Do we need a Postmodern philosophy?
In t'other thread, I posed the question of whether the postmodern era happened. Two thirds said Yes, one-third No. A tenth said Yeah but it was pomo's fault. Lots of commentary from a few of the naysayers and the yeah-butters but not so much about whether the postmodern era occurred, more along the lines of my starting point for this thread, a quote from our single-radianed elder statesman:
Quoting 180 Proof
The question is: Does postmodern philosophy add anything _new_?
The way I'd probably break this down is as follows: does postmodernism have
- descriptive
- predictive
- prescriptive
- novel
value? (Will add more e.g. cognitive if you like.)
The previous thread suggests a small majority of us think it has a descriptive value. A few choice prognostications from Lyotard suggest a predictive value:
- that it would be necessary for computers to legitimise future knowledge and discovery, e.g. that people would trust a computation before pen & paper type theory or human expertise, experience and skill.
- that this dependence on technology would massively accelerate it's investment and growth
- that knowledge (data, now it's all on computers) would be commidified and mercantilised, collected for the purpose of being sold to other people collecting knowledge
- that the absorption of knowledge would become ever less about training minds and ever more vocational
- that people would choose many disconnected micronarratives over grand narratives, for instance may hold different views in different contexts that, put together, would contradict or otherwise not cohere
- that computation would aid these micronarratives by making access to information fast and easy.
What about ethics? Okay, pomo has observed the world, found some epoch, and figured out where it's all going, but what are we supposed to do about it? Lyotard's answer to this was for us to abandon conformity in favour of diversity, to have lots of different kinds of knowing and not just one. This could be on an individual or social level: the important thing is that discourse is fleshed out from all perspectives.
What Lyotard was arguing for, whether he knew it or not, was noise as an ethic. This makes pomo ethics part of an optimisation problem. When genomes mutate, what they're doing is adding noise (error, variance) to the genome, which allows for nature to find better solutions to ecological problems. However Lyotard champions noise for noise's sake: there is no fitness function, no selection criteria... No one has a perspective by which to judge a micronarrative inferior to another or to a grand narrative.
180 argues that this is nothing new. Actually, no, he argues that this has precursors; he concludes that this is nothing new. The most obvious precursor is Wittgenstein, but Wittgenstein did not apply language games to ethics and politics; Lyotard did, so this is new, however incremental. And there's a little Darwin in there in moving from teleological, targeted, designed ethics to diversity through a pseudo-randomisation of narratives, but not so far as selection.
Another prescription is the thorough open-mindedness of Derrida. While modernism is bias bottom-up, typically anthropocentrism, but also ethnic and gender bias (proof that modernists hardly tried to escape their own ignorance), Derrida teaches his own kind of pluralism, not of epistemologies but of viewpoints, to systematically find every possible interpretation of a text without preferring one over another, and every possible authorial bias that hides and us hidden by those readings.
My favourite example is from queer critical theory but told to me by an American playwright who's name annoyingly escapes me at the moment (I swear it's David something but not Mamet). Deconstructing Shakespeare's Othello, a very strong case can be made that Iago is gay (his romantic-sounding pledge of devotion to Othello, his ambiguous "I lay with Cassio lately", but ultimately his frustrating (but genius) refusal to explain why he planned Desdemona's murder).
We can't ask Shakespeare, but that's not grounds to accept a classical interpretation. We know that Hitchcock did a similar thing in Rope: had two gay villains that audiences didn't realise were gay, so it's far from unthinkable. Perhaps this is just my postmodern bias, but the story seems much better this way, much more satisfying and thrilling, and ultimately that's why I accept it. A reliance on some internal or external justification for either this or a classical interpretation is never going to be forthcoming: we cannot reason our way out of this; all we can do is generate hypotheses and choose what makes sense to us. Rationalism fails us, but diversity has our backs.
Moral relativism is not a postmodern invention, however it is so strongly associated with pomo that it is the basis of Chomsky's criticism: you can't be a moral relativist, having all possible perspectives at once, so pomo is rubbish.
But you can be a moral relativist. Moral relativism doesn't mean that you take every position. I don't agree with infant genital mutilation, but I understand that an orthodox Jew will have a different perspective, and that has an impact on how I discuss the issue with them (I'm not likely to appeal to shame, for instance). On less disturbing matters, such as trans women's use of ladies' toilets, I don't have my own opinion but am sympathetic to both contrary arguments, even if one of them is usually stated in a demented way (and it ain't the post-gender argument that's demented).
How is this different from modernist relativism? In and of itself, not much. The difference is in the status of relativism. Postmodernism is about diversity, not necessarily within an individual but within a society; as such, relativism has a higher status in pomo than in modo (hence the association with the former more than the latter).
All of the seeds of pomo ethics lie within modernism, but this isn't particularly insightful. Modernism has evolved. Eventually it speciated. We don't argue that humans are a kind of fish simply because of continuity. 180's list above is a good prehistory of postmodernism (except the last few entries): a sequence of blows to traditional modern ways of thinking that, with some historical events thrown in (suffrage, the world wars), modernism could not survive. It ceased to be itself. Where modernism ends and postmodernism begins is like asking how many grains of sand constitute a sand dune. But I digress.
What is the novelty of postmodernism if it's largely a putting together of ideas that occurred during the modern era? The obvious one is its brand and application of plurality. If the postmodern condition is an acceptance that no simple set of metanarratives will apply to all, the superposition of different, contradictory micronarratives (such as the two views on ladies' toilets) is the inevitable result... shy of one group defeating the other by other means (political or violent oppression, for instance).
Much of what we complain about in pomo is noise. Someone says something that is obviously stupid and biased and based on ignorance... #sopomo. But noise is how nature figured out how to make a human that could make a computer. Selecting one artefact and running with it, suppressing the rest, is not only disastrous in practice (there goes the planet), it doesn't work in theory. Yes, modernism evolved over time and, yes, we could keep calling whatever we have now modernism until it's explored every variant, contradicting itself many times over (DESCARTES: you can figure everything out by thinking hard; KANT: no you can't), but that's incoherent, slow, and unlikely to even approach success. A more optimal, fast-paced approach for our fast-paced lives is to do what Derrida said: explore all the possibilities now and let them co-exist, at least for a while.
My personal view is that humans will naturally provide the rest of the optimisation, the selection criteria to eliminate the bullshit and keep the best of all possible narratives, which takes us into memetics. It won't bring back metanarratives any more than evolution will result in a single species of identical individuals.
As a final observation, since we're not an infinite number of monkeys, the postmodernism we ended up with is only one of many possible postmodernisms. It's not necessarily good. (In principle, as someone pointed out, you could deconstruct Of Grammatology and get different deconstructions.) A lot of the science criticism, especially from the feminist social constructivists and religious bandwagon-jumpers, has been utterly moronic. I've previously argued that's the price to pay for the good stuff that has improved science practice, but here I'd like to point out that even if the quality of postmodern criticism hasn't been high on average, that doesn't mean we should abandon diversity and deconstruction, pick a metanarrative or two, and carry on under the pretence that we're right. We could demand, or at least wish for, a better class of pomo. In fact, the best tools against things like rampant social constructivism and post-truth politics seem to me to be the very tools of postmodernism, to dismantle shallow narratives and lay bare the biases of their authors. Certainly better and quicker than waiting for a paradigm shift.
Quoting 180 Proof
Back in the day I'd found philosophical p0m0 to be an academically effete redundancy selling the news a day late and dollar short that "metanarratives, epistemes" were suspect because they – their subject Man – had been decentered. Big whup. Modernity organically grows out of the first great (though marginalized) decentering: Copernicus' Heliocentric model of the solar system, followed by (just the highlights):
• Galileo's Mediocrity Principle, Relativity & (revived) "atomism"
• Spinoza's Natura Naturans, Conatus, Affects ... & (first of a kind) biblical criticism/deconstruction
• Newton's Gravity constant (death of telelogy)
• Hume's Bundle theory of "the self", Induction problem & Is-Ought "guillotine"
• Darwin-Wallace's speciation (descent) by Natural Selection
• Boltzmann's 2nd law of thermodynamics ("heat death of the universe")
• Schopenhauer-Nietzsche's Will ("unconscious") ... genealogical method, perspectivism, etc
• political-economic anarchism (mutualist, syndicalist, libertarian communist, etc)
• Einstein's Relativity theories
• quantum uncertainty
• Gödel's Incompleteness theorems (+ Turing, Von Neumann, Chaitin, Wolfram)
• Shannon's Information entropy
• Wittgenstein's forms of life-language games-meaning is usage
• fallibilism ... falsificationism ...
• semiotics ... structuralism ...
• Chomsky's Universal Generative Grammar
• absurdism (e.g. Zapffe, Camus)
• economic democracy (stakeholder socioeconomics contra shareholder capitalism)
• Kahneman & Tverksy's cognitive biases & prospect theory
The question is: Does postmodern philosophy add anything _new_?
The way I'd probably break this down is as follows: does postmodernism have
- descriptive
- predictive
- prescriptive
- novel
value? (Will add more e.g. cognitive if you like.)
The previous thread suggests a small majority of us think it has a descriptive value. A few choice prognostications from Lyotard suggest a predictive value:
- that it would be necessary for computers to legitimise future knowledge and discovery, e.g. that people would trust a computation before pen & paper type theory or human expertise, experience and skill.
- that this dependence on technology would massively accelerate it's investment and growth
- that knowledge (data, now it's all on computers) would be commidified and mercantilised, collected for the purpose of being sold to other people collecting knowledge
- that the absorption of knowledge would become ever less about training minds and ever more vocational
- that people would choose many disconnected micronarratives over grand narratives, for instance may hold different views in different contexts that, put together, would contradict or otherwise not cohere
- that computation would aid these micronarratives by making access to information fast and easy.
What about ethics? Okay, pomo has observed the world, found some epoch, and figured out where it's all going, but what are we supposed to do about it? Lyotard's answer to this was for us to abandon conformity in favour of diversity, to have lots of different kinds of knowing and not just one. This could be on an individual or social level: the important thing is that discourse is fleshed out from all perspectives.
What Lyotard was arguing for, whether he knew it or not, was noise as an ethic. This makes pomo ethics part of an optimisation problem. When genomes mutate, what they're doing is adding noise (error, variance) to the genome, which allows for nature to find better solutions to ecological problems. However Lyotard champions noise for noise's sake: there is no fitness function, no selection criteria... No one has a perspective by which to judge a micronarrative inferior to another or to a grand narrative.
180 argues that this is nothing new. Actually, no, he argues that this has precursors; he concludes that this is nothing new. The most obvious precursor is Wittgenstein, but Wittgenstein did not apply language games to ethics and politics; Lyotard did, so this is new, however incremental. And there's a little Darwin in there in moving from teleological, targeted, designed ethics to diversity through a pseudo-randomisation of narratives, but not so far as selection.
Another prescription is the thorough open-mindedness of Derrida. While modernism is bias bottom-up, typically anthropocentrism, but also ethnic and gender bias (proof that modernists hardly tried to escape their own ignorance), Derrida teaches his own kind of pluralism, not of epistemologies but of viewpoints, to systematically find every possible interpretation of a text without preferring one over another, and every possible authorial bias that hides and us hidden by those readings.
My favourite example is from queer critical theory but told to me by an American playwright who's name annoyingly escapes me at the moment (I swear it's David something but not Mamet). Deconstructing Shakespeare's Othello, a very strong case can be made that Iago is gay (his romantic-sounding pledge of devotion to Othello, his ambiguous "I lay with Cassio lately", but ultimately his frustrating (but genius) refusal to explain why he planned Desdemona's murder).
We can't ask Shakespeare, but that's not grounds to accept a classical interpretation. We know that Hitchcock did a similar thing in Rope: had two gay villains that audiences didn't realise were gay, so it's far from unthinkable. Perhaps this is just my postmodern bias, but the story seems much better this way, much more satisfying and thrilling, and ultimately that's why I accept it. A reliance on some internal or external justification for either this or a classical interpretation is never going to be forthcoming: we cannot reason our way out of this; all we can do is generate hypotheses and choose what makes sense to us. Rationalism fails us, but diversity has our backs.
Moral relativism is not a postmodern invention, however it is so strongly associated with pomo that it is the basis of Chomsky's criticism: you can't be a moral relativist, having all possible perspectives at once, so pomo is rubbish.
But you can be a moral relativist. Moral relativism doesn't mean that you take every position. I don't agree with infant genital mutilation, but I understand that an orthodox Jew will have a different perspective, and that has an impact on how I discuss the issue with them (I'm not likely to appeal to shame, for instance). On less disturbing matters, such as trans women's use of ladies' toilets, I don't have my own opinion but am sympathetic to both contrary arguments, even if one of them is usually stated in a demented way (and it ain't the post-gender argument that's demented).
How is this different from modernist relativism? In and of itself, not much. The difference is in the status of relativism. Postmodernism is about diversity, not necessarily within an individual but within a society; as such, relativism has a higher status in pomo than in modo (hence the association with the former more than the latter).
All of the seeds of pomo ethics lie within modernism, but this isn't particularly insightful. Modernism has evolved. Eventually it speciated. We don't argue that humans are a kind of fish simply because of continuity. 180's list above is a good prehistory of postmodernism (except the last few entries): a sequence of blows to traditional modern ways of thinking that, with some historical events thrown in (suffrage, the world wars), modernism could not survive. It ceased to be itself. Where modernism ends and postmodernism begins is like asking how many grains of sand constitute a sand dune. But I digress.
What is the novelty of postmodernism if it's largely a putting together of ideas that occurred during the modern era? The obvious one is its brand and application of plurality. If the postmodern condition is an acceptance that no simple set of metanarratives will apply to all, the superposition of different, contradictory micronarratives (such as the two views on ladies' toilets) is the inevitable result... shy of one group defeating the other by other means (political or violent oppression, for instance).
Much of what we complain about in pomo is noise. Someone says something that is obviously stupid and biased and based on ignorance... #sopomo. But noise is how nature figured out how to make a human that could make a computer. Selecting one artefact and running with it, suppressing the rest, is not only disastrous in practice (there goes the planet), it doesn't work in theory. Yes, modernism evolved over time and, yes, we could keep calling whatever we have now modernism until it's explored every variant, contradicting itself many times over (DESCARTES: you can figure everything out by thinking hard; KANT: no you can't), but that's incoherent, slow, and unlikely to even approach success. A more optimal, fast-paced approach for our fast-paced lives is to do what Derrida said: explore all the possibilities now and let them co-exist, at least for a while.
My personal view is that humans will naturally provide the rest of the optimisation, the selection criteria to eliminate the bullshit and keep the best of all possible narratives, which takes us into memetics. It won't bring back metanarratives any more than evolution will result in a single species of identical individuals.
As a final observation, since we're not an infinite number of monkeys, the postmodernism we ended up with is only one of many possible postmodernisms. It's not necessarily good. (In principle, as someone pointed out, you could deconstruct Of Grammatology and get different deconstructions.) A lot of the science criticism, especially from the feminist social constructivists and religious bandwagon-jumpers, has been utterly moronic. I've previously argued that's the price to pay for the good stuff that has improved science practice, but here I'd like to point out that even if the quality of postmodern criticism hasn't been high on average, that doesn't mean we should abandon diversity and deconstruction, pick a metanarrative or two, and carry on under the pretence that we're right. We could demand, or at least wish for, a better class of pomo. In fact, the best tools against things like rampant social constructivism and post-truth politics seem to me to be the very tools of postmodernism, to dismantle shallow narratives and lay bare the biases of their authors. Certainly better and quicker than waiting for a paradigm shift.
Comments (90)
'Freud remarked that "the self-love of mankind has been three times wounded by science’, referring to the Copernican revolution, Darwin’s discovery of evolution, and Nietszche’s declaration of the Death of God. In a strange way, the Copenhagen Interpretation gives back to humanity what the European Enlightenment had taken away, by realising the central role of observation at a fundamental level of reality'.
[quote=Albert Einstein]A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish the delusion but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind.[/quote]
Unless and until humanity overcomes 'the illusion of otherness', which is precisely to see and understand the world from the egological point of view, as something other to and outside the self, conflict will never cease and peace will never be achievable. That requires a reorientation, a conversion of mind, metanoia, which is the only subject of philosophy proper. This lies in a completely different direction to academic postmodernism, and academic philosophy generally.
Such an attitude is post-modern in that it is able to supersede the typical obsessions and tropes of the modern period, but it is a-historical, in that it is deeply informed by the worlds' perennial philosophical traditions.
Or should I pose the question to the administrators?
For the record, I'd say a philosophy with the qualities you describe is assuredly _not_ postmodern. It sounds like a narrative that aims for one over-arching answer to everything.
EDIT: But yes I appreciate it's not modernism either.
Quoting ssu
Be my guest.
Yes, I suppose I’m offering a meta-narrative, of the kind that postmodernism rejects.
You ducked my question on your previous thread about p0m0 when I'd asked
Quoting 180 Proof
because I don't see anything significant or important. Whether or not that makes p0m0 "justifiable" I can't say until I have a better idea of your meaning, KK.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I appreciate that the OP is unforgivably long.
Okay, somehow this got lost on first read of the OP.
No no no no no ... Nada. The p0m0s are great exemplars of how not to do philosophy: obsession with philosophies – and adjacent (media? lifestyle? consumer? rhetorical? sociological?) signifiers / narratives / representations / identities :yawn: – in lieu of philosophizing. That said, I think "justifies" is the wrong word (it hangs me up); intellectually beneficial, or edifying, seem clearer. Anyway, my verdict: p0m0 isn't worth a philosopher's time. In this sense I vote "no".
Quoting Wayfarer
In light of the 'decenterings' (i.e. shredding the (Western) palimpsest of metanarratives) included in the OP, I wonder, Wayf, how much – if any – of my take on this idea ("new horizons of being") you agree with.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/571229
I want to know just which philosophers you count as being postmodernist and why you would count them as such before answering that question.
So called Deconstructive Postmodernism (Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard) seems to be popular in the field of philosophy (maybe not for pure analytics or logical positivists) but exploring how language and culture limits and determines our worldviews and systems of values seems a useful endeavor.
I suppose the usefulness of critiques of modernism depends on what one assumes to be the basic tenets of modernism. If they are materialism, reductionism and determinism then yes I think critiques are well placed and very useful.
I am a strong fan of so called constructive postmodernism particularly the process philosophy forms.
I can't imagine how, it was right there on page 6 of 29.
Quoting 180 Proof
But as per the last thread, that's not answering the question being asked. In fact, you answered this question in the previous thread:
Quoting 180 Proof
in which you agreed that the issue is not with there being a postmodern philosophy but with the postmodern philosophers we had. But then I think getting straight answers out of the pomophobes is a big ask :razz:
Quoting Janus
For this purpose it's not relevant. I'm not asking which pomo philos are worth a damn, just whether we should have postmodern philosophy at all. Essentially it takes the answer to the last poll as a given and asks whether dealing with the postmodern condition in philosophy in particular is worthwhile, irrespective of the particular personalities and their takes on it.
Another way of asking this is: even if you detested every postmodern philosopher to date, is there good reason to wish for some better postmodernism of the future, or is the whole field pointless by virtue of being postmodern?
I'll take exception to this on Wittgenstein's behalf!
Whereof one cannot speak... you would have him apply language games?! No, that would be absurd. Instead he acted, choosing the most dangerous activities as an Austrian solder; going to work as a mere hospital orderly during the second war.
And if Cornish is to be believed, he was also politically active...
Quoting Kenosha Kid
...and in so doing undermined his own foundations.
I think so to. Logocentrism needs some sanity-checking.
Quoting prothero
Yeah this is a huge issue. Post-modern architecture is a revolt against modern architecture, which is essentially Marxist. It is not a revolt against modern literature or philosophy. Postmodern art is a revolt against modern art, which is essentially Freudian. It is not a revolt against modern ceramics or philosophy.
This diversity of what pomo is (or is against) has a correlate with the diverse (sometimes contradictory) modes of modernism itself. There isn't really a thing called modernism. Like postmodernism, it's fundamentally an era, not a movement.
A modernism that can be both Descartes and Kant, both science and idealism, both industry capitalism and Marxism, is not coherent. Really what modernism is as I see it is a general way of thinking in terms of history, destiny, and the limitless transcendental power of the mind. It's a belief in a universal ideal that we are destined to arrive at, a rationalist Zion.
Postmodernism is the acknowledgement that there's more losers than winners in that game. The only way to have more winners is to have more games, different rules sitting side-by-side: architecture that is austere and flippant, culture that is high and low, ethics that are personal and global, etc.
Quoting Banno
That started out like a contradiction but didn't end that way...
:wink:
That's my area of interest this week.
So are you asking whether we should have philosophy that rejects or eshews grand narratives? Or?
I don't see how. I'm assuming you can differentiate between carpentry and a firm of bad carpenters.
Yes, or a philosophy of ethics, politics, aesthetics, etc. for that already being accepted as the case. Is there some need, whether it has been met fully, partially, or not at all, to move beyond modernism to something that deals with the living in postmodern condition (the perceived breakdown of grand narratives, as you say)?
Consider:
It's not Soviet brutalism; nor the phalic expressions of capitalism. It sits in the heart of a avowedly communist nation, a postmodern twist.
China wins, again.
Weirdly, Soviet architecture was much more decorative than Western modernist architecture. I think their take was that buildings still ought to inspire. Marxist architecture is purely functional and cheap.
EDIT: Actually I was in East Berlin recently, and the architecture is surprisingly decorative.
Something is needed in so far as it solves a problem or is generally speaking useful. This last part of being useful is subject to the "but what's useful depends on the person" - type argument. I don't see how the main figures in postmodernism helped much. If someone thinks that writing obscurely or playing with words is substantive, then fine, it is useful for a few people.
I fail to see why "metanarratives" are a better way of talking that speaking of "points of view" or "perspectives". That language games can be used to create a certain framework to stifle or control or shape thought and discourse, is not new either. Orwell wrote about that quite clearly.
The onus is on those that think that postmodernism is needed to explain why.
Implicit is the pomo breaking of expectations. But in the land that let a thousand flowers bloom, Post modernism is one more flower.
If, as you say, the grand narratives have broken down and we are in a postmodern condition, then it could be that postmodernist philosophical. literary and sociological movements brought about, or helped to bring about, that condition. That said, how would you see a postmodern philosophy as helping to deal with that condition?
(Bear in mind that I am skeptical, as I said in the other thread, that the modernist grand narrative has significantly broken down; it seems to me that the abiding grand narrative now, at least in the so-called "developed" nations, is that science will enable us to understand everything, not only about nature but about ourselves, and overcome all obstacles to human survival, flourishing and even immortality).
I'd say that any philosophy that helps to overcome that particular grand narrative (scientism) should be welcome, since that narrative or set of beliefs would seem to, ironically, contain the seeds of humanity's, or at least civilization's, destruction, not to mention that, if taken seriously, it detracts from the richness of human experience.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
Well that didn't work. Anyway, it's lovely :rofl:
Interested to know what you think AP will get right that pomo got wrong.
I thought pOmO was thought by its AP detractors to be "not even wrong". :yikes:
Is that why they fail to find fault with it?
Well, all those hordes of academics had to ensure a living for themselves, publish or perish, as it were, and what offers more opportunity for coining new career-making terms than pomo?!
The emergence and spread of postmodernism is an indicator of how the world of academia exists primarily for its own sake, catering to its own needs, interests, and concerns. It's also a cautionary tale of what happens when academia is opened to plebeians, ie. people who don't belong there.
No, rather that it is not even wrong is the fault they find with it. But note, I haven't said I think they are right or that the criticism is apt.
I don't disagree but this latter part involving the plebeians - how do you see this working?
It's more what you'd expect as a conclusion to a more fundamental fault. But yeah it does seems like that kind of leap to me. It's been interesting reconciling the responses to the two questions with the polls, which is what this was all about.
I agree wholeheartedly with your take on postmodernism. I’d just like to add something to your comments on Derrida.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
What I would describe Derrida doing when he deconstructs text text is attempting to situate it in the richest and therefore most ‘precise’ context possible. Let’s say he is taking on Plato. First, he will choose a specific text of his rather than make general
comments about the arc of his philosophy. He does this because he recognizes that an author’s ideas change not only from period to the next in their lives, but even within a single work. Derrida typically goes to great lengths to justify a claim that he frequently makes that a certain consistent thematics unites the various periods of an authors writing. He then attempts to convey this thematics as faithfully as possible before he sets out to deconstruct it. One would think that Derrida would argue that it is impossible to convey any work ‘faithfully’, according to the author’s intent , since deconstruction. seems to reject the idea that one can ever locate this intent. But what Derrida means by interpreting the work faithfully is , to take into account that the reading is taking place from the vantage of a 20th or 21at century context , and the personal vantage of Derrida ( or whoever else is attempting the deconstruction) , and what ever other contexts belong to the interpreter’s background. Unearthing as many of these intertwined contexts as one can make explicit go towards strengthening the rigor of the reading. Having thus made explicit all of these interwoven contexts, Derrida proceeds to deconstruct Plato, revealing the interdependencies underlying Plato’s univocal and unequivocal assertions. So rather than encouraging every possible interpretation without preference for any one , Derrida is encouraging an exhaustively researched method of situating a work within the most complexity and intricate contexts.
Here’s one of my favorite examples
from ‘Points’ , the collection of interviews. Derrida’s
response to the question concerning the meaning of drug addiction is a great demonstration of how he attempts to situate the context of the meaning of a concept in as rich and ‘precise’ a way as possible.
Q.: You are not a specialist in the study of drug addiction, yet we suppose that as a philosopher you may have something of particular interest to say on this subject, if only because of the concepts common both to philosophy and addictive studies, for example dependency, freedom, pleasure, jouissance.
J.D.: Okay. Let us speak then from the point of view of the nonspecialist which indeed I am. But certainly you will agree that in this case we are dealing with something other than a delimitable domain. The criteria for competence, and especially for professional competence, are very problematic here. In the end, it is just these criteria that, whether directly or not, we will be led to discuss. Having identified me as a philosopher, a non-specialist in this thing called "drug addiction," you have just named a number of highly philosophical concepts, concepts that philosophy is obliged to consider as priorities: "freedom," "dependency," "pleasure" or "jouissance," and so forth. So be it. But I propose to begin quite simply with "concept," with the concept of concept. "Drugs" is both a word and a concept, even before one adds quotation marks to indicate that one is only mentioning them and not using them, that one is not buying, selling, or ingesting the "stuff itself" [!a chose meme ]. Such a remark is not neutral, innocently philosophical, logical or speculative. Nor is it for the same reasons, nor in the same manner that one might note, just as correctly, that such and such a plant, root, or substance is also for us a concept, a "thing" apprehended through the name of a concept and the device of an interpretation.
No, in the case of "drugs" the regime of the concept is different: there are no drugs "in nature." There may be "natural" poisons and indeed naturally lethal poisons, but they are not poisonous insofar as they are drugs. As with drug addiction, the concept of drugs supposes an instituted and an institutional definition: a history is required, and a culture, conventions, evaluations, norms, an entire network of intertwined discourses, a rhetoric, whether explicit or elliptical. We will surely come back to this rhetorical dimension. There is not, in the case of drugs, any objective, scientific, physical (physicalistic), or "naturalistic" definition (or rather there is: this definition may be "naturalistic," if by this we understand that it attempts to naturalize that which defies any natural definition or any definition of natural reality). One can claim to define the nature of a toxin; however, not all toxins are drugs, nor are they considered as such.
Already one must conclude that the concept of drugs is a non-scientific concept, that it is instituted on the basis of moral or political evaluations: it carries in itself norm or prohibition, and allows no possibility of description or certification-it is a decree, a buzzword [mot d' ordre]. Usually the decree is of a prohibitive nature; occasionally, on the other hand, it is glorified and revered: malediction and benediction always call to and imply one another. As soon as one utters the word "drugs," even before any "addiction," a prescriptive or normative "diction" is already at work, performatively, whether one likes it or not. This "concept" will never be a purely theoretical or theorizable concept. And if there is never a theorem for drugs, there can never be a scientific competence for it either, one attestable as such and which would not be essentially overdetermined by ethicopolitical norms. For this reason I have seen fit to begin with some reservations about the division "specialist/ non-specialist." No doubt the division may prove difficult for other reasons. From these premises one may draw diff erent, indeed contradictory ethico-political conclusions.
On the one hand, there would be a naturalist conclusion: "Since 'drugs' and 'drug addiction,' " one might say, "are nothing but normative concepts, institutional evaluations or prescriptions, this artifice must be reduced. Let us return to true natural freedom. Natural law dictates that each of us be left the freedom to do as we will with our desire, our soul, and our body, as well as with that stuff known as 'drugs.' Let us finally do away with this law which the history of conventions and of ethical norms has so deeply inscribed in the concept of'drugs'; let's get rid of this suppression or repression; let's return to nature." To this naturalistic, liberal, and indeed la.xist decree [mot d' ordre] one may, on the basis of the same premises, oppose an artificialist policy and a deliberately repressive position.
Occasionally, this may, just like its liberal counterpart, take on a therapeutic guise, preventativist, if I can put it like that, inclined to be persuasionist and pedagogical: "we recognize," one might say, "that this concept of drugs is an instituted norm. Its origin and its history are obscure. Such a norm does not follow analytically from any scientific concept of natural toxicity, nor, despite all our best efforts to establish it in this sense, will it ever do so. Nonetheless, by entirely assuming the logic of this prescriptive and repressive convention, we believe that our society, our culture, our conventions require this interdiction. Let us deploy it consistently. At stake here are the health, security, productivity, and the orderly functioning of these very institutions.
By means of this law, at once supplementary and fundamental, these institutions protect the very possibility of the law in general, for by prohibiting drugs we assure the integrity and responsibility of the legal subject, of the citizens, and so forth. There can be no law without the conscious, vigilant, and normal subject, master of his or her intentions and desires. This interdiction and this law are thus not just artifacts like any other: they are the very condition of possibility of a respect for the law in general in our society. An interdiction is not necessarily bad, nor must it necessarily assume brutal forms; the paths it follows may be rwisted and symbolically overdetermined, but no one can deny that the survival of our culture originarily comprises this interdiction. It belongs to the very concept of our culture, and so forth.
From the moment we recognize the institutional character of a certain concept of drugs, drug addiction, narcotics, and poisons, two ethico-political axiomatics seem to oppose each other. Briefly put, I am not sure that this contradiction is more than superficial; nor am I convinced that either of these logics can follow through to their conclusions; and finally I am not sure that the two so radically exclude each other. Let us not forget that both start from the same premises-that is, the opposition of nature and institution. And not simply of nature and the law, but indeed already of two laws, of two decrees. Naturalism is no more natural than conventionalism.”
I think part of the problem is deciding just what philosophical literature should be counted as postmodernist and what should not. Deleuze, for example, is a self-avowed metaphysician, so does he count as a postmodernist? Some of the strong critics of PM find value in Deleuze and in Foucault, and yet the latter, at least, is generally considered to be a postmodernist philosopher, even an archetypal example. I remember reading Zizek on Badiou, if memory serves, where he praises Badiou as finding a way beyond the 'postmodern sophists', and yet it is not clear just who he refers to with that term.
Zizek is quite entertaining and often says interesting things. But if Lacan does not count as someone of which the term "postmodernism" is correctly used on, then we aren't talking about anything.
Perhaps Zizek has Lyotard in mind, maybe Derrida or Baudrillard.
Derrida shirked the label postmodernist too. As I said, I don't think it matters whether one considers a particular philosopher to be a postmodernist or a proto-pomo. These are equivalent to saying: I set an arbitrary delineation _here_. Whether you start at Lyotard, or Derrida, or Wittgenstein, or the French existentialists, or Darwin, or Kant is entirely up to you.
My view is that there's no real boundary between late modernists (taking Descartes as the start of modernism) and early postmodernists/protopomos. The latter evolved from the former. When one species evolves into another, there is rarely a particular individual that marks the start of a new species.
However, if you cannot proceed on this basis and are open to an arbitrary nominal beginning, understanding that it is arbitrary, you could follow Steven Hicks and start with Kant, including (by my reckoning) Wittgenstein, the phenomenologists, and the existentialists.
But despite these people being the seeds of postmodernism, it will outrage many who'd claim them purely for modernism, labouring under the illusion that there _is_ a non-porous boundary between modernism and postmodernism. In which case maybe start with Derrida. This would outrage Derrida, but he's dead, so...
In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism. You have to be very learned to be that wrong.[/quote]
I agree with the thrust of this, but I'd also argue that a marker of difference between modernism and postmodernism is an explicit self-awareness of the modernist sensibility and a self-reflexivity that is not overtly present in modernism. I mean, quick literary examples. Modernist authors: Joyce, Kafka, Beckett, Marinetti. Real fuckin' weird, huge emphasis on experimentation with form, a response to dramatic changes in the world around them. Anyone not paying attention might mistake their work for 'postmodern'. And then postmodern: Pynchon, McCarthy, Palahniuk, Ashbury. Here you get a real involution of form, writers well aware of what they are doing and thematizing that awareness at the level of the work itself; they are writers incredibly comfortable with what they are doing in the sense of exhibiting a sense of "play" with their audience and themselves (no matter how 'dark' the subject matter gets). They take for granted the lack of foundationalism that seems to torture or perplex Joyce/Kafka/Beckett/Marinetti and turn it into an aesthetic principle to be explored for its own sake. It's the difference between "the world is fucked up, how should we respond?" and "the world is fucked up, so we may as well inhabit it".*
A proper reading would flesh this out with concrete examples but I'm lazy so. In a formula: the postmodern is the modern become self-conscious. Edit: one more example to really hammer it home: if Marx was a modernist (and he was), can we really say that his thought is also imperceptibly shades into postmodernism? He'd roll over in his grave.
Beckett is the transitional writer here. Postmodern literature is generally thought to start with him, albeit with outliers (e.g. The Third Policeman).
Quoting StreetlightX
:up:
Part of my motivation for these threads was a dissatisfaction with those wheeled-out pomo criticisms. I was hoping to see where, starting from the first obvious question (is/was there a postmodern condition), pomo was perceived to fail. But that doesn't appear to be a conversation we can have: we skipped right to the end, the conclusion, straight away. For instance, 0 posts in support of the leading poll option on this thread. It seems hysterical to me.
I agree with this; there is no well-defined boundary, and I'm not convinced there is any well defined difference between modernism and postmodernism other than the latter's explicit rejection of the grand narrative. I am also minded of what we might think the difference between modernity and postmodernity to be if there is one. Do you think there is a postmodern condition as distinct form a merely modern?
Quoting StreetlightX
The problem with this is that it seems to be saying that the awareness that the world is "fucked up" is not already a self-reflexive modernist critique of the condition of modernity, if not of the modernist sensibility itself (whatever we might take that to be). Is the world fucked up because of the modernist sensibility?
You say "not overtly present"; so if post-modernism is the transition from a not overtly present (an implicit) self awareness of the modernist sensibility (and condition?) to an explicit self-awareness of it, does it follow that the world is therefore less fucked up because of the rise of the post-modernist critique? Or is the world now more fucked up than ever because of the postmodernist movement?
It's interesting that you say the post-modernists were comfortable with what they were doing (and with the fucked up world?) because that seems to raise the question as to whether they were more comfortable simply because they inhabited a more prosperous and comfortable epoch. I don't agree that it was a "lack of foundationalism" that "tortured or perplexed" the modernists, but rather a sense of meaninglessness or ennui. There simply wasn't as much to distract oneself from a sense of emptiness in the earlier time as there came to be in the later.
If postmodernism is the rejection of the grand narrative, then the authors you cited are already postmodern. Of course there will also be different "mappings" regarding modernism/ postmodernism depending on whether you are considering literature and the arts, or philosophy, anthropology, politics and so on.
Yes, I think so. The killer blow in terms of the condition is how predictive _The Postmodern Condition_ was: it reads like a history book.
In terms of it being non-modern, also yes. I think that, aside from anything else, and despite a lot of good (mathematics, empiricism), modernism is first and foremost a faith in the power of superior man (both 'human' and 'male'), his language, and his tools: an inherent rightness of his thinking, his writing, and his transformation of his environment.
I think we are more pluralistic, relativistic, even nihilistic now. We're right to treat governments, ideologies, authorities, and technologies like AI with suspicion, because the myth of the inherent rightness of their tokens is rightly exploded. Information is available to debunk or undermine anything now, and it's no longer a question of the right-est but the least wrong: which micronarratives have to give way when they conflict (under the full understanding that any choice is to some extent arbitrary)?
I certainly agree that there is movement against what you here characterize modernism as being; to deny that would be absurd. But I also think that much of that amounts to lip service. It's like the global warming issue: perhaps the majority of people who are comfortable enough to have the leisure to think about it, and were privileged enough to get a half-decent education will say that yes we really should do something about it, and yet they resist any diminishment of their lifestyles or even relatively minor
inconveniences, which would be necessary to make any difference and resort instead to empty virtue signalling.
Quoting Kenosha Kid
I agree and this is highlighted nicely by the debate about Covid and the vaccines. People don't know who to trust, since their confidence in governments and corporations (in this case represented by what is referred to as "Big Pharma") and their motives has been significantly eroded.
Only here it is not a battle of micronarratives, but a battle between the grand narrative represented by the government, the health authorities and the pharmaceutical industry, and the various micronarratives that represent lack of confidence in, and even suspicion of, those entities and what might be their "real motives".
How do I see what working? Kicking plebeians out of academia?
Practically, I think this is a lost cause, the damage is done, and the system will just have to gradually purge itself from intruders in indirect ways, such as by increasing scholarship tuitions, increasing competition between students and between academics, allowing for (more) nepotism and cronyism. This should bring the educational system back into the domain of the elite, where it belongs.
I bet this really really riles up every democratic, egalitarian bone in your body. That is not my intention. I think though that many people waste a perfectly good lower middle class life trying to be something they are not when they try to join the elite by trying to get a fancy education.
Quoting baker
Not sure i understand how that helps. Trump University?
Thinking that having everybody going to tertiary education would improve the economy and the society is the error. Yes, a lot of people opt for easy subjects which don't have actual demand on the private sector, just a few openings to teach the subject. Yet university level education ought to simply show that you are quite capable of learning new things and working in various jobs that demand complex thinking. But when that bar is lowered too low, then you have a problem.
Of course if the attitude in the university is to a) party, b) somehow manage through the exams and c) forget everything later, then naturally that doesn't help in the long run. It should be about life long learning, as the philosopher John Dewey put it.
That people are educated is a really important issue. Just to give one example, having a functioning democracy needs people to be educated and aware of political issues.
Not simply impervious to knowledge and wisdom. But in order for knowledge to have a chance to become wisdom, the person has to meet the socio-economic requirements for such a process. The poor usually can't meet those requirements. There is a kind of misery that only the educated poor know.
This is not to say that the poor cannot be wise about anything; it's just that they cannot be wise about fancy academic topics.
Democarcy and egalitarianism are harmful, counterproductive for academia, which is by its nature elitist and competitive.
The question is, educated in what? "Educated" as in being a member of the socio-economic elite, or as in vocational training?
I think you lost me here. What socio-economic requirements are needed and how does that process work?
It always matters. Even if university education is free, one would still need considerable resources in order to be able to keep up with those who could readily afford the tuition, so that one could still viably compete for internships, network, etc..
This is esp. pronounced in the humanities and esp. in the arts when students are aiming to graduate from knowledge of a culture to which they cannot afford to belong.
I don't think poverty mentality is intrinsic to poor people, as long as they stay within the bounds of what is realistically possible for them. But it rears its head when a person tries to live far above what they can afford.
Like in the above example of finding yourself calculating how many hours you need to work in order to be able to pay for a theater play ticket: sure, you might still go ahead and buy it and go see that play. But your experience of it will be marred with the knowledge that you had to make sacrifices; you will not be able to "enjoy" the play. Eventually, you'll end up resenting the theater, or idolizing it. Either way, you won't be able to establish a critical attitude toward it, the way you're supposed to according to art theory. It'll be too personal for you.
Starting from the basics, educated as being able to read. Then having basic education. It is not only that people can work in more technical jobs, but also have an understanding of things like math, biology, history and so on. It is very useful for a society to function.
To argue this point, here is an anecdote: I remember a friend that served in Afghanistan and worked in CIMIC (Civil-Military-Cooperation), which in reality stood for military intelligence that even leftist politicians accepted. Then there were going to be elections in Afghanistan and her team had to gather intel on how the population was feeling about the elections. In this work going to small hamlets she could see what being in war for decades means for the education level of the people. Many didn't know there was an election and few didn't know just what elections are. Things like what a "kilometer" is were not known to many. After coming back from the country, she had large doubts of the progress been made there.
The literacy rate in Afghanistan is now 43% and over 10 million Afghanis are illiterate.
Now with this kind of voter population, you think a functioning democracy can be created with voters following politics and choosing better candidates from others?
The problem with Afghans is not their education level. One issue is that democracy is totally foreign to them, who tend to decide things by consensus (among males). Another is the religious mindset spread by education, as most people with an education in Afghanistan got it from a madrassa, ie a coranic school. As a result, they see political leaders as being either from God or from the Devil; their political world is still "enchanted". Yet another issue is tribal law and tribal politics that trump any national sentiment.
Let me add that many of these madrassas are funded by one Islamic party or another, and are often used as ideological training grounds, as PoMo would predict. Textbooks such as this are not uncommon:
Afghanistan's brush up with modernity happened in the 70's with the Daoud regime and the early days of the communist regime. The tribes revolted Jehad-type against the whole thing circa 79/80.
So perhaps you don't need to be modern first in order to become postmodern, since the Afghans have skipped the modernity phase almost entirely, and yet display postmodern tendencies re the malleability of truth.
Why should the Afghans have democracy? Can you justify?
We have democracy, and what good has it done us?
Please remind us how global warming and global pollution have come about!
You're serious? ? ?
Yes, it is exactly the same in any Western country as it is in Afghanistan.
I assume you refer to the US or to some Western democracy (if not, please correct).
You then truly to compare your "plight" to a country where since 1978 from 1,4 million to over 2 million people have died in a continuing war from a population of 32 million? In a country where it all started with a Communist revolution that killed instantly thousands? Guess they don't need democracy, basic rights or working institutions.
The simple fact is that the alternatives to democracy are pretty ugly indeed. They are only so many Monacos, Bruneis or Gulf States, you know. The problems in the US or West are not in any way in the same ballpark as in non-democratic Third World countries. One should remember that.
Quoting ssu
For the poor in first world countries, it's not much different.
There is a pattern in Afghanistan of rulers trying to install modernity and not being successful with it. After Daud the Saur revolution led to a lot of people being killed...and a forty year war.
Actually, it is.
People who are poor in the US (or Finland) would be quite rich in the Democratic republic of Congo. You see, from the global perspective you have to look at absolute povetry. Nearly all of the statistics about povetry in the First World are of poverty compared to the median/average income.
Starting from people that earn less than 1$ a day or 365$ a year. Huge difference to those who are poor in the US.
It's pretty outrageous to even consider that being poor in a rich western country is the same as being poor in Third World country. So no: absolute poverty is the real issue. Relative povetry doesn't mean anything globally as there are such huge differences between countries. Just imagine if you would just consider the richest place in the US where the average household income is half a million dollars. How poor really is relatively poor household that only would get only 200 000$ or less?
Your government considers poor being a family of four earning annually 25 000$ or less. The global median family income is less than 10 000$. Hence basically the majority of all the people in the World live in povetry...compared to the US. And it doesn't change so much when you count the cost of living to change this: prices of a car or apartment are still quite comparable.
Living in a small hut without electricity and running water is something different to having an income of 40% of the median income in the US or having that 25 000$ or so annual income for a family. And the homeless people in the US? There's half a million of them in a country with 320 million people. In the Democratic Republic of Congo there are about 90 million people who call DRC home do not consistently have a home. Not surprising in a country where 72% of the people live in extreme poverty.
An actual person can only look at and experience things from their own perspective, from their own experience, from their own life as it is, right on the spot.
To an actual person, the abstract perspective of a government statistical institution is irrelevant.
Is this really so hard to understand? What does it help you if you are rich by the standards of some banana republic, when you live in a first world country and struggle to make ends meet, constantly living on the edge of exhaustion?
Is it really hard to understand that extreme povetry, that you really don't have anything, is different from relative poverty, that you have less than your wealthy counterparts?
Quoting baker
Keep on bitching about despair of people in the wealthiest country where people don't starve to death, where institutions work, where poor do get assistance, unlike in other parts of this World and then insist that it doesn't matter at all just where we draw the line when we talk about poverty.
The simple truth: in which country you are poor does matter. No way to refute it.
In a first world country, a poor person has to have many things just to be able to live up to the demands of earning a living. One doesn't have them for one's own luxury. For example, having a car and a smart phone is a must, or one could be unemployable.
Perhaps there are first world countries where what you say happens, but I'm not living in one. If I don't manage to take care of myself, it's death in the gutter for me.
That's the first dividing line with well to do countries and others. There is no so cohesion, nobody will help a stranger.
Seeing abandoned children in the gutter made me understand why people would fall for such crazy ideas as marxism-leninism. Then it makes sense to send the rich to hell. Unfortunately many other things go to hell then also.