Two features of postmodernism - unconnected?
It recently occurred to me that the two features for which postmodernism seems to be best known, and to which its critics most strongly object, are very different from one another and are not – so far as I can tell – necessary consequences of one another.
Those features are
(1) a rejection of the notion of absolute truth, sometimes presented as a statement that 'truth is socially constructed'; and
(2) the employment of very long explanations with obscure use of language.
These seem unconnected to me because I lean strongly toward the former view but I also really dislike long, unclear explanations.
However that second doesn't necessarily mean I 'disapprove of' pomo expression, as it depends on what it's intended to achieve.
If a long, opaque passage, whether pomo or from some other school, is intended to argue that such and such is the case then I reject it because to argue that something is the case is a matter of logic. Logic can always be expressed concisely and clearly if one is prepared to work hard enough at it, and failure to do so is often an indicator of laziness, incompetence or arrogance on the part of the author.
If on the other hand, the purpose of the passage is to recommend to the reader that they consider the world from a particular perspective, that's an entirely different matter. The text of the passage is intended to create that perspective for the reader, which is a transformative, rather than a logical, exercise, and it can be as obscure as one likes. It's like listening to a poem or music. The first time I heard Brahms' second symphony on my parents' scratchy old record player was a deeply transformative experience for me, which had nothing at all to do with logic or language.
If pomo denies absolute truth then it seems reasonable to infer that its obscure passages are not intended to prove that 'this is how it is' (since there is no absolute fact of the matter about 'how it is') but rather to suggest 'try looking at things from this point of view / try to have this experience'. If so then I see no reason for anybody to object to the second famous feature of pomo. But I still don't see it as a necessary consequence of the first, or vice versa.
Nietzsche denied absolute truth but was a very clear writer, while Kant was a very obscure writer who seemed to believe in all sorts of absolutes, including truth. Neither were postmodernists.
I have some questions, on which I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts.
1. For those that like pomo, do you think these features are fair characterisations of pomo writing? If so, do you think they are related in any way or is it just historical happenstance that they both occur in the same movement?
2. For those that dislike pomo, to which of the two features do you object? If both, which one irks you most? Or is it some other feature not mentioned here?
Those features are
(1) a rejection of the notion of absolute truth, sometimes presented as a statement that 'truth is socially constructed'; and
(2) the employment of very long explanations with obscure use of language.
These seem unconnected to me because I lean strongly toward the former view but I also really dislike long, unclear explanations.
However that second doesn't necessarily mean I 'disapprove of' pomo expression, as it depends on what it's intended to achieve.
If a long, opaque passage, whether pomo or from some other school, is intended to argue that such and such is the case then I reject it because to argue that something is the case is a matter of logic. Logic can always be expressed concisely and clearly if one is prepared to work hard enough at it, and failure to do so is often an indicator of laziness, incompetence or arrogance on the part of the author.
If on the other hand, the purpose of the passage is to recommend to the reader that they consider the world from a particular perspective, that's an entirely different matter. The text of the passage is intended to create that perspective for the reader, which is a transformative, rather than a logical, exercise, and it can be as obscure as one likes. It's like listening to a poem or music. The first time I heard Brahms' second symphony on my parents' scratchy old record player was a deeply transformative experience for me, which had nothing at all to do with logic or language.
If pomo denies absolute truth then it seems reasonable to infer that its obscure passages are not intended to prove that 'this is how it is' (since there is no absolute fact of the matter about 'how it is') but rather to suggest 'try looking at things from this point of view / try to have this experience'. If so then I see no reason for anybody to object to the second famous feature of pomo. But I still don't see it as a necessary consequence of the first, or vice versa.
Nietzsche denied absolute truth but was a very clear writer, while Kant was a very obscure writer who seemed to believe in all sorts of absolutes, including truth. Neither were postmodernists.
I have some questions, on which I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts.
1. For those that like pomo, do you think these features are fair characterisations of pomo writing? If so, do you think they are related in any way or is it just historical happenstance that they both occur in the same movement?
2. For those that dislike pomo, to which of the two features do you object? If both, which one irks you most? Or is it some other feature not mentioned here?
Comments (60)
I suspect that Nietszche's misunderstanding and subsequent mis-representation of Kant's 'copernican revolution in philosophy', set the stage for the 'perspectivism'. I think it’s a mistake to say that Kant himself endorsed perspectivism, which is ‘the philosophical view that all ideations take place from particular perspectives, and that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives in which judgment of truth or value can be made’ – although I can see how that conclusion might be drawn from Kant. But Kant himself believed in an ethical absolute, namely, the moral imperative, and also believed that faith in God was essential from the viewpoint of both ethics and rationality, even though he also argued that it was impossible to prove the existence or non-existence of God, on the basis of reason alone. (as per the ‘antinomies of reason’.) Whereas for Nietszche, having declared the ‘death of God’, no such moral or ethical absolute could be said to be real, which is why he predicted and was in some ways responsible for the onset of nihilism.
In any case, post-modernism (which is not anyway a school of thought or philosophy) generally understands all judgements to be embedded in a realm of discourse against which they are validated, and ‘distrusts meta-narratives’, whether they are religious or scientific in origin. As a consequence, I think most of those who describe themselves as post-modern would be hesitant to speak of any form of absolute or Capital T truth, or even its absence, as their focus is generally critical.
So yes, our world is socially constructed. But then in recognising this fundamental subjectivity, the philosophical project can be to discover the most objective point of view. Pomo argues instinctively for plurality and thus loses sight of the possibility that there is indeed a rational unity to be found.
On the second point - opaqueness - I have no objection to jargon and difficulty. But I agree that Pomo often uses language in a way that suggest cleverness rather than actually delivering substance.
The key trick is to employ familiar dichotomies - like love and strife or potential and actual - and treat them as self-contradictory paradox that radically undermines any possibility of unifying certainty. So because neither can be right, yet both are right, everything becomes just a poetic dance around the subject designed to make the writer look clever and the subject matter forever elusive. It can be talked about endlessly, and nothing settled can emerge - which is good if you want to dazzle the impressionable.
So Pomo - not all of it of course, just the general tendency - is opaque because it has institutionalised a fundamental abuse of good philosophical reasoning. It's game is to tease with paradox rather than account via dialectical analysis.
Then the other associated stylistic fault is that it resists giving concrete examples of the abstract arguments it pretends to spin.
AP is clear as it is scientific in this respect. Here is the general theory, now here is the commonsense illustration that makes precise what I might mean. This is an example of a sound method of thought being institutionalised (even if AP can be just as wordy, muddled or trite at times).
So writing skills vary tremendously. But well structured thought will always shine through. And rigour means developing a theory that is systematic (not a toying with contradiction to prove the impossibility of systematisation). And then that system of thought might be true or false - but that isn't a problem if you also argue your case using concrete examples. That is the evidence by which readers can test the strength of the intellectual edifice you wish to present.
I'd say the two are connected in the sense that without truth the human intellectual enterprise is re-directed from saying things about the world to performative utterances which are neither true nor false but do things, such as signal how advanced or superior the speaker is while pretending to say something about the world or the nature of truth. Unclarifiable unclarity does that, and it is impossible to refute.
It's not necessary, but it does make sense that it is a consequence.
Quoting andrewk
No, but they are certainly figures in a line leading to postmodernism, especially Nietzsche. This critical survey, for example, traces its roots to 18th century thinkers like Kant and Rousseau.
Quoting andrewk
Both equally irk me (the former, because relativism is self-defeating, the latter because it's enormously irritating to read), but another feature you neglected to mention, which I also find pernicious, is that postmodernism is in large part nested inside Marxism and leftist politics. You're right that postmodernism espouses epistemic relativism (as well as other kinds), but the default and backup position of most of its major theorists is still Marxism/leftism, even though they don't always explicitly state this. What then happens is that these thinkers are taught almost exclusively in the humanities and social sciences, excepting analytic philosophy departments, such that so-called disinterested, academic scholarship is now taken to mean, "an analysis of X according to the ideas of one or another postmodernist thinker Y."
You are clearly right that they needn't be related. (Goodman's a pretty extreme constructivist and not at all obfuscated.)
On the other hand, it seems to me that the first characteristic underwrites the second. There are things we're careful about on the more scientific/analytic side of things that don't often seem valued on the other side:
I find almost all these, as it were, "canons of accountability" ignored in the kind of writing I think you have in mind. Thus
Argumentation is almost completely replaced by rhetoric. (God I sound like such an old fogey!)
Another side-effect is the need to move fast. Without the expectation of actually establishing anything, there's no need to take your time. In fact, it's easier to carry your readers along and keep them from noticing the shortcuts if you move quickly.
To an extent, they are linked. Postmodernism is more or less us grasping the metaphysical significance of our empirical being. It outlines the beginning and ending of a language, how our ideas are produced in the world, what they mean with reference to other viewpoints and their significance to power. Most of all, postmodernism is the destruction of the metanarrative, of the idea their is one particular way of thinking or existing.
God, Capitalism, Modernism, The Enlightenment, and Communism/Marxism (if we are talking post WW2 and 1960s) are dead. They were never the only meaning of the world, only myths which hid a huge array of meanings and impacts from us. A lot of the accusation of "opaque" language are more of a political nature. Postmodernism brings in concepts which amount to the destruction of metanarrative. What better way to keep your preferred metanarrative in power than claim it's opposition is not saying anything and makes no truth claim? The claim postmodernism doesn't deal in truths or claims is what it opponents wish it was.
Much of the supposed "controversies"about postmodernism misreading or misusing "scientific concepts" is just a misunderstanding of what those arguments are doing. Take the famous accusation Newton's Principia Mathematica was a "rape manual." What did that mean? The opponents of postmodernism rant and rave about it being some nonsensical claim suggesting doing math amounts to advocating rape. It never was. Metaphor was the point-- how scientific disciplines are blind to experiences and impact of individuals, to how viewing all the world as mere objects to control excludes recognition of people and whether you ought to be controlling them.
Where the analytical reduces ( "It's just only math!" ), postmodernism expands ("No, it is not just math. It's math as part of a culture and community which has particular consequences for various people and what they mean" ). A lot of the supposed "complexity" of postmodernism is just proponents upset that the postmodernist is bringing a wider scope of the meaning of the world. Despite what it opponents would claim, postmodernism is not a metanarrative. It's point is no metanarrative is adequate. We have to don't just have to do the work of describing the interactions of the world (science), but also the meaning of our world and its relationships too.
In this respect, postmodernism has roots in Kant, who points out our experience and knowledge is always our own, and Nietszche who describes how our meaning is an expression of the world, of ourselves, rather than of another realm (e.g. God, The Enlightenment, Modernist Utopia, Communist Utopia, etc.).
Probably the issue I have with pomo, just from my opinion, is that it seems sort of disconnected and anti-methodological. It also seems to be overly-skeptical of science. It takes the scientism of today and cashes out with an view on the complete opposite of the spectrum. Which is implausible imo.
Also I never understood how it is possible for truth to be relative, and yet believe this proposition to be true.
I have a simple assignment for you. Try reading a postmodernist with an open mind, as I once did, and see if you can make heads or tails of what he's saying. If you can, then perhaps you could enlighten us wee mortals. Usually, when someone does claim to have understood something a postmodernist has said, his or her translation turns the highly obscure and provocative claims of the postmodernist into utterly trivial points that don't need to be made. This is known as the Motte and Bailey technique discussed here, among other techniques in the postmodernist charlatan's arsenal. If you can't, you will soon begin to surmise either 1) that you just don't understand it yet or 2) that it cannot be understood and was never intended to be fully understood. If the former, you're in denial. If the latter, then you've cracked the code, as I see it.
I personally recommend Badiou if you want a good laugh. I had an especially epiphanic moment not too long ago when I realized that grown adults with PhDs actually take a guy like him seriously, when I can't read a sentence of his without scrunching my face in befuddled amusement that gives way to derisive chuckling.
Obscure language doesn't annoy me so long as meaning is not also obscured. I can deal with words I need to google, but I am severely annoyed when I need to both google words and guess what their intended use is due to vagueness and ambiguity.
As someone like Fred Jameson points out, a representative list of 'postmodernists' might include poets like John Ashbury, authors like Thomas Pynchon and artists like Andy Warhol, no less than the many philosophers who are often taken to fall under this banner. For my part, I think the concerns with both truth and 'obscure language' are rather overstated, and miss the forest for the trees. The former because there is no such thing as 'the postmodernist position on truth', the latter because it's mostly a triviality that doesn't merit extended discussion.
At any rate, phrases like "x is just a social construct" seem to be commonly found in post-modern thinkers and I wonder why that is or what exactly it means to be a social construct. Can a social construct itself be a social construct?
Please excuse my naivety. I often feel like Nietzsche's philosophy falls into this trap. He was obviously intelligent enough to recognize this paradox (if indeed there is one), but I'm not sure if he was ever able to resolve it.
Edit: I hadn't initially read deathbarracuda's post right above mine, but it appears as though we have the same fundamental question.
[quote=Patrick West]Nietzsche believed in truth, albeit of an unstable, contingent, perspectival and disposable variety. He believed in constant experimentation and argument. His Übermensch forever goes beyond and above. This is why they had to struggle, because truth was difficult but ultimately necessary to obtain through free-thinking and reason. As he wrote in Daybreak (1881): ‘Every smallest step in the field of free thinking, and of the personally formed life, has ever been fought for at a cost of spiritual and physical tortures… change has required its innumerable martyrs… Nothing has been bought more dearly than that little bit of human reason and sense of freedom that is now the basis of our pride.’ Far from being casual about truth, Nietzsche cared deeply about it. And any truth we held had to earn its keep. ‘Truth has had to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts, on which our love and our trust in life depend, had to be sacrificed to it’, he wrote later in 1888 in The Antichrist.
Nietzsche believed truths had to be earnt. He believed we had to cross swords in the struggle for truth, because it mattered so dearly, not because ‘anything goes’. We had to accept as true even that which we found intolerable and unacceptable, when the evidence proved it so. All points of view certainly are not valid. Walter Kaufmann, who began the mainstream rehabilitation of Nietzsche after the Second World War, concluded in the fourth edition of his classic Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist (1974): ‘Nietzsche’s valuation of suffering and cruelty was not the consequence of any gory irrationality, but a corollary of his high esteem of rationality. The powerful man is the rational man who subjects even his most cherished faith to the severe scrutiny of reason and is prepared to give up his beliefs if they cannot stand this stern test. He abandons what he loves most, if rationality requires it. He does not yield to his inclinations and impulses.’[/quote]
http://www.spiked-online.com/spiked-review/article/nietzsches-enlightenment/19617#.WRwFGnV96kA
Not exactly, it means perspectives or things (e.g. identity, values, people, the thing-itself) lie outside the social construct of language or experience. Genetics and ancestry, for example, are not the language or category we use to talk about them (to address an topic VagabondSpectre mentioned).
A person's genes, for example, would be the same regardless or how we talked about them or how we categorised them as belonging to a particular race or not. Race is social construct not because people somehow genes, skin tones to ethnic history, but rather because none of those features are the category of race. Race is another layer of language and experience we've associated with facts like genes, skin colour and cultural heritage: descriptively race is not genetics, skin colour or ethnic history. It another idea (a category to which people belong) and states (our thoughts and culture of who belongs to which category) of the world altogether .
With respect to postmodernism and truth, there is no need to get outside the "social construct" to speak a truth. Any instance of of human language, experience or philosophy is a social construct (including postmodernism). For the postmodernist, telling truth doesn't mean getting outside the social construct, to access The Truth, to the irrelevance of meaning and experience. It just means using a social construct (human language, experiences) to speak a truth and meaning.
I'll admit that I may be strawmanning these positions, albeit it unintentionally, especially the latter one. It's an interesting topic for sure.
His passionate criticisms of these phenomena, and related things, would only seem to make sense from some privileged standpoint. He felt he won this Truth precisely by freeing himself, in a hard-fought battle, from the dominant perspective of his (our?) time, which of course he traced back to Christianity.
Is the beef with science or with those - often not scientists - that make philosophical claims about science, such as that science reveals the Truth? The two are very different things.
I am passionate about science and devote time to improving my skills in QM and GR, as well as learning more about Thermodynamics. But I do not believe that it reveals 'Truth'. That is a philosophical claim, not a scientific one. My interest and participation in science is driven by considerations that are part instrumental and part aesthetic, neither of which relies on a belief that science delivers Truth.
Further society's interest in, and considerable investment in, science is principally driven by its instrumental value, not by any philosophical beliefs about Truth. We invest in science because it brings us useful things.
Quoting Erik It's not at all dumb, because many people assume that. But I also think the implication fails. Someone who says truth is a social construct may also add - or leave implicit - 'including any assertions about truth that I may appear to be making now'.
Or, put more crudely, the person could just be saying 'trust nobody, including me'. There is nothing contradictory about such a statement. Nor is it only made by postmodernists. Krishnamurti, who was not at all postmodern, said things like that often.
Not really - not because I disagree, mind you, but simply because the actual engagement with the sciences, with a few exceptions, has been relatively sparse. That is, science just isn't spoken about all that much (philosophy, literature, art, and institutions are by far the majority of the objects of analysis). The overwhelming attitude, as far as I can tell, is simply indifference. And where it has been engaged, I think there's been both positive and negative characterizations, in ways that belie any generalization. This is definitely changing btw, and some of the most exciting philosophy in the last twenty years has taken place, for my money, at the exact intersection between science and much of the philosophy influenced by 'postmodernism'.
This is one of those phrases, which, while widely attributed to postmodernist philosophers, appears almost nowhere in any of the relevant texts. The problems with the phrase are numerous, but the most obvious one would be: why 'just'? Why would something being a social construct make it somehow 'less real' than anything else? Is society somehow irreal? Second and more importantly, the idea that 'society' could itself be some sort of totalizing force that could univocally 'construct' anything at all would be among the most suspect ideas that one could possibly conceive of, in a post-modernist context.
There is some truth to the constructivist emphasis which the phrase tries to capture I think, but on its own it's a completely blunt and philosophically unsophisticated notion that, as far as I know, is pretty much never uttered by anyone relevant to the discussion.
My familiarity with these issues is very limited, but I have read a bit of Foucault (and a lot of Heidegger and Nietzsche, from whom he apparently drew inspiration), and I also found Edward Said's Orientalism to be extremely thought-provoking. I read it many years ago, but he seemed to find sinister motives behind the construction of particular 'truths' that oftentimes try to pass themselves off as detached scholarship. I was under the impression that this was a seminal work within the postmodern canon.
But yeah, this may be an egregious mischaracterization of a diverse 'movement' that cannot be so easily pinned down. I do genuinely appreciate any additional insight.
For sure, which is why you'll rarely find the term 'social construct' actually employed by anyone outside a kind of pejorative or highly qualified usage. Perhaps I can put the problem with the phrase this way: the idea that 'the social' constructs anything at all doesn't 'answer' the question of what something is/how something comes about - all it does is shift the answer one step back: what in turn, 'constructs the social' (this is what Darth, I think, was getting at)? In no postmodern-associated text I know (which is not to say all of them!) is 'the social' treated as an explanatory principle - in all cases would 'the social' itself - or at least it's workings - be something to be explained.
This is not to say the phrase can't be used productively, by the way. In fact, it's strongest associations are with the sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, who are anything but 'postmodernists', and their whole idea was to provide precisely a social theory by which to explain 'how society works'.
As for Said's Orientalism, it's been a while since I've read the work, but I don't recall him framing the issue as one of 'truth', so much as a question of discourse (his object of analysis was literature after all), and a quick skim through seems to confirm this. In fact, here's a nice passage from the introduction: "In the first place, it would be wrong to conclude that the Orient was essentially an idea, or a creation with no corresponding reality. ...There were - and are - cultures and nations whose location is in the East, and their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West. About that fact this study of Orientalism has very little to contribute, except to acknowledge it tacitly. But the phenomenon of Orientalism as I study it here deals principally, not with a correspondence between Orientalism and Orient, but with the internal consistency of Orientalism and its ideas about the Orient (the East as career) despite or beyond any correspondence, or lack thereof, with a "real" Orient."
Yes. The "arbitrary" nature of any culture or human experience is sort of the point. Why does our culture exist the way it does?
Obviously, there are all the causal links we can describe of how our culture came to be, but that doesn't answer the question. Why is it that those states produced our culture as it is rather than some other possiblity?
In this sense, it's? arbitrary. Nothing about our history necessitated our culture be one possible outcome rather than another, it just happened that way. The destiny ascribed by metanarratives is destroyed.
No longer is there any myth or value which guarantees a just world , fulfilling life or knowledge needed for life. All questions of living are turned over to ethics and power. Living with wisdom and florishing become about either doing the right thing or getting other people to do what you need. The heuristic of just partaking in belief or tradition is destroyed.
In the political context, it does mean outright maliciousness in many cases. What else can we call killing those who think differently to you to hold power? Or systematically devaluing a particular sort of person so you can just take whatever they own? Or closing a border to people fleeing conflict? Power is maliciousness a lot of the time. Do people realise at the time? Not necessarily, some just think they are doing God's will, helping savages or stopping terrorists, but that doesn't change its cruelty and malicious goal.
I think in some ways it's mainly a difference in attitude toward logic and science. Do you see them as liberative or oppressive? There's a touching passage in Tarski's little Introduction to Logic that I'll quote in full here:
That's Tarski writing from Harvard in 1940, having fled Poland before the German invasion.
Some of us still cling to the hope and the heritage of the Enlightenment. And for us, clarity is itself a value.
I find this very dichotomy oppressive. The scientific method is neither good nor bad. It's just a tool. It can produce good results in the hands of responsible people and bad results in the hands of irresponsible people.
Scientologists seek to eliminate irrationality from themselves and ultimately humanity, and the word they use for their goal is "clear." There are at least two sides to every story. If you only understand one side, you're only seeing 50% of the truth.
Imagine a flatscreen tv that's playing a talking head, announcing the last two sentences of the previous paragraph.
Wait, I'm curious, unless you're in a specialized scientific or technological field, how does QM, GR, thermo, etc help you instrumentally?
Part of the aesthetic of learning science, from what I can tell, is that you're learning stuff about the world. Science finds out what is the case, what reality is like. If all it made were models that were somehow useful but were not accurate representations of reality, I wouldn't really be interested in it. It would seem empty and fake.
You're right of course.
OTOH, speaking broadly (and uncomfortably) in a history-of-ideas way, there was a narrative in the period, say, between the second world war and the rise of post-structuralism and friends, that saw modernity as the problem, that painted National Socialism as "rationality run amok" or something. I don't find that view persuasive.
Don't diss the clams, man.
I've been reading philosophy, most of it analytic, fairly intensively for a few years now. The supposed difference in readability between analytic and pomo philosophy seems to me mistaken. There are hard-to-read analytics and hard-to-read pomos. At the mo', for example, I am stalled in the midst of 'Sameness and Substance' by David Wiggins, because it defies your ideas andrew and makes logic very hard work. Deleuze was a breeze compared to this. Robert Brandom is another whom I have struggled through heroically! Halfway through I thought, come back Baudrillard, all is forgiven. But I made it through acres of repetition and out into the space of my own reason successfully
Still, it's what people say: that pomo is pointlessly complex whereas Brandom and Wiggins are pointfully (a word that needs ushering into life) complex. Some sort of prejudice is lurking even in this.
One area I've become more interested in is the divide between the natural sciences and the social sciences. It's amazing how little social science analytic philosophers know about, and how often their examples of scientific method are drawn from physics, chemistry and biology. Applied sociology is deeply present in all our cultural and personal lives, from how we are managed at work, through how we are governed, to the Facebook/Google toys we play with. But you wouldn't know from analytic philosophy. I have wondered whether the problem is that the analytic world is individualist - the myth of the lone ethicist, thinker, speaker - and it's only those damn Continentals who deal with the human group, social action. So even someone like Habermas, who seems like a bridge-builder between the analytic and Continental approaches, doesn't get mentioned in the corridors where I hear gossip.
GR helps me whenever I use GPS, which would be hopelessly inaccurate without it.
QM enables me to write these fascinating messages on this computer, and read the fascinating messages typed in by people on the other side of the world.
Thermo helps me whenever I travel by bus or use mains electricity, the majority of which is still produced by steam-driven turbines.
GR is probably the least useful of the three, if we treat it as just the incremental accuracy over Newton's theory, rather than as an entire theory of mechanics, which it really is. But even as only an incremental theory, it gave me the thrill of following the Apollo missions as a child, of which I still have fond memories and some much-loved scrapbooks.
I agree with this mcdoodle.
Obscurity is by no means confined to pomo. I get far more irritated at obscure writing by analytics than I do by Continentals, because I feel that Continentals have an excuse (perhaps 'a justification' would be a better word there).
The part of Einstein's 1905 paper that derives his Special Theory of Relativity is only a few pages, as is John Bell's 1960s paper that changed the world of quantum mechanics. If something as complex and profound as those can be logically derived in a few pages I see no excuse for analytics to embed their arguments in wordy tracts that run for hundreds of pages.
I do love Hume though, even though he was lamentably verbose (500+ pages in The Treatise of Human Nature - what's that about then?). I have to remind myself that they didn't have word processors in those days so editing wasn't as easy as it is now. Perhaps those older analytic texts are more like running commentaries on their own process of exploration, with all the turns, dead ends and realisations that entails.
But if I remember correctly, the American Anthropological Association Statement on Race says:
1.) There are no biological races in the human species.
2.) Race is a cultural construct based on arbitrary characteristics.
3.) Race was created to justify imperial/colonial subjugation of people.
4.) The genetic variation within racial groups that we have constructed is greater than the genetic variation between those groups.
The American Anthropological Association is a scientific organization, not a postmodern theorist.
Wasn't that malicious behavior around before anybody ever heard of "postmodernism"? Wasn't it around as part of pre-modernity and modernity?
Weren't Manifest Destiny, colonialism, etc.--the kinds of things that postmodernists criticize, not facilitate, it seems to me--direct or indirection products of modernist ideas and values? How was the removal of Native Americans--something before "postmodernism"--any different from any other "killing those who think differently to hold power" or "systematically devaluing a particular sort of person so you can just take whatever they own"?
I have heard it said that postmodernism is "modernism on steroids". Maybe that is saying the same thing that you are saying in fewer words.
My observation is that the one thing people who ridicule or dismiss postmodernism almost invariably leave out is this context: postmodernism is a response to modernity / the Enlightenment.
Without that historical context everything anybody says about postmodernism is a distortion, in my opinion.
It all seems to be a big symbiotic relationship. Without the Enlightenment postmodern theory would not exist. Enlightenment champions/sympathizers are galvanized by the attacks postmodern theory makes against their beliefs, values, institutions, etc. The latter and former increasingly feed off of each other, it seems.
Truth is a social construct? What "truth" is that statement referring to? Truth as a concept used by prehistoric hunter-gatherers? Truth as a concept used by the first Christians? It is referring to truth as an Enlightenment concept, is it not? Context matters.
I think that they are related.
But the way that I would characterize the second feature is this: if a point that you are making is that the rules of literature, art, architecture, etc. are a repressive Enlightenment/modernist relic, what better way to reinforce that point than intentionally breaking the rules in your own writing?
Philip K. Dick
William Faulkner
Don DeLillo
Phillip Roth
Toni Morrison
William Gibson
Thomas Pynchon
Cormac McCarthy
Flannery O'Connor
and others.
I know I'm going to regret this, but ...
That's a really strange list. DeLillo and Pynchon, sure. But not Dick, Faulkner, Gibson, McCarthy, or O'Connor. (Roth and Morrison I haven't read.)
Calvino's the other obvious choice. Maybe Vonnegut? Maybe John Barth. Maybe DFW?
I don't know if you're going to regret this, but you just made an erroneous correction of my correct claim giving no aesthetic or literary foundation to justify it. Not only that, you took an erroneous shot at it by calling it "really strange" without explaining that. That's not polite discourse.
Dick's Borgesian work is considered by traditional scholars from Bloom to Jameson as Postmodern in its refusal to congeal or finalize its realities like the early Postmodern author Borges, and Ubik is a paragon of Late Capitalist criticism so relevant to Jameson's definition of Postmodern fiction. Gibson is the Shakespeare of Cyberpunk, as Postmodern/Deleuzian a genre that is out there, deconstructing notions of human and mechanized existence. Brian McHale, in his seminal, Postmodern Fiction, identifies Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom as the beginning of Postmodern narrative fiction where the intertextual narrative itself deconstructs ontology and epistemology, undoing the stability of the former often found in Postmodernism. The same dynamics are found in both McCarthy's The Crossing and Morrison's Beloved, not surprising, since both authors are very Faulknerian. O'Connor's work represents the embracing of chaotic spirituality in Modernist fiction, a Postmodern quality moving away from HIgh Modern deep skepticism of relgion, as seen in Postmodern texts like Roth's The Counterlife, Ozick's The Messiah of Stockholm and the films Blade Runner and The Proposition.
Barth is definitely a "High" Postmodern author, Vonnegut is a PKDick & Pynchon copying hack.
This statement only has value if you identify which Postmodern philosophers, and which of their works, you have read.
You seem to have taken what I said as a claim to know for a fact that, for instance, Phil Dick is not a postmodernist writer, rather than an expression of my opinion that he is not. Perhaps instead of saying your list was "strange" I should have said it was "surprising," to me at least.
Given a precise definition of "postmodernist," I suppose it could be a fact that Dick either is or isn't a postmodernist. By and large literary criticism does not achieve this level of precision. For example, it has never seemed to me that Blake and Wordsworth and Keats and Byron have all that much in common. I don't particularly care if someone wants to call them all "Romantics," but I remain largely skeptical of "schools" of art except where a group of artists are demonstrably self-conscious about it (as with the Surrealists, say). Even then, differences regularly overwhelm similarities.
So you are working with a definition of "postmodernist" broad enough to encompass these diverse writers, and given this definition and your method of applying it, it is a fact that the authors you mention are postmodernists. If I could be compelled to embrace this definition and the method of applying it, then I would be compelled to accept it as a fact that Phil Dick was a postmodernist. We would be doing literary history as science.
But part of the point of any science is what it cares about and what it doesn't. If you're doing orbital mechanics, the color of the bodies involved is irrelevant. If you want to select particular features and ignore others, you can of course classify authors however you like, and those classifications are objectively right or wrong, relative to the criteria of classification. What do you choose to ignore about a writer's work? Not only is there room for debate on what to count and what to ignore in a given artist's work, it is clearly acceptable to ignore nothing at all, and forego doing science here at all.
I don't have any such science. I think of certain authors as postmodernists, and have some rough and ready reasons for doing so: there was a cohort of authors coming up in the late fifties and sixties who began taking the conventions of fiction as something they could play with within their works of fiction. They produced fiction that was noticeably odd by the usual standards. I call those guys "postmodernists," not least because John Barth did, and because some of them were self-conscious about it. It's also the point in history when most writers become academics. Since then, this reflexivity has itself become a sort of convention. I don't see Phil Dick doing anything remotely like that, despite being a contemporary, so I don't think of him as a postmodernist. That's about the depth of my interest. I don't claim there's a fact of the matter here.
Btw, have you read D. H. Lawrence's book about American literature? He describes Poe in terms that would strike the contemporary ear as "deconstruction." Might be up your street.
You literally said "but not Dick." You did not say "possibly" not Dick or "it's my opinion it's not Dick." So, either avoid making such affirmative corrections or don't deny making them when you do.
This paragraph is entirely disingenuous of you since you initially corrected my list and even called it "really strange." If you didn't think there was a somewhat stable definition of "Postmodernist," you wouldn't have done so. And Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, and Byron have a lot in common since they all focus on Poetry of the self, hence they are Romantic like the Medieval Romantic tales. And you know very well that genres like "Romantic" and Postmodern are no different than "Blues" or "Punk" or "Science Fiction: while they have malleable, not entirely definable borders, they do have accepted and recognizable ones. So, one can say PKDick is Postmodern while Nathaniel Hawthorne is not.
You clearly read my post poorly. My definition isn't broad, it's just better informed than yours. And I made It clear that I wasn't the only one considering these authors to be Postmodern, scholars as noted as Jameson, Bloom, and McHale did so, too. I'm sorry you've never heard of them. And I never said anything about clear "facts." You don't speak about clear facts with genres, but you can make solid arguments for the inclusions of works in them as I did. You can't say it's a fact Frankenstein is Science Fiction, but many, including myself, make solid arguments for it being such. I did the same with my novels in the Postmodern genre. You have yet to counter that.
This paragraph doesn't address anything I said, so it's irrelevant to the discussion. It's amazing how you have failed to address my reasons for including my texts in the Postmodern genre at all. Considering that is the subject of the discussion, you really should.
I'm sorry, but your definition is incomplete as Postmodern is used in the field. You correctly address the temporal part of a certain class of Postmodern writers, but you completely ignore Postmodernism's aesthetic aspects as defined by such notable scholars as Fredric Jameson, Harold Bloom, Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, and Roland Barthes. Postmodernism is a strain of Modernism, so it shares and builds off of many of its aesthetics. To ignore or reject that aesthetic component of Postmodernism as you have done is failing to recognize Postmodernism.
And my initial response to you and my passage above shows why that's a mistake.
I haven't, but Poe is definitely at the Postmodern spectrum of High Modernism, particularly with his emphasis on the irrational uncanny, preventing the return to the autonomy of the self High Modernism likes but Postmodernism abhors. The fact both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida have written famous essays on his "The Purloined Letter" affirms that connection.
See, this is the sort of thing that makes sense if you want to do literary history or cultural history as a science. From my point of view, reading Don Juan is about as different an experience as you could hope to have from the experience of reading The Prelude. From that point of view, lumping together Wordsworth and Byron is bizarre. That's not a critique of your approach; it is a statement that my purposes in reading and discussing poetry are different.
For your purposes, everything you said may make sense. I have no doubt that it makes sense to someone like Jameson. But I am not interested in doing literary history or criticism as a science. That's why I'm not rebutting each and every one of your points. I'm not doing science. I explained my historically based usage of the term "postmodernist" and it is avowedly unscientific, but it provides, I think, a complete explanation of why I don't apply the term the way you do. My usage has a certain provenance. Pre-Jameson & friends it was the standard way to use the word. It may not work in your circles, but you're not claiming some sort of "ownership" of the word, are you?
Btw, do you really think Barthes couldn't have given Hawthorne a postmodernist reading if he had wanted to? I'm betting he could have. Guy was a magician.
P.S.: It is not a good habit to assume that the people disagreeing with you just don't know what they're talking about, haven't heard of or haven't read certain authors, etc. Sometimes people might just disagree with you.
No, It makes sense if you know literary history well; you clearly don't. There's nothing scientific about it. To reject Byron, Keats, Wordsworth, and Blake as Romantic poets makes as little sense as rejecting Coltrane, Charlie Parker and Miles Davis as Jazz musicians. In other words it makes no sense.
Again, I'm not doing literary history/criticism as science, and you haven't shown I have. You, however are doing it as bad science, as you take an incomplete notion of the term "Postmodernist' and incorrectly apply it as if it were true. And you haven't rebutted any of my points, and you haven't even addressed my field-supported reasons for including my novels in my list. So, since you are not engaging that, I won't be reading or responding to any more of your posts on the matter. And you only gave a complete explanation of your misuse of the term "Postmodernist." That was pointless. You don't just not apply the term the way I do; you apply it incorrectly and ignorantly of the term's aesthetics and history.
Your usage has no provenance as Jameson was the first scholar to establish Postmodernism as a genre. Your ignorance of the field and the term "Postmodernism's" history is showing again. And "my circle" is the academic English field and the field of Modernist and Postmodern lit scholars, of which I am one. That has much more provenance than what your circles think.
Again your ignorance of the term "Postmodern" and what it means shows. We're not discussing the reading of the literature but the literature itself. So, whether or not Barthes could give a text a "postmodern reading," whatever that may be, is irrelevant.
[b]P.S., it's a good habit not to correct someone who clearly knows more than you about the subject, and the only one who showed you don't know what you are talking about is you. Maybe you should stop showing that and show some humility in a field in which you are not well-versed. So, as I said, we are done. If you are not even going to address my reasons for including my texts, our discussion is pointless.
Have a good one.[/b]
Should also have mentioned Donald Barthelme. Maybe Robert Coover. I never read Gaddis. John Hawkes is the same era but it always seemed to me he had his own fish to fry. The Blood Oranges and Second Skin were two real favorites of mine, beautiful novels. It's too bad nobody reads him anymore.
The idea that race was invented to subjugate people is just misplaced anger or something...
So you've adopted Landru's beliefs about science. *sigh*
Are you really interested in QM, GR and thermodynamics because of their instrumental value? I'm not. I'm interested in them because I think they reveal something true about the world. Now this isn't absolute truth in that all things in science are subject to revision. But neither is it merely social construction, because these are theories about how the world works.
I really don't understand the view that people are only interested in science because it has instrumental value. No doubt that's true, but it seems awfully apparent that the majority of people think science is approximating the truth about the world, best as we can get at it. And so we're often fascinating by all sorts of discoveries that have no real insturmental value for our lives.
I think Black Holes are fascinating, but they have zero instrumental value for my life.
Quoting Marchesk Where is Landru? I fervently agree with half he says and fervently disagree with the other half. I haven't heard from him in ages. I miss him.
Agreed on both accounts. I don't know that he ever made it over here.
I think you've misread me. My point about the maliciousness of power at any time. This is not a truth brought about in the development of postmodernism, it's just identified and made explicit in postmodern analysis of society and values. I was giving the postmodern critique of power in the context of society-- it's the postmodernist's criticism I am speaking here.
I think Landru was part of the initial group of posters here or pretty close to it; he's got over 200 posts here. If I remember correctly, his posting dropped off and he stuck mostly to the original PF, till it imploded.
I don't know exactly. After the site was sold, it ran pretty smoothly for a while. I don't know whether it was just because there were no problems or because the owners were maintain it.
Then the forums broke, I can't remember exactly how, but it was serious, like trouble logging in/database issues/not displaying content properly and the owners just didn't fix it. The site became unusable. Someone else here probably knows more about it than I do.