I'm sitting here reading the introductory material for my Cultural Geography class (which of course was cancelled today because of the ice), and I am struck by the blatant postmodern themes running throughout it. While I am fascinated by postmodern ways of thinking and, admittedly, sometimes attracted to them, I'm Kingsian enough to read into these as red, subjective flags. Take a look. After talking for three pages about the impossibility of defining the term "culture," the author poses what he claims to be...
"...the fundamental problem of Western metaphysics: how do we grasp or comprehend the world? How can we be sure our representations of the world are accurate? How do we test the reliability of knowledge given the role that subjectivity, perception, and representation necessarily play in the formation of that knowledge? Philosophers from Aristotle to Descartes to Kant and Heidegger have of course wrestled famously with this problem. Restated in terms of culture, the problem asks how we can recognize the ways we perceive, experience, and represent the world, symbolically and with meaning, without losing some sense of the world's 'external and objective reality'. Given the fact that our understanding of how the world actually is depends upon how we know the world in the first place, knowledge can become frustratingly circular, reflecting as much the subjectivity of knowing as the objectivity of what is known. Debates over culture are essentially debates generated by this frustration."
Actually, upon closer reading, this passage may not be so damning as I first thought. The concept of "the subjectivity of knowing" and "the objectivity of what is known" makes a lot of sense, unless the subjectivity of knowing here precludes the actual ability to know. It's something to think about, and it will be interesting as I'm sure (or rather I hope) we spend some time in the class defining the term "culture."
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