Postmodernism

[simonmaal]

Not really. Post-modernism in general and post-structuralism specifically reject Marxism and Marxist approaches...

I agree: I would not say that Marxism and post-modernism go hand-in-hand. Let me explain my reasons for this:

If we are to argue that postmodernism focuses on the constructive nature of knowledge, then by default, we need to concede that is itself a construct and thus subject to context. Therefore, post-modernism could be placed in a kind of superordinate "democracy of ideas" and be placed on a par with other worldviews (or next to heavily modified versions of itself). So even if there were a left wing (or anarchistic) feel to post-modernism, the ideology is more than capable of absorbing ideas from other parts of the political spectrum.

 

[mad]

So, the answer to my original question is:

Yes, Postmodernism is a subject for Skeptics, but I am too late and it is no longer relevant. And I don’t know what I am talking about, but its OK, because there are other equally valid ways of knowing things.

 

[brodski]

So, the answer to my original question is:

Yes, Postmodernism is a subject for Skeptics, but I am too late and it is no longer relevant. And I don’t know what I am talking about, but its OK, because there are other equally valid ways of knowing things.

If that's how you read it...

 

[roger]

Instead of trying to define what it is, an attempt that I've never successfully witnessed , how about just sharing 5 or 10 of the top findings in the field. That would go a long way.

 

[simonmaal]

Instead of trying to define what it is, an attempt that I've never successfully witnessed , how about just sharing 5 or 10 of the top findings in the field. That would go a long way.

I know where you are coming from, but that request is a bit like asking to see the 5 or 10 top findings in the field of skepticism. Post-modernism is a way of thinking, not a research tool.

 

[simonmaal]

So, the answer to my original question is:

Yes, Postmodernism is a subject for Skeptics, but I am too late and it is no longer relevant. And I don’t know what I am talking about, but its OK, because there are other equally valid ways of knowing things.

No, you are missing the point.

My definition of postmodernism is this: no matter how objective any piece of research is, there are no theory-free observations. But this was an integral part of scientific thinking long before post-modernism appeared as a discrete concept. Postmodernism is merely an extension of critical thinking.

So I don't think we need to get too concerned about postmodermism diluting science, unless it is abused in the ways I highlighted earlier in this thread. If we were to over-relativise all knowledge, we would end up with the "epistemic fallacy"; in other words, we would fail to distinguish between objective reality and our interpretation or experience of it. We would be doing the latter whilst ignoring the former, which would make absoultely no logical sense at all. In order to determine how to study something (epistemology), we need to state what we believe exists to be studied (ontology). Epistemology and ontology can only be understood in the light of each other - so we have another dialectic to go alongside realism-relativism. From that point of view, post-modernism enhances the skeptical mind rather than detracts from it (but take that comment with my earlier caveat borne in mind).

 

[roger]

I know where you are coming from, but that request is a bit like asking to see the 5 or 10 top findings in the field of skepticism. Post-modernism is a way of thinking, not a research tool.

5 or 10 top findings in scepticism? Easy peasy.

Homeopathy doesn't work.
Dowsing doesn't work.
GSIC chip? Doesn't work.
Acupuncture - except for low level pain management, doesn't work.
Penicillen works.
Occam's razor is a reliable, but not foolproof way to choose between competing theories.
Giving everyone the same horoscope (w/o their knowledge) leads them to all access the reading as scarily accurate, casting doubt on the value of horoscopes.

I could continue, but you get the idea. We'd have major arguments about whether the above are truly "top", or how exactly these fall under the rubric of sceptism rather than medicine, etc., but that is not the point. It's pretty easy to list findings based on the sceptical way of thinking.

So, what have we discovered with this new way of thinking?

ETA: Perhaps this post will be considered disengenous, so let me expand. I can not list any major finding from poetry, say. That does not mean poetry is pointless. I love poetry. It's pleasurable. It does, however, pretty much exclude poetry as a method of research. However, if read this thread, we see claims like "Post-modern approaches to gender, race and sexuality have informed liberalism for most of the second half of this century." The examples proffered so far have fallen flat to my judgement. For example, the idea that women should earn the same as men was attributed to PoMo; Darat successfully showed that was not the case.

It's trivial to take a tenet of scepticism, and apply it to a subject. So how about a pomo exibition? Take a subject, and apply pomo to it, avoiding the jargon so we can all read it.

I've read a lot of pomo in support of work I've published (CV on request), and I can honestly say that I've never felt I learned anything new, that the article or book could be summarized in any useful way, that any contribution was made other than "publish or perish". I'm genuinely asking to be proven wrong.

 

[Jekyll]

My definition of postmodernism is this: no matter how objective any piece of research is, there are no theory-free observations. But this was an integral part of scientific thinking long before post-modernism appeared as a discrete concept. Postmodernism is merely an extension of critical thinking.

But problems with the orbit of Mercury were observed long before general relativity explained it.

The result of observations should not change from one scientific epoch to the next, provided that they are honestly reported, but the way they are explained away in the context of contemporary theory changes.

 

[simonmaal]

(deleted duplication)

 

[simonmaal]

5 or 10 top findings in scepticism? Easy peasy.

Homeopathy doesn't work.
Dowsing doesn't work.
GSIC chip? Doesn't work.
Acupuncture - except for low level pain management, doesn't work.
Penicillen works.
Occam's razor is a reliable, but not foolproof way to choose between competing theories.
Giving everyone the same horoscope (w/o their knowledge) leads them to all access the reading as scarily accurate, casting doubt on the value of horoscopes.

Skepticism did not find these things. The experimental technique discovered these things, led by a skeptical mindset. Skepticism is not a methodology, it is a way of thinking that embraces the scientific technique as its methodology.

I could continue, but you get the idea. We'd have major arguments about whether the above are truly "top", or how exactly these fall under the rubric of sceptism rather than medicine, etc., but that is not the point. It's pretty easy to list findings based on the sceptical way of thinking.

So, what have we discovered with this new way of thinking?

Your last two sentences answer your earlier question: skepticism is a way of thinking, post-modernism is a way of thinking. Expirements are a tool of investigation, discourse analysis is a tool of investigation. Post-modernism is a super-ordinate idea; it is a way of consolidating findings from different methodologies.

 

[simonmaal]

But problems with the orbit of Mercury were observed long before general relativity explained it.

I'm not an expert on astronomy so I'll take this finding at face value (do excuse me if I sound stuffy here - skeptic's etiquette , also excuse my attempt at using this example to illustrate the point if I seem to go awry with the theoretical side of it).

OK, disclaimers dealt with. The ontology in the mercury example could be roughly defined as planets and gravity. The epistemology would be positivist: using the natural sciences to discover how planets and gravity behave. In contrast, the rudimentary attempts by the Babylonians to explain the movement of the heavens (what they believed to be the object of study affected the way in which they investigated it) would produce very different research methods. As an aside, the Babylonians were very accurate in their predictions even though their explanations have since proved to be wrong. So we need to look at how the close relationship between ontology and epistemology contributed towards understanding. We cannot have one without the other.

In fact, what you go on to say next makes this point very nicely:

The result of observations should not change from one scientific epoch to the next, provided that they are honestly reported, but the way they are explained away in the context of contemporary theory changes.

Yes, that's it exactly!!!

 

[roger]

Skepticism did not find these things. The experimental technique discovered these things, led by a skeptical mindset. Skepticism is not a methodology, it is a way of thinking that embraces the scientific technique as its methodology.

Right. So give me something discoved using the pomo mindset. Or just something that could be discovered using the pomo mindset. Walk us through it. Show us pomo in action, don't just talk about what it is like.

This is not a difficult question to my mind.

 

[volatile]

Right. So give me something discoved using the pomo mindset. Or just something that could be discovered using the pomo mindset. Walk us through it. Show us pomo in action, don't just talk about what it is like.

This is not a difficult question to my mind.

One rather obvious example is the decoupling of sex and gender which has allowed us to understand transexuality more sympathetically. Without post-modern works on this question, such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, there would not have been the social climate from which the Gender Recognition Bill could have emerged. This Bill will be enacted into law in the next parliamentary session.

 

[Buckaroo]

Not wanting to appear rude, but do any of you actually know what post-modernism IS? Have you ever read any?

The problem is what many of us HAVE read. For example, this, from Felix Guattari*:

We can clearly see that there is no bi-univocal correspondence between linear signifying links or archi-writing, depending on the author, and this multireferential, multi-dimensional machinic catalysis. The symmetry of scale, the transversality, the pathic non-discursive character of their expansion: all these dimensions remove us from the logic of the excluded middle and reinforce us in our dismissal of the ontological binarism we criticised previously.

or this, from Gilles Deleuze*:

In the first place, singularities-events correspond to heterogeneous series which are organized into a system which is neither stable nor unstable, but rather ‘metastable,’ endowed with a potential energy wherein the differences between series are distributed . . . In the second place, singularities possess a process of auto-unification, always mobile and displaced to the extent that a paradoxical element traverses the series and makes them resonate, enveloping the corresponding singular points in a single aleatory point and all the emissions, all dice throws, in a single cast.

I defy anyone to explain, even in context, what these passages mean. Faced with deliberately obfuscatory, convoluted, neologism-peppered, unparsable nonsense designed to impress graduate students enough to get into their pants (many of these guys are French, after all ), is it any wonder most of us don't make further attempts at many of these "intellectuals?" (That said, I have enjoyed and appreciated some Foucault, particularly Discipline and Punish.)

Parenthetically, PoMo is still going strong in quite a few departments. My Lit professor girlfriend and I broke up after a fight about Lacan only a few years ago -- I revealed that I thought his writings were bunk, and she complained that I didn't "respect her profession." So it goes...

* Quotes and Dawkins' discussion of Sokal's Intellectual Imposters are here: http://www.simonyi.ox.ac.uk/dawkins...eviews/1998-07-09postmodernism_disrobed.shtml

 

[roger]

One rather obvious example is the decoupling of sex and gender which has allowed us to understand transexuality more sympathetically. Without post-modern works on this question, such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, there would not have been the social climate from which the Gender Recognition Bill could have emerged. This Bill will be enacted into law in the next parliamentary session.

Thank you. I am not an expert in the field, but I would not trace the social climate to Butler's work, but more to things like the 60s. As a nonexpert, I certainly am prepared to stand to be corrected. Nontheless, I'm certainly ready to accept it as an example of what pomo can do, so let's stick with it. It certainly seems to have potential.

I don't have time right now to address this further; I hope other posters do. I will say I can't get any real traction with her ideas. To the extent I can, I am dubious, in that she seems to remove all aspects of biology from behavior. When we try to get to specifics, the arguments are as hard to catch as a greased pig. I offer this site, which I believe to believe a reputable academic source, as an example.

"In opposition to theatrical or phenomenological models which take the gendered self to be prior to its acts, I will understand constituting acts not only as constituting the identity of the actor, but as constituting that identity as a compelling illusion, an object of belief"

"Because there is neither an 'essence' that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires; because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all. Gender is, thus, a construction that regularly conceals its genesis"

That clears it right up for me

Somewhat more seriously, substitute happiness for gender in the above. The sentences still say the same thing, and we can agree or not. But there is a biological basis for happiness, it's not just an act.

And that's my problem with pomo. I've never seen any that tries to ground itself in facts, instead it gets lost in supposition. There is no 'thing' called happiness, nor can we exactly define it; that does not render it a fiction or a construction.

I have no idea if gender (in the feminist/Butler sense) is biologically based, and if so, to what extent. But reading about Butler (which is different from reading Butler, I admit), doesn't make me want to turn to her as a source for thinking about it. Surely an unfair characterization given such a cursory overview, but I've read a lot of other pomo stuff (not gender related), and I honestly feel weary at the thought of reading more. Biased, yes, but there it is.


ETA: we shouldn't fault a discipline for using arcane language. I don't expect to understand medical journals. I do expect a doctor to explain the upshot to me. Hopefully this thread will provide some upshots.

 

[Matt the Poet]

Buckaroo - I could do the same thing by selecting a random paragraph from a cosmology text. Like any other specialised discipline, cultural theory has it's own terminology.

From my (admittedly amateur) understanding of the field, the first passage seems restating the fairly common point that attempts to divide any social or cultural milieu into two (male/female, gay/straight etc.) always generate awkward 'in between' states (transgender, bi) that demolish said division. I'm presuming that the 'machinic catalysis' that does this is described earlier in the passage.

The second sounds like its from one of Deleuze's texts on cinema - he's trying to describe the difficult business of how we synthesise different shots into a narrative - how we 'read', for example, the Odessa steps sequence, which is essentially a series of 'singularities', into some coherent whole and decide what its trying to tell us. But again, without context I could be wrong - just as I could be wrong in trying to reconstruct an entire Nature paper from the methods paragraph.

 

[volatile]

And that's my problem with pomo. I've never seen any that tries to ground itself in facts, instead it gets lost in supposition. There is no 'thing' called happiness, nor can we exactly define it; that does not render it a fiction or a construction.

That's precisely it. In the absence of empirically measurable substance, or a methodology through which to empirically test certain things, we need a philosophically reasonable way to approach these kinds of questions. Post-modernism is one such approach. Here you seem to be castigating postmodernism for failing to provide something it never set out to provide in the first place. Butler makes no claims as to the empirically-testable nature of gender, but such as this is currently untestable she provides a cogent, coherent and well-argued account which helps all of us come to an understanding of the problematising of gender identity that transsexuals demonstrate, as well as a rational case for how society might change to cope with this.

Matt the Poet pointed something similar out earlier on - too heavy a reliance on something like biology could be interpreted to sanction things like rape, and we need a non-empirical way of thinking through why this might not be the best way of living as human beings.

Postmodernism is just a perspective, a way of looking, a set of metaphors and methods of illustrating how relationships function. It doesn't make testable truth claims, but nor should it be criticised for it.

I have no idea if gender (in the feminist/Butler sense) is biologically based, and if so, to what extent. But reading about Butler (which is different from reading Butler, I admit), doesn't make me want to turn to her as a source for thinking about it. Surely an unfair characterization given such a cursory overview, but I've read a lot of other pomo stuff (not gender related), and I honestly feel weary at the thought of reading more. Biased, yes, but there it is.

So you'll happily judge it without making an attempt to understand it, and then when someone suggest something which might help you in this task, you reject it out of hand? You'd accuse a woo of hypocrisy and closed-mindedness if they did the same regarding a scientific subject. It's shame.

I personally have problems with Butler's conception of transseuality, and wrote as much in my MA thesis. But it's undeniable that things which have entered the common vernacular, such as the oft-repeated contention that transsexuals were "born in the wrong body", come directly out of the postmodern thinking of the 60s and 70s.

ETA: we shouldn't fault a discipline for using arcane language. I don't expect to understand medical journals. I do expect a doctor to explain the upshot to me. Hopefully this thread will provide some upshots.

Indeed. I wholeheartedly agree.

 

[roger]

So you'll happily judge it without making an attempt to understand it, and then when someone suggest something which might help you in this task, you reject it out of hand? You'd accuse a woo of hypocrisy and closed-mindedness if they did the same regarding a scientific subject. It's shame.

Huh? I said I don't have time to pursue this in depth at this exact moment, and I shared with you the results of my earlier attempts. And I specifically said it would be unfair of me to characterize it as being X or Y based on such a cursory overview.

I'll address the rest of your post later, I'm not ignoring it.

ETA: to be clear, I don't have time to go buy, read the book, reread this thread, and respond constructively and thoughtfully. I hope that doesn't preclude my chatting in a discussion that interests me, and that was at one point of my life the bane of my existance.

 

[jon]

One rather obvious example is the decoupling of sex and gender which has allowed us to understand transexuality more sympathetically. Without post-modern works on this question, such as Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, there would not have been the social climate from which the Gender Recognition Bill could have emerged. This Bill will be enacted into law in the next parliamentary session.

Part of my concern about discussing 'postmodernism' is that most of the more interesting people called postmodernists wouldn't agree with the description. E.g. Butler is very critical (in Feminists Theorise the Political) of the “gesture of conceptual mastery that groups together a set of positions under the postmodern”.

If you want to argue that someone's work, or a body of ideas, are useful or are meaningless bollocks, fair enough. I'm not sure that lumping together a whole load of different people (who don't necessarily agree with one another) into a group, and then using a piece of jargon that many of them don't like to name a group that many or most of the supposed members don't see as a group, is helpful.

 

[roger]

What is a "gesture of conceptual mastery"?