Postmodernism and Its Impact (2017)
areomagazine.com
areomagazine.com
> Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.
I typed some keywords into Google and found the full quotation here: https://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=184, but I'm not sure if he expands on it further in any of his books.
As often happen Scott Alexander has written a nice article on the topic; in this case it is a review of a Chinese-American mother that lives the Chinese education system through a western lens and comes to like some of the differences.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-lit...
In addition, one should keep in mind that there are ways to instill some discipline and self-control into one's children that don't turn them into mindless little automatons (as the Chinese school in the reviewed book tries to do).
Usually, academia is inquiry: physicists are inquiring into how matter and energy work, historians are inquiring into what happened and why, etc. From a distance, postmodern philosophy looks like it is inquiring into how society works, what hidden assumptions we have, etc.
But it isn't, really. It's a game about who can say the most interesting thing, constrained by some rules about how things being said have to be grounded in other things that have been said, and with some way of scoring interestingness that i don't have a firm grip on. There's no genuine attempt to understand things, or to test what is said against reality. Truth doesn't matter at all. Foucault, for example, was successful not because he said true things, but because he said new and previously unimaginable things, and expressed them lyrically.
>> that being you said, “Foucault, for example, was successful not because he said true things, but because he said new and previously unimaginable things, and expressed them lyrically.”
>> Wikipedia: “Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions.”
Your reasoning in sum appears to be that you don’t understand something, so it must be without merit.
Sure, one might argue that Foucault's theories lack mathematical proofs, but to argue against them without as much is no better.
What proof do you have Foucault's theories depart from reality?
I came across this article some time ago: https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2019/09/20/3-concordia...
At first the concept seemed completely ludicrous. Three white researchers from Canada want to "decolonize" science and will try to integrate "indigenous" knowledge into physics. Then I remembered the concept of moral entrepreneurship and it all made sense. The goal is not to advance physics or to achieve "social justice" whatever that means, it is to appear virtuous in a novel way.
There are endeavors that call for lots of rigor and little creativity and others that call for the opposite. Not everyone has those two qualities at the same time so there has to be some division of labor.
Also something can be great for other reasons but I am focusing on why someone who cares solely about the advancement of science should love Dadaism and critical theory.
Could you give examples of some of the problems and self-contradictions that postmodernism identified?
The most important lesson for literary criticism, as far as I (very vaguely) remember, was an emphasis on intertextuality, which downplayed the role of individual author (Barthes' "death of the author"), and thus downplayed authority of the author. It may be one way of looking at things; although not particularly productive and known to previous literary scholars, especially those who had been studying folklore.
> inspired most of all by Nietzsche
The will to power, you mean? Is there a textual link between Nietzsche and the founders of postmodernism?
The postmodernists worshipped Nietzsche; he was their lodestar. (There are many textual links, but I'm a long way out of grad school—someone else will have to provide them). If you think of Foucault's concentration on the topic of power, that's entirely in the Nietzschean line. The postmodernists were mostly following through on the explosion that Nietzsche and Freud wrought on Western ideas of rationality and objectivity.
I started writing a comment about this when I saw the thread, but could feel it starting to turn into more of an essay, and that's not a good thing at 3am. I remember going to see Derrida when he came to Stanford shortly after 9/11. It was impossible to understand a single thing he was saying—I have a funny story about that for another time. (Edit: turns out I posted it years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341350)
And yet...for all the obscurantism and bullshit, the Sokal hoax and everything else—I came to the conclusion that the postmodernists touched something deeper than their critics, something which we have yet to reckon with.
The real problem with the postmodernists is not that their texts are full of ornate bullshit (look up the story about Searle asking Foucault why he can't just write straightforwardly, and Foucault saying no one in Paris would take him seriously if he did). The real problem is that their program is only negative. Unless I missed it, they never point to anything new.
After deconstructing all the self-contradictory things that humans call knowledge, they have no recommendation for what anybody should actually do. They reach the limits of the human, at which point the only answer is spiritual—but having rejected any possibility of spirit, they end up with nothing. Or, to put it in a different way: deconstruction is fine, but what are you adding? Or another way: criticism, even consummate criticism, isn't enough. (Edit: I found another old comment about this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713432)
p.s. I didn't answer your question about examples. It's not so easy to give clear examples, because the postmodern analysis isn't definitive on isolated data points—it's more a preponderance-of-the-evidence thing. Also, it's been a large and unspecified number of years since I worked with this material.
And yet we proceed, at least in STEM subjects, with the epistemological methods that we trust and that we believe to work, as if postmodernists didn't happen. They may have influenced the politics of science, or the philosophy of science, but they have not changed a thing about how scientific or engineering knowledge is acquired.
Are there historical examples when radical philosophical scepticism changed the way science is done? Descartes, with his "evil demon", Hume, the solipsism of George Berkeley — they all have valid points, and they all have pointed out contradictions in things we call knowledge, with sufficient force to have been immortalised in textbooks on the history of philosophy, but they haven't changed the practice of engineering and science, I don't think.
This did not take in scientific fields because they did their revolution early XXth century. And while postmodern critics were right, their proposed solution (relativism and/or nihilism) weren't. Everybody now knows that when you have a valid critic, your solution will likely be viewed as "more valid", even though this is absolutely untrue. That's probably what happened in social studies.
Also i follow subects in humanities (history and linguistic, and some consciousness philosophy) and those follow the same epistemological methods. Sadly you can only find the papers in academia and at least in France, know "historians" (TV historian) are not following those methods at all.
ps: The only postmodern i read was foucault, so everything i've said on postmordernist only apply to my understanding of him.
> deconstruction is fine, but what are you adding?
This makes me think that Nietzsche would have despised post-modernism. As if they copied his method but not his intentions.
> And yet...for all the obscurantism and obvious bullshit, the Sokal hoax and everything else—I came to the conclusion that the postmodernists touched something deeper than their critics, something which we have yet to reckon with.
This is something I deeply agree with. In my interpretation that central topic was essentially Nietzsche's "god is dead" and the following loss of center (both individually and collectively).
But then Jung's answer to those problems are superior in every sense, especially in the context of how to approach it from an individual perspective.
This was not the best written comment, but in many sense I have been significantly disappointed by post-modernism especially because I can see a lot of potential unrealized value in it.
Maybe yes, because Nietzsche's real interest was in a positive program. On the other hand, I feel like Nietzsche is more unpredictable and delicate than our image of him. He's quicksilver. If he had continued, he would have gone to unexpected places, so we can't really say.
Foucault in his final years was more interested in a positive program as well. There's a great article (discussed on HN in the past) about Foucault taking LSD in Death Valley with some LA friends, and changing his outlook as a result. Unfortunately he didn't live long enough to do more than leave pointers.
In technical fields, we usually expect people to immersive themselves in a particular vocabulary to be able to understand difficult technical books, yet in philosophy we often expect these texts to be readily accessible to laypeople. Why? Derrida's work emerged from a tradition heavily influenced by Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche and others, all difficult authors in their own right. Of course we might find it disappointing that these texts are not accessible to the general public in a way that, say, Russell's popular writings were, but isn't that nevertheless an absolutely valid choice on the part of the author?
Also, it should be pointed out that the so called postmodernists were not the first to employ a very difficult writing style that we might on first glance perceive as obscurantist: Heidegger is a good example of someone who coined a ton of neologisms because he thought it necessary to escape the traditional discourse. You might not buy his argument (I'm not sure I do), but Heidegger felt he had a good reason to distance himself from the existing discourse.
Are the main texts of postmodernism dense and hard to understand? Sure. Should they be a required reading for everyone? Of course not. But I don't think they are necessarily negative and I don't agree that they have no 'recommendation for what anybody should actually do'. Even Derrida, arguably the most deconstructive and 'negative' of the bunch, can be applied in a myriad of 'positive' ways, this is doubly true for authors like Deleuze & Guattari, for example. I think it ultimately depends on whether you view a critique of political or social structures as purely negative. I would argue that such a critique offers an avenue for change, by enabling us to see the status quo as something that can be attacked, rethought and then reformed.
But those are just my 2 cents on why I like (some of) the postmodernist authors. I think it's absolutely fine if not everyone buys into their thinking, I would just wish for a more honest engagement before dismissing them out of hand.
The problem with the "always shifting always destabilizing" mode of a writer like Derrida is that it doesn't treat the listener as someone who matters. The listener is dispensable, while the author (ironically, the author who was supposed to have died) performs self-referential pirhouettes. There's something deeply non-relational about that, which I don't like. At the same time, I think the "nothing to see here" critics of the postmodernists are even more wrong.
Deleuze/Guattari is a different vein which I never really explored. I had a copy of Anti-Oedipus many years ago but I never really read it. It surprised me when they re-emerged as a fashionable item in the English-speaking world.
The other thing though is that that is not a simple question. (Edit - the question in the video is: "Can you find something in postmodernism which is not either a triviality cloaked in polysyllables or is false?") It has a trap door built in: the word 'triviality'. If you did find an answer, it would be easy to say it doesn't count because it's trivial. Doubly so because Chomsky already understands a lot of the same things about power and language—he has his own critiques of those, which are not identical with the postmodernists' but there are overlaps for sure—so a lot of that wouldn't strike him as new, just dressed up in pretentiousness. Triply so because if you have the mind of a Chomsky, most things are going to seem trivial anyway.
At a deeper level, Chomsky is an 18th century rationalist, so he's never going to accept a critique of the foundations of Enlightenment reason, and there's no single argument by which such critiques are conducted, let alone a single passage in a text that you can point to and say 'here it is'. Chomsky certainly understands this, so his question is really a bit of theater, a way of cauterizing a topic that he has been asked about incessantly for decades now and must find incredibly boring. He's so polite to the people who interview him, especially to naive questioners, that he doesn't show this directly, but you can see it in the charming way that he can't help but smile a tiny bit when he brings out his perfectly-crafted discussion-ending question. ("So that's about all I can say.")
I think a lot of what he's saying there (and in many other places where he's been asked about this) is more a matter of taste than real disagreement. To someone who values clarity of language and is a master of it, the gobbledygook of the postmodernists (which was mostly a concoction of a small intellectual scene in which people were competing on style) would seem godawful because it is, and would also seem like a huge distraction from things that matter.
I wouldn't want to reread the postmodernists. I did my time in grad school and came to dislike that material because it was so obscure, and because of the emporer's-new-clothes dynamic where everyone felt like they had to pretend to understand it because they were afraid of being the only one who didn't. The primary lesson I gained from that was how to be unafraid to ask a simple question. That's a powerful thing when no one else is willing to.
But what brought me around to respecting them was studying spiritual traditions whose critiques of human concept production are actually much closer to the postmodernists than anybody else. (Edit: I found an old comment where I wrote about this in more detail, if anyone cares: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713432). If you know anything about postmodernism, you know what an irony that is, because the postmodernists made a grand point of rejecting the language of spirit (e.g. presence, awareness, transcendence, anything higher) even more than they rejected the language of rationality. As a result, they end up with nothing. But if you become interested in looking at your own self-deception, nothing is a good thing to have. The conceptual solvents of postmodernism can be useful in that way, and as I said elsewhere in the thread: usually when people reject these things stridently, it's not because of what is wrong in them but because of what is right. (Another example is Freud, which is another story.) I wouldn't put Chomsky in that category though. I think he mostly just finds it uninteresting.
I would be very interested in your thoughts on what the postmodernists touched on that is deeper than their critics.
I would be a little kinder to the postmodernists if I were writing that today. That might be because another 11 years have gone by since I actually had to read them. Memory becomes more like imagination over time, and I'm probably imagining a version of them that I like better.
The important thing is that the things they called fictions and illusions largely are fictions and illusions. They embedded these insights in a nihilistic frame that is ultimately unhelpful, but the contributions are still valuable. It's a bit like seeing how a magic trick works: once you see it, you can't unsee it, and you become able to see the same trick in the future—except in this case the "magic tricks" are rationalizations that humans use to hide things, justify things, pretend things. That phenomenon is challenging to look at and goes much deeper than it appears to. The useful way to work with it, though, is to apply it to oneself.
I am not an expert in post-modernism, but it all sounds a lot like it found the really fundamental timeless question that was emerging in the collective unconscious of their time but then decided to give a severely incomplete and exaggerated answer.
I would have preferred if history had moved toward a focus toward inward inspection and recentering rather than outward criticism and deconstruction.
The "postmodernism" that's criticized today has drifted quite a bit towards high-modernism itself. There was a shared sense when this first came up that you can only critique "large, complex theoretical frameworks" by building a new large, complex theoretical framework of your own. But ultimately it turned into a key weakness.
https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-S...
Well, yes. Hicks is in the Sagan/Diamond mode of summarizing for a general audience.
It isn't super surprising that someone like Lacan, who wrote incomprehensible gibberish, laced with spurious references to advanced concepts from pure mathematics like algebraic topology, became an idol in such a climate.
Basically I think it is time to recognise that baby boomer philosophers produced tons of intellectual garbage. They have been in positions of power in the philosophy and social science departments for the last few decades. Their "Marsch durch die Institutionen" (march through the institutions) is complete. Turns out they were far less competent and talented overall than the people they rebelled against.
It seems like the only logical thing was to try something very different and question really basic assumptions. I would be genuinely fascinated to hear about a better alternative course that keeps in mind the situation they were in and the role of plenty of philosophers in bringing them there.
Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. But not any jigsaw puzzle. An unbelievably huge jigsaw puzzle that's been mixed up with other jigsaw puzzles. Some of them are really old and faded. Some of them are brand new. Some are larger and some are smaller. The edges change from jagged to smooth. Like everyone else at the table, you've been trying to put this one puzzle together for years, trying out numberless pieces until one day you realize that you don't even have the box for it. Like everyone else, you were told what it looked like when you were first sat down in this room and left to it. But you're not making any progress and the solution, the memory faded by time and others, doesn't feel right and you abandon it.
Now, you ask everyone around you about what the puzzle looks like. And they are all certain about what it looks like when it's finished, despite the fact that you know they haven't spent nearly enough time looking in the box, or the pieces, and you're pretty damn sure it's not a picture of your loved ones burning, a giant man creating smaller men, or nothingness.
And you start to talk with other people who don't believe in these solutions. They have their own ideas about the puzzle. The vast majority of them think the idea of a pre-solution is the problem. If only those who have been working on their own sections piece by piece were allowed to work together with their work corroborated by other piece-by-piece sectioners, without pre-solutionists telling them what it looks like, it'd be put together by now. You think this is the right course of action going forward. So you dabble in doing your own piece-by-piece work, keeping up with the latest pictures of the latest additions to different sections, published and funded by the people who originally sat you down at the table.
And everything is fine. For a while. Then you begin to see that the sectioners' works are being used to justify new pre-solutions by onlookers that aren't compatible with each other. Some sectioners are just producing pictures of themselves and their funders. And you realize that this just doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. Not the pre-solutionists, not the sectioners. It's all a giant question with no authority and no one seems to realize how insane and un-ending the whole process is. Then you pick up a piece that changes everything. In it you merely see the Self and your own reflection in it. But it changes everything.
You look up from the table and see through eons. You see everyone who has ever been sat down at this puzzle table. You see the same people wearing different costumes as the endless passage of time flows. You see the same puzzle processes and sections arising, maturing, then being scattered. You notice this and infinite other things, lost to the ephemera of cognition and memory. Then the pieces fall into place in your brain. And you see that it isn't a puzzle. It was never a puzzle. You realize in your vision that there were countless people throughout time who stood up from the table. And they saw a door and went through it. And came back. And they said in exaltation in the plurality of dialects and tongues that this is not a puzzle. It is a map. A map to exit the room. These chosen few make a new map of the room, offering it triumphantly to the rest. Some see it and in turn stand up and leave the room to go outside. Others follow. But the stream of people slows and stops. The map is left, abandoned by those who followed it to those that didn't or couldn't. And those remaining beings slowly rip it apart, piece by piece, to fit in their view of the puzzle until it too resembles... a puzzle.
You proceed to come down from grasping this piece, realizing the truth of what you have seen; That this in fact a massive collection of old, incomplete maps, made puzzles by mankind, all showing the way to a door that leads to outside the realm of the puzzle. So you stand up from the table, go to the exit, and open the door. And there it is. Outside. The Sun. Indescribable to anyone who has been left inside the cave their entire lives. This is so apparent to you that it is the very definition of self-evidence, bound with knowledge ascertained by pure observation. And you realize that nothing, absolutely nothing can erase the certainty that outside and the Sun exists, having been there. You now have a decision to make. In an act of compassion, you return to the room and proceed to draw yet another map for those left behind...
It was also enthusiastically imported into US academia, where it became the new normal - a good way to keep intellectuals distracted while not being a real threat to established power. Unlike traditional Marxism and its offspring, which it successfully replaced.
But what if one draws their self-esteem not from their own accomplishment, but from the feelings of others? Then, incomprehensibility is ammunition for the argument from intimidation. You simply threaten to attack the character of anyone who disagrees.
It takes the form of: “Only a fool/deviant/sinner/idiot/ can fail to see that X argument is false/true.”
"Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize...that that’s a pretty narrow vision..."
The goal isn't to win the argument; the goal is to prevent any discussion at all. The only way to fight it is with moral certainty.
I do, but specifically, I would have thought that incomprehensibility is bad for spreading ideas. In order for ideas to spread, someone has to be willing to read these texts, overcome the hurdles of the dense language, and recognise something new, interesting and important; something they agree with. Incomprehensibility stands in the way of this process.
But at that point, it's not being propagated based on its truth or usefulness, but merely as a form of signalling "I'm one of the smart ones". I suspect that at least part of the success of postmodernism is due to this.
Consider Steve Jobs answer to why Xerox failed and meditate on the implications in higher education:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0
Or consider this scene from Mad Men:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcneQ6N50Q&t=39
Different industry, same phenomenon. Pursuit of truth and a notion of objective reality constrains discourse to a very limited band of possible outcomes, let alone actual outcomes. If you remove those constraints, the floodgates open and the signal will immediately be drowned by intentional noise. And if you don't play ball, your institutions will inevitably replace you with someone who will.
Honestly, if Foucault came alive today and saw how the neoliberals took advantage of postmodernism (by stealing their language of difference and deconstruction to distract and prevent people from thinking about capital alongside to race/gender relations), he would be very disappointed.
A much wiser and more humane attitude towards continental philosophy was expressed by the great analytic philosopher Michael Dummett, who remarked that the division of philosophy into two traditions which largely don't talk to each other represented a great failure of philosophers to live up to the ideals of their subject. It's hard to claim you are seeking wisdom when you are unwilling to listen to your brethren.
Dummett wrote a whole book about this, _Origins of Analytical Philosophy_. It will take substantially more time to read than this article, but on the other hand, it will actually leave you better-informed at the end of it. (He has a hilariously specific answer to when analytic philosophy diverged from continental philosophy: page 62 of Frege's book _The Foundations of Arithmetic_. And it's a really good answer, too!)
We are now about as far away from postmodernism as postmodernism was from, say, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism
The postmodernists and the pragmatists have a lot in common actually.
If your point is that postmodernism was dominated by fashion and cant, sure. That was clear decades ago. But it doesn't follow that there was nothing there, and one ought not to throw the baby out with the bullshit. People often dislike something not because of what it got wrong, but because of what it got right.
In the meantime (unless you'd care to do a tl;dr of postmodernism for us?), I'll leave these two links here, neither of which are probably edifying, but hopefully one may be amusing: https://existentialcomics.com/comic/344 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57PWqFowq-4
First of all, I think there are a lot of issues with how the term "postmodernist" is applied. One should always distinguish valid applications such as Postmodernist Architecture, which is a very distinctive movement that does push forward certain concepts that existed in the Modernist architecture (you can look up the Bateson building and the philosophy behind it). Postmodernism in contemporary art is a much weaker application, in a sense that to kind of put every post-war artist(or post 70's) under this moniker doesn't really achieve much.
The article discusses something which came to prominence not so long ago, the inclusion of the radical ideas in the mainstream left-wing discourse in States. I don't want to touch the identity/gender politics part here, but the death of meta-narrative the author attributes to Lyotard is an interesting part.
What her main problem is if I understood that correctly - there are a number of ideas and symbols, which are close to the heart of "liberal democrat", and there is a certain metanarrative that she holds as true. And that is being attacked by relativists and deconstructionists. What are those symbols - Equality, Freedom, Science, Reason. And the metanarrative is the Path of Progress, move from the darkness to the light of civilization.
Yet all of these symbols are quite problematic. Freedom often means free market and representative democracy and in extreme cases neoliberal worldview. Civilization served as the main excuse for subjugating the natives. Language of science was deployed to effectively introduce questionable government social policies by using "objective", "approved by experts" approach. Most of the slaves were sold in the Age of Enlightenment yet in the "bad" Dark Ages and Middle ages slavery was almost non-existent in the western world.
My issue with her worldview is that she sincerely believes that good things that happened during Modern age - progress of sciences and bad things - Belgian Congo, for example, are not the inverse side of the same coin but are totally unrelated.
James Watt research into steam was funded by slavery, not in a metaphorical sense but literally - his research was funded by plantation owners, and he himself had profited from slave trade.