Nasreddin's Apologia

Nasreddin says:

... If ideas are no longer capable of improvement, if a real theoretical impasse has been reached, as I believe it has, then there is no good reason not to return to the good old prose of Marx and Engels. I don't want to. And I think the key to solving this problem lies in an analogy to space, not to time. Wittgenstein writes, famously, in the Philosophical Investigations:

Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.

The "new boroughs," of course, are the great new developments of technical language that have emerged over the last century. Where does the tangled skein of poststructuralist prose fit in this city? Is it its own new borough, or is it a gleaming ugly glass Libeskind skyscraper in the midst of the medieval town?

Though I bristle a bit at his polemic, Nasreddin has (as usual) been an excellent curator of metaphors. His post is worth a full and careful read. Here's the Sokal hoax discussion he refers to, and here's a related and fascinating post on the anti-humanism of Modern architecture.

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