The Death of Postmodernism and Beyond (2006)
philosophynow.org
philosophynow.org
Furthermore, the article claims that postmodern is characterized by an ironic self awareness, and never has this idea been more prominent in culture. In recent years I have noticed that TV commercials have become more and more self-aware. Take for example a recent commercial by what I believe was Verizon. It says something like "More coverage, more data." and then another actor comes into screen saying "and more people saying more." If this isn't ironic self awareness, I'm not sure what is.
Those are postmodern concepts about culture. But the postmodern metaphysical and epistemological nihilism are, as another commenter said, basically bedrock in terms of philosophy.
I think that perfectly proves the author's point, though. The "self awareness" of postmodernism has filtered to even the most banal of sources and been left in the dust by the avant garde of today. Irony and sarcasm as critical devices are dead for anyone but the hacks.
From the article:
>"people who produce the cultural material which academics and non-academics read, watch and listen to, have simply given up on postmodernism. The occasional metafictional or self-conscious text will appear, to widespread indifference – like Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park – but then modernist novels, now long forgotten, were still being written into the 1950s and 60s. The only place where the postmodern is extant is in children’s cartoons like Shrek and The Incredibles, as a sop to parents obliged to sit through them with their toddlers. This is the level to which postmodernism has sunk; a source of marginal gags in pop culture aimed at the under-eights."
Only today there are only hacks. And everybody still uses irony and sarcasm.
Besides, the parent is right. Postmodernism is not a theory to inform cultural production (how people make stuff), although its confusingly referred to as such sometimes.
Postmodernism is a condition of a whole culture (or a whole society) and the inventions that appeared later on (the internet, mobile apps, interactive shows etc) that the author speaks about, only serve to make the world even more postmodern.
The core of postmodernism is that we have exhausted modernity -- and indeed there are no trends that are "new under the sun anymore", not just because everything has been done before (which is almost true), but because society doesn't care about following this or that form en masse anymore and then proceeding to another (e.g. how baroque turned romantic, turned 12-tone, etc. or similarly in any other sphere).
Instead, everything is fragmented, and everybody (artist or not) can do whatever they please and have an audience/followers. There is no canon and no single "normative" culture the way it was 80 or 100 or 150 years ago.
Plus, nothing is able to baffle anyone anymore -- in the way that each generation before could shock some part of the established culture (up to perhaps punk, but probably not even that, and not even 50s rock n' roll -- it only shocked the most conservative parts of society, and had no problem being marketed, sold, and dominating the airwaves in record time).
Postmodernism is also about having access to all the cultural production and modes of the past, and the internet and co made that even more so. Artists, politicians, marketeers, etc can borrow from any period, and repackage and resell everything, combine it, etc.
All of these things are what are described as the "postmodern condition" by the now dead French theorists of the postmodernism.
And none of those things is going away.
Even a total return to modernism or classicism across all artists for example, would still be postmodern -- because before post-modernism art didn't regress to previous periods, it invented new modes.
You can do whatever you like, as long as you're trying to make money (or sometimes more abstract social credit) by selling it/you as hard as possible to your customers.
And there are only potential customers now - not audiences in the old scene-with-common-values sense.
Postmodernism, such as it is, is now a marketing gimmick, occasionally used to add some spicy irony to make sales efforts more successful.
The real horror is that this applies everywhere - not just in commerce, but in the arts, the sciences, academia, and especially in politics.
You can't make it postmodernisms fault that our philosophical inquire made us realize what the postmodernists realized. It might be horror in your eyes but then reality is horror and it's our job to build useful structures on top of that knowing they might not last forever.
It's not like postmodernism can be disregarded just because it doesn't lead you to some "Truth", philosophical inquiry leads us wherever it leads us. That's the point of philosophy, not giving you comfort in truth but in inquiry
This whole paragraph made me think of Black Mirror.
> Instead, everything is fragmented,
Isn't there a new form of art (the likes of BM) that takes all these fragment and puts them back together in novel ways that help us reconnect them with the human condition and what that means in a post-modernist society.
Not so much trying to go back in time but trying to reach back for things that were important and give them new prominence?
As I write this, I'm considering the Jordan Peterson as performance art .. he certainly shocks and discomfits many people and as much as you might like him or disagree with him is position is pretty much unassailable.
Even Trump and Brexit look more sensible through this lense.
Indeed, isn't one of Putin's most senior advisors some kind of professor of post-modernism or something?
As PM becomes more and more mainstream surely it makes sense that society find new and unusual ways to continue cultural progress ...
EDIT some other modern media that pops to mind: Mr Robot with it's non-linear narrative and skewed perspective on modernity. The Handmaids tale which, though a few decades old, actually seems more relevant nowadays. I want to say "Ex Machina" but I kind of feel the narrative style doesn't serve the subject matter at all.
Ah. Having started actually reading TFA this is apparently the whole point!
Well, that's the very definition of post-modernist art: putting fragments together in novel ways (only the sole novelty is in the arrangement, and not some inherent quality -- in the sense that two conjured random numbers are different, but they're nonetheless still numbers, not something else, like e.g. Stravinsky was still categorically different than Bach. Now we're all collage makers, and the only difference is what we chose to stuck together).
>As I write this, I'm considering the Jordan Peterson as performance art .. he certainly shocks and discomfits many people
Many people are mock-shocked these days (what with PC norms and all), but few or none are actually shocked.
In the end Jordan Peterson is just another public speaker/figure one hates or disagrees with, not "the end of civilization as we know it" which is how e.g. norm-breaking figures were perceived back in the day.
>Even Trump and Brexit look more sensible through this lense.
I think Trump and Brexit look more sensible under this interpretation: rich/power elites had lost contact with the people, and pushed their own interests (anti-middle/worker class laws and conditions) under the pretext of "globalization".
The "unwashed masses" then took revenge in the polls, and could care less if the new President is uncultivated or incompetent (they had an idiot president under Bush anyway, and the sky hasn't fallen), or if Britain is separated from EU (they didn't see much improvement in their everyday lives under EU anyway, and they prefer their autonomy to the German-driven collective harmonious pipedream that is EU).
Perhaps that's what characterises this new paradigm. The durability of reality. That our much vaunted social norms have far less impact than we think.
Peterson makes absolute sense to me as performance art. (EDIT now so too does 50 shades of grey)
Black Mirror so is postmodernism in a yet-relevant format. Postmodernism may still be relevant but it's the interpretation of post-modernism as dogma (itself antithetical to PM) which is not.
It's the priests and priestesses of postmodernism that gets people's backs up isn't it, not so much the concept(s) itself.
Yes, that. Especially since the concept itself was never meant to be something one can opt to follow or not follow -- just a description of the reality we're in.
It's not that we're "postmodernists" that is, but that we live in a "postmodern" world -- and so we can't be anything aside from that.
As for Peterson, I see him as something orthogonal from postmodernism.
He is someone that talks from a traditional values standpoint in an era where different norms are becoming the mainstream. He doesn't say anything outrageous, in the sense that what he says would be common acceptable wisdom 30 or 50 years ago (and for tons of people still is).
The whole outrage is not because he's saying something inherently outrageous, but because he dares to publicly stray from the mainstream while still being mainstream.
Somebody could say the same things in a 1950 classroom or the president could say them in 1970s and nobody would bat an eyelash -- even among the leftist and more progressives. Heck, the Monty Python made fun of "gender identities" for example in the late 70s, and those bunch was and is as progressive as they come: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
That's why people are shocked by him, and worse still for people who uncritically swallow this stuff he's often right.
That's what makes him "post modern" in a post-modern world, and very much a spectacle.
I see Monty Python as questioning these ideas as a way of advancing the discussion. They're comedy though. They're not claiming "truth" status.
Not necessarily. A lot of good things, but perhaps a lot of excess as well.
(e.g. in my opinion end of segregation and women and gay rights obviously great. Non-binary bathrooms, "gender-neutral pronouns", "Safe zones" and other absurdities not so much).
Peterson plays between those two (condemns the bad developments but often some good developments too). But nowhere near the caricature he's made to look but those who he'd rather uncritically embrace everything.
It's like with the French revolution: a lot of good things, but a lot of zeal to cut heads and change things to absurdity. It's just the bias of the current advocates that make any change from the older norms seem great. In retrospect a different generation would laugh at some of our excesses. (Like the 80s and still on to day laugh with hippies, whereas in the sixties and early 70s those ideas -- heck, even those clothes -- where de rigueur for young people).
Non-binary bathrooms? I don't see why anyone would legislate for bathrooms at all.
I'll draw the line at gender-neutral pronouns since "they/their" is perfectly adequate and means I don't have to change how I use language overnight to accommodate a fringe group.
Excess, sure. I'm happy to see some exuberance among communities once oppressed.
I don't share the fear of some that these communities are becoming the oppressors, although clearly (as with the whole C-16 thing) some are getting carried away.
If you take Peterson seriously, I kind of feel like he's just throwing away everything that's happened in the last few years and acting like it didn't happen. It's as though his whole didactic is tone-deaf.
An enlightened approach would be to integrate the new ideas with the old.
What are you referring to by "everything"?
both academics and non-academics watch/see advertising, they see memes, many of which are highly self aware. What about Rick and Morty, an incredibly popular TV show among many groups of people? Nihilism, self-awareness, and breaking the 4th wall are basically trademarks of the show.
Also as I stated, postmodern concepts like simulacra and hyperreal are more useful descriptors than ever.
See: "most banal of sources". Rick and Morty is a case study on this exact point. A perfectly plausible commercially packaged shadow of reality. I wouldn't be so elitist as to call Roiland a hack, but he is working firmly within "what was and is". He is not showing us an envisioned possible future, or exploring any novel ideas. It's just riding the last dying gasps of postmodern existential angst that was drilled into our heads by The Simpsons and Family Guy. Perfectly competent as a work of commercial entertainment, but not original art to be studied critically.
While it is indeed banal, please, then, mention any other source that is not banal, and does not owe 90% of its existence to postmodernism.
I don't think you'll find any on either side of the Atlantic, no matter how highbrow it purports to be.
>He is not showing us an envisioned possible future, or exploring any novel ideas.
That's orthogonal and unrelated to postmodernism. Postmodernism wasn't about envisioning new ideas and futures -- in fact it said that new ideas are nigh impossible, as all current forms/ideas are just imitations and recombinations of existing ideas and forms, and all are perceived with equal indifference towards their novelty factor (or lack thereof).
In other words, if I created Blugrass-Death Metal-Opera combo in 1920 I would be a pioneer and a modernism breaking norms etc, and would have even shocked some part of the establishment and public.
Nowadays it would be business as usual, even if somebody hasn't already made that combination, nobody would bat an eye for its emergence. And the same holds true for anything else. It's just a new product, not a new form.
When music (to keep it to that sphere) progressed in small steps that took decades/years to be superceded, there were new forms (eg. Palestrina, Mozart, Beethoven, Mahler, Stravinsky, etc).
Now that it has embraced anything from silence (4.33) to total noise (e.g. Pan Sonic and noisecore), there's nothing really new. Anything will sit somewhere between those extremes (that are already received).
Where existent theory is flawed, it needs improvement. But the world is going to keep going where it's going...
Postmodernism broadly consists of only two tools. The first, as you mentioned, is the deconstructive POV, the ability to look at an object as-is and to understand its origin, its design, its footguns, its flawed narrative, its social excuses, its secret hatreds. But there's more.
We also get the curse of relativity, the understanding that all epistemic sources are relative and that we ultimately choose to believe what we believe. This was definitely frustrating, coming on the heels of modernism, and that's why postmodernism has its name: modernism is clearly wrong and serves only to mislead and enslave via narrative control.
But in return, we get something good: Concepts can become relativized too, and so we get many simple metaphysical statements as ways to understand what things are. What is a proof? Well, it's whatever convinces you that something is true. We lose absolute proof, but each of us gain a deeper understanding of what it means to prove something to somebody. What is art? Well, it's an expression in some medium. We lose art galleries, but now we can be artistic just by expressing ourselves any time we find new media, such as video games or graffiti or atomic layer deposition or selfies.
We get another good thing: A more precise understanding of how the various pieces of knowledge fit together. By talking of theories and evidence and logic as objects in their own rights, rather than as absolute facets of the universe, we can connect the various sciences and reunify the entire philosophical endeavor under a single umbrella, just like Quine always wanted with his semantic web of science. Maths is logic is metaphysics. [0]
Edit: Formatting, examples.
Whenever I meet people who claim there is an objective truth I always ask them to give any examples. So far I have not met anyone who can come up with an objective claim that isn't merely basing that on a frame of reference which can be deconstructed or shown to be based on a set of apriori assumptions itself.
Tell me whack more about your whack frame of reference...
I see postmodernism and extreme relativism as a sort of awesome stage of society where we get to make up reality because we are freed from mundane concerns like knowing where our water comes from or where our sh%t gets flushed to. It is quite wonderful that many many people get the luxury of never even being curious about these things.
Meanwhile, the engineers, doctors, carers, labourers (I am missing a lot out here) who ultimately keep people alive tend to have quite definite opinions about critical aspects of reality.
Granted these are still not objective truths because all experience is subjective. All I can say is that a sophist who believes that rent is not an objective truth is nonetheless likely to find themselves (subjectively) on the streets if they don’t pay it.
But don't forget that the fact most of our early engineering advanced were done by philosophers who had the time to ponder and tinker.
So rent is in fact highly subjective. Not the definition but the reality of it.
I'm not too familiar with postmodern theory, would you explain this please?
Say I state that you posted the above sentence, and that that is an objective truth.
How would you break that down to assumptions?
In a dictionary, all the words are defined by other words.
Observe that all experience is subjective, anyone can have any set of axioms they like and “voila”, there can be no “objective” truth.
It’s true in this kind of tautological way, and kind of interesting.
On the other hand no one I know truly acts as though this is true. Also I think the world is a lot more interesting and frankly simpler to think about if you assume objective truths exist.
> Observe that all experience is subjective, anyone can have any set of axioms they like and “voila”, there can be no “objective” truth.
Hmmm,ok. So does this mean it's a critique on how language models the world instead of the world itself?
My axioms doesn't affect yours. Or a rat's, or a cats. Yet we'll all interact. Where does the interaction happen if not in an objective overlap, that which the subjectivity attempts to describe?
The words we use can described by other words, but other words do describe them.
The cells in our digestive tract do not care if we think the apple poisoned or not. They will respond to the amount of arsenic present in the fruit though. Is that response subjective?
That's one narrative, there are many others (in fact an infinite amount of other perspectives). You are just choosing one way by reducing the reality of the interaction of the apple, the cells, atoms, time, how it gets in your body how that suddenly help you burn energy and run faster which then means your footsteps are a little deeper in the soild you run which kills a few ants which then turn into soil and goes back into the ecosystem.
There isn't an objective perspective on this only reductions into narratives.
How does postmodern thinking define objective and subjective, and contrast the two to come to the conclusion that an objective reality does not exist?
Postmodern thinking doesn't come to a conclusion that an objective reality doesn't exist per se.
Don't think about it as a proposition about how the world is.
Postmodernism shows through ex. deconstruction how language isn't as solid a foundation to talk about the world objectively as we might want to believe.
So, in other words, it's a critique of the idea of the absolute and objective frame of references.
It doesn't say that we can't use classical physics just that the second we start to formulate proposition about how the world is we are ultimately using an axiom to do that.
Now, this axiom is useful enough that it might allow us to build spaceships to fly to Mars but it might be that it doesn't allow us to do faster than light travel to reach Alpha Centauri.
Not sure I answered your question satisfactorily if not let me know and I will try again. It's worth spending time on.
I think I'm getting it. It's basically that we use mental modals to go about our business, but these modals will always be limited in scope. True objectivity is, in a sense beyond us.
Because how true could that be by defintion?
I do believe in objective truth, even if not realistically achievable and perhaps not philosophical mainstream. But if it is also simpler and more interesting, that is an additional plus and probably more correct.
I also admit to having premises and no problem to reflect upon them. Only to some of them I keep a sentimental relationship. A frame of reference might always be needed. But why should the frame be special?
Subjective to me is the relevance of the assumption about truth. The same can be said about a lot of discussions about conscience and general perception.
The flat earthers don't fall off the planet just because they think the world is flat and believing it flat still allow them to find the way from village A to B if close enough.
It's just not a good enough model to build ex. a GPS satellites.
So I agree that we will, of course, assume a lot of things are "objective" even though they aren't from a philosophical point of view and that's all good. Philosophically though you can't really get around the postmodern philosophy if you want to discuss reality to it's full extent we can.
Those are the kind of questions you would ask to start pulling it all apart. Those questions would be absurd in a normal discussion but in philosophy, they are important questions because they help us unravel our assumptions about the reality we often take for granted.
I feel like you are not questioning the message but the way and the "tools" used to convey it. ("what are words?" "what does it really mean when you say X?"). You want to start the discussion by questioning the (supposed) common middle ground of understanding that will be used for it. This way, I think, you kind of refused to try to give an answer to your parent.
I don't claim the anyone can "know truth totally and completely". But, conceptually I think there is. In a particular point of the universe at a particular time there was a specific particle there. Or wasn't. It couldn't be and not be. Subjectively it may seem one thing or the other. O even both. But it was either there or not.
And how do you deny the truism "The Universe IS"[0]? If you deny it you face a paradox because how can you call it false if false doesn't exist?
[0] By "Universe" I mean everything that exists, existed and will exist. Concrete and abstract.
But "the universe is" is just tautological I.e it doesn't help you understand the universe any better and you still have to define what you mean with universe even your [0] will run into all sorts of problems (like what is time, what does it mean something exists etc)
It's it's own axiom and conclusion in the same sentence.
Gödel proved that mathematically and logically with his "incompleteness theorem" but you can also as I did above show it in different ways.
And you are right I am not questioning the message I am questioning the assumptions of the message. As I have said other places.
You obviously can't have a normal everyday discussion like that i.e. we normally speak with a lot of assumptions many of them completely unfounded and still manage to get productive results.
But philosophically this is a different discussion where you are forced to question the assumptions of your axioms.
So what matters is not what something _is_ but what something _means_?
And I used that tautology because a tautology eliminates the "everything is subjective". (Unless everybody's opinion is the same. But that makes still a subjective opinion?)
Tautologies are semantic and thus bound by the axiom of language itself. I.e. "universe" is an assumption, an axiom.
So no it doesn't really eliminate "everything is subjective" it fits perfectly into the postmodern critique of language itself.
I can see the above. And that the assumptions and problems in languages shape our thoughts and view of reality (the universe).
But, like I said before, instead of tackling what the sentence _means_ you tackle it's tools and execution (language and it's use). I find it like facing a a physics equation and starting to question "what is lightspeed 'c'?", "why is it in m/s?", "why is it base 10?".
In philosophy, these are _the_ questions you ask because you are trying to go the foundation.
But even in science "what is lightspeed" and why is in m/s ARE relevant questions not to do the science but to establish the tools for doing the science.
I'm finding it hard to see how you adopt such a way of thinking in a macro level.
Example: Person A says to me X. It is impossible to me to assert anything about it because I cannot _know_ the intent, meaning and reasoning by A to get to X. And even if I could totally and completely "be" inside A's mind, there would be problems involving language (for structuring thought) and sensory perception.
1 - Does this mean that X is totally unqualifiable? (true/false, valid/invalid, etc)
2 - If 1 is true, how does that that not fill you with epistemological dread? Anything can be anything. And anything can be or not be. Everything can be reduced to nothing including our own consciousness/ego.
And I'd like you to answer this previous point:
>> But "the universe is" is just tautological I.e it doesn't help you understand the universe any better...
> So what matters is not what something _is_ but what something _means_?
(And since this is getting big, could you point me to some resources to learn more about postmodernism? And maybe continue our discussion via email?)
If you believe the world is flat you aren't exactly right but you are right enough to get from village A to B if they are close enough to each other.
Newton wasn't exactly right but his understadning of gravity was good enough that it was useful to us.
Einstein wasn't exactly right but he was right enough for classical physics (just not Quantum Mechanics).
In other words, we believe in things all the time that are useful while not necessarily true.
That's the point. you don't need universal truth to be locally right. The models have their limits, Us and our ability to establish them. They are an interpretation of reality not reality itself. I.e. our experience of reality and reality is not in a 1 to 1 relationship. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do science or we shouldn't make assumptions about whether something is good or bad or better or worse or right or wrong we should just know that we are really just playing word games in the grand scheme of things.
Postmodernism doesn't say we can't make assumptions on macro level it's indirectly saying we ARE making assumptions and these assumptions are the frame of references but are limited by the language we use to express them. So we can't really know the true interpretation of something just the reduced version that our perception and vantage point allows us to establish.
In other words we are ultimately the axiom of the available perspectives of reality.
I have linked to a few things in another discussion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17366596
would be happy to continue the conversation my contact info is in my details.
If it's absurd in regular situations, of what use is it in daily life?
I think you referring to the more popularized life-philosophy which is quite different.
Postmodernism doesn't ignore conventional context it inquires about the solidity of it. The job of philosophy is to ask questions not find answers.
But the purpose of a question is to seek an answer. It's very definition implies this...
I dunno, on the surface this just appears like formalised intentional abstruseness to me. A formalised method to intentional miss the point.
But thanks for the replies, I appreciate it! This is rather interesting. Do you have some recommended links or books? I want to delve into this a bit more.
So, with postmodernism, you can go all the way down the rabbit hole as a philosophical exercise, and when you come back up and resume daily life, perhaps there are things you took for granted that you now begin to question. For example, a comment way up this chain asserted that "good art is better than bad art in ways that aren't purely relative." I used to believe that (Rembrandt must be better than a 3-year-old's scribble, right?), but now I don't believe that any art (music, film, etc) can be objectively argued to be better than any other, there is no good and bad art, only art that an individual likes or doesn't like.
Postmodernism to me actually leads toward a greater tolerance of other people and the state of the world. When you tear down the concepts of "right" and "wrong" - in the context of morals, ethics, human behavior - you realize they're as shaky and subjective as anything else. If you can't prove that your way is the right way, how can you tell someone else they're wrong?
Not sure I'm understanding you correctly. Are you saying we should be tolerate everyones behaviour because there's no right and wrong?
Do I completely tolerate, with no misgivings, every action taken by another human being, or every circumstance the world places me in? Not exactly. Somewhere there is a clash between abstract intellectual ideals and the reality of flesh and bones and animal brains. But, going back to your original question, I do think this line of thinking has had a real and practical impact on my daily life and the way I view things and interact with people.
Postmodernism was the philosophy that peeled of kind of the last layer which is the language itself and showed that the very tool we were using to express objective truths itself was in fact highly subjective and ridden with assumptions.
I can assure you the point is not to miss the point. Philosophy is for the most part not useful for everyday discussions as it tends to deal with things that often sound absurd (is it ok to kill babies if they cry) but it's important to understand that philosophy is informing other areas such as scientific methodology and to inform how to think about scientific discoveries. Falsification is a product of philosophical pondering. So is Kuhns Paradigm Shift.
With regards to books.
I would say that "Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations" is a pretty good place to start.
https://www.amazon.com/Postmodern-Theory-Interrogations-Stev...
Although he isn't considered a postmodernist per se as such I would also say that Kuhns "The structure of scientific revolution" gets you an interesting view into postmodernism without gunning for it. And it's about science which in itself is always interesting.
You should probably also read some Derrida or maybe start by watching the documentary about him he is pretty hard to read unless you are motivated. But you could start with "Speech and Phenomena" or of course Focult (but try and ignore the many political nuances)
And keep in mind postmodernism doesn't lead you to a conclusion it just shows you the limit of language. It's from that limit we must build structures while knowing they can always be broken down again.
Personally, it's helped me analyze the world differently and see past assumptions which allowed me to come up with better solutions for my clients. But it can also just be something that opens up your eyes for a different way to think about the world.
And when postmodernism is used as a toolkit to deploy different narratives, with the same amount of misleading and control, pointed a in slightly tweaked directions? What exactly did we get?
A new way to set down a foundation of bullshit, but perpetrated by a group that pulls up the ladder behind them. Excluding anyone who doesn't know how to play their semantic games from having an opinion about consensus reality.
No, it shows something completely different: modernism is merely subjective, just like anything else. I wholeheartedly agree with the subjectivity part of post-modernism, but I don't see how it contradicts or disproves the modernist concepts; if anything, it only strengthens the objectivits approach, where each person or a collective is assumed to act out of his own, subjective, self-interest.
The only thing it destroys is utilitiarian "universal" ethical system, which is completely deserved.
You seem to be confusing what the purpose of philosophy is. It's not to establish truth but rather to inquire about truth.
Postmodernism shows us how fragile any truth proposition is and that's a useful way to think about things (especially when you are trying to break someone elses argument down)
I am no fan of the current usage of postmodernism in gender and identity politics but postmodernism as a philosophical perspective isn't going anywhere in fact eve Jordan Peterson one of the most popular critics of postmodernism uses it to make many of his arguments (i.e. to deconstruct the gender and identity politics)
You can't escape postmodernist realization.
What I mean is this: If people truly believe "how fragile any truth proposition is", then why bother to put a lot of effort into making your truth propositions as solid as possible? Why try to make your writing as clear as possible, when people are going to misunderstand it anyway? I suspect that the shallowness that the article complains about may be because people are now functionally postmodern, not just intellectually so.
In contrast, Derrida and Foucault were intellectually postmodernists, but still wrote in a modernist way. That is, they wrote as if they could genuinely communicate truth propositions and be understood.
You don't need objective truth to establish useful and constructive assumptions. It's perfectly fine to reduce reality into something more narrow and confined.
As an example. You can use classical physics to get to Mars with a spaceship. But you can't use it to travel faster than light to Alpa Centauri (but maybe quantum physics). Both classical physics and quantum physics are proven to the extent we can prove anything but they are in contradiction to each other and tells us something different about reality (one says it's local another says it fundamentally non-local)
Or you can believe the world is flat which is good enough for you to get from village A to B but not good enough to navigate the entire planet.
Postmodernism is not a critique of what is useful but claims about what is true and objective.
Derrida and Foucault were caught in the same semantic mesh as the rest of us they just showed through that how elusive it is. Derrida especially showed through his writing.
http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html
How To Deconstruct Almost Anything
My Postmodern Adventure
By Chip Morningstar, June 1993.
"Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman
In a world of overwhelming information and especially fake information, a strong belief in the "elusiveness of meaning and knowledge" and of doubt in anyone possessing an ultimate truth, and the high degree of skepticism that results, would seem essential - a pre-Internet philosophy that seems tailor-made for the Internet era. Instead, people seem to be embracing ideology (ultimate truths), self-importance (another ultimate truth, rather than 'ironic self-awareness') and whatever claims can be insisted upon rather than supported through reason and fact; they are abandoning skepticism and reason, and the project of the Enlightenment entirely. I would ask what they see as the solution to this flood of lies and deception, but I'm afraid their answer will be that they don't care.[0]
I was at a lunch with someone I hadn't spoken to in years, an English lit academic whose PhD was about a post-modern author; one of their co-workers sat between us. I mentioned reading something related to their dissertation; to my surprise, my friend was clearly embarrassed; they said 'I don't read those things any more'. Other PhDs I know have abandoned intellectualism as fervently as the 'psuedo-modernists'; they buy into the ideology and fake news du jour too. If not them, then who? (When I mentioned this to a sympathetic academic, they said 'they aren't intellectuals; they're just a medieval guild'.)
I want to ask: Why did academics and intellectuals abandon post-modernism? Why has everyone else? How can they knowingly lie to themselves and accept the misinformation as truth? What do they think will replace it? How do they intend to solve these problems without it?
[0] To avoid redundancy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17361122
But there's not a lot of use in talking about anything like this stuff in general conversation. Groups of people get exposed to something a little bit, someone smugly tells them that the emperor has no clothes, and it quickly becomes more enjoyable for them to use that tiny bit of smugness to dismiss rich and useful lines of thought. At a certain point, there isn't much to say to people who have developed an allergy to certain kinds of terms, analysis, and lines of thought.
Sure, you can see it on HN. But I expect more from experts in their own domain. Perhaps that's why I'm disappointed.
> At a certain point, there isn't much to say to people who have developed an allergy to certain kinds of terms, analysis, and lines of thought.
I do disagree with this. In that scenario, people are following the herd like sheep; it's not a result of strong beliefs. Among sheep, one leader can change the direction of things, at least to an extent.
Well, I am skeptical that people are that easily led... I feel that it's more the case that they respond to what they need and so if what you're providing doesn't line up with their (possibly dysfunctional) view of the world your ideas will fall on deaf ears. It's not like these ideas in their functional forms have ever been widespread beyond artists using them as a post hoc justification for why their work resonates with the popular mood.
As to your first point about "experts in their own domain"...
I believe that most of the folks who care about these ideas are probably neither in academia nor have much access to popular discourse.
There are plenty of threads to pickup in this world where the intellectual work is still ongoing, but the people in academia mostly don't consider these ideas useful because (among many reasons) they destabilize their already unstable position in the economy.
My dissertation director was way more interested in a very conservative approach to history than in unpacking language, and he was, I think, fairly representative of the people in the field: if you're interested in theoretical concerns, then you're almost definitely going to be either unemployed or become unemployable as an academic or an intellectual.
It's really tough for my cohort to afford to write while paying off student loans working at Barnes and Nobles or adjuncting a 5/5 at some JC. At the same time, I personally have the time to write, but I'd rather focus on playing music because it's a lot more relatable for most people.
You might consider someone like Mark Fisher (kpunk) to be the kind of person I am thinking of when I say that theory in the university is a rough endevor. I'm in the middle of reading his "Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?" and I think it addresses this, so maybe pull the PDF and take a skim. His personal mode of addressing the issue (he eventually killed himself) is probably not super healthy, but at the same time I am not sure that there really is much else that is actionable here.
> Well, I am skeptical that people are that easily led... I feel that it's more the case that they respond to what they need and so if what you're providing doesn't line up with their (possibly dysfunctional) view of the world your ideas will fall on deaf ears.
I'll add a couple points, hopefully without belaboring the question: First, governments, corporations, and political organizations spend a lot of time and money trying to influence opinion, especially online (even on HN); they must believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can lead people. Second, I agree that your ideas can't conflict with their worldview, and in fact the way to lead people (in this sense) is to target their worldview; frame that, program their assumptions and their conclusions are second nature.
funny thing.
"Radio phone-ins, computer games – their shelf-life is short, they are very soon obsolete. A culture based on these things can have no memory – certainly not the burdensome sense of a preceding cultural inheritance which informed modernism and postmodernism. Non-reproducible and evanescent, pseudo-modernism is thus also amnesiac: these are cultural actions in the present moment with no sense of either past or future.
The cultural products of pseudo-modernism are also exceptionally banal, as I’ve hinted. The content of pseudo-modern films tends to be solely the acts which beget and which end life. This puerile primitivism of the script stands in stark contrast to the sophistication of contemporary cinema’s technical effects. Much text messaging and emailing is vapid in comparison with what people of all educational levels used to put into letters. A triteness, a shallowness dominates all. The pseudo-modern era, at least so far, is a cultural desert."
There's too many old cities still called some variant of "New City" like Novgorod (founded 882 years ago), Naples (founded as Neapolis in the 7th century BC), and Carthage (founded in the 13th or 9th century BC).
postmodernism just refers to a movement that came into existence (or at least into fashion) after modernism. it's at least as old as the 50s or 60s.
For postmodernist, the intellectual process is deconstruction and critical thought, and the utopia is sort of multicultural but radically individualistic world, and the replacement of capitalism with some sort of vague socialism.
However, postmodernists don't really believe in their claimed radical perspectivism. So for instance, when there is a dispute between peasants claim they are starving and beaten down, and the wealthy landholders claim the peasants are doing just great, they think the peasants are objectively correct and the landholders are just plain wrong.
Postmodernism came about because Marxism had come to a political dead end, and so leftist types in France decided to try to use Nietzschean relativism as a way to undermine liberal realism, in hopes it would somehow lead to their desired utopia.
This doesn't make much philosophical sense, since Nietzsche was militantly anti-socialist, and as a political strategy it has been an utter failure.
post modernsim says, nah, your objective things aren't objective, you just found some "shadows" that look prettier to you.
I think pseduo modernisim is a bit more more like the cave, a sort of acknowledgement that there are real objective things but the shadows are things in and of themselves. Except these are special shadows that can produce brilliant colorful holograms, and these fancy shadows are also interesting things, in fact they can make life super interesting. But somehere in these shadows there is some kind of objective reality.
post modernsim says, nah, your objective things aren't objective, you just found some "shadows" that look prettier to you.
I agree, that is why I said it is a variation on Plato's cave, not a simple repetition. What they have in common is the belief that what seems real in experience is in fact not, and that to arrive at an understanding of the true state of affairs requires a complex intellectual process that is radically different from ordinary thinking. Contrast all this with, for instance, Aristotle.
But rather than pick apart at cultural examples, I want to take issue with a more central claim: "The shift from modernism to postmodernism did not stem from any profound reformulation in the conditions of cultural production and reception." This is not an uncontroversial claim. Theorists like Fredric Jameson describe postmodernism as precisely a change in material conditions.
I don't have space to describe all of Jameson's arguments here, but I'd encourage anyone curious about the shift from modernism to postmodernism to look into them. They're more robust and convincing than this article, for sure.
Something the OP doesn't dive into much but I found myself wondering is that the "pseudo-modern" label is artificial. It seems like an important aspect of the post-post-modern culture/philosophy is that it's uncoalesced -- no one starts/joins a successful movement of self conscious difference (haha or differance) from post modernism.
So it's left to the grumpy olds to start making names
Frighteningly prescient.
At some level reality itself may be an illusion and we can never be sure of time and space. However, if we concede that point, then we concede that potentially nothing exists then we cannot debate it because we don't exist either. So even by discussing a matter we are taking an assumption that we exist and that something exists for us to talk about, even if the precise meaning of the words isn't nailed down by anyone. At this point, postmodernism starts to look a bit weak, because to communicate we must assume some shared reality between two parties which is quite possibly going to be objective by both parties standards.
And in the framework of human endevour, there are a huge number of hypothetical realities we have ruled out by scientific experiment. It is overwhelmingly likely at this point that something objective exists and we've narrowed in on it quite a bit from, say, 10,000 BC.
Unless you get people to agree on definitions that define the problem away, but then you're just going to be using a different definition to pose the question that came up, because it will keep coming up.
Language is just a tool to express ourselves. It's not the fabric of existence.
The exercise is semantic in the sense that it seeks to describe and then connect sets of concepts to sets of beliefs in certain contexts.
So in that sense, it's analytically deep. However what tends to happen is that most casual students get to a certain depth in PM, say undergraduate level, give up on the complexity and then throw their hands up and say "nothing is real so I can create my won world that you need to conform to." That's the problem.
"The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
Visuospatial thoughts are the easiest example. This even happens for things that aren't inherently spatial, like abstract concepts, if there is a useful spatial metaphor.
Edit: Language is fascinating, of course. However, I find the underlying mental layers that support it to be equally fascinating, if not more so.
You can wink, that wink can have meaning or it's just a wink or you got something in your eye. How do you determine what it is without having used language somehow to establish what a wink could mean? And that's just on the surface of the amgiguity.
It’s almost as though you don’t understand what he is talking about.
But the second they get expressed into language, philosophical analysis kicks in.
You can't express truth though but you can be it (i.e. you can wink)
Language simply isn’t the limit of anyone’s world.
It’s also plainly obvious that humans have access to many other ways of expressing themselves and communicating other than language, and some truth can certainly be expressed.
The second you start claiming things about how the world is through language I can access that and analyze it through ex. a postmodern lens.
You can certainly experience all sorts of things that is beyond language to express but then they are that personal experiences and highly subjective.
What Objective truth can be expressed through language? If you knew the answer to that one you would win a Nobel price and I would certainly do whatever in my power to make sure you got it cause that would be a big deal and fundamentally change EVERYTHING.
Which is why no one has taken me up on the offer to formulate such a truth. It's simply not a useful way to think about what language expresses.
And now you’re suddenly focussed on ‘objective truth’. Moving the goalposts because it’s obvious that truth can be expressed through means other than language.
Why not just admit that language is limited but it’s not the limit of our world, or our expression? Why is that so hard?
Is what this subthread is about.
Perhaps you should read what the people you are replying to are commenting on. Then you’ll understand the context.
If you’re replying to the comment I quoted, then my points clearly stand. Language is not the limit of anyone’s world unless they decide to limit themselves that way.
Magnificent philosophy.
there are many languages and each languages has many medium. There is no limit to communication. In fact we probably don't even speak the same native language, yet here we are communicating with each other.
In addition that Existentialism is after Wittgenstein's take on a analysis. Existentialism attempts to answer the questions that we care about such as how we live our lives and our own values.
Existential philosophy is also, in part, very readable opposed to the great difficulty of reading Postmodernism.
I've thought about it in similar ways, but I fear those are the words of the incumbent facing the disrupter (if you'll pardon an abused analogy). What you say is true if you start with the premise of the postmodernist. That is, in effect I see it as saying nothing more complicated than postmodernism is the outcome of postmodernist assumptions.
Typically, the disrupter has a different agenda, different goals entirely, which is why the incumbent can't understand them - it makes no sense in the context of the incumbent's goals. In this case, the agenda, the assumption, of postmodernism is a desire for the truth (which can't be had) or as realistic an understanding of it as possible.
An hypothesis, stealing a bit from the article: The psuedo-modernist, to use the word from the article, doesn't care about the truth, so all your postmodernism is in the trash. Their reality is whatever they create or believe in the moment. It's fake news, fake economics, fake science (climate denial), whatever is in their Facebook feed, whatever their sources or friends repeat over and over, whatever is said most loudly or with the most anger - whatever can be insisted upon - whatever makes you angry. (Remember when anger was a sign of irrationality? Now it's a sign of a new reality being created.) All authoritative sources are destroyed, including all work product of academia (if you believe some HN comments). Propaganda is reality, and to an extent that is true: Perception is reality, and people can maintain those delusions for a long time. (And yeah, that's pretty scary.)
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick (though I've never verified its provenience)
Wittgenstein is all about trying to work out how language works.
Postmodernism combines Nietzsche and Marx and then looks at text but ignores people who had been looking at text philosophically for decades.
You could equally claim that all postmodern philosophy is really just Zen Buddhism reinterpreted.
I don't think it takes anything away from anyone.
It also shows that Postmodernism itself is the second form of textual analysis in recent times which indicates that it is unlikely to be the final form of philosophy.
The other point about Postmodernism is that while texts are meant to be reinterpreted in any way the reality is that shallow readings of who the author was and what they like to do in the bedroom has been the primary result.
Hardly. There are plenty of psychoanalytical models (still being) explored that have more utility and the inevitable philosophies that extend from them will be just as final. The tools of measure are the roots of modern philosophy and postmodernism is little more than an ancient narrative about behavior that sprouts from mass media.
I'm wondering whether you'd agree with the following paragraph, even though my words aren't your words:
You and I are exchanging words right now. Those words don't really mean anything. Meanings are private to each mind, and everybody decodes words and interprets them as having different meanings. Those meanings, or perhaps those concepts, within each mind will give rise to some sort of worldview (or POV for short) which gives everybody their own uniquely-colored glasses through which the world's stage, players, narratives, and behaviors appear filtered, giving rise to new meanings and possibilities.
This paragraph was hand-written and spontaneous, but I think that you'd nonetheless agree with it because it is an attempt to capture common societal ideas about how English encodes meanings, and thus I think that most English-speakers will decode it to predictable concepts, and I think further that folks who have studied philosophy, not just postmodernism, will find concepts in it similar to the concepts that I've imagined.
Why this is fascinating: I think that this understanding of language decoding as a strange loop is totally overlooked by this crowd, but it could completely overhaul how giants in the field are read, in particular Hofstadter.
We both are brough up in a context where we understand the meaning of "the desktop" as a metaphor for computer UI unless (unless you haven't learned that then you think it's the other physical desktop)
See https://medium.com/swlh/anatomy-of-a-noob-why-your-mom-suck-... where I explore that.
In other words, we are using language as a way to communicate experiences of phenomena (an apple or a painting or a movie) but our experiences will never be exactly the same and we will never be referring to exactly the same but it's good enough statistically to be "a pattern"
So yeah I guess I agree if I understand you correctly.
But that's missing the larger point which is that perhaps we shouldn't look at things as being true or false but instead useful. In other words "there is no truth" is, of course, neither true nor false but just a perspective that's useful (just like believing in truth can be).
I am fine with the incompleteness of this perspective (i.e. it's never fully resolved) and I would argue that philosophically there is no way around it (I can take any claim you make about truth and deconstruct it) and show that it's based on an apriori frame of reference.
So you have to think about it differently than "Truth" to understand the point of postmodernism.
So I'm reduced to "what's useful for advancing my team". And it turns out that fake news, outright lies, and constant propaganda are useful for that. (Postmodernism doesn't recognize the possibility of real truth. Does it recognize that some things are still lies?)
In practice, therefore, postmodernism turns out to be rather destructive in its effect on the political system. One might even say that, in this area, postmodernism is not useful, at least in terms of the system as a whole.
Postmodernism is just a way to analyze "the claimed" and yes it destroys (deconstructs any claim) but a decision will be made, something will win over something else.
You downvote if something as an example is of topic or inflamatory or otherwise destroyes the conversation, not something you disagree with which is part of the discussion.
Never heard it was ok to downvote just because you disagree but would love to see the statement about that.
I still think it's a lousy way to run a discussion. (Too low a bandwidth - you only get one bit of information.) But it seems to be the rules here.
My take on it is that they start as a sort of art. Name things. Get big abstract points across. Shift attention from one thing to another. Use a different perspective lens. Enlightenment era "rationalism," for example. When it's an eye opening perspective, we will adopt the whole system of thought.
Then, leaks in the abstraction start to become obvious. Does Hegelian reasoning (to get meta) really have three distinct phases. What about these examples over here, that seem to have four or two.
If the abstraction/ideology has been built upon, and those ideas are now important to the integrity of subsequent ideas then, most likely, we'll try to fix the underlying theory. Generally, what we do is keep the labels, but change/augment their meaning. "Workers State" has an increasingly nuanced & technical meaning, depending on how long it's been since Marx said it. So does net neutrality. So does liberal democracy, rule of law, Agile... "From now on, we're doing Agile"" has the exact opposite implications in 2018 then it did in 2003.
Postmodernism, as a word, has been at that stage for while. It's too much work patching the damn thing. It obscures more than it informs. Generally, instead of describing something using the word postmodernism (or one of its many associated terms) it will be easier and better to just explain things directly.
So, it's essentially gaming, right?
Gotta be kidding me.
Is there a clickbait algorithm that is luring writers to mythologize Derrida et al as titans of a bygone era in academia? Seriously-- other than the Wachowskis, name one important figure who was influenced by Baudrillard...
But the point is that the end result of the project of modernity had resulted in the development of the means of atrocity, of automatic mass death and holocaust, and the only sane move in that instance was to put it aside and move past it. Hence: "post".
Coupled with the burgeoning theories from physics, Heisenberg's uncertainty, and the rest, and the idea that perhaps we not on as solid a foundation as we thought, and the time was ripe for moving on to new ways of thinking about the world.