Hacker News Reader

> The postmodernists worshipped Nietzsche; he was their lodestar.

> 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.

> This makes me think that Nietzsche would have despised post-modernism. As if they copied his method but not his intentions.

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.

> After deconstructing all the self-contradictory things that humans call knowledge

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.

I think that if we could zoom out to a more historical perspective, things would probably look different. History isn't linear and overlapping things are always going on at the same time. The new coexists with the old. It's true that most practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge don't give a fig about what the postmodernists had to say, but it doesn't follow that the postmodern critique is without effect. It would be interesting to know who 'wins' a hundred years from now. I wouldn't bet on the practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge as we know it today.

> It's true that the practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge don't give a fig about what the postmodernists had to say, but it doesn't follow that the postmodern critique is without effect.

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.

Depends of your definition of science, but historical science definitely changed in the 70s. Was it under the inflence of postmodernists or skeptics? Was it by comparison to other scientific fields? Was it because historian now had real formations?

Hard sciences, I think, are based on the correspondence theory of truth – their statements are tested by whether or not they correspond to what's observed in what's believed to be reality. I realise that for some sciences, such as physics, it's becoming increasingly difficult, with such proposals as string theory or many-world theory. I don't know how much of a reality, apart from physical artifacts, there is in historical science.

The rise of science itself is the leading example.

It is because early postmodernists found a "Truth". And by that i mean a postmodern version: a reality from their point of view. Their critics of power, art and knowledge were right... Half a century before they made them for physics, and decades ago for biology, but for other fields (except maybe philosophy that turned around a bit before).

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.

> I came to the conclusion that the postmodernists touched something deeper than their critics, something which we have yet to reckon with.

I would be very interested in your thoughts on what the postmodernists touched on that is deeper than their critics.

I wasn't going to answer this because I didn't want to spark the wrong kind of argument in the thread, and because it would take a scary amount of time. But I ran across an old comment where I wrote about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713432. Those are still my views.

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.

Although I think we probably agree in most respects, I want to offer a slightly different perspective on some of the points you raised. While it has become a sort of trope to dismiss postmodernist texts as difficult (true) and obscurantist (here I disagree), there is usually a pretty good reason for why these texts are written a certain way. For example, Derrida's writing style is heavily linked to and inspired by the difficulty to pin down the blind spot that he thinks is always part of our metaphysical tradition. If you follow his 'argument' far enough to agree that there is no privileged outside from which we could see this blind spot (since this shift of perspective would then introduce another blind spot), then it absolutely makes sense to adopt his always-shifting, always-destabilizing mode of writing.

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.

I agree with most of this. I don't think, though, that the obscurity of the postmodernist writers is just a matter of technical material not being accessible to non-specialists. There is a trickster and bullshitter element to what they were doing. The complicated aspect is that they were also expressing important truths.

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.

I want to suggest that you email Noam Chomsky in reply to his question here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XeWWz4y1coU#t=34m58s

Chomsky spends hours every night answering everyone's emails because he thinks it's his duty. I wouldn't want to add to that load. Let him enjoy his new family and the Arizona sun or wherever he happens to be now.

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.

Thank you for this articulation. Sincerely made my day.