Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins
physics.nyu.edu
physics.nyu.edu
Which is why I am desperate, really, for someone to step in and demonstrate the worth of someone like Jacques Derrida, or more dangerously, Lacan or Boudrillard. B-d, for instance, had a bunch of cool ideas, about simulacra and maps and territory and the Gulf War. I've witnessed them, if only in aphoristic form. So how is it that a community that's at least capable of putting out a good handful of really modern, interesting notions can apparently be so firmly up to its knees in bullshit? I think it's unworth us to dismiss this entire wing of 20th-C thought altogether. But when you start trudging through the ludicrous, depressing gibberish that is on display here, it's hard not to. Can everybody have truly been absolute frauds? How am I to reconcile the two attestations of Baudrillard: obvious falsehood and farce on the one hand, and demonstrable cleverness and insight on the other?
I don't think anyone here would take Ray Kurzweil's books seriously, but quite a few people would upvote an article by Dawkins or Chomsky, whose books have contributed to their respective fields in the same way that Kurzweil has to ours -- which is to say, not at all.
P.S. The last time someone submitted an article about the Sokal affair, I posted a short comment about the importance of postmodernism here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564856
Ever heard of a "meme"?
Dawkins has contributed plenty to his field, and he writes very accessible books.
That essay by him obviously doesn't criticize the entire field. He's just telling his readers to put up some nonsense filters before they start reading padded fluff.
In writing his book, Dawkins ignored the last 2000+ years of scholarship on the nature of ideas, and influenced a tiny group of academics who are completely isolated from any other form of philosophy.
The Journal of Memetics (which was the only one of its kind) ceased publishing in 2005.
It was a throw-away comparison, not the point of the book. But, the term "meme" is a good meme, and it caught on.
For contributions to the field please refer to his journal publications. A partial list is given in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_publications_by_Richard...
The problem is that it's not Dawkins' or Chomsky's academic articles that have showed up on HN, it's the other stuff.
1) He was clever, had many interesting ideas, but was caught up in a culture that caused him to publish his ideas in essays/aticles that were largely meaningless, causing the ideas to go mostly unnoticed.
2) Even a defective clock tells the correct time twice a day.
The short version: Sokal (and those who follow in his footsteps) cherry-pick their quotes, and then refuse to read them in any kind of context whatsoever. To think that this has anything to do with forming an informed opinion of a philosopher (or other thinker) is ludicrous.
I'd say that's a good thing, though. It helps to understand that there are probably better ideas than yours, because then you don't sit put, but at the same time, it's good we all have a drive to explain and create. Otherwise, we'd still be using punch cards -- to weave our HN postings into Jacquard's loom.
I find McLuhan idea's about the role of media within society interesting, and very relevant to any working with Internet-related projects. The same could be said for a lot of postmodern ideas, which seem to partly revolve around the fact that the changes wrought by modern technology question the foundations of things like psychology, society, gender and so on.
I find McLuhan idea's about the role of media within society interesting, and very relevant to any working with Internet-related projects. The same could be said for a lot of postmodern ideas, which seem to partly revolve around the fact that the changes wrought by modern technology question the foundations of things like psychology, society, gender and so on.
Having read a bunch of original monographs and articles, a a stack of scathing critiques and even more scathing countercritiques, having went through two graduate seminars on Derrida and postmodernism (not for credit - I was studying math at the time), luckily with a professor who welcomed criticism, here's what my very personal opinion comes down to:
1. Most of it is bunk. There's just no escaping it. However, that's not necessarily a strong point against it, because see Sturgeon's Law.
2. Occassionally, some of it contains real insight, thoughts of depth and value; unfortunately, you have to work really hard to get to them, as they're shrouded by murkiness and vagueness to a degree that's quite astonishing. The thing is, postmodernists will tell you (and, in so many words, so will the primary texts) that this vagueness and murkiness is necessary; that there's no way to approach the deep thoughts except by deconstructing language and thought themselves. Well, I ain't buying that (I've tried very hard to buy that, it just won't get bought). In all cases where I actually reached something I thought was valuable, all the junk on the way only hindered, never helped - the horrible jargon, the bureaucratic sentences, the nonsensical code-words, the weak and unstable pulse of the argument. I remain convinced that none of this is necessary, and it's there simply because the culture encourages bad writing, in which it's easier to hide pure bunk (see 1.).
I offer Derrida as an example of a postmodern (well, poststructuralist) author who has Something To Say. In particular, after some wrangling and exasperation, I grew to appreciate his Dissemination, especially the first part, Plato's Pharmacy, which offers some brilliant observations on Phaedrus and the nature of writing (again, if you can plough your way through to them, etc.). I recommend this. I've never read his more famous Of Grammatology, and not sure I will now.
3. The quality of writing varies wildly from one author to another, even if we restrict to the most famous ones. Lacan is bullshit, pure and simple. Don't waste your time on him. Foucault seems to have been a shoddy scholar whose theories fall apart when you look at the evidence closer. Baudrillard I've come to regard as a sort of a gifted stand-up artist with an ear for impressive aphorism.
With all the occassional good stuff I found while reading postmodernist literature and arguing with friends about it, I couldn't possibly "follow" it in any meaningful way because of these (again, my personal opinion, etc.) flaws:
a) culture that accepts and encourages texts of very poor quality. This is more damning than 1. above; this makes sure the shit rises to the top. Most of writing is so obscure that it's not possible to refute it: there's nothing solid to get hold of to refute. Behind this obscurity is a huge amount of parroting, bad thinking and simply nonsense, and nothing in the intellectual postmodenist life encourages you to try to separate the wheat from the chaff; in fact, you're the enemy if you think wheat and chaff can possibly be separated, or even exist in any objective way. Think of the Bogdanov affair others recalled in comments here. In Sokal, outsiders (a physicist, other scientists, journalists) criticized the "postmodernists", who counter-attacked in the "culture wars". In Bogdanov, physicists and mathematicians themselves attacked the apparently nonsensical work, and the debate was between scientists. There's a huge difference here.
b) the double standards that pervade all texts and thought. Postmodern authors almost never scrutinize their own assumptions as critically as they scrutinize, say, the assumptions of modernists. It gets ridiculous after a while, because you find it hard to believe that someone can, say, claim that all ideologies are equally suspect and we must denounce the very possibility of knowledge itself if we are to get to the bottom of it all; and then in the next paragraph prostrate themselves dogmatically before some other thinker and quote their claims with all the reverence of Gospel truth, obviously bearing universally validity. You keep thinking, wait, it must be a joke, but the punchline never comes. Another way in which this annoyed me was how inevitably almost all those guys were ideologically extreme leftists, usually Marxists. It's not even the ideology itself that irked me the most, it's how unimaginable it was to see anything else, how dogmatically it pervaded everything, and never got a fraction of critical attention that was lavishly spent on, say, the idea of objective truth, or the simulacra in modern capitalist society. These are just two most obvious examples, but really, the amount of double standard going on, the lack of reflection at one's own thoughts is very irritating. At the end, I couldn't accept it even as a worthy way of exploring the world that's simply alien to me. I couldn't escape the conclusion that almost all of it was junk, sometimes very attractive intellectually - and therefore dangerous - junk; with some surprising exceptions, like some of Derrida I talked of above, which don't, after all, change the overall picture.
Yes. There are many historical examples of fields which are simply complete nonsense, with some practitioners who are well-intentioned and wrong and others who are just blatant charlatans. Alchemy is one obvious example. More controversially, psychotherapy in our own era probably qualifies (http://www.amazon.com/House-Cards-Robyn-Dawes/dp/0684830914).
Alchemy had a long history, though, and often resembled practical chemistry much closely than it did a quest for chimerical substances. The practical side of alchemy produced some worthwhile facts and techniques, and overlapped in many places with early chemistry. Some late practitioners of alchemy are also honored as important early scientists: Isaac Newton, Roger Bacon, and Tycho Brahe among them. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chemistry shows quite a bit of overlap.
But alchemy had to be rejected in order for modern science to emerge. There were several reasons: first, it was illegal to practice alchemy in many areas. Partly because of this, alchemists were secretive, while science advances by sharing information. Finally, Francis Bacon's work on the scientific method came along late in the game. So the only logical way forward was to re-brand the sensible parts of alchemy as natural philosophy or natural science, and proceed from there.
Could you explain that in English?
But seriously, I have no doubt all those smart people have some interesting insights about culture etc.
It's just too bad they are covered up by their own cultural belief that things simply can NOT be expressed clearly and succinctly.
I happen to think this is a coping strategy with the fact that 90% of everything is crap. It's a strategy to make it very hard to differentiate the crap for the good stuff.
That said...
My biggest problem with postmodernism is simply that there seems to be no "there" there. Of course, postmodernists would likely argue that that's the point, but it's terribly hard to talk about something so nebulously defined.
But the result of decades of postmodernist (and deconstructionist, and poststructuralist, since they're all interrelated) thought, to me, has ultimately been nothing but a game. One plays the game by choosing some particular thing (the "text", which of course is not required to actually consist of text) and:
1. Denying any and all conscious intentions the author/designer/creator may have had.
2. Reading into it any and all assumptions/positions/prejudices which happen to be fashionable to assign to one's target, by liberally playing with language or context.
This is problematic to me because it has no justifiable basis -- it's just as ad-hoc and just as unsound as a Freudian constantly asserting this or that unobservable, untestable subconscious motivation. Of course, within postmodern thought this is considered valid because postmodern thought admits the existence of nothing but present subjectivity.
And the worst part is that the largest visible result has been nothing more than the fulfillment by postmodernists of what Foucault had described in his work: an entrenched power which can bring itself to bear against dissidents and which structures all discourse to its own advantage through things like its use of language.
Meanwhile, what you consider to be "cool ideas" are not necessarily new, and not necessarily foreign to people here. Take, for example, "the map is not the territory": this is not a particularly new insight, and it would be a poor programmer indeed who confused, in the style of Magritte's famous warning, an instance of a Pipe class in a program with an actual pipe.
I'm having a hard time believing this can be anything other than satire.
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=menstrual+poststructural...
It's funny at first, but after a while just kind of draining.
In the long run the mediocrity gets stripped away, and we're left with the interesting ideas. Phlogiston dominated scientific discourse for far longer than it needed to.
This is my question exactly. I would like to see a short intro to postmodernism that starts with Wittgenstein and explains in relatively clear language what new insights it produced. I don't know if it's safe or unsafe to assume that the postmodernists read Wittgenstein.
Post-modernism (in the sense of this type of thing, anyway) arose and mostly deals with literature, where imagery, symbolism, and metaphor are the main carriers of meaning rather than spelling things out literally. Also, its purpose isn't so much to interpret the work itself as it is to look through it and see what it says about the writer and the reader. In this case, it's the same thing applied to science rather than a novel, and while it might not be very relevant to fluid mechanics, it might be saying something worthwhile about scientists and gender roles (in a stylised and heavily symbolic way) once put back into context.
That said, 90% of everything is crap and I've no doubt that this is too; it does certainly seem to be on the surface.
Edit: I'm different than that other 'crux' who is also standing up for postmodernism here. Odd coincidence!
For what?
> it might be saying something worthwhile about scientists and gender roles (in a stylised and heavily symbolic way) once put back into context.
Please, humor us. What might that "something worthwhile" be?
Are you saying the language in the quote above isn't loaded down with symbolic and metaphorical imagery? Or, more specifically, that it isn't drawing metaphorical parallels, rather than literal ones, between physical concepts and cultural ones?
> Please, humor us. What might that "something worthwhile" be?
Please, spare me your sarcasm and scare quotes.
Should I interpret your scepticism as a belief that there is nothing at all worthwhile to say about gender and culture in science?
No, I'm asking what her statement is a metaphor for.
A conversation along these lines should look like the following:
Crux: "I wouldn't take that vacation if I were you. A rolling stone gathers no moss."
Jib: "What do rolling stones have to do with anything?"
Crux: "I was speaking metaphorically. What I mean is that as long as you keep going (like the stone,) you'll keep your momentum (won't gather moss.)"
> Should I interpret your scepticism as a belief that there is nothing at all worthwhile to say about gender and culture in science?
No, just that her quote isn't saying anything worthwhile about gender and culture in science. The fact that you can't identify anything it even "might" be saying is evidence for this.
In general, our conversation seems to fit the following pattern:
A: "There are many zorks in this world."
B: "Really? Name one."
A: "Are you saying there's no such thing as a zork? Prove it!"
B: "..."
I don't believe I could say without either more context, or without just making up one of my own.
I was simply pointing out that to try and take the quote literally would be absurd.
> No, just that her quote isn't saying anything worthwhile about gender and culture in science.
I myself am not convinced that it does (note my use of "might" in the first reply here!) -- again, it was a completely context-free excerpt. But as a whole, it (or other writing of a similar nature), certainly could be saying something interesting, yet you deny the very possibility.
I'm not interested in inventing meaning from a short quote and putting my words into the author's mouth, and I do not have the time to go read the originals. So: you will get no satisfaction from me when it comes to a summary of the original unexcerpted work.
Suffice to say that I believe there are many interesting things to be said about gender and science, from the obvious statistics, anecdotes and trends, to the less obvious -- such as the historical, cultural, and linguistic parallels between science and authoritarian patriarchy, for example.
A side note: I myself have never claimed to be speaking metaphorically, nor used an obvious metaphor, so your sarcastic exchange (haven't I asked you to spare me it?) is rather off the mark.
I think we have very different rules of discourse, because I wasn't being sarcastic. Where I come from, that sort of conversation is what one goes through when a metaphor isn't understood. (If you claim that some statement is a metaphor, it is generally implicit that you understand it, and can thus explain it; so it is entirely reasonable for someone to ask you to explain it.)
Anyways, yes, I'll admit that it's possible that the original quote has (an intelligent) meaning. Hell, it's possible that timecube.com has such a meaning. I don't find either proposition terribly likely. My guess would be that Luce Irigaray is an intelligent woman who likes to say things which sound interesting; in this case, she was talking about things she didn't understand. It's possible that my guess is wrong, but you've provided very little evidence on this point.
Sokal et al. acted in bad faith by cherry-picking the worst instances of postmodernist discourse and setting up postmodernism as a monolithic entity universally opposed to the values of scientific inquiry. I Love To You[3] is an example of a book written by a post-modernist (one of the ones Sokal et al. made fun of, incidentally) without any obvious obfuscation. I also enjoyed the interview with her, "Thinking life as relation,"[4] although it's a bit less accessible.
[1]http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/
[2]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/nature0...
[3]http://books.google.com/books?id=-6fSONDCgW4C&printsec=f...
[4]http://www.springerlink.com/content/g447683933t14555/?p=6bff...
It tries to draw conclusions about the relative divergence times of different genes based on degrees of sequence similarity. This evidence is extremely weak, as there are much more likely explanations for the observed patterns of sequence variation, such as a shift in the selection pressure on a gene down the chimp/human lineage, for instance. Despite this weakness, they chose to highlight the sensational conclusion that human and chimp ancestors must have swapped genes through mating long after the presumed speciation time. This was irresponsible, because it caused a widespread public sensation when the paper came out.
it seems pretty harsh to lump it together with [1]...
I'm not lumping them together. The common characteristic is that they're both garbage. The conclusion of [2] is a subtler form of it but not to an evolutionary scientist: the problem with it was immediately obvious to me and many others as soon as it came out. And it's a more serious corruption of scientific discourse because it's a Nature article. The data the analysis was based on has merit, though.
It's not proof that the whole field is garbage by any means, but it is at least clear evidence that a lot of respected names in the field are publishing crap that they provably don't understand. That's really not a good sign - there may be crap published in fields like physics, but it's not coming from the Feynmans, it's coming from the relative unknowns.
Secondly, while I haven't read the papers from which Sokal et al. take their examples, and don't know what they were about, I am certain that they're not trying to contribute to scientific knowledge in any conventional sense. I gather from a friend who studies this stuff that Irigaray was playing with the language of scientific discourse in some way. I haven't looked into it further. Some of the stuff Sokal derides certainly deserves it. One of his examples is where Irigaray's work is used to justify sloppy thinking about feminism in science education. That is definitely problematic and deserves to be dismissed out of hand. But generally speaking, Sokal picked out these quotes without clearly explaining their context and intent, and that seems problematic, too.
The professor wasn't much help either because he was too busy telling stories about what it was like when he fought Mussolini's fascists in WW2. It's no surprise I dropped out...
http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
Information about the generator can be found at the bottom of the generated page.
I think that every culture has had their fair share of overly-respected sophomores. How many do you think trolled around Athens, and were forgotten by history because nobody cared to record what they said? With a bit of common sense, that's what will happen here too.
Postmodernism unfortunately must often take the heat from those people.
Postmodernism is an observation is a critique of the absolute frames of references. It's not an atempt to claim how the world is but rather a tool to hack reality.
In that sense no people on HN should be against postmodernism but rather understand it instead of just showing their ignorance.
“Society is part of the paradigm of narrativity,” says Debord; however, according to Dietrich[9] , it is not so much society that is part of the paradigm of narrativity, but rather the genre, and some would say the dialectic, of society. Foucault uses the term ‘realism’ to denote the role of the poet as artist. However, Parry[10] states that we have to choose between dialectic objectivism and precapitalist deappropriation.
Any number of situationisms concerning capitalist discourse may be discovered. But the example of subdialectic textual theory intrinsic to Joyce’s Dubliners is also evident in Ulysses, although in a more mythopoetical sense.
Lacan uses the term ‘capitalist discourse’ to denote the common ground between reality and sexual identity. Thus, Lyotard’s essay on subdialectic textual theory implies that the law is capable of truth.
Baudrillard promotes the use of textual narrative to deconstruct hierarchy. In a sense, several materialisms concerning the futility, and eventually the paradigm, of subdialectic culture exist.
The characteristic theme of the works of Joyce is the role of the reader as observer. However, in Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce deconstructs realism; in Ulysses, although, he analyses capitalist discourse.
He's not disrobing anyone (perish the thought), he's reporting on Skoal & Bricmont disrobing people.
The entire point of the exercise was similar to the stunt Sokal pulled: to demonstrate the quality of the venue by submitting a paper that anyone competent in the field would recognize as garbage.
I try not to reply to these types of arguments, but two days in a row of dissing postmoderism is a bit much, and so I'll try to defend postmodernism, cause I do think it's worth defending.
The first problem with postmoderism is it exists across fields. There was a movement in architecture. There was a movement in theatre. If you listed all the fields, you'd notice that they're all creative. That's the other problem, and the one that creates so much confusion for non-creative people. I wouldn't say all scientifically minded (digital thinking) people are not creative, but I'd guess a majority probably aren't. It's those that have problems with it, and this is why people 'that get it' call them 'stupid'. I don't agree that they're stupid, but I do think it's to do with the lack of natural creativity.
From my interpretation, the thing about postmoderism is that it measures the field using what makes that field unique as the variable. Postmodern designers feared that 'creativity' in design was disappearing, as it was the 'creativity' that designers valued, so without it - there was no more design. The postmodern philosophers, who are mostly concerned with humans, came to the same conclusion - humans were disappearing. Without humans, there was no more philosophy.
You also have to remember that these are creative people asking the questions, and creative people cannot be tamed. They love a prank, and if they choose to write, their styles become poetic and humourous. They redefine words as that is what philosophy has been doing since the origins of it. A bunch of drunk greeks sitting around defining concepts like love. Hegel re-defined practically every stylistic word he could find - to be poetic. Philosophy may have branched out into fields like science, but its origins are in human creativity, and that can't be measured by rigorous scientific method. It's art for thinkers. It explores a world that 'does' exist, but science choses to ignore as it has no other option but to. Some people can't accept that, and in this modern culture with modern people on a postmodern trajectory, they lash out, which results in some ridiculous polemics against it.
The big point of postmodernism that needs to be understood is that it is the 'end' of something. The 'end' of design. The 'end' of humans. It doesn't mean those things will cease to exist, but that what made them worthy of our attention was going to 'end'. Tech fields haven't yet hit a point where new ideas stop coming, but there will come a time where the only things coming out are rehashes of twitter or myspace. That's when a genuine postmodernism movement will rise within technology.
The ultimate test of postmoderism is to hand a naturally creative human a book by Baudrillard, and see if they get it. I would guess at least half could interpret a bulk of it.