrates that what sounds like harmless lunacy in people like Bruno Latour is in fact deadly. When people start believing "computer ergo sum, " their minds are open to all demons. (8) The disdain for the biological world in post structuralist theory and the disdain for physical labor that is part of the worship of computers cannot be separated. The supercilious contempt that poststructuralist's feel for people who still believe a real world exists is only the most extreme and absurd version of the contempt that white-collar workers have felt for blue-collar workers and farmers ever since the Renaissance. Noxious plants with deep roots are very hard to kill; well-intentioned but half-hearted criticism of post structuralism and computers is not going to be enough. We need a deeper criticism of the falsehoods in our culture, a stronger knowledge that the reality of our life on earth must be the test of truth than the books by Goodheart, Harris, and Henderson offer. But this criticism and this knowledge do not depend on some great intellectual breakthrough, some yet undiscovered insight.
If we could once again take literature seriously we would not have to look any further than As You Like It and The Winter's Tale, where the rich are forced to remember that their life depends on the poor who grow their food, that only fools and tyrants feel contempt for shepherds. If we can truly believe that the selfsame sun that shines upon Bill Gates's court hides not his visage from a cottage in Bangladesh, then dear life can indeed redeem us.
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Research essay sample on Life On Earth Ergo Sum
