Postmodernism
Mike
> postmodernism while standing on one foot?
Not whilst standing on one foot!
The problem of defining postmodernism is that there is no one
postmodern philosophy and thus no one summary. All one can do is look
for certain common features or assumptions. These common assumptions
are best seen in postmodern treatment of the self.
Most important early modern philosophies were doubly centred in the
notion of a rational morally autonomous self. The givenness of the
self [morally] has its origin in the Reformation notion of the
individual's right to read and interpret holy writ for him/herself.
The givenness of the self [epistemologically] also has its origin in
the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. Of course, beyond both of these lies
the Rennaissance reappraisal of authority in the light of classical
antiquity. Essentially the modern self is thought of as absolute and
centred; the sufficient authoritative centre of both epistemology and
morality.
Postmodern reflection on the self is really a point of convergence for
many late-modern criticisms of centred selfhood. Just as modernism
began with a 'shift to the self', postmodernism begins with a 'shift
from the self', a shift actually begun in the late modern period in
the writings of thinkers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud amongst
others. Marx critiqued modernist morality and epistemology by
focussing upon the collective-class-locatedness of all thought. He
argued, "Does it require deep intuition to comprehend that man's
ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man's consciousness,
changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence,
in his social relations and in his social life?" [Communist Party
Manifesto] Nietzsche critiqued all thought and morality by suggesting
that they are best explained as functions of power-relationships
within cultures. Thus for Nietzsche the essentially irrational "Will
to Power" decentres the enlightenment search for ABSOLUTE truth by
decentring the rational foundation of human thought itself. Freud
decentred the self by arguing that human selfhod is a construction of
unconscious irrational yet pseudo-rationalised dynamics rather than an
unconstructed absolute.
Thus for most postmoderns the feature which they share is the
'decentring' or relativising of the self, which is not now seen as a
rational absolute but as the product of largely unconscious causes.
As a result, all epistemology is considered to be relativised and
de-ontologised (all claims to truth are to be seen as manifestations
of class, power or psychosexual interests - manifestations which
contain the seeds of their own deconstruction) as are all ethics [see
Jaques Derrida]. In many respects the postmodern 'shift from the
self' presumes and extends the modernist notion of criticism of all
authority: this is the essence of its extension of the hermeneutical
suspicion of Marx, Nietzsche and Freud [Paul Ricoer writes on this].
Interestingly, it undermines its own foundations because, in claiming
to decentre the self, it removes the notion of autonomy which is at
the heart of the modernist enterprise. If selfhood is a
class/power/psychosexual/unconscious/irrational construction then the
self is in no position to criticise any authority.
It saws off the branch on which it sits and drinks from the well in
which it has just peed.
Don Watkins III
>Can someone summarize the essential elements of the philosophy of
>postmodernism while standing on one foot?
What do you mean by foot? And what do you mean by stand? And what do you mean
by "one"? And what's philosophy? And who's to say what's essential?
Got it?
Don Watkins
dave odden
> >Can someone summarize the essential elements of the philosophy of
> >postmodernism while standing on one foot?
> What do you mean by foot? And what do you mean by stand? And what do you
mean
> by "one"? And what's philosophy? And who's to say what's essential?
That depends on what you mean by "mean". And isn't (blah blah something that
is not about meaning) really a kind of meaning?
Acar
"dave odden" <od...@ling.ohio-state.edu> wrote in message
news:4fgT9.26784$GF.13...@twister.columbus.rr.com...
That depends on the meaning ofthe word "isn't".
x
x
x
jposamen
Got me to laugh out loud. I liked your response.
In addition (though no more cogent), Postmodernists resist defining
Postmodernism, because the act of defining is itself anti-Postmodern.
However, most Postmodernists I know insist that truth and meaning fall
within the realm of the Subjective and that our thoughts and values
are "social constructions" (i.e. products of Culture). But just like
everyone else, they think the world is going to hell in a hand basket.
-Jordan-
jposamen
> > But just like everyone else, they think the world is going to hell in a
> > hand
> > basket.
>
>
> -Ryan Jamieson
Right. And I can sympathize with your reading of that (seemingly) horrible
textbook.
-Jordan-
LP
<ryan.j...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>Can someone summarize the essential elements of the philosophy of
>postmodernism while standing on one foot?
>
>-Ryan Jamieson
From:
http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Work/Reviews/1998-07-09postmodernis
m_disrobed.htm
Richard Dawkins' review of Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and
Jean Bricmont. Profile Books 1998, £9.99. To be published in U.S.A. by
Picador as Fashionable Nonsense.
Published as `Postmodernism Disrobed',
Nature 394, pp 141-143, 9th July 1998
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with
strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of
reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your
pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style
would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose
your lack of content. The chances are that you would produce something
like the following:
We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between
linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and
this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The
symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive
character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the
logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the
ontological binarism we criticised previously.
This is a quotation from the psychoanalyst Flix Guattari, one of many
fashionable French `intellectuals' outed by Alan Sokal and Jean
Bricmont in their splendid book Intellectual Impostures, which caused
a sensation when published in French last year, and which is now
released in a completely rewritten and revised English edition.
Guattari goes on indefinitely in this vein and offers, in the opinion
of Sokal and Bricmont, "the most brilliant mlange of scientific,
pseudo-scientific and philosophical jargon that we have ever
encountered." Guattari's close collaborator, the late Gilles Deleuze
had a similar talent for writing:-
In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous
series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor
unstable, but rather `metastable,' endowed with a potential energy
wherein the differences between series are distributed . . . In the
second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification,
always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element
traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the
corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the
emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.
It calls to mind Peter Medawar's earlier characterisation of a certain
type of French intellectual style (note, in passing the contrast
offered by Medawar's own elegant and clear prose):
Style has become an object of first importance, and what a style it
is! For me it has a prancing, high-stepping quality, full of
self-importance; elevated indeed, but in the balletic manner, and
stopping from time to time in studied attitudes, as if awaiting an
outburst of applause. It has had a deplorable influence on the quality
of modern thought . . .
Returning to attack the same targets from another angle, Medawar says:
I could quote evidence of the beginnings of a whispering campaign
against the virtues of clarity. A writer on structuralism in the Times
Literary Supplement has suggested that thoughts which are confused and
tortuous by reason of their profundity are most appropriately
expressed in prose that is deliberately unclear. What a preposterously
silly idea! I am reminded of an air-raid warden in wartime Oxford who,
when bright moonlight seemed to be defeating the spirit of the
blackout, exhorted us to wear dark glasses. He, however, was being
funny on purpose.
This is from Medawar 1968 Lecture on "Science and Literature",
reprinted in Pluto's Republic (Oxford University Press, 1982). Since
Medawar's time, the whispering campaign has raised its voice.
Deleuze and Guattari have written and collaborated on books described
by the celebrated Michel Foucault as "among the greatest of the great.
.. . Some day, perhaps, the century will be Deleuzian." Sokal and
Bricmont, however, comment that "These texts contain a handful of
intelligible sentences sometimes banal, sometimes erroneous and we
have commented on some of them in the footnotes. For the rest, we
leave it to the reader to judge."
But it's tough on the reader. No doubt there exist thoughts so
profound that most of us will not understand the language in which
they are expressed. And no doubt there is also language designed to be
unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought. But
how are we to tell the difference? What if it really takes an expert
eye to detect whether the emperor has clothes? In particular, how
shall we know whether the modish French `philosophy', whose disciples
and exponents have all but taken over large sections of American
academic life, is genuinely profound or the vacuous rhetoric of
mountebanks and charlatans?
Sokal and Bricmont are professors of physics at, respectively New York
University and the University of Louvain. They have limited their
critique to those books that have ventured to invoke concepts from
physics and mathematics. Here they know what they are talking about,
and their verdict is unequivocal: on Lacan, for example, whose name is
revered by many in humanities departments throughout American and
British universities, no doubt partly because he simulates a profound
understanding of mathematics:
.. . . although Lacan uses quite a few key words from the mathematical
theory of compactness, he mixes them up arbitrarily and without the
slightest regard for their meaning. His `definition' of compactness is
not just false: it is gibberish.
They go on to quote the following remarkable piece of reasoning by
Lacan:
Thus, by calculating that signification according to the algebraic
method used here, namely:
S (signifier) = s (the statement),
s (signified)
With S = (-1), produces: s = sqrt(-1)
You don't have to be a mathematician to see that this is ridiculous.
It recalls the Aldous Huxley character who proved the existence of God
by dividing zero into a number, thereby deriving the infinite. In a
further piece of reasoning which is entirely typical of the genre,
Lacan goes on to conclude that the erectile organ
.. . . is equivalent to the sqrt(-1) of the signification produced
above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its
statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1).
We do not need the mathematical expertise of Sokal and Bricmont to
assure us that the author of this stuff is a fake. Perhaps he is
genuine when he speaks of non-scientific subjects? But a philosopher
who is caught equating the erectile organ to the square root of minus
one has, for my money, blown his credentials when it comes to things
that I don't know anything about.
The feminist `philosopher' Luce Irigaray is another who is given whole
chapter treatment by Sokal and Bricmont. In a passage reminiscent of a
notorious feminist description of Newton's Principia (a `rape manual')
Irigaray argues that E=mc2 is a `sexed equation'. Why? Because `it
privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally
necessary to us' (my emphasis of what I am rapidly coming to learn is
an in-word). Just as typical of the school of thought under
examination is Irigaray's thesis on fluid mechanics. Fluids, you see,
have been unfairly neglected. `Masculine physics' privileges rigid,
solid things. Her American expositor Katherine Hayles made the mistake
of re-expressing Irigaray's thoughts in (comparatively) clear
language. For once, we get a reasonably unobstructed look at the
emperor and, yes, he has no clothes:
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the
inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she
attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men
have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings
that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids. . . From this
perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive
at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow
cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have
been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
You don't have to be a physicist to smell out the daffy absurdity of
this kind of argument (the tone of it has become all too familiar),
but it helps to have Sokal and Bricmont on hand to tell us the real
reason why turbulent flow is a hard problem (the Navier-Stokes
equations are difficult to solve).
In similar manner, Sokal and Bricmont expose Bruno Latour's confusion
of relativity with relativism, Lyotard's `postmodern science', and the
widespread and predictable misuses of Gdel's Theorem, quantum theory
and chaos theory. The renowned Jean Baudrillard is only one of many to
find chaos theory a useful tool for bamboozling readers. Once again,
Sokal and Bricmont help us by analysing the tricks being played. The
following sentence, "though constructed from scientific terminology,
is meaningless from a scientific point of view":
Perhaps history itself has to be regarded as a chaotic formation, in
which acceleration puts an end to linearity and the turbulence created
by acceleration deflects history definitively from its end, just as
such turbulence distances effects from their causes.
I won't quote any more, for, as Sokal and Bricmont say, Baudrillard's
text "continues in a gradual crescendo of nonsense." They again call
attention to "the high density of scientific and pseudo-scientific
terminology inserted in sentences that are, as far as we can make
out, devoid of meaning." Their summing up of Baudrillard could stand
for any of the authors criticised here, and lionised throughout
America:
In summary, one finds in Baudrillard's works a profusion of scientific
terms, used with total disregard for their meaning and, above all, in
a context where they are manifestly irrelevant. Whether or not one
interprets them as metaphors, it is hard to see what role they could
play, except to give an appearance of profundity to trite observations
about sociology or history. Moreover, the scientific terminology is
mixed up with a non-scientific vocabulary that is employed with equal
sloppiness. When all is said and done, one wonders what would be left
of Baudrillard's thought if the verbal veneer covering it were
stripped away.
But don't the postmodernists claim only to be `playing games'? Isn't
it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no
absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else,
no point of view is privileged? Given their own standards of relative
truth, isn't it rather unfair to take them to task for fooling around
with word-games, and playing little jokes on readers? Perhaps, but one
is then left wondering why their writings are so stupefyingly boring.
Shouldn't games at least be entertaining, not po-faced, solemn and
pretentious? More tellingly, if they are only joking around, why do
they react with such shrieks of dismay when somebody plays a joke at
their expense. The genesis of Intellectual Impostures was a brilliant
hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, and the stunning success of his coup
was not greeted with the chuckles of delight that one might have hoped
for after such a feat of deconstructive game playing. Apparently, when
you've become the establishment, it ceases to be funny when somebody
punctures the established bag of wind.
As is now rather well known, in 1996 Sokal submitted to the American
journal Social Text a paper called `Transgressing the Boundaries:
towards a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity.' From start
to finish the paper was nonsense. It was a carefully crafted parody of
postmodern metatwaddle. Sokal was inspired to do this by Paul Gross
and Normal Levitt's Higher Superstition: the academic left and its
quarrels with science (Johns Hopkins, 1994), an important book which
deserves to become as well known in Britain as it already is in
America. Hardly able to believe what he read in this book, Sokal
followed up the references to postmodern literature, and found that
Gross and Levitt did not exaggerate. He resolved to do something about
it. In Gary Kamiya's words:
Anyone who has spent much time wading through the pious, obscurantist,
jargon-filled cant that now passes for `advanced' thought in the
humanities knew it was bound to happen sooner or later: some clever
academic, armed with the not-so-secret passwords (`hermeneutics,'
`transgressive,' `Lacanian,' `hegemony,' to name but a few) would
write a completely bogus paper, submit it to an au courant journal,
and have it accepted . . . Sokal's piece uses all the right terms. It
cites all the best people. It whacks sinners (white men, the `real
world'), applauds the virtuous (women, general metaphysical lunacy) .
.. . And it is complete, unadulterated bullshit a fact that somehow
escaped the attention of the high-powered editors of Social Text, who
must now be experiencing that queasy sensation that afflicted the
Trojans the morning after they pulled that nice big gift horse into
their city.
Sokal's paper must have seemed a gift to the editors because this was
a physicist saying all the right-on things they wanted to hear,
attacking the `post-Enlightenment hegemony' and such uncool notions as
the existence of the real world. They didn't know that Sokal had also
crammed his paper with egregious scientific howlers, of a kind that
any referee with an undergraduate degree in physics would instantly
have detected. It was sent to no such referee. The editors, Andrew
Ross and others, were satisfied that its ideology conformed to their
own, and were perhaps flattered by references to their own works. This
ignominious piece of editing rightly earned them the 1996 Ig Nobel
Prize for literature.
Notwithstanding the egg all over their faces, and despite their
feminist pretensions, these editors are dominant males in the academic
lekking arena. Andrew Ross himself has the boorish, tenured confidence
to say things like "I am glad to be rid of English Departments. I hate
literature, for one thing, and English departments tend to be full of
people who love literature"; and the yahooish complacency to begin a
book on `science studies' with these words: "This book is dedicated to
all of the science teachers I never had. It could only have been
written without them." He and his fellow `cultural studies' and
`science studies' barons are not harmless eccentrics at third rate
state colleges. Many of them have tenured professorships at some of
America's best universities. Men of this kind sit on appointment
committees, wielding power over young academics who might secretly
aspire to an honest academic career in literary studies or, say,
anthropology. I know because many of them have told me that there
are sincere scholars out there who would speak out if they dared, but
who are intimidated into silence. To them, Alan Sokal will appear as a
hero, and nobody with a sense of humour or a sense of justice will
disagree. It helps, by the way, although it is strictly irrelevant,
that his own left wing credentials are impeccable.
In a detailed post-mortem of his famous hoax, submitted to Social Text
but predictably rejected by them and published elsewhere, Sokal notes
that, in addition to numerous half truths, falsehoods and
non-sequiturs, his original article contained some "syntactically
correct sentences that have no meaning whatsoever." He regrets that
there were not more of the latter: "I tried hard to produce them, but
I found that, save for rare bursts of inspiration, I just didn't have
the knack." If he were writing his parody today, he'd surely have been
helped by a virtuoso piece of computer programming by Andrew Bulhak of
Melbourne: the Postmodernism Generator. Every time you visit it, at
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/, it will spontaneously
generate for you, using falutless grammatical principles, a spanking
new postmodern discourse, never before seen. I have just been there,
and it produced for me a 6,000 word article called "Capitalist theory
and the subtextual paradigm of context" by "David I.L.Werther and
Rudolf du Garbandier of the Department of English, Cambridge
University" (poetic justice there, for it was Cambridge who saw fit to
give Jacques Derrida an honorary degree). Here's a typical sentence
from this impressively erudite work:
If one examines capitalist theory, one is faced with a choice: either
reject neotextual materialism or conclude that society has objective
value. If dialectic desituationism holds, we have to choose between
Habermasian discourse and the subtextual paradigm of context. It could
be said that the subject is contextualised into a textual nationalism
that includes truth as a reality. In a sense, the premise of the
subtextual paradigm of context states that reality comes from the
collective unconscious.
Visit the Postmodernism Generator. It is a literally infinite source
of randomly generated syntactically correct nonsense, distinguishable
from the real thing only in being more fun to read. You could generate
thousands of papers per day, each one unique and ready for
publication, complete with numbered endnotes. Manuscripts should be
submitted to the `Editorial Collective' of Social Text, double-spaced
and in triplicate.
As for the harder task of reclaiming humanities and social studies
departments for genuine scholars, Sokal and Bricmont have joined Gross
and Levitt in giving a friendly and sympathetic lead from the world of
science. We must hope that it will be followed.
Rod Nibbe
> From:
> http://www.world-of-dawkins.com/Dawkins/Work/Reviews/1998-07-09postmodernis
> m_disrobed.htm
> Richard Dawkins' review of Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and
> Jean Bricmont. Profile Books 1998, £9.99. To be published in U.S.A. by
> Picador as Fashionable Nonsense.
> Published as `Postmodernism Disrobed',
> Nature 394, pp 141-143, 9th July 1998
LOL! Jeezus that was good. Thanks for sharing.
I'm still laughing!
It reminded me of a similar piece I read
in the Atlantic Monthly a while back called,
"The Reader's Manifesto." Serious, cutting,
witty, funny and cathartic. Fortunately, I
discovered it's still webbed. Check it out:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2001/07/myers.htm
-RKN
Beaten Paths Are For Beaten Men
Michael Moser
0433.0...@mb-ba.aol.com>...
If that's true, then any definition of postmodernism is a valid
definition.
Here is what i got from Larry Wall - (he invented a programming
language PERL
- the new thing about is that it is 'postmodern')
http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html
===========================================================================
....
Heidi said, ``You wanna know something really funny. In my IMP class,
our class slogan is, 'There's more than one way to do it.'''
``You're kidding,'' I said. [I should also say that that IMP stands
for Interactive Math Program, which is a math curriculum in which you
sort of learn everything at once. In sort of a postmodern way.]
Anyway, I said, ``You're kidding.''
``No,'' she said, ``That's why IMP is better for math students like
me--we learn better when we can see the big picture, and how
everything fits in. The old way of learning math never gave you any
context''.
While I was digesting this, and thinking about how it applied to
computer science, she went on, ``Well, it's like, you know, we have
this saying at school, when somebody gets uptight about something, we
say: 'Tsall good. If someone is depressed, we say: 'Tsall good.'''
``But you don't actually think everything is good, do you?''
``No, of course not.''
``Are you saying that everything has good elements in it?''
``No, Dad, I think when we say that, we're saying that, overall,
things are good. Like, look at the big picture, don't just focus in on
the two or three bad things that are happening to you right now.''
I report this conversation to you not just because I think my kids are
cute and smart, but also because I think it's important that we know
where our culture is going, and because it's our kids that will shape
our culture in the future. I don't think I could have defined
postmodernism better than Heidi. Look at the big picture. Don't focus
in on two or three things to the exclusion of other things. Keep
everything in context. Don't go out of your way to justify stuff
that's obviously cool. Don't ridicule ideas merely because they're not
the latest and greatest. Pick your own fashions. Don't let someone
else tell you what you should like. 'Tsall good.
That's all well and good, but I ask you, if it's all good, why, in
every other breath, does my daughter say ``That sucks.''?
There's a mystery here, and if we can fathom it, perhaps we'll learn a
thing or two. I think that what's going on here is that our culture
has undergone a basic shift, one that is actually healthy. It used to
be that we evaluated everything and everyone based on reputation or
position. And the basic underlying assumption was that we all had to
agree whether something (or someone) was good or bad. Most of us
actually used to believe in monoculturalism. Although even back then,
we didn't really practice it. And in fact, you could argue that the
whole point of Modernism was to break our cultural assumptions. We
could argue all day long about whether postmodernism came about
because Modernism succeeded or because it failed. As a postmodern
myself, I take both sides. To some extent.
This would bother a Modernist, because a Modernist has to decide
whether this is true OR that is true. The Modernist believes in OR
more than AND. Postmodernists believe in AND more than OR. In the very
postmodern Stephen Sondheim musical, _Into the Woods_, one of the
heroines laments, ``Is it always or, and never and?'' Of course, at
the time, she was trying to rationalize an adulterous relationship, so
perhaps we'd better drop that example. Well, hey. At least we can use
Perl as an example. In Perl, AND has higher precedence than OR does.
There you have it. That proves Perl is a postmodern language.
But back to the monoculturism of Modernism, or rather the assumption
of monoculturalism. Nowadays we've managed to liberate ourselves from
that assumption, by and large (where by and large doesn't yet include
parts of the Midwest). This has had the result that we're actually
free to evaluate things (and people) on the basis of what's actually
good and what's actually bad, rather than having to take someone's
word for it.
=====================================================================
now i have to confess, that i didn't understand the thing either.
ok.
let's see in some ten years - if it was worth something than it shall
remain ;-).
Brad Aisa
>
> Can someone summarize the essential elements of the philosophy of
> postmodernism while standing on one foot?
Wink, with a subjective sneer on your face.
--
Brad Aisa <ba...@NOSPAMbrad-aisa.com>
http://www.brad-aisa.com/ -- PGP public key available at:
http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?search=Brad+Aisa&op=index