The
ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE
Plato's take on how we
experience the world
One of
the clearest explications of Plato's
Theory of Forms is in "The Allegory of the Cave", a chapter in
The Republic. The allegory features a number of prisoners in a
cave who spend their entire lives trapped underground, and who can
only see shadows of themselves cast on the walls opposite them (they
can't turn their heads even to see the source of light). Not
surprisingly, these prisoners end up believing that their shadows
are reality.
Now, if one of these prisoners were to escape to the surface, he'd
be free for the first time ever, but now he would
be out of his element -- the only "reality" he'd ever known -- and the
problems would really start. Not only would the sun blind him (he'd
been stuck in a dimly lit cave for years, remember); he'd also be
completely unable to make sense of this real world. All its (true)
forms and shapes would be unintelligible to a man who'd spent his
entire life abstracting his experience of the world from dim shadows
on the wall. But what if he eventually managed to
make sense of some of this new reality; what happens if he returns to
the cave? Now he'd have trouble making out, or even meaningfully
perceiving, the dim shadows on the wall, his "reality" of old. And as
he attempts to tell of his new experiences to those he'd left behind,
they would mock him, ridicule him, call him mad. How could they even
begin to understand what the former escapee was describing. "It's too
weird!"
In a
nutshell, this allegory is meant to highlight the nature of human
knowledge and experience, in that what we see around us ever day are
but "shadows" -- to be contrasted with the eternal forms (as
above) of the intelligible world, that lies beyond our direct
experience but which contains "true" knowledge. In the allegory,
the shadows on the cave are our reality; the chains are our social
restrictions; the "outside" (where the sun is) is the World of Forms,
the world of truth; and the escapee is, ultimately, the philosopher, a
man who can be understood by few, if any, and who is constantly
ridiculed and mocked by those who cannot make sense of what he is
saying.
So
there.
See also:
AMERICA
A WORK BY
BAUDRILLARD
You might think Baudrillard
is a couple of cans short of a six-pack, but here's one more place where
his ideas do hit home. To cut a long story short, he uses America as an
example of everything he talks about re. simulation, hyperreality, and
the media. For example:
- Disneyland and America are one and the same.
There is no "real" America outside Disneyland; the walls surrounding
Disneyland are there to make people think that Disneyland is only a
fantasy land, and there really is a real America out
there.
- On the same tack, Watergate, presented to the world as an
example of the system righting itself, was in fact nothing more than
Nixon being offered up as a scapegoat and patsy, to disguise the fact
that the political system hadn't changed. (And if you think the system
has really changed for the better since Watergate, you're probably in
the minority.)
See also:
~~~~~~~~~~
ARCHITECTURE &
POSTMODERNITY
A good example is the Stuttgart Museum, designed by James
Stirling:
1) Plunders history to create a make-believe culture -
intentionally and artificially uses past architectural styles in a pick
and mix fashion.
2) Lacks "spiritual conciousness" -- there's no
reason to it, it's meaningless.
3) Like modern
architecture, the postmodern can also be playful, ironic and
self-referential; but unlike modernism was is still serious; it had a
project and a meaning. Postmodernism doesn't.
4) This building
"represents confusion in contemporary culture" -- here the commentator
contradicts himself; the building is either meaningful or
meaningless.
Another example: the Humana Building, Louisville,
Kentucky, by Michael Graves:
1) Blends in with its surroundings
(river, dams, bridges).
2) Weightier and substantial, not garish like
most postmodern architecture.
3) Obscene - capitalism in
disguise.
![Pompidou Centre, Paris]() Or how about the Pompidou Centre in Paris (see
right): a building that looks like it's been turned inside
out.
Here's a point to ponder, all the same. Architecture is often
used as a visual metaphor for the way postmodernity works -- its designs
full of pastiche, so-called humor, lack of an underlying structure, etc.
But "postmodern" architecture does have an underlying structure
-- of steel, reinforced concrete, and so on. It has to, otherwise it'd
just fall apart. The building might look just plain weird, but it still
has to function as a working building. So if we accept that
postmodern buildings have an underlying structure, does that mean that
that postmodermity as a concept also has a structure somewhere? Just
something to ponder . . .?
See also:
~~~~~~~~~~
ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE
Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short, basically means any
electronic- or computer-based system that exhibits, or appears to
exhibit, symptoms of intelligence, i.e., it can go beyond its basic
programming to carry out new tasks, or learn new ideas.
Artificial Intellience as a modern concept goes back at least to
1936, when English theorist and computer pioneer Alan
Turing wrote a scientific paper outlining the possibilities of
machines thinking for themselves. Turing continued his work during and
after the Second World War; he formulated the now-famous Turing
Test, which would provide a benchmark for deciding whether machines
actually display "intelligence" independently of human input.
In the 1980s and 1990s the debate has moved on to the point
where most researchers are now comfortable with the idea that machines
can display some sort of "artificial" intellience (think of the IBM "Big
Blue" computer that recently beat Kasparov at chess, for example).
However, the debate now focuses on whether machines really are
intelligent, or whether they merely act as if they are
intelligent. The former position, known as
Hard AI, held by Hans Moravec and
others, centers on the idea that advanced computers can simulate all
human brain functions and are in fact real brains, only based in
an electronic format rather than the carbon-based (human/animal)
format. The brain's intelligence, they insist, is no more
than a series of logical, mathematical algorithms, which can be
replicated in an electronic environment. (By the same way of thinking,
human brains are exactly like electronic ones--they are "soft machines";
they do exactly the same things, just in a different environment. On the
other hand, Soft AI proponents hold that,
while computers might be able to imitate human intelligence, they will
never be able to truly simulate it. There are aspects to human
intelligence that cannot be reduced to mathematical algorithms, and
therefore cannot be replicated by machines.
Within this debate there is also
research going on, particularly at MIT and NASA, to try to try to create
genuinely intelligent machines. These efforts have, in recent years,
moved away from using single-processor supercomputers to parallel
processing machines (more on this to come).
See also:
~~~~~~~~~~
AVANT
GARDES
The avant-garde, in its nineteenth-century artistic and
political manifestations, had some essential qualities. Its philosophy:
The artist becomes both free and isolated; artists no longer have the
comfort of patronage, so they form small, self-supporting artistic
groups. There were three main criteria for the avant garde:
- It redefines or reshapes
artistic form and technique; emphasizes innovation (e.g., Cubism,
Joyce).
- It changes the subject
matter, alters social references.
- It changes the system of
distribution and reception of art (e.g., Dada).
Origins of the Avant
Garde:
1) When the concept of an avant garde
arose (in the mid-19th century) it was at first a political concept
concerning radical political groups (St. Simon, Marx, Proudhou,
William Owen - Utopians and Socialists).
a) 1840s-1860s saw a coincidence of
artistic change and radical politics.
b) 1870s-1880s - the
concept of avant garde changes from a political concept to radical
artistic groups. e.g., Manet.
2) The avant garde turned away from the
old artistic formations - guilds, schools, salons, etc. 3) The
movement heralded a shift in support from private patronage to public
exhibition through the media, the state and commerce.
4) Artistic
avant gardes have been mainly left-wing because of the influence of
radical politics; they have been defined as "political actors."
The experience
of the avant gardes was primarily a metropolitan one.
Cities began to become international crossroads in the 20th c. (e.g.,
Dublin, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow). These cities attracted
communities of foreigners who developed a new common sign
system in their art, and pushed themselves to new heights of
innovation.
Artistic avant gardes occurred in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and not earlier, because the metropolitan experiences of the
modern city simply did not existence any
earlier.
Modernism and avant gardes:
1) Avant
gardes were considered "the bridge to modernism." However, differences
emerged:
a) Avant
gardes were explicitly political in their art; modernism was
symbolic.
b) Avant gardes attempted to reintegrate art with life;
modernists were more concerned with formal innovation for it's own
sake.
c) Avant gardes were against bourgeois tradition;
modernists attempted to re-invent it.
See also Modernity,
Modernism.
2) From the
1950s: The capitalist media machine and culture industry gear up to
experimentation; ultimately absorbs the avant gardes; high/low culture
barrier collapses. Now the question is: Is there any room left for an
avant garde at the end of the 20th century, or (as Jameson
would have us believe) has the whole thing imploded in the culture of
late
capitalism?
See also:
CT. Subject Index
Aa
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Last Updated mar 6
2001 |