How French "Intellectuals" Ruined The West
April 4, 2017 5:52 PM Subscribe
The irrational and identitarian “symptoms” of postmodernism are easily recognizable and much criticized, but the ethos underlying them is not well understood. This is partly because postmodernists rarely explain themselves clearly and partly because of the inherent contradictions and inconsistencies of a way of thought which denies a stable reality or reliable knowledge to exist. However, there are consistent ideas at the root of postmodernism and understanding them is essential if we intend to counter them. They underlie the problems we see today in Social Justice Activism, undermine the credibility of the Left and threaten to return us to an irrational and tribal “pre-modern” culture.
Just because you don't want to deal with the destabilizing implications of the postmodern critique doesn't mean it is, broadly, irrational or incorrect.
Just because you don't want to deal with people of color, LBGBTQ people, and others on the margins of power demanding to be accounted for and included by "Social Justice Activists" - to be treated as human beings - in their visions of the future doesn't mean you'll be able to dismiss this as "identity politics" with any hope of success.
We can't build a successful leftist movement by trying to wish ourselves back into the reductive, exclusionary certainties of modernity. The task ahead - and it is a huge and frightening one - is to build one knowing what we now know, without nostalgia or the liberal revanchism on display here.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:06 PM on April 4, 2017 [56 favorites]
Just because you don't want to deal with people of color, LBGBTQ people, and others on the margins of power demanding to be accounted for and included by "Social Justice Activists" - to be treated as human beings - in their visions of the future doesn't mean you'll be able to dismiss this as "identity politics" with any hope of success.
We can't build a successful leftist movement by trying to wish ourselves back into the reductive, exclusionary certainties of modernity. The task ahead - and it is a huge and frightening one - is to build one knowing what we now know, without nostalgia or the liberal revanchism on display here.
posted by ryanshepard at 6:06 PM on April 4, 2017 [56 favorites]
This is a really clumsy, poorly informed hatchet job on a set of thinkers the author clearly cherry-picks, and citing Andrew Sullivan as if he can refute the idea of intersectionality just underlines that.
posted by kewb at 6:13 PM on April 4, 2017 [35 favorites]
posted by kewb at 6:13 PM on April 4, 2017 [35 favorites]
I decided to check the about page and flip through the headlines of "Aero" before digging into an article that's already raised a lot of red flags with the FPP abstract paragraph, and the title. Can anyone tell me a little bit about this site? Because I'm most assuredly looking at it through narrowed eyes at the moment.
posted by codacorolla at 6:14 PM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by codacorolla at 6:14 PM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]
my vote is that Neoplatonism ruined the West
If you are serious about this, we'd love to hear why! My impression is that it didn't have that much effect, with its system of emanations from the One, other than influencing Renaissance hermeticism, and, through that, some kinds of occultism
posted by thelonius at 6:17 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
If you are serious about this, we'd love to hear why! My impression is that it didn't have that much effect, with its system of emanations from the One, other than influencing Renaissance hermeticism, and, through that, some kinds of occultism
posted by thelonius at 6:17 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
postmodernism is worse than wrong, its irrelevant and generally poor scholarship.
Having said that, claiming that social justice in particular and the left in general are bad things because of postmodernism is just silly. There are plenty of empirical positivist social scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, historians, sociologists, etc. that exemplify the best things about social justice movements. if descriptions about the world and how it works can't be verified empirically, then what good is it? Fortunately, many of the claims made by the left--the wage gap, incarceration rates, racial discrimination, racial bias in hiring, etc--are actually empirically verifiable and guess what! the empirical results show these things exist. These studies, IMHO, are much more useful and important than the vast majority of inscrutable postmodern writing.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:26 PM on April 4, 2017 [26 favorites]
Having said that, claiming that social justice in particular and the left in general are bad things because of postmodernism is just silly. There are plenty of empirical positivist social scientists, philosophers, literary scholars, historians, sociologists, etc. that exemplify the best things about social justice movements. if descriptions about the world and how it works can't be verified empirically, then what good is it? Fortunately, many of the claims made by the left--the wage gap, incarceration rates, racial discrimination, racial bias in hiring, etc--are actually empirically verifiable and guess what! the empirical results show these things exist. These studies, IMHO, are much more useful and important than the vast majority of inscrutable postmodern writing.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 6:26 PM on April 4, 2017 [26 favorites]
Postmodernism is a tool for thinking that self-evidently works some of the time. The Hawkeye Initiative is a pretty basic example of postmodernism in action. No amount of philosophical hemming and hawing is gonna convince me that drawing men in the poses that comic book women are drawn in doesn't tell us something real and important about the world of comic books.
posted by straight at 6:29 PM on April 4, 2017 [12 favorites]
posted by straight at 6:29 PM on April 4, 2017 [12 favorites]
"It is dangerous to the degree of an existential threat to further damage people’s confidence in the empirical sciences." Postmodernism is what's doing this? I don't really see a solid case made for that in this essay.
posted by Bob Regular at 6:31 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by Bob Regular at 6:31 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
Re-hashed not so good.
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:33 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:33 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
Me: I bet this is about foucault and queer theory.
*clicks link*
*sees foucault staring dead ass at me.*
Me: yup.
posted by shmegegge at 6:39 PM on April 4, 2017 [12 favorites]
*clicks link*
*sees foucault staring dead ass at me.*
Me: yup.
posted by shmegegge at 6:39 PM on April 4, 2017 [12 favorites]
this seems like a strangely anachronistic essay to me... firstly because the heyday of "postmodernism" is over. people were talking about the death of postmodernism 20 years ago! postmodernism is a "was". secondly because we don't see "postmodernism" threatening the sciences. in fact, we see "old" postmodernists defending the sciences , expressing regret even (see for example bruno latour, essentialy the founder of (critical) science studies); the postmodern critique of science has been in many ways incorporated into science, and enhanced it! the threat is obviously coming from the right, no? thirdly because it is often the (far) left criticizing "postmodern" theory for its complicity with liberalism (this is zizek's whole thing). i could say a lot more but this is my immediate reaction
posted by LeviQayin at 6:43 PM on April 4, 2017 [36 favorites]
posted by LeviQayin at 6:43 PM on April 4, 2017 [36 favorites]
Not to liveblog, but I got to the Andrew Sullivan namedrop, sighed audibly, and scrolled down to see how much more I was in store for. This person needs an editor. Maybe three or four.
posted by codacorolla at 6:44 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by codacorolla at 6:44 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
To me, the social justice movement seems the exact opposite of postmodernism, insofar as its focus is on the nitty gritty details of making things less bad for people who have been getting the short end of the stick for some time because it's the right thing to do, high minded intellectual frameworks and academic 'objectivity' be damned.
posted by Zalzidrax at 6:48 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by Zalzidrax at 6:48 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
This could have been potentially interesting as history of thought, but like others, I'm finding it raises a lot of red flags and seems invested in a particular brand of finger-pointing at leftists and activists who've gone too far that I've grown weary of. Is there an overall point, or is this more Vampire Castle style, "Identity Politics is out of control!!!!" nothingness?
posted by byanyothername at 6:51 PM on April 4, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by byanyothername at 6:51 PM on April 4, 2017 [6 favorites]
Bullshit.
I've got a meeting that I've gotta run to, otherwise I'd spend a little more time in explicating how this is an essay against postmodernism by someone who doesn't understand postmodernism directed at an audience that doesn't understand postmodernism, despite living in it every day.
But really, pretty much every gloss is pure bullshit of a pretty predictable form.
The only way out of postmodernism is through it, and this idiot wants to Make Philosophy Great Again by stuffing Foucault and Derrida full of straw and then whacking them.
posted by klangklangston at 6:54 PM on April 4, 2017 [43 favorites]
I've got a meeting that I've gotta run to, otherwise I'd spend a little more time in explicating how this is an essay against postmodernism by someone who doesn't understand postmodernism directed at an audience that doesn't understand postmodernism, despite living in it every day.
But really, pretty much every gloss is pure bullshit of a pretty predictable form.
The only way out of postmodernism is through it, and this idiot wants to Make Philosophy Great Again by stuffing Foucault and Derrida full of straw and then whacking them.
posted by klangklangston at 6:54 PM on April 4, 2017 [43 favorites]
This article is inveterate horseshit, an attempted drive-by aimed at post-structuralism after a feverish night scouring wikipedia pages.
posted by R.F.Simpson at 6:56 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by R.F.Simpson at 6:56 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
Absolutely, LeviQayin. Anyone writing about postmodernism as a powerful force on the academic left in 2017 is getting the long side-eye from me. In 1997, sure. But this trick of complaining about identity politics and "postmodernism" goes way back. Judith Butler was already complaining about being lumped in with something called "postmodernism" in...the mid-90s? (In, I think, 1995, in the debate with Benhabib discussed here).
I've certainly never run into someone identifying as a "postmodernist" in the past decade--the fact that this guy uses the term is a sign of how little he knows about the world he's critiquing.
That said, it is true that continental theory from the 70s-90s is still read and cited and assigned in humanities and social science (for certain values of social science) courses, but it's seen--in anthropology, at least--as part of a toolset and as part of our intellectual history. I mean, in line with LeviQayin's point, science-wars-bogeyman Bruno Latour's Why has critique run out of steam? was published 13 years ago.
And as he points out repeatedly, it's always been true that saying things are socially constructed (or "performed," as Butler would have it) doesn't mean that they aren't "real" or that they don't have durable, tangible, even violent effects. I mean, why bother critiquing them otherwise?
posted by col_pogo at 6:59 PM on April 4, 2017 [10 favorites]
I've certainly never run into someone identifying as a "postmodernist" in the past decade--the fact that this guy uses the term is a sign of how little he knows about the world he's critiquing.
That said, it is true that continental theory from the 70s-90s is still read and cited and assigned in humanities and social science (for certain values of social science) courses, but it's seen--in anthropology, at least--as part of a toolset and as part of our intellectual history. I mean, in line with LeviQayin's point, science-wars-bogeyman Bruno Latour's Why has critique run out of steam? was published 13 years ago.
And as he points out repeatedly, it's always been true that saying things are socially constructed (or "performed," as Butler would have it) doesn't mean that they aren't "real" or that they don't have durable, tangible, even violent effects. I mean, why bother critiquing them otherwise?
posted by col_pogo at 6:59 PM on April 4, 2017 [10 favorites]
I only have peripheral knowledge of this stuff, but does anyone else find the term "postmodern" off-putting? That's a word I might associate with art, but if we're talking about critical or social theory, I'd expect the words deconstruction or post-structural.
posted by mr_roboto at 7:04 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by mr_roboto at 7:04 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
"POSTMODERNISM AND ITS IMPACT, EXPLAINED"
Save me from the "explanations" of people who can't be bothered to do basic research on what they're supposedly writing about.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 7:06 PM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]
Save me from the "explanations" of people who can't be bothered to do basic research on what they're supposedly writing about.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 7:06 PM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]
Just because it looks like this post has attracted an audience who might like it, here's one of my favorite little youtube videos
posted by dismas at 7:06 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by dismas at 7:06 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
I should apologize for assuming the author was a man--and for revealing my lack of clickthrough...Mea culpa.
posted by col_pogo at 7:08 PM on April 4, 2017
posted by col_pogo at 7:08 PM on April 4, 2017
(I believe I originally found that in this FPP from six years back)
posted by dismas at 7:12 PM on April 4, 2017
posted by dismas at 7:12 PM on April 4, 2017
Helen Pluckrose is a researcher in the humanities who focuses on late medieval/early modern religious writing for and about women.
This explains the peculiar conceit that pops up in the article a few times suggesting that postmodernism is in danger of returning pre-modern ideas into fashion, a pretty silly idea. No more heliocentrism for us anymore, thanks to the postmodernists!
posted by kozad at 7:13 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
This explains the peculiar conceit that pops up in the article a few times suggesting that postmodernism is in danger of returning pre-modern ideas into fashion, a pretty silly idea. No more heliocentrism for us anymore, thanks to the postmodernists!
posted by kozad at 7:13 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
I only have peripheral knowledge of this stuff, but does anyone else find the term "postmodern" off-putting? That's a word I might associate with art, but if we're talking about critical or social theory, I'd expect the words deconstruction or post-structural.
It's often a useful signifier of someone who either doesn't know what the hell they're talking about or wants to hand wave away nuance.
posted by juv3nal at 7:15 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
It's often a useful signifier of someone who either doesn't know what the hell they're talking about or wants to hand wave away nuance.
posted by juv3nal at 7:15 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
Helen Pluckrose is kind of a great name, though. I wonder if Pluckrose is the name she was born with or her own invention.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:18 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:18 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
OK. I finished it. It was terrible. Just really, really bad, D- quality work. This is not the best of the web, and seems to be hosted on something that's a slightly more intellectual version of Reason Magazine. Setting aside whether or not I agree or disagree with the thesis that's being advanced (insofar as the article attempts to advance a thesis) this is just fucking terrible in terms of history, argumentation, coherency, consistency, and quality of writing. Let me reiterate, because I'm venting, that this article completely fucking sucks.
For starters,
What evidence they do bring in tends to be one-off examples. They bring up an out of context tweet from the march for science, and then connect that to a non-sequitor story about how a specific group in Africa wants to decolonize scientific knowledge. This is a style of argumentation that I recognize well from this genre of mental diarrhea, because it's really all they have. Rapid fire off three or four anecdotes taken out of context and then claim with ridiculous sincerity that the barbarians are at the gates. I hope that one of those authors reads this so that I can personally say that if you use this tactic: "go fuck yourself." Take note that with a few personal stories, and a few out of context bits from the front page of Yahoo News, they seem to believe that they have mapped out the grand, apocalyptic peril of the entire leftist movement, and seemingly The Enlightenment itself. To put it mildly, I'm not convinced.
Jumping off from an astonishingly flimsy argument that doesn't understand what it is arguing against, fails to present a single piece of concrete evidence that what they're describing is occurring, and does so in a way that reads more like a personal complaint than a scholarly approach to a serious topic, they then have the fucking audacity to link this to social justice work.
Unsurprisingly, given the above, they seem to be lumping all social justice work (regardless of its methods, aims, theories, or origin) into a single category that they can then assault as being a fundamental problem of "the left". But not before walking back that clear subtext with, "The rise of populism and nationalism in the US and across Europe are also due to a strong existing far-Right and the fear of Islamism produced by the refugee crisis. Taking a rigidly 'anti-SJW' stance and blaming everything on this element of the Left is itself rife with motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. The Left is not responsible for the far-Right or the religious-Right or secular nationalism, but it is responsible for not engaging with reasonable concerns reasonably and thereby making itself harder for reasonable people to support.
I can't respond directly to that without a lot more cursing, so I'll cut it short: this isn't coherent even within itself, much less the rest of your article, MUCH LESS reality. Mercifully, the article ends. It does so with this fucking chestnut, "Our current crisis is not one of Left versus Right but of consistency, reason, humility and universal liberalism versus inconsistency, irrationalism, zealous certainty and tribal authoritarianism. The future of freedom, equality and justice looks equally bleak whether the postmodern Left or the post-truth Right wins this current war. Those of us who value liberal democracy and the fruits of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution and modernity itself must provide a better option."
As others have mentioned upthread, this is a fight that has been had. The author should look at what passed for sociology and anthropology (really where I'm most familiar with those theories) before the French theorists (also, what weird, weird fucking framing for the headline for an article that never really mentions France outside of a signifier for farty old men "angerery reacts only") that she rags on introduced important concepts to those fields. In large part, those ideas are still important, but have largely been synthesized with what we might consider more modernist sensibilities.
What the author has presented here is an ahistorical backscratching of a certain breed of old fashioned academic who doesn't like being called on their bullshit and is scared to realize that their diploma doesn't automatically make them a good person. Ironically it's the very identity politics that she mistakenly straw-mans as being the bane of the modern left. Terrible.
posted by codacorolla at 7:28 PM on April 4, 2017 [34 favorites]
For starters,
this seems like a strangely anachronistic essay to me... firstly because the heyday of "postmodernism" is over. people were talking about the death of postmodernism 20 years ago! postmodernism is a "was". secondly because we don't see "postmodernism" threatening the sciences. in fact, we see "old" postmodernists defending the sciences [snip for brevity]This, this, one thousand times this. It seems as though the author has read a single, not very good, not very current, summary of Post-modernism that glosses a few major thinkers, and hasn't read anything that builds on those theories. There's a lot of it, and most of it refigures or rejects elements of that foundational theory. On preview, as col_pogo says, it's extremely goddamn odd if you find someone who writes a paper that solely cites the canon thinkers of the 70s and 80s. So, when the author writes this,
The social sciences and humanities, however, are in danger of changing out of all recognition. Some disciplines within the social sciences already have. Cultural anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and gender studies, for example, have succumbed almost entirely not only to moral relativity but epistemic relativity. English (literature) too, in my experience, is teaching a thoroughly postmodern orthodoxy. Philosophy, as we have seen, is divided. So is history.My reaction is "what?" They then support this, not with any sort of meta-reviews, or critique, or research but with... a few personal anecdotes with just-so stories about how they feel mistreated in a few academic exchanges. Do staunch modernists not believe in irony? A charitable description of this line of argumentation would leave off any mention of intellectual honesty, and instead point out that it's ahistorical and ignorant of the literature.
What evidence they do bring in tends to be one-off examples. They bring up an out of context tweet from the march for science, and then connect that to a non-sequitor story about how a specific group in Africa wants to decolonize scientific knowledge. This is a style of argumentation that I recognize well from this genre of mental diarrhea, because it's really all they have. Rapid fire off three or four anecdotes taken out of context and then claim with ridiculous sincerity that the barbarians are at the gates. I hope that one of those authors reads this so that I can personally say that if you use this tactic: "go fuck yourself." Take note that with a few personal stories, and a few out of context bits from the front page of Yahoo News, they seem to believe that they have mapped out the grand, apocalyptic peril of the entire leftist movement, and seemingly The Enlightenment itself. To put it mildly, I'm not convinced.
Jumping off from an astonishingly flimsy argument that doesn't understand what it is arguing against, fails to present a single piece of concrete evidence that what they're describing is occurring, and does so in a way that reads more like a personal complaint than a scholarly approach to a serious topic, they then have the fucking audacity to link this to social justice work.
Unsurprisingly, given the above, they seem to be lumping all social justice work (regardless of its methods, aims, theories, or origin) into a single category that they can then assault as being a fundamental problem of "the left". But not before walking back that clear subtext with, "The rise of populism and nationalism in the US and across Europe are also due to a strong existing far-Right and the fear of Islamism produced by the refugee crisis. Taking a rigidly 'anti-SJW' stance and blaming everything on this element of the Left is itself rife with motivated reasoning and confirmation bias. The Left is not responsible for the far-Right or the religious-Right or secular nationalism, but it is responsible for not engaging with reasonable concerns reasonably and thereby making itself harder for reasonable people to support.
I can't respond directly to that without a lot more cursing, so I'll cut it short: this isn't coherent even within itself, much less the rest of your article, MUCH LESS reality. Mercifully, the article ends. It does so with this fucking chestnut, "Our current crisis is not one of Left versus Right but of consistency, reason, humility and universal liberalism versus inconsistency, irrationalism, zealous certainty and tribal authoritarianism. The future of freedom, equality and justice looks equally bleak whether the postmodern Left or the post-truth Right wins this current war. Those of us who value liberal democracy and the fruits of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution and modernity itself must provide a better option."
As others have mentioned upthread, this is a fight that has been had. The author should look at what passed for sociology and anthropology (really where I'm most familiar with those theories) before the French theorists (also, what weird, weird fucking framing for the headline for an article that never really mentions France outside of a signifier for farty old men "angerery reacts only") that she rags on introduced important concepts to those fields. In large part, those ideas are still important, but have largely been synthesized with what we might consider more modernist sensibilities.
What the author has presented here is an ahistorical backscratching of a certain breed of old fashioned academic who doesn't like being called on their bullshit and is scared to realize that their diploma doesn't automatically make them a good person. Ironically it's the very identity politics that she mistakenly straw-mans as being the bane of the modern left. Terrible.
posted by codacorolla at 7:28 PM on April 4, 2017 [34 favorites]
Postmodernism is a tool for thinking that self-evidently works some of the time. The Hawkeye Initiative is a pretty basic example of postmodernism in action
Why is this kind of satire credited particularly to post-modernism?
posted by smidgen at 7:52 PM on April 4, 2017
en français, the most fashionable intellectuals have a phrase for this kind of writing — c'est, comme on dit, hilarrible
posted by RogerB at 8:11 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by RogerB at 8:11 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
We see in Derrida the basis of "ironic misandry" and the well-known mantra "reverse racism isn’t real". We see the idea that "identity", in the sense of the word I don't like, is everything. We see too a rejection of the need to understand the other’s point of view. The intention of the speaker is irrelevant. We see in Derrida whatever the fuck we want to see, because that's what postmodernism is about, right? We see what must be the same kind of thinking it takes to believe in "microagressions" and other illiberal illusions of the authoritarian academic pessimists.
I'm glad someone has finally come along to point out the dangers of postmodernism, before it's too late.
posted by sfenders at 8:29 PM on April 4, 2017
I'm glad someone has finally come along to point out the dangers of postmodernism, before it's too late.
posted by sfenders at 8:29 PM on April 4, 2017
I don't have to know a damn thing about philosophy to know that saying French intellectuals ruined the West is like blaming Margherita of Savoy for Pizza Hut.
posted by CynicalKnight at 8:54 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by CynicalKnight at 8:54 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
Postmodernism is a tool for thinking that self-evidently works some of the time. The Hawkeye Initiative is a pretty basic example of postmodernism in action
Why is this kind of satire credited particularly to post-modernism?
In about the sense that the identity politics and distrust of metanarratives she's upset about are particularly attributable to postmodernism. They're not necessarily, although postmodernism might be one way to get you to them. Which is why it's so silly for her to rail against postmodernism when she's really upset about black women getting too uppity. Post-modernism isn't the only way that people get to those positions and the ways that it does are either pretty sensible or have fallen out of fashion.
posted by straight at 9:07 PM on April 4, 2017
Why is this kind of satire credited particularly to post-modernism?
In about the sense that the identity politics and distrust of metanarratives she's upset about are particularly attributable to postmodernism. They're not necessarily, although postmodernism might be one way to get you to them. Which is why it's so silly for her to rail against postmodernism when she's really upset about black women getting too uppity. Post-modernism isn't the only way that people get to those positions and the ways that it does are either pretty sensible or have fallen out of fashion.
posted by straight at 9:07 PM on April 4, 2017
HOW FRENCH “INTELLECTUALS” MADE A REDUCIONIST SYSTEM OF THOUGHT LOOK ABSURD: POSTMODERNISM AND ARGLE BARGLE, ARGLE BARGLE, AND ANDREW SULLIVAN
Fixed.
posted by ethansr at 9:12 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
Fixed.
posted by ethansr at 9:12 PM on April 4, 2017 [1 favorite]
This appears to be a random chick who took an M.A. in history somewhere and may not even be presently employed...I mean, as much as I'd like to believe in the omnicompetence of historians, is it even worth getting worked up over her opinions?
posted by praemunire at 9:20 PM on April 4, 2017
posted by praemunire at 9:20 PM on April 4, 2017
high minded intellectual frameworks and academic 'objectivity' be damned.
Skepticism of high minded academic frameworks and the pretense of academic objectivity is arguably consistent with the spirit of postmodernism.
But "postmodernism ruined everything" or "the Frankfurt School ruined everything" - I'm pretty sure it was Glenn Beck who was into that last one as more or less a literal conspiracy theory - are memes that pop up from time to time (mostly on the Right) and my reaction is similar to that of a lot of people in this thread. In academia at least much of that stuff is well past its peak. If truth has been fragmented in the 21st century I think it's more because of social and technological changes than French philosophy.
posted by atoxyl at 9:23 PM on April 4, 2017
Skepticism of high minded academic frameworks and the pretense of academic objectivity is arguably consistent with the spirit of postmodernism.
But "postmodernism ruined everything" or "the Frankfurt School ruined everything" - I'm pretty sure it was Glenn Beck who was into that last one as more or less a literal conspiracy theory - are memes that pop up from time to time (mostly on the Right) and my reaction is similar to that of a lot of people in this thread. In academia at least much of that stuff is well past its peak. If truth has been fragmented in the 21st century I think it's more because of social and technological changes than French philosophy.
posted by atoxyl at 9:23 PM on April 4, 2017
I am here to read a version of this argument, which I don't think is completely wrong. But it's been written a bunch of times in the past 30 years or so. So you have to offer something new. Or some nuance! Or something current!
There was a pretty good essay here(?) that said that, while cultural studies stopped being hot in the academy, it got weirdly assimilated into youth culture and is having another go. There was an analogy to the popular spread of the big ideas from New Criticism even as that movement also became passé in the academy. (I still hear stuff the New Critics said blithely labeled as "postmodernism," from people who should know better.)
So but it's not exactly the same argument, but it's saying something about the cultural impact of "postmodernism" that actually engages with non-ancient cultural developments.
Hm I guess it was this one.
posted by grobstein at 9:48 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
There was a pretty good essay here(?) that said that, while cultural studies stopped being hot in the academy, it got weirdly assimilated into youth culture and is having another go. There was an analogy to the popular spread of the big ideas from New Criticism even as that movement also became passé in the academy. (I still hear stuff the New Critics said blithely labeled as "postmodernism," from people who should know better.)
So but it's not exactly the same argument, but it's saying something about the cultural impact of "postmodernism" that actually engages with non-ancient cultural developments.
Hm I guess it was this one.
posted by grobstein at 9:48 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
> English (literature) too, in my experience, is teaching a thoroughly postmodern orthodoxy. Philosophy, as we have seen, is divided. So is history.
English departments have been eaten alive by the digital humanities over the course of the past ten years, so unless "postmodern orthodoxy" == "feeding texts to natural language processing systems and then visualizing the results," the first statement is on the face of it wrong. I'm less familiar with history as a field, but from my limited standpoint DH is displacing critical theory there, too.
this is all much to my chagrin, because I've got an old-fashioned suspicion that DH scholarship results in a lot of pretty diagrams but, often, very little useful insight. There are good DH projects -- but most of the really interesting ones are deeply informed by poststructural theory and/or marxism.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:56 PM on April 4, 2017 [9 favorites]
English departments have been eaten alive by the digital humanities over the course of the past ten years, so unless "postmodern orthodoxy" == "feeding texts to natural language processing systems and then visualizing the results," the first statement is on the face of it wrong. I'm less familiar with history as a field, but from my limited standpoint DH is displacing critical theory there, too.
this is all much to my chagrin, because I've got an old-fashioned suspicion that DH scholarship results in a lot of pretty diagrams but, often, very little useful insight. There are good DH projects -- but most of the really interesting ones are deeply informed by poststructural theory and/or marxism.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 9:56 PM on April 4, 2017 [9 favorites]
"I'm glad someone has finally come along to point out the dangers of postmodernism, before it's too late."
Fry_not_sure.jpg
posted by klangklangston at 10:28 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
Fry_not_sure.jpg
posted by klangklangston at 10:28 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
Some disciplines within the social sciences already have. Cultural anthropology, sociology, cultural studies and gender studies
Are these all even "social sciences?" I do tend to think of "* Studies/* Theory" fields as having significant roots in this kind of theory - I don't think of them as particularly claiming to be sciences. They are doing just what they set out to do, and hardly dominate the academy in any real sense. Sociology I definitely think of as a social science. I also think of it as having a fair amount of empirical, analytical stuff going on these days - I know people who are doing that. Anthropology I think of as having competing traditions. Am I off base about any of this?
posted by atoxyl at 10:45 PM on April 4, 2017
Are these all even "social sciences?" I do tend to think of "* Studies/* Theory" fields as having significant roots in this kind of theory - I don't think of them as particularly claiming to be sciences. They are doing just what they set out to do, and hardly dominate the academy in any real sense. Sociology I definitely think of as a social science. I also think of it as having a fair amount of empirical, analytical stuff going on these days - I know people who are doing that. Anthropology I think of as having competing traditions. Am I off base about any of this?
posted by atoxyl at 10:45 PM on April 4, 2017
so let me get this straight, "cultural relativists" (a category of people often talked about but rarely seen in real life) are tearing apart the fabric of fact-based, logical, western civilization, huh?
that's weird because it seems to me that cultural relativists aren't the ones doing stuff like denying climate science and making vast, xenophobic, and unscientific judgments about entire racial or religious groups around the world these days. rather, it seems like the people who do those things have a very well defined (hierarchical, even) view of what culture they are in and where it stands. and, what's more, they have political power, which, let's be honest, is what really matters in the end.
posted by wibari at 10:54 PM on April 4, 2017 [8 favorites]
that's weird because it seems to me that cultural relativists aren't the ones doing stuff like denying climate science and making vast, xenophobic, and unscientific judgments about entire racial or religious groups around the world these days. rather, it seems like the people who do those things have a very well defined (hierarchical, even) view of what culture they are in and where it stands. and, what's more, they have political power, which, let's be honest, is what really matters in the end.
posted by wibari at 10:54 PM on April 4, 2017 [8 favorites]
As someone who's been outside of academia for a while, I'm curious--if postmodernism is old news, what do you call the current state of things? Post-postmodernism?
posted by joedan at 11:29 PM on April 4, 2017
posted by joedan at 11:29 PM on April 4, 2017
...we are at a unique point in history where the status quo is fairly consistently liberal, with a liberalism that upholds the values of freedom, equal rights and opportunities for everyone regardless of gender, race and sexuality.I think this rather summarises the perspective of the article.
posted by doop at 11:35 PM on April 4, 2017 [3 favorites]
As someone who's been outside of academia for a while, I'm curious--if postmodernism is old news, what do you call the current state of things? Post-postmodernism?
It seems to me like everyone is focusing on Deleuze with the same fervor of 90's Foucault mania. I think this indicates the continued destabilizing influence of post-structuralism along with a new desire for a metaphysics and ontology that doesn't rely on science and technology.
Also, nonhuman theory seems to be all the rage but that's pretty broad. I know someone mentioned DH earlier but that seems to be a top-down imposition. Are there any grad-students and/or professors excited about DH? It seems like faculty and students alike utilize it as a necessary evil for funding, publishing, etc.
Economically speaking, Marxism, far from being outdated, feels immanent at my deep south state university. You would be hard pressed to find any undergrads in the humanities who aren't already familiar with the trickle-down versions of Marxism and Cultural Studies. Often, their preceding interest in these things are why they pursue the Humanities.
But I'm drifting. The buzzwords today seem to be Deleuze, nonhuman, and accelerationism (don't @ me).
posted by R.F.Simpson at 11:43 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
It seems to me like everyone is focusing on Deleuze with the same fervor of 90's Foucault mania. I think this indicates the continued destabilizing influence of post-structuralism along with a new desire for a metaphysics and ontology that doesn't rely on science and technology.
Also, nonhuman theory seems to be all the rage but that's pretty broad. I know someone mentioned DH earlier but that seems to be a top-down imposition. Are there any grad-students and/or professors excited about DH? It seems like faculty and students alike utilize it as a necessary evil for funding, publishing, etc.
Economically speaking, Marxism, far from being outdated, feels immanent at my deep south state university. You would be hard pressed to find any undergrads in the humanities who aren't already familiar with the trickle-down versions of Marxism and Cultural Studies. Often, their preceding interest in these things are why they pursue the Humanities.
But I'm drifting. The buzzwords today seem to be Deleuze, nonhuman, and accelerationism (don't @ me).
posted by R.F.Simpson at 11:43 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
> As someone who's been outside of academia for a while, I'm curious--if postmodernism is old news, what do you call the current state of things? Post-postmodernism?
I call the current state of things an omnishambles, but that has more to do with the casualization of academic labor than about any particular critical approach.
though if pressed I'd double down on my overstated-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy argument for something like "digital methods-ism" as the dominant fad.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:44 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
I call the current state of things an omnishambles, but that has more to do with the casualization of academic labor than about any particular critical approach.
though if pressed I'd double down on my overstated-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy argument for something like "digital methods-ism" as the dominant fad.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:44 PM on April 4, 2017 [4 favorites]
As someone who's been outside of academia for a while, I'm curious--if postmodernism is old news, what do you call the current state of things? Post-postmodernism?Sounds like flustercuck?
posted by fullerine at 11:49 PM on April 4, 2017 [2 favorites]
"This article is inveterate horseshit, an attempted drive-by aimed at post-structuralism after a feverish night scouring wikipedia pages."
Not even! If she scoured wikipedia, she'd see that Lyotard didn't coin "postmodern" — it was actually coined about 100 years earlier! It's like claiming Betty Friedan coined "feminism."
And when one of your explicit fact claims can be so easily disproven…
Jesus, now I'm wondering if this is all a troll — that'd be pretty goddamned postmodern. But since her pinned tweet complains that feminism is often unbalanced and silly, while supporting MRAs who work for female equality, if it's a troll, it's too deep for my mouth.
"Are these all even "social sciences?" I do tend to think of "* Studies/* Theory" fields as having significant roots in this kind of theory - I don't think of them as particularly claiming to be sciences. They are doing just what they set out to do, and hardly dominate the academy in any real sense. Sociology I definitely think of as a social science. I also think of it as having a fair amount of empirical, analytical stuff going on these days - I know people who are doing that. Anthropology I think of as having competing traditions. Am I off base about any of this?"
Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies, Sociology, Gender studies, all of them include empirical research inside of their domains, and that research is often significantly affected by pomo theory. I think that there is a disjunction in the way that "theory" gets used, though, as it's significantly weaker than in, say, physics, but functionally equivalent to, say, economics, which claims a much more empirical basis despite being as riven with bullshit.
"that's weird because it seems to me that cultural relativists aren't the ones doing stuff like denying climate science and making vast, xenophobic, and unscientific judgments about entire racial or religious groups around the world these days. rather, it seems like the people who do those things have a very well defined (hierarchical, even) view of what culture they are in and where it stands. and, what's more, they have political power, which, let's be honest, is what really matters in the end."
So, the thing is, it's both: Right-wing hierarchical authoritarians are using the tools created by pomo theorists to attack modernist institutions — all while blaming lefties for doing just that. The ones denying scientific authority are doing so because they have a competing framework where truth value is assessed through ideological tribal ties. That's pomo! That's why I said the only way out is through!
I really do think that the art history framework is the best one for clarifying postmodernism, and clearing up some of the confusions. After all, "postmodern" got its start in art criticism.
It's a little titchy on definitions right at the beginning because finding the beginning is contested (appropriately), but modernism celebrated progress, over-arching theories (e.g. Marx and Freud's), new ways of looking at things, and clarity. It depicted life as lived NOW rather than harkening to a mythic past. And it reacted to and critiqued life as lived now.
…but.
"Postmodern" is first used to describe some of the very same art. "Postmodern" springs up around the Impressionists, who were also called modernists. Manet's paintings of Parisian society are modernist; Luncheon on the Grass can be pretty fairly argued as a postmodern piece, where its medley of references evokes more history than it displays, where the intentionally rough background undermines the assumption of a landscape painting, where the gaze of the nude woman can legitimately be read in a hundred different ways. The painting is acknowledging that both the painter and the audience know that this is an illusion, and it undermines the faith in the ability of paintings to depict a real truth, an explicit critique of the neo-Platonist, Academic tradition.
"Postmodern" is, then, reactions to the claims of modernism, building on them and undermining them — and rejecting the binary claim of modernism that postmodernism can't both build and undermine! Postmodernism then also exists anywhere that modernism has been, and after WWI, modernism had been everywhere — and books like All Quiet on the Western Front were modernist works that explicitly deal with the anomie and ennui of modern living… but postmodern works like Waiting For Godot reduce the search for solutions to babble. Both are anti-authoritarian, both deal with the failure of institutions, and just as many people call Waiting for Godot "modernist" as call it "postmodernist."
Or, to translate it into another discipline, Einstein's theory of special relativity, despite being "relative," is modernism. It's universal, useful, clear. On the other hand, Godel's theorems of incompleteness are postmodernism — they're specific, and demonstrate an underlying contradiction in trying to construct a system that is both complete and consistent.
Anyway, it's getting late, so I better toddle off before I spin myself too much further into the pomo hole.
posted by klangklangston at 11:49 PM on April 4, 2017 [14 favorites]
Not even! If she scoured wikipedia, she'd see that Lyotard didn't coin "postmodern" — it was actually coined about 100 years earlier! It's like claiming Betty Friedan coined "feminism."
And when one of your explicit fact claims can be so easily disproven…
Jesus, now I'm wondering if this is all a troll — that'd be pretty goddamned postmodern. But since her pinned tweet complains that feminism is often unbalanced and silly, while supporting MRAs who work for female equality, if it's a troll, it's too deep for my mouth.
"Are these all even "social sciences?" I do tend to think of "* Studies/* Theory" fields as having significant roots in this kind of theory - I don't think of them as particularly claiming to be sciences. They are doing just what they set out to do, and hardly dominate the academy in any real sense. Sociology I definitely think of as a social science. I also think of it as having a fair amount of empirical, analytical stuff going on these days - I know people who are doing that. Anthropology I think of as having competing traditions. Am I off base about any of this?"
Cultural Anthropology, Gender Studies, Sociology, Gender studies, all of them include empirical research inside of their domains, and that research is often significantly affected by pomo theory. I think that there is a disjunction in the way that "theory" gets used, though, as it's significantly weaker than in, say, physics, but functionally equivalent to, say, economics, which claims a much more empirical basis despite being as riven with bullshit.
"that's weird because it seems to me that cultural relativists aren't the ones doing stuff like denying climate science and making vast, xenophobic, and unscientific judgments about entire racial or religious groups around the world these days. rather, it seems like the people who do those things have a very well defined (hierarchical, even) view of what culture they are in and where it stands. and, what's more, they have political power, which, let's be honest, is what really matters in the end."
So, the thing is, it's both: Right-wing hierarchical authoritarians are using the tools created by pomo theorists to attack modernist institutions — all while blaming lefties for doing just that. The ones denying scientific authority are doing so because they have a competing framework where truth value is assessed through ideological tribal ties. That's pomo! That's why I said the only way out is through!
I really do think that the art history framework is the best one for clarifying postmodernism, and clearing up some of the confusions. After all, "postmodern" got its start in art criticism.
It's a little titchy on definitions right at the beginning because finding the beginning is contested (appropriately), but modernism celebrated progress, over-arching theories (e.g. Marx and Freud's), new ways of looking at things, and clarity. It depicted life as lived NOW rather than harkening to a mythic past. And it reacted to and critiqued life as lived now.
…but.
"Postmodern" is first used to describe some of the very same art. "Postmodern" springs up around the Impressionists, who were also called modernists. Manet's paintings of Parisian society are modernist; Luncheon on the Grass can be pretty fairly argued as a postmodern piece, where its medley of references evokes more history than it displays, where the intentionally rough background undermines the assumption of a landscape painting, where the gaze of the nude woman can legitimately be read in a hundred different ways. The painting is acknowledging that both the painter and the audience know that this is an illusion, and it undermines the faith in the ability of paintings to depict a real truth, an explicit critique of the neo-Platonist, Academic tradition.
"Postmodern" is, then, reactions to the claims of modernism, building on them and undermining them — and rejecting the binary claim of modernism that postmodernism can't both build and undermine! Postmodernism then also exists anywhere that modernism has been, and after WWI, modernism had been everywhere — and books like All Quiet on the Western Front were modernist works that explicitly deal with the anomie and ennui of modern living… but postmodern works like Waiting For Godot reduce the search for solutions to babble. Both are anti-authoritarian, both deal with the failure of institutions, and just as many people call Waiting for Godot "modernist" as call it "postmodernist."
Or, to translate it into another discipline, Einstein's theory of special relativity, despite being "relative," is modernism. It's universal, useful, clear. On the other hand, Godel's theorems of incompleteness are postmodernism — they're specific, and demonstrate an underlying contradiction in trying to construct a system that is both complete and consistent.
Anyway, it's getting late, so I better toddle off before I spin myself too much further into the pomo hole.
posted by klangklangston at 11:49 PM on April 4, 2017 [14 favorites]
I don't understand this article, because the few effective "relativists" I've met are regular working non-academic non-activist people who believe that "both viewpoints are valid", or tell people "there's no right or wrong". So I don't get the author's "explanation" that French academics caused this, when political expediency (modern "realpolitik") and neoliberal ideology could be better explanations for it.
Actually I get it now. If you look at the first few times "relativity" appears in the essay, it's obvious the author is using it as a floating signifier. "We see in Lyotard..." reifies the concept, and then afterwards, the author moves the rhetoric as if the reader accepts their definition/concept of "relativism". That's an example of foot-in-door sophistry.
posted by polymodus at 11:53 PM on April 4, 2017
Actually I get it now. If you look at the first few times "relativity" appears in the essay, it's obvious the author is using it as a floating signifier. "We see in Lyotard..." reifies the concept, and then afterwards, the author moves the rhetoric as if the reader accepts their definition/concept of "relativism". That's an example of foot-in-door sophistry.
posted by polymodus at 11:53 PM on April 4, 2017
On the other hand, Godel's theorems of incompleteness are postmodernism
That's kind of a terrific example in a way, because what seems to be not obvious about postmodernists is that they are actually higher-order realists, but somehow get construed as solipsistic relativists.
posted by polymodus at 11:57 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
That's kind of a terrific example in a way, because what seems to be not obvious about postmodernists is that they are actually higher-order realists, but somehow get construed as solipsistic relativists.
posted by polymodus at 11:57 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
Skepticism of high minded academic frameworks and the pretense of academic objectivity is arguably consistent with the spirit of postmodernism.
Oh I totally agree! But I do feel like the postmodernist philosophers I have read were quite concerned with these sorts of things, albeit to deconstruct them.
Whereas I feel like social justice stuff is philosphically working the other direction: trying to construct something new out of the suffering of the past and the mess of human experience. Not that there isn't deconstruction isn't involved. Queer theory certainly deconstructs traditional gender roles, but that's for a practical reason: it's in the way of building something that works for everyone.
And part of my view could be the contexts in which I've encountered the two things. Studying postmodern philosophy by reading Foucault is doubtlessly different from learning about social justice work from activism and on the ground discussion. I'm sure if I was an active participant in the philosophical discourse when postmodernism was being created, I'd have a different view of how everything fits together.
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:58 PM on April 4, 2017
Oh I totally agree! But I do feel like the postmodernist philosophers I have read were quite concerned with these sorts of things, albeit to deconstruct them.
Whereas I feel like social justice stuff is philosphically working the other direction: trying to construct something new out of the suffering of the past and the mess of human experience. Not that there isn't deconstruction isn't involved. Queer theory certainly deconstructs traditional gender roles, but that's for a practical reason: it's in the way of building something that works for everyone.
And part of my view could be the contexts in which I've encountered the two things. Studying postmodern philosophy by reading Foucault is doubtlessly different from learning about social justice work from activism and on the ground discussion. I'm sure if I was an active participant in the philosophical discourse when postmodernism was being created, I'd have a different view of how everything fits together.
posted by Zalzidrax at 11:58 PM on April 4, 2017
> But I'm drifting. The buzzwords today seem to be Deleuze, nonhuman, and accelerationism (don't @ me).
posted by R.F.Simpson at 11:43 PM on April 4 [+] [!]
Deleuze feels very ten-years-ago to me, but that might just be because I was very into Deleuze ten years ago. Animal studies is definitely a big thing (yay!), but stuff like object oriented ontology still seems more popular with grad students (none of whom are finding jobs) and in less-professional Internet fora than with people on the tenure track publishing peer-reviewed work.
Regardless of whether or not DH is particularly popular with either faculty or students, institutional support (read: grant money and TT job lines) for it is so strong that that's where humanities research is moving. Yes, it's top-down — but really, money is what moves academic disciplines, not the preferences of the people working in those disciplines.
memo to self: either drop the cynical pose at least a little bit, or else go full Diogenes and
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:59 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by R.F.Simpson at 11:43 PM on April 4 [+] [!]
Deleuze feels very ten-years-ago to me, but that might just be because I was very into Deleuze ten years ago. Animal studies is definitely a big thing (yay!), but stuff like object oriented ontology still seems more popular with grad students (none of whom are finding jobs) and in less-professional Internet fora than with people on the tenure track publishing peer-reviewed work.
Regardless of whether or not DH is particularly popular with either faculty or students, institutional support (read: grant money and TT job lines) for it is so strong that that's where humanities research is moving. Yes, it's top-down — but really, money is what moves academic disciplines, not the preferences of the people working in those disciplines.
memo to self: either drop the cynical pose at least a little bit, or else go full Diogenes and
- give up
- drop out
- move out of my apartment
- abandon all my possessions
- live in a large urn used for shipping wine.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 11:59 PM on April 4, 2017 [5 favorites]
Theory: the only reason we're discussing this is that some pretty-dumb group-blog-with-pretensions hired a particularly slick graphic designer. Because seriously: she lost me when she quoted the Encyclopedia Britannica to define a philosophical concept, which is kinda embarrassing if one is not in primary school.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:28 AM on April 5, 2017 [9 favorites]
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:28 AM on April 5, 2017 [9 favorites]
well for my part mainly I'm discussing it because I was ready to jump all over it right from the title, and felt relieved, but also sort of deflated, when I found out that the community had already jumped all over it before I got here.
also I have insomnia.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:37 AM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
also I have insomnia.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:37 AM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
I, too, am discussing this because of insomnia.
But I really do think we're taking this more seriously than we should because it looks fancy. It makes me wonder who is funding this dumb, slick "magazine."
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:44 AM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
But I really do think we're taking this more seriously than we should because it looks fancy. It makes me wonder who is funding this dumb, slick "magazine."
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 12:44 AM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
This is why I come to the Blue - to see people hash out bloody internet battles discussing someone's poorly written article. I am going to bed though, now.
posted by yueliang at 1:02 AM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by yueliang at 1:02 AM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
When I saw the FPP, I immediately knew I wouldn't be reading the article, and that I would enjoy the discussion. Thanks all, this is great fun.
As a student at an art academy during the 1980's, I was expected to read all the post modern thinkers, and to underpin my projects with distillations of their writing. In my opinion, back then, it was old-people stuff, and I with most people my generation and younger, rejected it all as soon as we were out of school. So yeah, she's 20+ years late.
All these years later I find myself quite enjoying Foucault, even though I am working on a piece that I hope eventually will be an argument against Madness and Civilisation.
posted by mumimor at 1:06 AM on April 5, 2017
As a student at an art academy during the 1980's, I was expected to read all the post modern thinkers, and to underpin my projects with distillations of their writing. In my opinion, back then, it was old-people stuff, and I with most people my generation and younger, rejected it all as soon as we were out of school. So yeah, she's 20+ years late.
All these years later I find myself quite enjoying Foucault, even though I am working on a piece that I hope eventually will be an argument against Madness and Civilisation.
posted by mumimor at 1:06 AM on April 5, 2017
I too came in to tear some stuff to shreds and am delighted to see it's been done.
So I don't get the author's "explanation" that French academics caused this, when political expediency (modern "realpolitik") and neoliberal ideology could be better explanations for it.
Everything is always France's fault. The reasons are easy: for all its many faults, it's one of the most successful leftist democracies in the world. Conservatives fucking hate that. Thus, French intellectuals (who are almost always leftists) ruined the world.
I'll be sitting here eating unpasteurized cheese and drinking locally-brewed beers while enjoying healthcare that doesn't cost me anything above about 5% of my salary in the form of taxes (I'm only counting the healthcare part, not the total amount of taxes paid) and six weeks of paid vacation per year on top of paid sick days whenever they're needed. Look, one can rightfully rail against all the wrongs too – I do so myself – but we've still got it better than a lot of other places. And yes it does pain me to say that as an American, seeing what all's going on in the States. But: I am also an American who for the last 20-plus years has been saying that the conservative-fueled hatred against France is precisely this: a way to blind Americans to the good sides of leftist thinking and policies.
posted by fraula at 1:42 AM on April 5, 2017 [18 favorites]
So I don't get the author's "explanation" that French academics caused this, when political expediency (modern "realpolitik") and neoliberal ideology could be better explanations for it.
Everything is always France's fault. The reasons are easy: for all its many faults, it's one of the most successful leftist democracies in the world. Conservatives fucking hate that. Thus, French intellectuals (who are almost always leftists) ruined the world.
I'll be sitting here eating unpasteurized cheese and drinking locally-brewed beers while enjoying healthcare that doesn't cost me anything above about 5% of my salary in the form of taxes (I'm only counting the healthcare part, not the total amount of taxes paid) and six weeks of paid vacation per year on top of paid sick days whenever they're needed. Look, one can rightfully rail against all the wrongs too – I do so myself – but we've still got it better than a lot of other places. And yes it does pain me to say that as an American, seeing what all's going on in the States. But: I am also an American who for the last 20-plus years has been saying that the conservative-fueled hatred against France is precisely this: a way to blind Americans to the good sides of leftist thinking and policies.
posted by fraula at 1:42 AM on April 5, 2017 [18 favorites]
Quel tas de conneries !
*takes a sip of delicious Gaillac wine*
posted by nicolin at 4:41 AM on April 5, 2017
*takes a sip of delicious Gaillac wine*
posted by nicolin at 4:41 AM on April 5, 2017
Am now sitting here, fighting the urge to spuriously and tendentiously invent a new movement, cis-modernism, and its antithetical trans-modernism, just so I can baffle and bamboozle alt-right dipshits into funneling think-tank money to me while I empire-build my way to a chair at a Russell group university, or maybe Ivy League.
Naah: I'm about 20 years too old, cynical, and lazy to go that route. But one of you might want to? cis-modernism can be an attempt to reclaim rationalist determinism for a post-postmodern age, while trans-modernism seeks to transcend the cis-modernist hegemonizing narrative by building a distributed, relational, but non-commutative framework for promulgating the virtues of relativism. Or something like that.
Anyone want to run with it? (I can keep up this line of bullshit for, like, forevs.)
Hint: I bullshit for a living, and I recognize a certain fragrant aroma when I smell it.
posted by cstross at 4:43 AM on April 5, 2017 [14 favorites]
Naah: I'm about 20 years too old, cynical, and lazy to go that route. But one of you might want to? cis-modernism can be an attempt to reclaim rationalist determinism for a post-postmodern age, while trans-modernism seeks to transcend the cis-modernist hegemonizing narrative by building a distributed, relational, but non-commutative framework for promulgating the virtues of relativism. Or something like that.
Anyone want to run with it? (I can keep up this line of bullshit for, like, forevs.)
Hint: I bullshit for a living, and I recognize a certain fragrant aroma when I smell it.
posted by cstross at 4:43 AM on April 5, 2017 [14 favorites]
English departments have been eaten alive by the digital humanities over the course of the past ten years
As someone who has been involved in digital humanities (among other approaches) in several disciplines, I really haven't seen this. Certainly, hiring patterns in English departments as a whole don't bear this out, as a look at the MLA Job Information List or jobs.ac.uk will verify.
I could see why one would want to oppose a certain data-driven science model against a certain kind of philosophical skepticism, and I can even see some deans and other ideologues favouring that binary model in order to denigrate "postmodernism"... but even if that defines 'DH' (which I don't believe it does), then DH-ers are very definitely not taking over English, nor will they any time soon. This is even more strongly the case with teaching than research.
It is correct, however, to say that digital humanities occupies the same sort of position in English departments' hiring strategies as 'theory' did at its height. Almost no-one got hired as a 'pure' theorist: you could and can be an early-modernist with interests in deconstruction, or a Victorianist interested in gender and sexuality from theoretical perspectives. Some schools liked the fact that theoretical interests provide links to other disciplines, but in both English and in History, materials generally trump method. The same is true of book history, and is now coming around again with medical humanities and world lit.
Lately, the trend has been to downplay big-tent DH as practiced across disciplines through research centres and libraries (which is historically where most of the work has taken place, often through non-tenured contract labour) and to reintegrate it into those disciplines. I'm seeing more job ads for digital historians or digital literary scholars instead, often from schools wanting to dip a toe in the water (and to be able to say, 'See, we have a dh-er!' like they used to do with the token theorist at conservative institutions). So perhaps what you see will come to pass.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 5:52 AM on April 5, 2017 [6 favorites]
As someone who has been involved in digital humanities (among other approaches) in several disciplines, I really haven't seen this. Certainly, hiring patterns in English departments as a whole don't bear this out, as a look at the MLA Job Information List or jobs.ac.uk will verify.
I could see why one would want to oppose a certain data-driven science model against a certain kind of philosophical skepticism, and I can even see some deans and other ideologues favouring that binary model in order to denigrate "postmodernism"... but even if that defines 'DH' (which I don't believe it does), then DH-ers are very definitely not taking over English, nor will they any time soon. This is even more strongly the case with teaching than research.
It is correct, however, to say that digital humanities occupies the same sort of position in English departments' hiring strategies as 'theory' did at its height. Almost no-one got hired as a 'pure' theorist: you could and can be an early-modernist with interests in deconstruction, or a Victorianist interested in gender and sexuality from theoretical perspectives. Some schools liked the fact that theoretical interests provide links to other disciplines, but in both English and in History, materials generally trump method. The same is true of book history, and is now coming around again with medical humanities and world lit.
Lately, the trend has been to downplay big-tent DH as practiced across disciplines through research centres and libraries (which is historically where most of the work has taken place, often through non-tenured contract labour) and to reintegrate it into those disciplines. I'm seeing more job ads for digital historians or digital literary scholars instead, often from schools wanting to dip a toe in the water (and to be able to say, 'See, we have a dh-er!' like they used to do with the token theorist at conservative institutions). So perhaps what you see will come to pass.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 5:52 AM on April 5, 2017 [6 favorites]
abandon all my possessions
Would it help if I mentioned that nothing exists?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:57 AM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
Would it help if I mentioned that nothing exists?
posted by the man of twists and turns at 5:57 AM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
If truth has been fragmented in the 21st century I think it's more because of social and technological changes than French philosophy.
I think this is very true. Pluckrose talks about "science, reason, humanism and liberalism" as though these are pillars of security, stability and certainty, when in fact they are do the exact opposite. Science uproots our notions of reality and our place in the universe. Reason uproots our categories and sows doubt. Humanism uproots the belief in a God-given order. Liberalism uproots the notion of fixed social hierarchy.
I think to a large extent the strands of late 20th century philosophy and theory that Pluckrose attacks (I won't use her labels "French" or "postmodern" because these just serve to inflame) are attempts to come to terms with this maelstrom; to reach for a deeper understanding of how knowledge is produced. In that sense I think they're firmly embedded in the Enlightenment project, even if they lead to a perhaps not always very productive deconstruction of meaning and understanding itself. We just have to press on. Or as klangklangston said, "The only way out of postmodernism is through it".
posted by dmh at 6:54 AM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
I think this is very true. Pluckrose talks about "science, reason, humanism and liberalism" as though these are pillars of security, stability and certainty, when in fact they are do the exact opposite. Science uproots our notions of reality and our place in the universe. Reason uproots our categories and sows doubt. Humanism uproots the belief in a God-given order. Liberalism uproots the notion of fixed social hierarchy.
I think to a large extent the strands of late 20th century philosophy and theory that Pluckrose attacks (I won't use her labels "French" or "postmodern" because these just serve to inflame) are attempts to come to terms with this maelstrom; to reach for a deeper understanding of how knowledge is produced. In that sense I think they're firmly embedded in the Enlightenment project, even if they lead to a perhaps not always very productive deconstruction of meaning and understanding itself. We just have to press on. Or as klangklangston said, "The only way out of postmodernism is through it".
posted by dmh at 6:54 AM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
As a student at an art academy during the 1980's, I was expected to read all the post modern thinkers, and to underpin my projects with distillations of their writing. In my opinion, back then, it was old-people stuff, and I with most people my generation and younger, rejected it all as soon as we were out of school. So yeah, she's 20+ years late.
All these years later I find myself quite enjoying Foucault, even though I am working on a piece that I hope eventually will be an argument against Madness and Civilisation.
I was also a student in the early 80's -- though I was a mature student, probably 30 or so -- definitely an 'old-people' when compared with the kids who were fresh out of school. And I was utterly besotted with the structuralists and post-structuralists. I did my undergraduate degree and my masters with people who worked with Stuart Hall, producing those initial monographs for the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies.
At the time, I thought people like Foucault and Gramsci were the dogs bollocks. They made earlier thinkers look lame. The whole critique of 'science' and 'empiricism' seemed completely correct to me.
Today, I think I bought into it because I hadn't read widely enough, and I didn't have enough experience of the real world. On graduating and moving into the kind of research that was responsible for shaping policy, it rapidly became pretty clear to me that if you attempted to make those Foucauldian-style arguments in that context, you'd persuade nobody of anything. It was always interesting though, to watch the knots the academically ambitious tied themselves in when writing up research, as they attempted to please their academic audience on the one hand, while simultanously satisfying their government funders on the other. Theoretical critique of empiricism in the literature review, followed by bog standard bean counting positivism. Very little of it was actually 'speaking truth to power'. It was mostly a kind of academic discourse that was aimed at reproducing a class of academic workers and excluding those who hadn't mastered the necessary discursive strategies.
So, the exact opposite to what it was aiming to be.
I was watching a rant by Jordan Peterson about post-modernism the other day, and he was making the claim that it's a very shallow body of thought that you can master it in about a week, you can appear to be an intellectual to outsiders and you don't have to do any real thinking.
I'm pretty sure those were the characteristics that gave it its appeal to me, but the moment I started to see its weaknesses, I started to find people who used those arguments hugely frustrating -- because of it's tendency towards relativism. If there is no 'truth', if one truth claim has no more validity than another -- why bother? Why bother to do anything at all? Fake news is just as valid as real news. Why bother about climate change if voodoo science is just as valid as attempts to do rigorous science?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 7:02 AM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
All these years later I find myself quite enjoying Foucault, even though I am working on a piece that I hope eventually will be an argument against Madness and Civilisation.
I was also a student in the early 80's -- though I was a mature student, probably 30 or so -- definitely an 'old-people' when compared with the kids who were fresh out of school. And I was utterly besotted with the structuralists and post-structuralists. I did my undergraduate degree and my masters with people who worked with Stuart Hall, producing those initial monographs for the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies.
At the time, I thought people like Foucault and Gramsci were the dogs bollocks. They made earlier thinkers look lame. The whole critique of 'science' and 'empiricism' seemed completely correct to me.
Today, I think I bought into it because I hadn't read widely enough, and I didn't have enough experience of the real world. On graduating and moving into the kind of research that was responsible for shaping policy, it rapidly became pretty clear to me that if you attempted to make those Foucauldian-style arguments in that context, you'd persuade nobody of anything. It was always interesting though, to watch the knots the academically ambitious tied themselves in when writing up research, as they attempted to please their academic audience on the one hand, while simultanously satisfying their government funders on the other. Theoretical critique of empiricism in the literature review, followed by bog standard bean counting positivism. Very little of it was actually 'speaking truth to power'. It was mostly a kind of academic discourse that was aimed at reproducing a class of academic workers and excluding those who hadn't mastered the necessary discursive strategies.
So, the exact opposite to what it was aiming to be.
I was watching a rant by Jordan Peterson about post-modernism the other day, and he was making the claim that it's a very shallow body of thought that you can master it in about a week, you can appear to be an intellectual to outsiders and you don't have to do any real thinking.
I'm pretty sure those were the characteristics that gave it its appeal to me, but the moment I started to see its weaknesses, I started to find people who used those arguments hugely frustrating -- because of it's tendency towards relativism. If there is no 'truth', if one truth claim has no more validity than another -- why bother? Why bother to do anything at all? Fake news is just as valid as real news. Why bother about climate change if voodoo science is just as valid as attempts to do rigorous science?
posted by PeterMcDermott at 7:02 AM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
A dichotomy I've noticed and love:
1. People on the "intellectual" right love to rail against postmodernism and its corrosive evils
2. People on the right also all seem to love Blazing Saddles.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 7:19 AM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
1. People on the "intellectual" right love to rail against postmodernism and its corrosive evils
2. People on the right also all seem to love Blazing Saddles.
posted by the phlegmatic king at 7:19 AM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
If there is no 'truth', if one truth claim has no more validity than another -- why bother? Why bother to do anything at all? Fake news is just as valid as real news. Why bother about climate change if voodoo science is just as valid as attempts to do rigorous science?
Postmodernism doesn't cause those kinds of problems. Postmodernism isn't the reason why people ignore science when it's in their interest to do so. Postmodernism is an attempt to deal with how and why that behavior is so deeply entrenched.
posted by straight at 7:33 AM on April 5, 2017 [7 favorites]
Postmodernism doesn't cause those kinds of problems. Postmodernism isn't the reason why people ignore science when it's in their interest to do so. Postmodernism is an attempt to deal with how and why that behavior is so deeply entrenched.
posted by straight at 7:33 AM on April 5, 2017 [7 favorites]
>> abandon all my possessions
> Would it help if I mentioned that nothing exists?
Ever since global fascism started fashing in earnest, I've stopped thinking of the likely nonexistence of everything as a problem and started thinking of it as a consolation.
So yes. It would help. Thank you.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:02 AM on April 5, 2017
> Would it help if I mentioned that nothing exists?
Ever since global fascism started fashing in earnest, I've stopped thinking of the likely nonexistence of everything as a problem and started thinking of it as a consolation.
So yes. It would help. Thank you.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:02 AM on April 5, 2017
I agree with another theme running through the discussion above, which is that "post-modern" is a pretty unclear term because it's been used so many different ways in so many different disciplines, often with disagreement among individual scholars within those disciplines as to what does or does not qualify as post-modern thought. I took an undergrad class on PoMo literature, and one of our first readings was a chapter that went through an imaginary museum with the docent pointing out 'exhibits' from sociology, theology, history, literature, the visual arts, music, etc. that all had been filed under "post-modern" thought at some point. The point of the essay was not only an introduction to the topic, but also to make students aware that it's a slippery category that gets applied in a multitude of different ways.
Personally, I find post-modernism to be most useful as a descriptor and body of theory that examines life under globalized consumer capitalism. If you accept that PoMo in that sense, then you can read a post-modern analysis of something as a modernist and still take something from it. Many of the works on PoMo that I've read in fact do offer empirical analysis and solutions derived from that analysis, but base their work on foundational post-modern critiques. I've always liked the position that people tend to not be one or the other, but inhabit a pre-modern, modern, and postmodern mode of thought simultaneously - the categorization is really just a tool that allows for perspective and analysis of living within that environment.
I think that the FPP article, but a running theme among most similar works, downplays the role that post-modernism had in challenging and refining approaches to social theory as it existed previously. Those canonical works, such as Lyotard or Foucault, need to be read within a context of history, because social science at that point really was (frankly) pretty shit in terms of being a positivist attempt to universalize white, male, western identities as the norm. Post-modern interventions lead to wider acceptance of post-positivist and constructivist approaches to a number of fields, and the incorporation of methodologies like Discourse analysis, grounded theory, and ethnography into broader academic thought. Most academics would agree that is a major contribution and an improvement over where social science was in the 50s and early 60s, but also would be unlikely to take a hard line stance against one approach or the other, with a tendency to blend approaches in their reading if not necessarily their methodologies.
posted by codacorolla at 9:35 AM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]
Personally, I find post-modernism to be most useful as a descriptor and body of theory that examines life under globalized consumer capitalism. If you accept that PoMo in that sense, then you can read a post-modern analysis of something as a modernist and still take something from it. Many of the works on PoMo that I've read in fact do offer empirical analysis and solutions derived from that analysis, but base their work on foundational post-modern critiques. I've always liked the position that people tend to not be one or the other, but inhabit a pre-modern, modern, and postmodern mode of thought simultaneously - the categorization is really just a tool that allows for perspective and analysis of living within that environment.
I think that the FPP article, but a running theme among most similar works, downplays the role that post-modernism had in challenging and refining approaches to social theory as it existed previously. Those canonical works, such as Lyotard or Foucault, need to be read within a context of history, because social science at that point really was (frankly) pretty shit in terms of being a positivist attempt to universalize white, male, western identities as the norm. Post-modern interventions lead to wider acceptance of post-positivist and constructivist approaches to a number of fields, and the incorporation of methodologies like Discourse analysis, grounded theory, and ethnography into broader academic thought. Most academics would agree that is a major contribution and an improvement over where social science was in the 50s and early 60s, but also would be unlikely to take a hard line stance against one approach or the other, with a tendency to blend approaches in their reading if not necessarily their methodologies.
posted by codacorolla at 9:35 AM on April 5, 2017 [3 favorites]
Regarding the term post-postmodernism. My memory tells me that the term was used seriously in the 90s and then relegated to the "What were we thinking?" dustbin of history.
posted by kozad at 9:54 AM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by kozad at 9:54 AM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
On what the preferred term is: well, I can answer as a cultural anthropologist only, since as many people have said here, "post-modernism" has been used to cover a huge range of intellectual positions (not to mention aesthetic movements, modes of production, etc), which is part of why it's not a very useful term.
In discussions of theory that I've been part of since 2007 or so, "post-structuralism" has had longer legs than "post-modernism" (which had almost no legs at all, as a term people used to describe what they were actually doing), although even there there's recognition that structuralism was a creature of the 50s-70s. Otherwise: "post-positivism," "critical theory"? Those capture something important.
I sometimes talk about being in the "critical" or interpretive social sciences. Which doesn't mean slavish devotion to French theory, but does suggest that that theory informs my stance towards the things I study. But as an anthropologist, that stance also comes out a far older tradition of relativism--going back to Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and others. (And my personal favorite response to concern trolling about relativism is Clifford Geertz on "anti-anti-relativism.")
posted by col_pogo at 11:04 AM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
In discussions of theory that I've been part of since 2007 or so, "post-structuralism" has had longer legs than "post-modernism" (which had almost no legs at all, as a term people used to describe what they were actually doing), although even there there's recognition that structuralism was a creature of the 50s-70s. Otherwise: "post-positivism," "critical theory"? Those capture something important.
I sometimes talk about being in the "critical" or interpretive social sciences. Which doesn't mean slavish devotion to French theory, but does suggest that that theory informs my stance towards the things I study. But as an anthropologist, that stance also comes out a far older tradition of relativism--going back to Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, and others. (And my personal favorite response to concern trolling about relativism is Clifford Geertz on "anti-anti-relativism.")
posted by col_pogo at 11:04 AM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
If there is no 'truth', if one truth claim has no more validity than another -- why bother? Why bother to do anything at all? Fake news is just as valid as real news. Why bother about climate change if voodoo science is just as valid as attempts to do rigorous science?
You're falling into exactly the trap you decry, claiming that something isn't true because you don't like its implications.
I also think it's pretty much nonsense to suggest that people do things because of truth. The history of the world, considered for even the briefest moment, would indicate the exact opposite to be the case.
The real problem is that "postmodernism" just isn't a thing with some single agenda or attitude to truth any more than "analytic philosophy" is (even less so, in fact, given its near meaningless breadth of application). Different people within traditions and discourses maintain different views and make different arguements. Anyone who says "Postmodernism is nonsense" is not even wrong, they're just chatting shit.
posted by howfar at 11:21 AM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
You're falling into exactly the trap you decry, claiming that something isn't true because you don't like its implications.
I also think it's pretty much nonsense to suggest that people do things because of truth. The history of the world, considered for even the briefest moment, would indicate the exact opposite to be the case.
The real problem is that "postmodernism" just isn't a thing with some single agenda or attitude to truth any more than "analytic philosophy" is (even less so, in fact, given its near meaningless breadth of application). Different people within traditions and discourses maintain different views and make different arguements. Anyone who says "Postmodernism is nonsense" is not even wrong, they're just chatting shit.
posted by howfar at 11:21 AM on April 5, 2017 [1 favorite]
voodoo science
Also please don't do this.
posted by howfar at 11:27 AM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
Also please don't do this.
posted by howfar at 11:27 AM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
voodoo science
Also please don't do this.
Sorry, what is being done?
posted by dmh at 11:58 AM on April 5, 2017
Also please don't do this.
Sorry, what is being done?
posted by dmh at 11:58 AM on April 5, 2017
"I'm pretty sure those were the characteristics that gave it its appeal to me, but the moment I started to see its weaknesses, I started to find people who used those arguments hugely frustrating -- because of it's tendency towards relativism. If there is no 'truth', if one truth claim has no more validity than another -- why bother? Why bother to do anything at all? Fake news is just as valid as real news. Why bother about climate change if voodoo science is just as valid as attempts to do rigorous science?"
A la polymodus in a comment upstairs from here: The answer is usually second-order reconsideration of underlying concepts and assumptions. The answer to problems of, e.g., the unverifiability of many of the pillars of behavioral psychology studies isn't to shrug and say that we may as well believe any of them, it's to regard many of them as suggestive but unsettled, and an opportunity (and need) for future research. Instead of certainty, they should be regarded with ambiguity, because they don't succeed on the grounds that they establish for themselves. The theories we have are explanatory for (some) of the data we have, but part of modernism is a tendency to get in front of the data (e.g. almost all popular reporting of evo-psych). These theories are easier for us, because complexity has a mental cost and we're all lazy to some extent, but post-modernism involves pushing back and saying that actually this stuff is far harder and more complicated than it seems from the outside.
To which, a large portion of the Western democratic population has been responding, essentially, "Nuh uh."
I'll agree that a large proportion of academic theory that I've read, as an undergrad or as a random jagoff, fails to answer the implicit question of "so what?" Like, you can certainly make a compelling argument that the placement of climate-tracking weather balloons is substantially determined by disparate access to economic resources, legacies of colonialism, etc. etc. But in order to have that transcend wankery, you gotta say that this can either have significant impact on the data collected or that it changes the future strategies for data collection or something. Otherwise, so what? Or, to use a stupendously simple example: It's inarguable that chairs have largely been designed for able-bodied people. The power structures of furniture makers have demanded it, and that's been reified into a traditional culture of chairs. Even our mental models of chairs are based largely on that — even people for whom these chairs are uncomfortable or unusable still think of chairs that way. You could dig up ample historical evidence, I'm sure. So what? That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the vast majority of chairs, and without further argument on how to make chairs for people who are excluded from accessing chairs, who cares? "A Foucaultian History of Ability in Furniture" may be publishable somewhere, but it's the academic equivalent of the Simirillian.
But rejecting climate science for bunk pseudoscience isn't the same flavor of postmodernism as recognizing that the use of WEIRD subjects for psych experiments undercuts their generalizability. For the former, it's a recognition that most people who aren't engaged in science or politics or whatever, don't actually care very much about the underlying facts. That means that, largely, convincing them with fact-based arguments won't work. It's a blow against the presumptive supremacy of modernist rationalism, but it's, again, second-order realism to recognize that comparatively few people are persuaded by facts, so if they're your audience, trying to argue about the minutiae of climate sampling isn't an effective rebuttal against their parroting climate denial bullshit. And with the WEIRD critique, that's a place where deriving norms from a subset of ostensibly normal people really is fraught with power disparity and has real effects on people's lives, and is also one of the places where postmodern critique is most needed.
I guess one of the underlying problems with postmodernism is that we as a species may be too dumb to live in a world as complex as postmodern critique reveals. At the very least, Pluckrose seems to be.
posted by klangklangston at 12:42 PM on April 5, 2017 [10 favorites]
A la polymodus in a comment upstairs from here: The answer is usually second-order reconsideration of underlying concepts and assumptions. The answer to problems of, e.g., the unverifiability of many of the pillars of behavioral psychology studies isn't to shrug and say that we may as well believe any of them, it's to regard many of them as suggestive but unsettled, and an opportunity (and need) for future research. Instead of certainty, they should be regarded with ambiguity, because they don't succeed on the grounds that they establish for themselves. The theories we have are explanatory for (some) of the data we have, but part of modernism is a tendency to get in front of the data (e.g. almost all popular reporting of evo-psych). These theories are easier for us, because complexity has a mental cost and we're all lazy to some extent, but post-modernism involves pushing back and saying that actually this stuff is far harder and more complicated than it seems from the outside.
To which, a large portion of the Western democratic population has been responding, essentially, "Nuh uh."
I'll agree that a large proportion of academic theory that I've read, as an undergrad or as a random jagoff, fails to answer the implicit question of "so what?" Like, you can certainly make a compelling argument that the placement of climate-tracking weather balloons is substantially determined by disparate access to economic resources, legacies of colonialism, etc. etc. But in order to have that transcend wankery, you gotta say that this can either have significant impact on the data collected or that it changes the future strategies for data collection or something. Otherwise, so what? Or, to use a stupendously simple example: It's inarguable that chairs have largely been designed for able-bodied people. The power structures of furniture makers have demanded it, and that's been reified into a traditional culture of chairs. Even our mental models of chairs are based largely on that — even people for whom these chairs are uncomfortable or unusable still think of chairs that way. You could dig up ample historical evidence, I'm sure. So what? That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the vast majority of chairs, and without further argument on how to make chairs for people who are excluded from accessing chairs, who cares? "A Foucaultian History of Ability in Furniture" may be publishable somewhere, but it's the academic equivalent of the Simirillian.
But rejecting climate science for bunk pseudoscience isn't the same flavor of postmodernism as recognizing that the use of WEIRD subjects for psych experiments undercuts their generalizability. For the former, it's a recognition that most people who aren't engaged in science or politics or whatever, don't actually care very much about the underlying facts. That means that, largely, convincing them with fact-based arguments won't work. It's a blow against the presumptive supremacy of modernist rationalism, but it's, again, second-order realism to recognize that comparatively few people are persuaded by facts, so if they're your audience, trying to argue about the minutiae of climate sampling isn't an effective rebuttal against their parroting climate denial bullshit. And with the WEIRD critique, that's a place where deriving norms from a subset of ostensibly normal people really is fraught with power disparity and has real effects on people's lives, and is also one of the places where postmodern critique is most needed.
I guess one of the underlying problems with postmodernism is that we as a species may be too dumb to live in a world as complex as postmodern critique reveals. At the very least, Pluckrose seems to be.
posted by klangklangston at 12:42 PM on April 5, 2017 [10 favorites]
Sorry, what is being done?
It is no more appropriate to use Voodoo and related religions as a lazy shorthand for something that one doesn't approve of than it is to used any other piece of language with clear connotations of religious and racial bigotry.
posted by howfar at 1:05 PM on April 5, 2017 [8 favorites]
It is no more appropriate to use Voodoo and related religions as a lazy shorthand for something that one doesn't approve of than it is to used any other piece of language with clear connotations of religious and racial bigotry.
posted by howfar at 1:05 PM on April 5, 2017 [8 favorites]
If anyone is interested in reading decent high level overviews of the theorists being discussed in this article, I can recommend two books:
Michael Crotty's The Foundations of Social Research, which is a historical overview of from positivism to PoMo. It was coursework reading for my PhD, and it helped me to understand the larger historical picture that I was getting into as a member of the academy. This will definitely help to frame the 'science wars' between post-whatever critical theorists and hardline scientists that the FPP author seems to be still stuck in. I was familiar with PoMo before reading this, but Crotty's analysis really helped me to understand it in terms of being part of a larger academic conversation.
George Ritzer is a Sociology professor who has two really excellent books about the social theories that comprise both Modernism and Post-modernism, he's written books on both Post- and modern sociological theory, and appears to have recently released a book through Sage that combines the two. The two other books I mention are both fairly cheap as paperbacks, and might be slightly dated, but are still very good. His prose is very clear, and he writes as if the reader has limited knowledge of sociology in general, while still presenting rich pictures of the relevant theories.
posted by codacorolla at 3:12 PM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
Michael Crotty's The Foundations of Social Research, which is a historical overview of from positivism to PoMo. It was coursework reading for my PhD, and it helped me to understand the larger historical picture that I was getting into as a member of the academy. This will definitely help to frame the 'science wars' between post-whatever critical theorists and hardline scientists that the FPP author seems to be still stuck in. I was familiar with PoMo before reading this, but Crotty's analysis really helped me to understand it in terms of being part of a larger academic conversation.
George Ritzer is a Sociology professor who has two really excellent books about the social theories that comprise both Modernism and Post-modernism, he's written books on both Post- and modern sociological theory, and appears to have recently released a book through Sage that combines the two. The two other books I mention are both fairly cheap as paperbacks, and might be slightly dated, but are still very good. His prose is very clear, and he writes as if the reader has limited knowledge of sociology in general, while still presenting rich pictures of the relevant theories.
posted by codacorolla at 3:12 PM on April 5, 2017 [5 favorites]
Also, "identitarian"? As in, European far-right neo-fascist types? That's not quite what I associate with postmodernism.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:49 PM on April 5, 2017
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:49 PM on April 5, 2017
polymodus: That's kind of a terrific example in a way, because what seems to be not obvious about postmodernists is that they are actually higher-order realists, but somehow get construed as solipsistic relativists.
OMG, this is what has confused me about my understanding of post-modernism versus what everyone seems to complain derisively about while calling it post-modern! I honestly thought it was obvious that peoples' perspectives affect what we perceive and how we remember it, especially based on the studies of perception in the last 15-20 years, so I've always been baffled by the people talking about nothing mattering instead of the fascinating problems of trying to account for competing realities with shared evidence.
One of these days I should actually read some post-modern philosophers... my perspective on post-modernism is 100% psychology + art.
posted by Deoridhe at 5:29 PM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
OMG, this is what has confused me about my understanding of post-modernism versus what everyone seems to complain derisively about while calling it post-modern! I honestly thought it was obvious that peoples' perspectives affect what we perceive and how we remember it, especially based on the studies of perception in the last 15-20 years, so I've always been baffled by the people talking about nothing mattering instead of the fascinating problems of trying to account for competing realities with shared evidence.
One of these days I should actually read some post-modern philosophers... my perspective on post-modernism is 100% psychology + art.
posted by Deoridhe at 5:29 PM on April 5, 2017 [2 favorites]
OK, it looks I'm late to the party and moreover I'm by no means qualified in philosophy, especially not postmodern philosophy. And after Charlie Stross's floor speech here I feel inadequate even at bullshitting... but anyway..
My only source on postmodernism is Jean Baudrillard, so I guess that's another hated cheese-eating word-salad monkey. I am interested in him because of his insights into science fiction, popular culture, and social control. The problem is that I'm yet to find how the reality we're living in differs from his bleak characterization. At that time, during his writing years, what we so desperately lament now has already been there -- the seeds of mass surveillance, the behavioral-predicting and click-laundering economies, and the normalization of the scandals, have already been sown.
Accusing the postmodernists of "ruining" the West is like, in the setting of The China Syndrome, accusing Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas's characters of creating the nuclear emergency. (And yes, Baudrillard wrote an interesting review of that film). If he were alive, he'd have said the accusers are complicit in the dissolution of the difference between effect and symptom, the real and the imaginary.
If anyone's interested and not yet has read his The Implosion of Meaning in the Media, read it and see how this is not relevant to today's situation and strategy, especially the peril of the author's call to "out-discourse" their opponents.
My gripe with the French postmodernists is that they tend to misappropriate concepts from STEM without explaining them, like how in the above essay Baudrillard talked about "entropy" and Shannon's information theory. This is a flaw that can be overcome if you're technically familiar with them, and to prevent this tendency we need more people caring about bridging the scientists and thinkers, and I fully get the author's idea about the attack on the credibility of science.
I can empathize with the nostalgia of a past where activism was authentic, good-faith, reasonable opposition. The classical liberalism. I want that too and I have deep respect and admiration for those who stand for that set of principles, and I am always amazed to find how one can always derive insight and moral strength from the classical examples -- just like I can derive another kind of insight from the postmodern.
But we live in extremely interesting times. I'd say we need to look at the full modes of our intellectual history, where there have ben huge caches of lessons, and use them wisely. We can discuss about the rest when liberty is actually won.
posted by runcifex at 7:37 AM on April 6, 2017 [4 favorites]
My only source on postmodernism is Jean Baudrillard, so I guess that's another hated cheese-eating word-salad monkey. I am interested in him because of his insights into science fiction, popular culture, and social control. The problem is that I'm yet to find how the reality we're living in differs from his bleak characterization. At that time, during his writing years, what we so desperately lament now has already been there -- the seeds of mass surveillance, the behavioral-predicting and click-laundering economies, and the normalization of the scandals, have already been sown.
Accusing the postmodernists of "ruining" the West is like, in the setting of The China Syndrome, accusing Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas's characters of creating the nuclear emergency. (And yes, Baudrillard wrote an interesting review of that film). If he were alive, he'd have said the accusers are complicit in the dissolution of the difference between effect and symptom, the real and the imaginary.
If anyone's interested and not yet has read his The Implosion of Meaning in the Media, read it and see how this is not relevant to today's situation and strategy, especially the peril of the author's call to "out-discourse" their opponents.
My gripe with the French postmodernists is that they tend to misappropriate concepts from STEM without explaining them, like how in the above essay Baudrillard talked about "entropy" and Shannon's information theory. This is a flaw that can be overcome if you're technically familiar with them, and to prevent this tendency we need more people caring about bridging the scientists and thinkers, and I fully get the author's idea about the attack on the credibility of science.
I can empathize with the nostalgia of a past where activism was authentic, good-faith, reasonable opposition. The classical liberalism. I want that too and I have deep respect and admiration for those who stand for that set of principles, and I am always amazed to find how one can always derive insight and moral strength from the classical examples -- just like I can derive another kind of insight from the postmodern.
But we live in extremely interesting times. I'd say we need to look at the full modes of our intellectual history, where there have ben huge caches of lessons, and use them wisely. We can discuss about the rest when liberty is actually won.
posted by runcifex at 7:37 AM on April 6, 2017 [4 favorites]
"My only source on postmodernism is Jean Baudrillard, so I guess that's another hated cheese-eating word-salad monkey. I am interested in him because of his insights into science fiction, popular culture, and social control. The problem is that I'm yet to find how the reality we're living in differs from his bleak characterization. At that time, during his writing years, what we so desperately lament now has already been there -- the seeds of mass surveillance, the behavioral-predicting and click-laundering economies, and the normalization of the scandals, have already been sown. "
Right after the election, I went hard down the Baudrillard hole, and specifically because I was looking for what solutions he proposed. And you're right that he's light on them. But it was his emphasis on science fiction's ability to create new ways of being that left me somewhat less angsty — one of the things that has helped me cope with the existential crisis Pluckrose blames on Baudrillard et al. is spending time thinking about what worlds I would want to see, how they would work, what the distance between here and there is.
"My gripe with the French postmodernists is that they tend to misappropriate concepts from STEM without explaining them, like how in the above essay Baudrillard talked about "entropy" and Shannon's information theory. This is a flaw that can be overcome if you're technically familiar with them, and to prevent this tendency we need more people caring about bridging the scientists and thinkers, and I fully get the author's idea about the attack on the credibility of science."
I think growing up in a house with a lot of dual-language German-English books made me a lot less vexed by some of the abuse of STEM terms (which does totally happen) because I'm used to assuming that familiar words mean something entirely different — it certainly helped when I read Heidegger in college, what with Sein and Dasein, which one translation rendered as "Being" and "Be-ing, respectively." It's easier for me to think of them as "Sein and Dasein" than to think of them as anything else, and just learn them as new words related to other ones I know. Since nearly all of the Continentals are translated from languages that I don't speak (at least not well enough to read philosophy heavily dependent upon language games), it's hard to feel like I have much of a stake trying to decide whether Baudrillard's pseudoscientific use of "entropy" is related all that meaningfully to the STEM definitions. That, and I think that there's enough other stuff that holds together that, hey, people still read Plato even though we know a lot of his arguments were absolute sophistry and bunkum. Aristotle's utility as a marine biologist hasn't held up, but that's not the part you focus on if you go back and read him now.
"I can empathize with the nostalgia of a past where activism was authentic, good-faith, reasonable opposition."
I was just vaguely musing that reframing "whiteness studies" as "white history" would probably get more grant money.
The classical liberalism. I want that too and I have deep respect and admiration for those who stand for that set of principles, and I am always amazed to find how one can always derive insight and moral strength from the classical examples -- just like I can derive another kind of insight from the postmodern."
I can respect it up to a point, but part of the problem is that many of those principles failed to deliver their promise, and Continental philosophy raises a lot of arguments that classical liberalism has no answer for about why those principles failed. In that light, a lot of the complaints about postmodernism just seem petulant. Classical liberalism promises equality, but it turns out that the definition of equality that it uses is deeply alienated from what most people think of when they think of equality, and there are deep conflicts within liberalism that need to be addressed — and one of the best conceptual tools for doing that is pointing out the contradictions embedded within classical liberalism, which hacks like Pluckrose have no answer for aside from cherry picking a few ridiculous things from the bevy of French intellectual pretension.
posted by klangklangston at 11:26 PM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]
Right after the election, I went hard down the Baudrillard hole, and specifically because I was looking for what solutions he proposed. And you're right that he's light on them. But it was his emphasis on science fiction's ability to create new ways of being that left me somewhat less angsty — one of the things that has helped me cope with the existential crisis Pluckrose blames on Baudrillard et al. is spending time thinking about what worlds I would want to see, how they would work, what the distance between here and there is.
"My gripe with the French postmodernists is that they tend to misappropriate concepts from STEM without explaining them, like how in the above essay Baudrillard talked about "entropy" and Shannon's information theory. This is a flaw that can be overcome if you're technically familiar with them, and to prevent this tendency we need more people caring about bridging the scientists and thinkers, and I fully get the author's idea about the attack on the credibility of science."
I think growing up in a house with a lot of dual-language German-English books made me a lot less vexed by some of the abuse of STEM terms (which does totally happen) because I'm used to assuming that familiar words mean something entirely different — it certainly helped when I read Heidegger in college, what with Sein and Dasein, which one translation rendered as "Being" and "Be-ing, respectively." It's easier for me to think of them as "Sein and Dasein" than to think of them as anything else, and just learn them as new words related to other ones I know. Since nearly all of the Continentals are translated from languages that I don't speak (at least not well enough to read philosophy heavily dependent upon language games), it's hard to feel like I have much of a stake trying to decide whether Baudrillard's pseudoscientific use of "entropy" is related all that meaningfully to the STEM definitions. That, and I think that there's enough other stuff that holds together that, hey, people still read Plato even though we know a lot of his arguments were absolute sophistry and bunkum. Aristotle's utility as a marine biologist hasn't held up, but that's not the part you focus on if you go back and read him now.
"I can empathize with the nostalgia of a past where activism was authentic, good-faith, reasonable opposition."
I was just vaguely musing that reframing "whiteness studies" as "white history" would probably get more grant money.
The classical liberalism. I want that too and I have deep respect and admiration for those who stand for that set of principles, and I am always amazed to find how one can always derive insight and moral strength from the classical examples -- just like I can derive another kind of insight from the postmodern."
I can respect it up to a point, but part of the problem is that many of those principles failed to deliver their promise, and Continental philosophy raises a lot of arguments that classical liberalism has no answer for about why those principles failed. In that light, a lot of the complaints about postmodernism just seem petulant. Classical liberalism promises equality, but it turns out that the definition of equality that it uses is deeply alienated from what most people think of when they think of equality, and there are deep conflicts within liberalism that need to be addressed — and one of the best conceptual tools for doing that is pointing out the contradictions embedded within classical liberalism, which hacks like Pluckrose have no answer for aside from cherry picking a few ridiculous things from the bevy of French intellectual pretension.
posted by klangklangston at 11:26 PM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]
In defence of the apparently indefensible (or, French ‘intellectuals’ did not ruin the West and can we please stop postie-bashing because it’s not actually terribly helpful thank you).
posted by sapagan at 6:46 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by sapagan at 6:46 AM on April 7, 2017 [2 favorites]
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Hey, if you're going to conflate "modernity" and "Modernism," we may have a problem. It's not like fascism is incompatible with Modernism, and I suspect that fascism has ruined more lives than Postmodernism with a comfortable margin.
Now, my vote is that Neoplatonism ruined the West, but I expect argument.
posted by GenjiandProust at 6:02 PM on April 4, 2017 [25 favorites]