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Comment by mistersquid | Hacker News Reader

Postmodernism and postmodernity describe very complex intellectual and artistic practices. The periodic belittling of these cultural formations by people who do not well understand them is unbecoming and tiresome.

The Sokal affair gets mentioned in threads such as this. But anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that _Social Text_'s editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insistence.

It puzzles and saddens me that so many intelligent scientists and empiricists repeatedly point to such instances of "postmodernity" as proof that the postmodern emperor has no clothes because such a broad statement is simply untrue. The work of many of late Twentieth Century philosophy by figures such as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigary, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, and many many more deserve serious studied contemplation. Their work is not easy to understand and, yes, they can be interpreted in many different ways.

They are not randomized strings of insider shibboleths.

Occasionally propagating "postmodern" meme generators is a childish form of territorial demarcation and we would all--humanists, scientists, and intellectuals of all kinds--be better off and richer if they stopped serving as propaganda that postmodernity has no cultural or intellectual value.

EDIT: grammar, readability, spelling. Added penultimate, single-sentence paragraph.

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I have read Derrida, Kristeva and Baudrillard, in French. Not all of their work, but enough to know it's a lot of bullshit. Derrida is extremely brilliant, but says nothing but banalities (sometimes funny ones, cf. "differance"). Baudrillard has interesting, poetic intuitions, that rest on nothing and take all of their value from their polemic content. Kristeva is not very intelligent, crazy at times, and guilty of the worst of the worst approximations and using mathematical concepts she doesn't understand, to explain / illustrate philosophical concepts she doesn't understand either.

You assert, without proof or reference, that anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that Social Text's editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insistence; but even if it were true, what would it prove, besides the fact that said standards were weak in the first place? And why didn't said editors accept to publish explanations after the fact? Had they been even a little concerned with the truth (as all philosophers should be) they would have been very happy to deconstruct a hoax, them being the victims notwithstanding.

The way I understand Derrida's work is that it's long-form trolling. You can't deny objective truth, and even deny that there is a single common interpretation to someone's writing that everyone can agree on, and carry on in a conventional philosophical argument without assuming the opposite of what you claim. But what you can do is subvert other people's assumptions of how writing is to be interpreted, for the lulz.

The problem is that postmodernism tends to make positive claims, but there's no empiricism to back it up.

If you're going to say everything is up to interpretation, you're making a positive claim. That requires empirical proof, at least in the rigorous social sciences.

Otherwise, your entire literature and peer review process is subject to the prior beliefs of the reviewers. That can, and has, led to an equilibrium state of ideological homogeneity in some subfields of sociology and philosophy (also some edge cases of cavalier empiricism passing review when it confirms priors in, say, social psychology). Once enough of a group thinks the same things, and ideas are not held up to some positive external standard, outside ideas don't get in anymore.

The hate for postmodernism expresses the disdain for an ideological group trying to give credence to its ides without being subject to the same standard as other ideas in science, social or not.

What types of empirical evidence have been previously used to justify theories of philosophy or cultural criticism? Some fields don't admit themselves to the scientific method because what's being studied is inherently subjective. That being said, it's a common reductive meme that art or literature can be interpreted to mean "anything"—I've never taken a course in literature or art criticism that allowed for interpretations of a work not backed explicitly by the source material.

There's a difference between the positive (this thing is like that) and the normative (this should be like that).

Positive questions are subject to empiricism, period. There is no cop out saying a positive statement is not testable. Even prohibitively difficult empirical questions (like in macroeconomics, psychology, biology, etc.) Are subject to testing.

Normative questions can be discussed without empiricism, correct, but you can't use this to infer on how things are. So if you want to say there should be no objective reality,fine. If you say that factual statements are a tool of oppression because there is no objective reality, you stepped into the testable.

Cultural criticism threads this line back and forth in a much too cavalier fashion. If you make a statement about how culture is, you've made a testable statement. There are plenty of ways to test cultural expectations, ask empirical psychologists and sociologists

> There's a difference between the positive (this thing is like that) and the normative (this should be like that).

Yes and then there's skepticism (doubt as to the truth of something) which is essentially what Postmodernism is.

A postmodernist would challenge the very notion that "empirical proof" is required to back up any claim and point to the numerous flawed studies in "soft" areas like sociology, ethnology and economics, where a questionnaire may be all the empiricism required for a published paper.

Personally I'm on the fence. I totally believe human behaviour is way more complicated than can be reflected by questionnaires and simple rigged observational studies, but there is a point where we absolutely can measure something. The efficacy of medicine, subatomical particles in accelerators or human effect on global warming – those are measurable.

The point where something goes from empirically possible to measure, to impossible, is hard to find. But I do think it exists.

I disagree. Why can we not just get really really good at measuring the universe and describe everything from there? If you agree with physics as a decent approximation of the universe, everything else is collective/emergent (though statistical, sure) behaviour; so there is no 'natural line' of impossibility at any level. In fact, I'd argue it's the opposite, but maybe I'm misguided and highly biased (as a physicist).

I guess my question is: what's your reasoning behind the statement that such a line exists?

Humans behaviour. A gazillion synapses interconnected together first directly in our brains and then by being part of a context.

I think it's like building a model accurately predicting the grains of sand around the world. Sure, theoretically we can get really really good at measuring everything, so we pretty much know where all those grains are, but I suspect we're not close.

Instead we must do, as you say, "decent approximation" – and this is where my line comes in. I think the crudeness of our current models to predict human behaviour are equivalent to roughly knowing where the Sahara desert is.

You can say that objective reality is dubious. But if you use that to subvert claims that survive testing, you're making a positive statement and you need a testable alternative. In any other case, what you're doing is using philosophy to push ideology by discrediting established facts.

I think we should separate "empiricism here is currently difficult" to "absolutely impossible"

Some fields of social science are undergoing internal turmoil (eg. Macroeconomics and some subfields of psychology). This is a good sign; old models are being discarded as new evidence and better methods pop up. In fact, I'm more concerned about sociology, where there wasn't a replication crisis.

Facts are being improved upon when you see crisis in replication. That's a sign of a healthy field of study.

As an econometrics/labor econ grad student, I can tell you I (and most of macro) could answer many questions definitively if we could do things we absolutely should not (eg. Run RCTs on real cities on things like the minimum wage). In microeconomics, we've resorted mainly to look for the effect of exogenous shocks on systems we care about (eg. The Muriel boatlift made a few studies on local unemployment/immigration due to the exogenous shocks nature of the event)

I would say objective reality is dubious, and wonder what claims do "survive testing"?

On the one hand, human behaviour, culture and influences is extremely fragmented, to the point where I wonder what is it we're trying to model? The subject we're trying to predict is part of this culture and influences, and probably shifting so fast it's questionable we can, with accuracy, predict much.

On the other hand we have the interpretor, the constructor of the study, who also is colored by culture and influences to the point where we must ask why is a certain model being constructed?What is predicted and why? How are people's actions interpreted to fit that model?

See I'm fine with all of what you just said. The problem comes at the next step, "Testable claims are dubious so XYZ."

Being skeptical is healthy. Inferring from your skepticism is not. Inferring leads to refusing vaccines, embracing homeopathic medicine, or asserting that a $15 federal minimum wage will have no disemployment effects in rural US counties.

No I would never make that leap. I believe social sciences in particular have suffered from over simplifying human behaviour to reduce it down to something that appears testable and that has resulted in silly predictions/claims.

But medical trials is a whole other story. Here you can very clearly construct a double blind to test the efficacy of a medicine.

The fact that "soft" sciences are too often junk sciences is not proof that "empirical proofs" aren't required. The opposite is true, in fact.

> But anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that _Social Text_'s editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insistence.

This is misleading. First, Social Text at the time explicitly did not practice peer review. You can't relax standards that aren't there. Second, their editorial requests were, in their own words: "We requested him (a) to excise a good deal of the philosophical speculation and (b) to excise most of his footnotes." He refused, and they published anyway. Sokal was certainly playing at being a recalcitrant author, but if an author's recalcitrance causes you to publish an article full of gibberish, you have still published gibberish.

The Sokal affair is not some knock-down destruction of the fields of postmodern and cultural criticism, but it's certainly a blemish. I encourage anyone who is interested to read http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html

> Occasionally propagating "postmodern" meme generators is a childish form of territorial demarcation

Or possibly it's just funny. Here's a similar one for discrete math: http://www.theproofistrivial.com/

> Or possibly it's just funny.

As the submitter, this is definitely what I was leaning towards. I didn't mean this as some knockdown of all postmodern thought (I like some pomo philosophers), but just poking fun at the obscurantism in the work of some subset of authors. And, that the generation of the text is at least mildly interesting from a computer science / linguistics perspective. Very surprised to wake up and see this with so much commentary / controversy.

Humanities student-turned software engineer here. Was once into PoMo studies.

I don't know about the Social Text bullying issue (I'd never heard of Social Text, so I didn't think its publication that significant), but Sokal's Intellectual Impostures picks apart most of those writers' abuse of scientific concepts extremely fairly and sensitively. He takes great care not to comment on their philosophical writing outside of its scientific content, and even then takes care to distinguish between literal and metaphorical use.

Also, I see little evidence of the 'bullying' mentioned here. Do you have any evidence to share?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair#Publication

I was mistaken about the peer review, as _Social Text_ was not peer-reviewed.

The article I was remembering discusses how Sokal refused to make the edits requested by _Social Text_'s editors. [0]

  > Having established an interest in Sokal's article, we did
  > ask him informally to revise the piece. We requested him (a)
  > to excise a good deal of the philosophical speculation and
  > (b) to excise most of his footnotes. Sokal seemed resistant
  > to any revisions, and indeed insisted on retaining almost
  > all of his footnotes and bibliographic apparatus on the
  > grounds that his peers, in science, expected extensive
  > documentation of this sort. Judging from his response, it
  > was clear that his article would appear as is, or not at
  > all. At this point, Sokal was designated as a "difficult,
  > uncooperative author," a category well known to journal
  > editors. We judged his article too much trouble to publish,
  > not yet on the reject pile, perhaps of sufficient interest
  > to readers if published in the company of related articles.

http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/9607/mst.html

It is understandable that Sokal was hesitant to remove the footnotes: they contain many of the best jokes and outrageous postmodern quotes (and also make it quite clear to any reader with a basic knowledge of the sciences that this was not meant seriously).

I agree that the work of Lacan, Derrida, Baudrillard, and their contemporaries do deserve study and contemplation. I've done it, and I learned a ton from it.

The problem that these generators address is much more circumscribed.

Rather, it is poking fun at the people who do not understand these literary giants, but claim to.

This kind of obscurantism is often used to hide the fact that the author doesn't fully understand what is going on.

A hallmark of deep understanding in any field is the ability to simplify complex concepts and relay them to a reader efficiently. (I'm not a physicist, but Brian Greene can explain String Theory and particle physics in a way I understand. Why can't someone do the same with Lacan?)

For example, Zizek is excellent at this. (As are many others.) If you read his papers, they do not sound like this. He uses the buzz-words necessary, but he makes straightforward arguments. And IMO, that's why he's been successful--he's helped get Hegel, Lacan, and other writers' complex philosophical ideas out to a very wide audience, efficiently--by writing good, quality prose.

Compare that with much of what comes out of undergrad/grad student writing classes, and I submit that there is a huge difference. And that's what this is poking fun at. Just my 2c.

At its deepest level, it is a question of inequality: some people are able to BS their way to tenure, fame, etc., by writing like this--because they understand the system better than others who weren't as well groomed through upbringing, good mentorship, or other circumstances. Writing this way is a strategy for certain people who know how the game is played: it has worked, and will continue to. But that's a problem, and it's one worthy of mockery.

> Rather, it is poking fun at the people who do not understand these literary giants, but claim to.

I'd go a level deeper, and say that these "literary giants" also suffer from "obscurantism". Maybe it's academia, or the fact they're trying to express a truly new thought (if that's possible nowadays), but comprehensibility suffers by using long and obscure words.

They also say "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery", so to expect undergrads won't to also do this is unrealistic.

I have a close friend who is doing a postdoc in these areas. I've reviewed a lot of text and talked a lot about the concepts.

The language may sometimes use long and obscure words, but it is for a reason, and it it precision. The thoughts and philosophical underpinnings are very nuanced and precise.

Synonyms exist in most languages, and english has a lot of them, and their only motivation is to express nuances.

Language will always have some vagueness associated with it, logic or maths don't. But logic and maths aren't great at expressing thoughts. (Maybe art is, but I'm not ready to make that argument here.)

I believe long words are a poor substitute for carefully chosen words. It's possible you think long words mean carefully chosen, that's usually not the case in my experience. Very few people actually bother to look up the exact meaning, but use those long words how they think what they mean. So length buys you nothing.

Along those lines, are you sure you mean precision and not accuracy? As long as descriptions of your thoughts are accurate, though not precise, that should suffice to convey them accurately and "truly" after a few tries - papers are long enough for some repetition :)

EDIT: And that's the most charitable interpretation. Using long or uncommon words to either obscure meaning or try and appear more eloquent are real dangers (c.f. "autoethnographic"). After all, why use "verbose" when you could use "sesquipedalianism"? I will admit that long words are fun, but in the same way insect collecting is - not appropriate or even interesting for everywhere and everyone.

Well. I'm not english native, I think I mean precision. :)

For me great writing is to convey a specific thought succinctly. A lot of the writers mentioned here aren't expressing something radically new like Plato or Descartes, but rather taking a small step describing nuances from a previous thought – hence precision.

Also, like computer science, I believe the field is entitled to a language describing concepts that aren't directly available without further studies.

"they can be interpreted in many different ways."

This is the clincher for me. How can you make a serious argument if what you say is open to interpretation? For every variable the possible meanings multiply exponentially. You may as well be saying anything, no-one will ever be able to test or refute it. In science a huge amount of effort is put into making things as clear as humanly possible, and still lots of problems in communication arise.

Postmodern writings can certainly be enjoyed in the same way as dense literature, for the use of language, references, cryptic meaning, and so on. But demanding to be treated as a meaningful addition to the corpus of human knowledge is simply narcissism.

Oh, wow. Found the grad student.

Maybe this postmodernist word salad phenomenon is the result of humanities students and professors (mistakenly) thinking that their area of study contains no more legitimate things to investigate.

Consequently, we're now seeing this mere intellect signaling being passed off as worthwhile content. Come on. You can do better.

Didn't go to grad school for this stuff, but I did study it in undergrad. I wrote dozens of papers like this, and they always got great marks.

For me, the reason I did it was simple: if you want good grades/academic-approval in this field... writing like that works!

I do think there is signaling going on--if your paper has the 'gestalt' of what a 'good paper' looks like, then you get an A. Because you 'get it'.

Similar signaling happens in all fields though, including software. For instance, when you're looking at a coder's website/github/resume, there are certain things hiring committees look for before passing on to the next level of the hiring process.

It's the same thing, I think. But the ultimate cause is most likely laziness. We use gestalt evaluation as a way to make quick judgments about whether a person understands our field. If they do--that means we don't have to read/evaluate that closely, and it's less effort for us.

Like all behaviors that are reinforced, there is motivation to encourage from both sides. Everyone wins on the deal.

> Everyone wins on the deal.

Except those who are new to the field, yet still have worthwhile contributions. They are shut out.

Removing this bullshit signaling and standards is what we've been trying to do in academics for decades, to allow even children from lower class families to actively contribute without any disadvantage to their peers.

Yet, now you're saying that this signaling is a "win-win situation"?

In a sarcastic way, yes. Obviously it's a problem that self-propagates and creates new problems. But it works for the "people in power"; those who wield influence in the literary field.

Ah, okay. I might have missed the sarcasm - obviously, with me being already sceptical of the person who'd write such a thing, I interpreted the text in a different way.

>I interpreted the text in a different way.

Maybe you should write a paper :)

But if we apply that thought to computer science. Would you argue we'd better stick to using Basic, because the concepts are easier than say Haskell?

Those new to the field would not appreciate why something is immutable and monadic, they are shut out. (Doesn't mean they can't churn out a simple form in VB).

It's not reasonable to hold everyone hostage to the least common denominator. That only foster mediocrity. Thankfully computer science has not suffered much from this, and I don't think social sciences should be held back either.

Actually, that's exactly what we do.

If you publish an algorithm in a paper, it's acceptable to do it in any language, pseudocode, as flowchart, structogram, etc.

I've seen papers describing algorithms in Scheme, Haskell, but also in python before.

There's a difference. You wouldn't expect some random person off the street to understand this algorithm even when expressed in simplified pseudocode.

Similarly there's no reason to expect a random person off the street to understand the language of a modern philosophical book.

Each field of study (social sciences and computer sciences) has its own domain specific language and concepts that requires some work to get your head around.

Every child that finished high school would be expected to be able to understand any such book with only their own knowledge and an encyclopedia, though.

There speaks someone who's never done any teaching. Trust me, you would be amazed by what people who have finished high school can fail to understand.

Well, I went to school in Germany - stuff's different here, ofc.

Not sure what you mean. German high school education tends to be better than US high school education (though I'm not from the US), but you are nonetheless overestimating what a typical high school graduate is able to understand without lots of prodding. Most people find coding quite difficult to learn, which is why it is possible to make quite a good living doing it.

Wikipedia says Luce Irigary says E=mc² could be a "sexed equation" as it privileges c over other "necessary speeds". How is it possible to think she isn't full of nonsense?

Why not embrace this sort of computer-generated text as an object of study? As you point out, even human-generated postmodern literature can be interpreted in many different ways. Ultimately the interpretation lies in the person reading the text, not the author. Computerized authors just make this more obvious.

> They are not randomized strings of insider shibboleths.

the joke is that from many people's perspective real papers are indistinguishable from this.

> Their work is not easy to understand and, yes, they can be interpreted in many different ways.

saying this about a paper would lead many in the harder science to question what the point of work that is able to be interpreted in multiple ways, does the paper even matter or is it just my interpretation that matters and if it's just my interpretation why should I even care about the paper to begin with, if something can mean anything doesn't it just mean nothing?

Irigary is the one who called E=mc^2 a sexist equation, right?

No further questions, your honour.

Did she?

https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/2hu5sb/did_l...

Serious comtemplation? You mean Kristeva, for instance, really, really did understand the mathematics she used. She was not really attempting to impress her readers with fancy words she evidently did not understand as Sokal clearly shows on page 46 of Intellectual Impostures.

Dawkins put it well "Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something like the following: " And he quotes the psychoanalyst (!!) Félix Guattari

     "We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously. "

Gotta say, this comment itself reads like it was written by the postmodern generator

No it doesn't. Come on, that's not a constructive response to a perfectly articulate comment.

To people who don't know anything about postmodernism (i.e. me), it certainly does.

The comment doesn't say anything about the content of postmodernist thought, so I can't see why you would say that. It's completely intelligible, and it's a bit childish to pretend otherwise.

i wasn't sure if it was sarcasm either

I thought it was copy/paste from the site.. until I realized he was serious. Poe's Law in action.

Really? I mean it uses some slightly unusual words (shibboleth, demarcation, unbecoming) but these are hardly technical terms, you'll find them in stories for children or teenagers. There are no complex or difficult sentences in there.

Who bullied the Social Text editors? How can I bully journal editors to accept my papers?

The point is not that "postmodernity has no cultural or intellectual value". Indeed, even a generator as exemplified in the article can be said to have such value. Since the end of the XIXth century it has become clear, albeit conveniently ignored, that the value of interest is crucially practical. Hic rhodus, hic salta. When it's not, aside from bringing some short-lived distraction, as any other consumption, it validates and reinforces a status quo that, judging by the state of the world, is not conducive to common happiness or productivity. To say the least.

I don't necessarily sympathize with postmodern studies as much as you, but threads like this really don't contribute much to HN and should be more tiresome for people across the board. We should recognize it for the flame-war that it really is, just one that doesn't have a proper representative on one side, i.e. a "community bubble" symptom.

If there's no technical discussion of the algorithm or an interesting bipartisan viewpoint to be had here, then all that's left is bashing that's been done before in past stories.

Really the best "criticism" of postmodern thought is that once you've gone through and deconstructed everything and reduced the world to power relations, it doesn't give you much indication what you can do about it. Of course, that's not what most postmodern thinkers set out to do. Dismantling the present is necessary for imagining the future.

Indeed. Start by reading the opuses of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, and Levinas and then maybe you can begin to talk about postmodernism and not be laughed out of the parlor.

Till then, stfu and start reading.

  But anyone who has studied the Sokal hoax knows very well that Social Text's editors were bullied into relaxing their peer-reviewed standards at Sokal's insistence.

Consider that there may be an intrinsic flaw in your field when the publication of factual claims relies entirely on social pressure. Consider that there is a flaw when claims cannot actually be "debunked," but rather merely receive counter social pressure.

  The work of many of late Twentieth Century philosophy by figures such as Jacques Derrida, Luce Irigary, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard, and many many more deserve serious studied contemplation...They are not randomized strings of insider shibboleths.

Listing authors in your field is literally a shibboleth.

  Occasionally propagating "postmodern" meme generators is a childish form of territorial demarcation

Your defense of postmodernism is to attack opponents and a list insider authors. Consider that those are classic territorial tactics.

From your defense, postmodernism seems akin medieval theologians debating the nature of the soul. There is a lot of internal self-promotion and politicking, and a lot of attacking outsiders, but nothing of actual use to the real world.

Social Text was not a major journal, and in fact didn't even review submissions. What could or couldn't get published in it is of very little significance. There have been similar pranks where low-tier computer science conferences have accepted nonsense abstracts. Does that mean that all of computer science is bullshit?

I suspect Sokal-eque hoaxes could get published one-by-one in every single postmodern journal and each would be deemed "not a major journal" in rotation.

Postmodernism is some kind of academic alternate reality that exists only in journals, so discrediting one is kind of a big deal.

The difference is that computer science is grounded in the real world. Every CS conference could fold, every journal could be disgraced, and yet Google would still answer my search queries. Therefore, I'm pretty sure 01+01=10. This unarguable power of reality is why empiricism won.

I wouldn't lean too hard on empiricism when the main thesis of your comment is an unsupported suspicion.

To repeat, Social Text is not peer reviewed, and it's not a prestigious journal, so it's not surprising that a hoax article got published in it. Similar hoaxes can be perpetrated in any field which has unreviewed journal or conferences, computer science included. Even physics is not immune:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/oct/22/nonsense-pap...

They did actually review the submissions (not a formal peer review process though), and initially rejected the Sokal paper for multiple issues, eventually accepting it with no changes for their "Science Wars" issue.

The irony that they decided to accept it exactly for the Science Wars issue, after initially rejecting it, is amazing. If they had published it in any other issue, the impact wouldn't be as dramatic.

Review means "peer review" in the context of a journal. Even very low-tier academic journals have a formal peer review process. Social Text was really more of a magazine than an academic journal.

I think Baudrillard's concept of simulacra was a pretty useful one.

"Square root of minus one equals = erectile penis"

"We do not understand fluid mechanics as well as rigid mechanics due to sexism, fluids are associated with women, and rigid with men"

"e=mc^2 is a sexed equation, prioritizing the speed of light over other speeds which are very important in our lives"

The first one is from Lacan, and other two from Irigay (they are not exact quotes, my apologies).

As The Economist put it:

"If you ask one of them a question, they draw out enigmatic little expressions from their quiver, so to speak, and shoot one off; and if you try to get hold of an account of what that one meant, you're transfixed by another novel set of metaphors. You'll never get anywhere with any of them."

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