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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.