Word: reductionist
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Like the minimalist sculptors, Chassler's a reductionist, calculating how much she can cut away and still call her work dance. It's almost a game, playful and mischievous, simple and literal. Chassler runs, tumbles, turns; what more simple movement is there? The first section of "Calling Out" requires the dancers to give up their weight to one another: what more literal approach to group improvisation can be imagined...
...outlook of the characters is thoroughly reductionist, their feelings and moods governed by chemicals and simple physical drives. Yet through the drugged, alcoholic, and lustful haze, the characters are troubled by an occasional resonance of deeper spiritual longings, in the form of 'street sadness' and 'false memories'. These bad dreams--all that remains from a lost world of emotion and intuition are anxiously banished from consciousness...
...occasional forays into literature are also, occasionally, rewarding--his discussion of asymmetry and ambiguity, for example. But here, too, linguistic analogies often lead him astray. There is something crudely reductionist about his view of poetry as prose dressed up by poetic transformations, and his claim that the sound structure ("phonology") of poetry works against structure and meaning ("syntax" and "semantics") ignores the work of linguists and literary critics alike...
...precisely and mathematically definable, and which helps to explain and interpret knowledge which is so definable. Philosophy in this sense is not subjective; it simply deals with what, by analogy with biological philosophy, might be termed vitalistic knowledge, as opposed to mechanistic knowledge. Even if we take a reductionist approach and assume that vitalistic knowledge is only knowledge which when more fully grasped will assume a mechanistic form, we can still admit that ignoring the vitalistic realm leaves us on a treadmill where no new ideas or even new techniques are available, because only the unknown or imperfectly known...
...first section of the book, a set of biblical tales retold, Kolakowski puts the original ambiguities into the Marxist-Leninist idiom. While this sounds reductionist, the effect is quite the reverse. Kolakowski is so faithful to and concerned with the problematic paradox of Hebraic legend that he exaggerates the difficulties to the point where, for sheer ambivalence, his tales rival even the parables of Kafka. Translated into the lingo of current ideological strife, the Old Testament acquires an applicability most have long given up suspecting. To take his own best illustration, Kolakowski turns the story of Jacob and Esau into...