Beyond (and Below) Incommensurability: The Aesthetics of the Postcard

The Argument: An Abstract: Incommensurability-the mutual incompatibility and untranslatability of theories and, by extension, cultures-is taken by many philosophers, most statesmen, and all practitioners of conflict resolution as (to quote Ian Hacking citing Donald Davidson) an evil.¹ The missed understandings that occur when translation fails, the missed opportunities when admixtures come apart, the wars-the violent deaths-that can and do ensue, are simply not, we can perhaps agree, good. But Davidsons argument (as summarized and tweaked by Hacking) that there is an immense amount of agreement about chickens and blades of grass and whats wet points to a dilemma that specialists in conflict resolution tend to evade or miss.² Even given the best of motives(peace on earth, goodwill toward men), an emphasis on the lowest common denominator among cultures can lead-it is worth observing in the context of this symposium-to the aesthetics of the postcard. A world in which communication is universally possible is a world in which not much can be said with specificity, and even less with grace, consistency, or sophistication. The implications of this dilemma are axiological as well as aesthetic, and such implications are not well treated in available languages of scholarly argumentation. What follows, therefore, is a piece of-it might be termed-art appreciation, an argument about taste and tastelessness being anything but abstract.