Postmodernism

[Matt the Poet]

Also, "In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger." Wikipedia...so take it for what it's worth.

I've found an online version of the essay, so will get back to you on that. Meantime, I'm pretty sure Heidegger had an absolute belief in some sort of objective reality. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was the foundation of his philosophy.

The modern project is to undercover the underlying truth of Being through reason, not mysticism, Hegel not-withstanding. Don't mistake an axiom (that there is such a thing as an objective reality about which we are capable of making true statements) for mysticism.

If that's an axiom, then its a metaphysical one. Mysticism was perhaps uncharitable. However, Modernism with a capital 'M' was quite happy to approach Being with a rational or a mystical approach. The modernist poets in particular went this way (Yeats' paganism, Eliot's high-anglican contemplations), but you could argue that Abstract Expressionism had a similar goal - reaching through the veil of representation to get at some kind of 'visual absolute'

The merits of cultural relativism aside (of which I think there are few - it is perfectly reasonable to judge other cultures. Taliban anyone?), I'll take that bet.

You don't judge the Taliban because they think differently. You judge them because they kill people for not having beards. And you don't shut down debate by calling them 'less advanced' - you accept that they are by definition a consequence of contemporary thinking and try to deal with how that happened. Which is a postmodern view that can lead to useful conclusions.

If Heidegger is the foundation of PoMo, then discrediting Heidegger does indeed undermine the entire discipline. Thus, I assume, your rejection of the assertion that Heidegger is the PoMo Moses.

Even if Wikipedia is right, and it's not quoting out of context, he isn't the foundation of Pomo, any more than, say, deBroglie is the 'foundation' of quantum physics. He might have dinged off a few thoughts in a few brains, but there's a hundred other voices out there contributing to the debate. Anyway - there's people out there who would argue that Derrida isn't really a postmodernist either - and certainly 'deconstruction' is only one strand of post-structuralist thought.

In addition, I would humbly advise you to avoid mis-interpreting your intellectual delight as an indication of validity.

Not fair. You didn't ask about validity, you asked about contribution to human flourishing - these are different things. I, like many others, am inspired by the writing of post modernists. The same way that people are inspired by the works of poets, painters, etc. My point was that inspiration like that is a conspiration to the flourishing of humanity.

 

[quixotecoyote]

Haven't read the topic, but this is too good not to post.

My graduate level rhetorical theory teacher was redefining post-modernism to make it fall in a continuum with positivist/interpretive/critical theory so her definition of postmodernism was "There is no truth. There is no way to find the truth and wouldn't be even if there was truth. There's no right and wrong involved and there's nothing we can do to figure it out or communicate it"

We asked her which philosophers actually held that position.

STUMP

 

[D'rok]

I've found an online version of the essay, so will get back to you on that. Meantime, I'm pretty sure Heidegger had an absolute belief in some sort of objective reality. In fact, I'm pretty sure it was the foundation of his philosophy.

Possibly. But he rejects instrumental reason as the means to discover it. He seems to want to uncover objectivity through subjective means. Absurd.

If that's an axiom, then its a metaphysical one. Mysticism was perhaps uncharitable. However, Modernism with a capital 'M' was quite happy to approach Being with a rational or a mystical approach. The modernist poets in particular went this way (Yeats' paganism, Eliot's high-anglican contemplations), but you could argue that Abstract Expressionism had a similar goal - reaching through the veil of representation to get at some kind of 'visual absolute'

Apparently this word "modernism" is some new concept that I have not encountered before and that doesn't seem to have any relation to what is normally thought of as "modernity". It's probably post-modern

You don't judge the Taliban because they think differently. You judge them because they kill people for not having beards. And you don't shut down debate by calling them 'less advanced' - you accept that they are by definition a consequence of contemporary thinking and try to deal with how that happened. Which is a postmodern view that can lead to useful conclusions.

I do indeed judge the Taliban for thinking differently. Their conception of "The Good" does not deserve any respect whatsoever. They are less advanced in every conceivable way - morally, technologically, socially, politically - than we are. Progress exists. Not all cultures are equal.

Now, don't mistake that statement as allowing no room for difference. There are cultural alternatives that are equally choiceworthy to ours; the Taliban is not one of them. Making that judgment is not unreasonable, and if PoMo can't make that judgment, it is flawed.

(That judgment is also not a call for invasion, violent regime change, or any other sort of ill-conceived adventurism. A bad culture is better than chaos).

Even if Wikipedia is right, and it's not quoting out of context, he isn't the foundation of Pomo, any more than, say, deBroglie is the 'foundation' of quantum physics. He might have dinged off a few thoughts in a few brains, but there's a hundred other voices out there contributing to the debate. Anyway - there's people out there who would argue that Derrida isn't really a postmodernist either - and certainly 'deconstruction' is only one strand of post-structuralist thought.

Derrida isn't a post-modernist? Well...this really is a slippery beast we're trying grasp hold of. It's almost as if the concept of post-modernism itself is open to contextual interpretation. How useful. (Yes...that was sarcasm. Sorry.)

Not fair. You didn't ask about validity, you asked about contribution to human flourishing - these are different things. I, like many others, am inspired by the writing of post modernists. The same way that people are inspired by the works of poets, painters, etc. My point was that inspiration like that is a conspiration to the flourishing of humanity.

We have a different definition of human flourishing. Acting on post-modernist inspiration, in my opinion, does not advance human flourishing. If you constrained yourself to contemplation in some sort of Epicurean Garden of post-modernism, then I would have no quarrel. Flourish away in the privacy of your own reflections. It's when you go from theory to practice that problems arise.

As you will see by reading that piece by Heidegger, I say these things only because I am irredeemably invested in the contemporary metaphysics of the technological World Picture. I cannot make true statements about anything when I am thus "enframed" in the results-based straitjacket of objectivity. (See "The Question Concerning Technology" for more about "enframing").

 

[D'rok]

--snip--

My graduate level rhetorical theory teacher was redefining post-modernism to make it fall in a continuum with positivist/interpretive/critical theory so her definition of postmodernism was "There is no truth. There is no way to find the truth and wouldn't be even if there was truth. There's no right and wrong involved and there's nothing we can do to figure it out or communicate it"
--snip--

Nihilism.

 

[quixotecoyote]

Nihilism.

Virtually no philosophers claim to be nihilists. It's used as a pejorative.

 

[drkitten]

It was postmodern architects who first railed against the dispiriting 'projects' for housing the urban poor - pointing out that responding to the desired experience of the people actually living there, regardless of how 'irrational' it might be, would do more good than imposing 'scientific' solutions from above.

Again, wrong. Dickens was writing about the dispiriting "workhouses" for housing the urban poor a century before Derrida and Foucault.

Apparently one of the key tenets of postmodernism is "take credit for other people's insights."

Another case in point:

You don't judge the Taliban because they think differently. You judge them because they kill people for not having beards. And you don't shut down debate by calling them 'less advanced' - you accept that they are by definition a consequence of contemporary thinking and try to deal with how that happened. Which is a postmodern view that can lead to useful conclusions.

That's hardly a postmodern view. The idea that people in foreign cultures do things differently has been around as long as there have been writings on culture. The idea that people can be different without being inferior equally so; shall I dig up some examples from More's Utopia?

Postmodernism's contribution to this debate is not to suggest that cultures can differ without being inferior, but to suggest that cultures cannot be inferior -- which is patent nonsense. As Drok pointed out, it's very easy to establish objective standards and to rank cultures along those standards; I'm not sure that I would go so far as to agree that "[the Taliban] are less advanced in every conceivable way - morally, technologically, socially, politically - than we are," since I'm sure there's some nutcase out there who can and will find a single measurable yardstick under which the Taliban can be observed to be superior -- I don't, for example, know what the rate of marijuana use is among the Taliban, but I bet it's lower than the US or the UK.

But nevertheless, "Progress exists. Not all cultures are equal."

 

[drkitten]

When I read Derrida I feel excited, bewildered, challenged, unsettled from my comfortable view of language and the world, ready to reconsider my assumptions. Don't know about you, but that sounds like flourishing to me.

Funny, usually when I feel "excited, bewildered, challenged, unsettled from my comfortable view of language and the world, ready to reconsider my assumptions," that's usually a sign that I have had too much to drink and/or need to lay off the cocaine for a while.

If "flourishing" is indistinguishable from "buzzed to the point of incoherence," then I'd definitely agree that PoMo flourishes.

 

[D'rok]

Virtually no philosophers claim to be nihilists. It's used as a pejorative.

I know. I'm using it as a pejorative. There is a problem with nihilism in post-modernism, even if your professor's definition isn't a good one.

 

[Matt the Poet]

Again, wrong. Dickens was writing about the dispiriting "workhouses" for housing the urban poor a century before Derrida and Foucault."

Apparently one of the key tenets of postmodernism is "take credit for other people's insights."

Disingenuous, at best. Is there really any way in which you thought I was claiming that postmodern architects were the first people ever to complain about the living conditions of the poor? I'm talking about their specific response to the sort of discourse that led to urban planners believing that they could 'rationalise' living space in th 1940s and 50s

Postmodernism's contribution to this debate is not to suggest that cultures can differ without being inferior, but to suggest that cultures cannot be inferior -- which is patent nonsense.

No, no, no. And no. Postmodernism (or in this sense postcolonial theory)'s contribution to the debate is to suggest that the term 'inferior' is meaningless in this context. And I would argue that it is precisely an ignorance of this absolutely vital argument which is causing so much bloodshed both there and in Iraq at the moment.

Start bandying words like 'inferior' about and suddenly you don't have to think about the conditions that produce horrible, brutal cultural outgrowths like the Taleban or Bin Laden and his cohorts (who, in passing, have a grasp of the effects of mass media that suggest a thoroughgoing understanding of certain aspects of 'modernity'). You just casually assume that they're a little delayed on the shining road of progress that leads to the holy grail of Free Market Democracy. Either give them a push or take them away and the progress of evolution along the Great Chain of Political Being is assured.

In order to see why this viewpoint has gone so terribly and visibly wrong, you need to understand that 'cultures' spread out in multiple technological and ethical dimensions, that the people within them are autonomous agents that have their own responses to those movements (and the movements of other cultures with which they interact). That every other bit of the whole damn mess is utterly contigent on every other bit. That every time you try to stick a label on any of it you'll always be wrong to some extent. That's postmodernism, and if anyone in any position of power had engaged with it just a tiny little bit we'd all be in a bit less of a mess than we clearly are.

 

[Matt the Poet]

doublepostsorry

 

[D'rok]

Start bandying words like 'inferior' about and suddenly you don't have to think about the conditions that produce horrible, brutal cultural outgrowths like the Taleban or Bin Laden and his cohorts (who, in passing, have a grasp of the effects of mass media that suggest a thoroughgoing understanding of certain aspects of 'modernity'). You just casually assume that they're a little delayed on the shining road of progress that leads to the holy grail of Free Market Democracy. Either give them a push or take them away and the progress of evolution along the Great Chain of Political Being is assured.

Pathetic strawman. Judgment does not equal an endorsement of determinism or Hegelian historicism. Nor does it grant carte-blanche for nation building, other forms of interference, or intellectual laziness. Progress exists but it is not historically inevitable.

1) The Taliban are inferior. 2) We do not have the moral right to "uplift" them militarily or otherwise. 3) We can analyze the conditions and actions that account for their inferiority. 4) We can be vigilant in ensuring that we do not mimic those conditions or actions in our own culture. 5) We can engage them diplomatically.

Al Qaeda is the wild-card in this little formula, but still...no post-modernism required.

 

[drkitten]

No, no, no. And no. Postmodernism (or in this sense postcolonial theory)'s contribution to the debate is to suggest that the term 'inferior' is meaningless in this context.

That is absolutely correct. And Postmodernism is completely and entirely wrong in mthat suggestion.

And I would argue that it is precisely an ignorance of this absolutely vital argument which is causing so much bloodshed both there and in Iraq at the moment.

I'm sure you would. You would also be wrong, too.

Start bandying words like 'inferior' about and suddenly you don't have to think about the conditions that produce horrible, brutal cultural outgrowths like the Taleban or Bin Laden and his cohorts

Nonsense.

There are a number of quite sensible modernists who have approached the question from an entirely different perspective where they recognize that the yardstick exists and question why cultures occupy different points on it. A classic formulation is Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East?

That Bush is an idiot with no grasp of diplomacy doesn't mean that there aren't intelligent modernists out there.

You just casually assume that they're a little delayed on the shining road of progress that leads to the holy grail of Free Market Democracy.

Oh, good grief. You're not really that stupid, are you? When you get done with your straw man, let me know -- in the meantime, you might just shut up and let the grownups talk.

In order to see why this viewpoint has gone so terribly and visibly wrong, you need to understand that 'cultures' spread out in multiple technological and ethical dimensions, that the people within them are autonomous agents that have their own responses to those movements (and the movements of other cultures with which they interact).

More meaningless pomodrivel.

That every other bit of the whole damn mess is utterly contigent on every other bit. That every time you try to stick a label on any of it you'll always be wrong to some extent.

More meaningless pomodrivel.

That's postmodernism,

That's right. It is postmodernism, and the easiest way you can tell is the way that it starts out by making unsupported statements that are demonstrably false, and then proceeds to "infer" meaningless consequences from the fase assumptions.

and if anyone in any position of power had engaged with it just a tiny little bit we'd all be in a bit less of a mess than we clearly are.

Quite possibly. On the other hand, if anyone in power had engaged with genuine modernist scholarship (e.g. Lewis), we'd be better off yet. Inaction born of meanlingless gibberish may be better than wrong action born of ignorance, but it will almost always lose to right action born of reason and understanding.

I repeat what I said eariler : "Postmodernism can do something that conventional scholarship can, but less effectively and with substantially increased likelihood of error.

I agree entirely."

 

[D'rok]

As an amusing aside, here is a quote from Jean-Francois Lyotard from his "The Inhuman" that attempts to capture the "Spirit" of post-modernism:

"Cast down the walls. Breach and breathe. Inhalation. BREATH, inside and outside. This concerns the thorax. The muscular walls of the rib-cage, of the defences of the thorax, exposed to the winds. Your breath as been set free, not taken away. An understatement: mouth to mouth contact with distance, as though with an infinity of air. And because the walls are down, there is no swelling."

Tear down those constricting walls of paternal reason, you freebird pomos! Set your breath free into the infinity of possibility! Swell no more! Strain at the chains of objectivity no more!

 

[Matt the Poet]

Pathetic strawman. Judgment does not equal an endorsement of determinism or Hegelian historicism. Nor does it grant carte-blanche for nation building, other forms of interference, or intellectual laziness. Progress exists but it is not historically inevitable.

Didn't say that. Really didn't. I know you don't believe that, I know Dr Kitten doesn't believe that. A quick pop across to the project for a New American Century website will swiftly reveal that they do, and them and their chums called many of the fateful shots.

1) The Taliban are inferior. 2) We do not have the moral right to "uplift" them militarily or otherwise. 3) We can analyze the conditions and actions that account for their inferiority.

Replace 'inferior' with 'brutal', 'horrible' etc. and you can make the same argument without even the slightest risk of historical determinism. So why not do that? It doesn't mean you're not passing judgment on their actions. No sane, moral person would endorse them. So why not do that? The only contribution that the word 'inferior' makes to the debate is to embed in it the unconsidered assumption that some sort of 'development' towards a 'superior' state is one possible answer to the problem.

 

[D'rok]

Didn't say that. Really didn't.

Then who said this:

You just casually assume that they're a little delayed on the shining road of progress that leads to the holy grail of Free Market Democracy. Either give them a push or take them away and the progress of evolution along the Great Chain of Political Being is assured.

Replace 'inferior' with 'brutal', 'horrible' etc. and you can make the same argument without even the slightest risk of historical determinism. So why not do that? It doesn't mean you're not passing judgment on their actions. No sane, moral person would endorse them. So why not do that? The only contribution that the word 'inferior' makes to the debate is to embed in it the unconsidered assumption that some sort of 'development' towards a 'superior' state is one possible answer to the problem.

Brutal, horrible, etc = bad.
Good = the absence of the brutal, horrible, etc.
Bad is inferior to good.
The Taliban are brutal, horrible, etc.
The Taliban are bad.
We are not as brutal, horrible, etc as the Taliban
We are at least "less bad" than the Taliban
We are closer to good than the Taliban
The Taliban are inferior to us.

Any problems with this train of reasoning? Or am I not allowed to make value judgments about brutality and its "badness" or "goodness"? If bad is not better than good, why would I choose good? Do I not choose good because it is superior to bad?

How can you make value-free judgments of value?

 

[drkitten]

Replace 'inferior' with 'brutal', 'horrible' etc. and you can make the same argument without even the slightest risk of historical determinism. So why not do that?

Because it buys nothing, and costs us a potential process.

More bluntly, because it's a dumb approach.

The only contribution that the word 'inferior' makes to the debate is to embed in it the unconsidered assumption that some sort of 'development' towards a 'superior' state is one possible answer to the problem.

The only contribution? How about to embed in the debate the considered assumption that some sort of development towards a superior state is one possible answer?

Societies change via a more or less continuous process -- in fact, one of the major flaws of the Bush approach to the Mideast is a lack of awareness of this continuity, and the (unconsidered) assumption that the Islamic fundamentalist caliphate can simply be replaced by a "modern" democracy. To anyone with awareness of cultural change as a gradual process, this is of course nonsense -- gradual processes resist sudden jumps.

However, if you make the considered assumption that any change, if it happens, will be gradual, one needs to figure out how to get from here to there and what the progression -- there's that word -- will be, and what will need to change in the infrastructure and external political environment (the controllables) in order to foster that change.

The fact that the idiots at the New American Century aren't aware of this doesn't make postmodernism the only other option on the market -- or even a viable product.

I don't know how many different ways I can politely tell you that you're wrong. For that matter, I don't know many different ways I can rudely tell you that you are wrong. But there are alternatives to the unthinking nihilism of postmodernism as well as the equally unthinking jingoism of the Bush neoconservatives. And the only progress that will be made will be by people who understand that the idea of "progress" is actually meanningful. If you want to make things better, don't start by denying the existence of better and worse.

 

[Matt the Poet]

Funny, usually when I feel "excited, bewildered, challenged, unsettled from my comfortable view of language and the world, ready to reconsider my assumptions," that's usually a sign that I have had too much to drink and/or need to lay off the cocaine for a while.

If "flourishing" is indistinguishable from "buzzed to the point of incoherence," then I'd definitely agree that PoMo flourishes.

Politics aside (the train is juddering) I've just got to respond to this. If it's true, I think it's rather sad. Has no artwork affected you in this way? Can you only access that level of mental intensity via chemical intervention?

Look, you're right in a certain sense. I don't think I can successfully argue that postmodernism has a lot of instrumental value. And yes, a lot of its political assumptions could equally be made by a good historian.

But I think it does have intrinsic value. The world is a better place for people like Paul Virilio and, yes, Derrida. What they produce has a certain kind of convoluted beauty.

Also, however it might be expressed, their thinking is humane. It's born of a desire to wriggle out from under the structures of oppression that blighted the 20th century, to find a new way of talking about things that works around the words that made that oppression possible (and if you don't believe it's all about words, I'd recommend reading the afterword on Newspeak in 1984. Orwell was no postmodernist, but he certainly believed that language determined social, if not actual, reality).

Even if it fails most of the time, isn't that worth a go?

 

[Pipirr]

But I think it does have intrinsic value. The world is a better place for people like Paul Virilio and, yes, Derrida. What they produce has a certain kind of convoluted beauty.

I'll agree with you on this point. An ex of mine was studying Derrida and got me to 'experience' a Derrrida 'text' or two. To this day, I can't tell you what it was about, or sum up Derrida's philosophy, or list any contributions that he made to philosophy or society. But just reading Derrida was quite an experience, albeit a dense and baffling one.

A certain kind of convoluted beauty? I'll agree with you on that...

 

[drkitten]

Look, you're right in a certain sense. [...] But I think [postmodernism] does have intrinsic value.

You are right in a certain sense. That is what you believe.

You're wrong, though. It doesn't.

The world is a better place for people like Paul Virilio and, yes, Derrida.

No, it isn't.

Also, however it might be expressed, their thinking is humane. ]

Yes. Funny how something can be humane and very bad for all concerned at the same time. It's probably humane to treat someone's complaining of a pain in their wrist by knocking them unconcsious with a crowbar --- but it's not a good idea, and it makes matters worse instead of better.

It's born of a desire to wriggle out from under the structures of oppression that blighted the 20th century, to find a new way of talking about things that works around the words that made that oppression possible

Yes, and like so much about postmodernism, it starts from an incorrect premise and degenerates into meaninglessless.

(and if you don't believe it's all about words, I'd recommend reading the afterword on Newspeak in 1984. Orwell was no postmodernist, but he certainly believed that language determined social, if not actual, reality).

Yes, and Orwell was wrong, too. The idea that language determines actual reality is of course the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it's been almost entirely discredited -- except, for some reason, among postmodernists that keep dragging it out and trying to ressurrect this half-decayed corpse. I note that you're more sophisticated than a straight-up Whorfian, and only apply linguistic determinism to social reality (whatever the hell that means) -- but there's still no support for that idea.

From Orwell (Politics and the English Language):

It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

The problem is simply that it isn't so. The slovenliness of our language does not make it easier for us to have foolish thoughts; one of the marks of human language is that the vocabulary is infinitely expansive. As a simple example, there are languages out there that have only two or three "basic color terms", but the people who speak them can make all the shade distinctions English-speakers can. In a language with only three colors, black, white, and red, something will end up being "red like a banana" or "black like the ocean." Funny, we do the same thing -- any paint store will sell you "bone," "eggshell," or "ivory" paint, and they all look different. If you can't name something, make up a new metaphor.

The whole point of Newspeak "is to remove all shades of meaning from language, leaving simple dichotomies (pleasure and pain, happiness and sadness, good thoughts and thoughtcrimes) which reinforce the total dominance of the State." (Wikipedia). But that's exactly what the psycholingusitic experiments show to be impossible. The overall tendency of any language is to create new lexical items precisely because they need more shades of meaning than can be expressed with the old ones.

"The underlying theory of Newspeak is that if something can't be said, then it can't be thought." (Wikipedia again). But that's exactly a wrong theory; it's been actively disproven, as dead as geocentrism or the doctrine of signatures. Postmodernism takes a statement that is known to be actively false and then rings verbiage around it, badly, in an effort to inflate an obvous untruth to something profound. Unfortunately, profound truths do not arise from false assumptions; the best that one can do is get something so vague that the falsity is hidden from superficial examination.

A math professor of mine summed up the problem in a single epigram. "When you try to prove something that isn't true, the proofs get long."

Even if it fails most of the time, isn't that worth a go?

No. If the probable result of a course of action is to make matters substantially worse, then it's not "worth a go" to take that course of action. Firing a machine gun randomly out my window might happen to kill a drug dealer or a rapist in the process of sizing up his next victim. Putting cyanide in a random bottle of milk on the grocer's shelf might kill a terrorist. Is that worth a go?

Postmodernism is intellectual cyanide; it destroys the minds of those who drink of it.

 

[Matt the Poet]

No. If the probable result of a course of action is to make matters substantially worse, then it's not "worth a go" to take that course of action. Firing a machine gun randomly out my window might happen to kill a drug dealer or a rapist in the process of sizing up his next victim. Putting cyanide in a random bottle of milk on the grocer's shelf might kill a terrorist. Is that worth a go?

Postmodernism is intellectual cyanide; it destroys the minds of those who drink of it.

Postmodernism is an immune system. It doesn't stop you from beliving in right and wrong, good and bad. It just prevents you from assuming that you have a fixed and unshakeable handle on what those words mean, or that they mean the same to everyone everywhere. It forces you to ask what you mean when you use phrases like 'the developing world' (who is developing? developing to what?) or 'freedom and democracy'.

And I still contend that some of it is very beautiful. A sort of 'mental sculpture'. exhiliarating to read, touching off all sorts of associations and ideas. Personally I don't want to live in a culture that doesn't value that sort of benefit in and of itself.