Postmodernism

[drkitten]

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.

Yes, precisely. And we can point out some fairly direct, useful, and "obvious" results of applying that mindset -- the list was provided in the post to which you respond.

Can you compile a similar list for postmodernism? "The experimental technique, led by a skeptical mindset, discoverd these things: [INSERT LIST HERE]."

Now, try this. "The [INSERT ADJECTIVE HERE] technique, led by a postmodern mindset, discovered these things : [INSERT LIST HERE]."

In my experience with postmodernism, neither the adjective nor the list can actually be inserted. You suggested that "equal work for equal pay" and "no scientific truth can be proven absolutely" were two elements of that list, but a deeper investigation into the historical record show that they weren't.

Similarly, some of the more hysterical wing-nuts in postmodernism have suggested that special "ways of knowing" should produce new insights unavailable except through "feminist science" (or some such gibberish). I've never seen a convincing list of such insights; I've rarely seen a list at all (convincing or not).

 

[Matt the Poet]

What is a "gesture of conceptual mastery"?

Stab in the dark here but could it possibly be a gesture that demonstrates mastery over concepts?

Oh, and Simonmaal - I'm not ignoring you. I'm sniffing around Gergen (KJ, I presume, rather than David...) so that I can provide an informed response.

 

[jon]

What is a "gesture of conceptual mastery"?

What I'd read Butler as writing about is the idea that - by talking about 'postmodernism', and lumping a whole load of theorists under that term - one could give the impression of understanding a whole range of diverse ideas and concepts, without engaging with the nitty gritty of these different ideas, approaches, etc. One could thus claim to have mastered and dealt with a concept of 'postmodernism' (or to have found that 'postmodernism' is unreadable nonsense) without engaging with the positions of the different theorists you'd place under that term.

Butler's writing could be clearer, but this from the preceding paragraph might (or might not) help put the idea of a 'gesture of conceptual mastery' into context:

the ’whole’, the field of postmodernism in its supposed breath, is effectively ‘produced’ by the example which is made to stand as a symptom and exemplar of the whole; in effect, if in the example of Lyotard we think we have a representation of postmodernism, we have then forced a substitution of the example for the entire field, effecting a violent reduction of the field to the one piece of text the critic is willing to read, a piece which, conveniently, uses the term ‘postmodern’.”

Did I mention that Butler's writing could be clearer

 

[roger]

Stab in the dark here but could it possibly be a gesture that demonstrates mastery over concepts?

I wasn't being disingenuous.

 

[Matt the Poet]

Now, try this. "The [INSERT ADJECTIVE HERE] technique, led by a postmodern mindset, discovered these things : [INSERT LIST HERE]."

Or this: The [INSERT ADJECTIVE HERE] technique, led by a feministmindset, discovered these things : [INSERT LIST HERE].

Trying to complete this sentence is equally meaningless - are you seriously suggesting that this makes feminism worthless?

 

[drkitten]

Or this: The [INSERT ADJECTIVE HERE] technique, led by a feministmindset, discovered these things : [INSERT LIST HERE].

Trying to complete this sentence is equally meaningless - are you seriously suggesting that this makes feminism worthless?

Quite the contrary; I specifically claim that completing that sentence is meaningful (with one minor emendation).

For example, the political process, led by a feminist mindset, discovered that granting women the right to vote, the right to own and control property, and the right to control their own fertility did not produce substantial negative impact on society.

In other words, feminism is specifically not worthless because of the positive results of the feminist mindset to which I can point.

No corresponding list exists for "postmodernism." Ergo, no corresponding proof exists that postmodernism is not useless.

 

[roger]

What I'd read Butler as writing about is the idea that - by talking about 'postmodernism', and lumping a whole load of theorists under that term - one could give the impression of understanding a whole range of diverse ideas and concepts, without engaging with the nitty gritty of these different ideas, approaches, etc. One could thus claim to have mastered and dealt with a concept of 'postmodernism' (or to have found that 'postmodernism' is unreadable nonsense) without engaging with the positions of the different theorists you'd place under that term.

Thanks, that's along the lines I was guessing.

Her phrase seems absolutely laden with assumptions, assumptions I don't buy. When I speak of a "poet", I mean just that. "Ah, just what" replies the eager pomo. I'm not so unsophisticated to get what the pomoist means, of course. We've had arguments about what is art, what is a poem, etc., on here, and they are enjoyable and worthwhile questions. Nontheless, if I take something that Wallace Stevens wrote and showed it to 1000 basically literate people, I predict confidently that they would correctly label it as "poem" or "article", depending on which it is, with a matching success rate of at least 99%. I also acknowledge that we could find "poets" whose writings couldn't be so easily categorized.

But I am not "gesturing", I am not assuming "mastery", nor am I blinded to the implications of what the limitations of the word "poem" can convey. I'm just using a word very usefully. Wallace Stevens wrote poems. It's merely a statement identifying one of the things Stevens did. If someone hasn't heard of him, well, know they have a slightly better understanding of what he did. Likewise, acknowledging that a group of writers took on various concepts that we can broadly trace to people like Lacan, Derrida, et al is not a particularly difficult idea to grasp. Nothing in that statement assumes that they all think the same thing, attacked the same problems, etc.


In short, I absolutely don't buy her position. We aren't grouping writers together as a "gesture of conceptual mastery", we are just trying to talk about something in a useful way. Volatile and others feel we have something to learn from some of these people. So, giving Volatile the benefit of the doubt, we talk about them. We aren't being "violent", or anything else.

I'm sure I'll be told that "violent" is being taken out of context. All I can say to that is pomo texts are riddled with such language. violence, gestures, mastery, subjects, endless power metaphors, metaphors that I argue the pomo dragged in, not metaphors that they discovered in the text.

 

[Jekyll]

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.

A bit wordy, but I think I agree with you .

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!!!

But aren't we disagreeing here?

no matter how objective any piece of research is, there are no theory-free observations.

In comparison, I'm asserting that there are theory free observations, or at least theory invariant observations. This idea is very important in science as it allows us to quantitatively evaluate different theories.

For example, we can make the objective assertion that: General Relativity is more accurate than Newtonian mechanics, which is at least as accurate and has greater predictive power* than those of the Babylonians.

*I don't know how good the Babylonians were but as they only worked out what was going on by counting, Newtonian mechanics almost certainly gives greater accuracy, and allows you to predict the movement of previously unobserved bodies.

 

[Matt the Poet]

Nontheless, if I take something that Wallace Stevens wrote and showed it to 1000 basically literate people, I predict confidently that they would correctly label it as "poem" or "article", depending on which it is, with a matching success rate of at least 99%. I also acknowledge that we could find "poets" whose writings couldn't be so easily categorized.

But I am not "gesturing", I am not assuming "mastery", nor am I blinded to the implications of what the limitations of the word "poem" can convey.

Ah - but what you are doing, interestingly, is agreeing that a poem can only, ultimately, be defined as 'something we all tend to agree is a poem' - which is quite a postmodern position in itself.

Likewise, acknowledging that a group of writers took on various concepts that we can broadly trace to people like Lacan, Derrida, et al is not a particularly difficult idea to grasp. Nothing in that statement assumes that they all think the same thing, attacked the same problems, etc.

Lacan was a psychoanalyst. Derrida was...well, that's a whole other argument in itself but personally I'd call him a philosopher. I'm sure people have tried to tie them together but I bet it's a pretty tortuous ride, and not a very fertile one - indeed, the resulting abomination would show exactly the problem of trying to engage with 'that postmodern stuff' rather than differentiating between different writers.

 

[Buckaroo]

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.

You may be right, and it is entirely possible that I have let my perceptions be colored by rubbish like Irigaray's prater about feminist fluid dynamics, to the point where I reflexively throw out the wheat with the chaff. But I'm not sure. For one thing, the jargon-riddled writing that characterizes a scientific paper has a definite, concrete meaning, unlike much of the writing I've seen from PoMo sources, which seems to depend on equivication of meaning and shifting goalposts to produce any kind of argument at all.

I will add, though, that my impressions have been formed mostly through those writings where there is clear intellectual abuse going on. I remember one particularly infurating case (and the case that first lent me a jaundiced eye where capital "T" Theory was involved) from a course on Holocaust literature, where we were studying an essay that applied a Theoretical analysis to a factual account of a concentration camp survivor escaping the camp through a sewer network, with much literary importance being placed on aspects the event that were arbitrarily and simply how it actually happened. It's probable that I've been biased against this kind of stuff ever since.

And here I'm just going to reveal my ignorance, because it has never been clear to me just what cultural theory IS. Of course the conventional meaning of "theory" in the sciences is an explanatory conceptual framework, the accuracy of which can (in principle, anyway) be judged by comparison with the real world, and that can be used to make predictions. But what does in mean in THIS context? As near as I can tell, cultural theory doesn't "explain" anything, is far from being a unified framework ("feminist," "queer," "post-colonialist" etc. readings of a text all being equally valid), can't be judged for accuracy against any standard, and can make no predictions. So it must mean something else entirely, and must have completely different aims. But what are they? Could someone explain?

 

[roger]

Ah - but what you are doing, interestingly, is agreeing that a poem can only, ultimately, be defined as 'something we all tend to agree is a poem' - which is quite a postmodern position in itself.

Seems I remember this being addressed in Don Quixote and by the greeks. IOW, we don't disagree with some specific ideas that ideas are, well, ideas, and fit inexactly when draped over physical reality. What we resist, is, well, let's look at your next paragraph...

Lacan was a psychoanalyst. Derrida was...well, that's a whole other argument in itself but personally I'd call him a philosopher. I'm sure people have tried to tie them together but I bet it's a pretty tortuous ride, and not a very fertile one - indeed, the resulting abomination would show exactly the problem of trying to engage with 'that postmodern stuff' rather than differentiating between different writers.

There's no point in a dictionary battle. So let's stipulate your point. Rename the thread, "Lacan et al". I hereby retract my violent gestures, I mean, typing "postmodern".

This is what Lacan had to say about an erect penis: ". . is equivalent to the sqrt(-1) of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1)."

Nonsense. This is gibberish, in context.

Specific things that Butler (I'm not calling her a pomo, note) said, such as the things above: Nonsense. Either gibberish, or trivial to show wrong.

Now, if you want to play the label game, you can, but some of us won't play.

IOW, I have read a lot of authors who would be "masterfully gestured" as PoMos. It was my job to write an annotated bibliography of this stuff at one point. I feel pretty confident I've read more of it than anyone else here, unless we have a PhD from a relevant department. And I'm saying it almost all sounds like a) nonsense b) trivially true statements, and c) statements trivially shown to be false. i got out of that racket around 1990 or so, so the author Volatile offered up is unread by me, so my assumptions about her work are very provisional, and admittedly colored by past experience. I sincerely hope Volatile or somebody can prove me wrong.

So let's not argue about what 'pomo' really means, and whether we can really call someone a pomo or not, and just realize we are talking about people and their writings. Surely we can do that?

 

[volatile]

Seems I remember this being addressed in Don Quixote and by the greeks. IOW, we don't disagree with some specific ideas that ideas are, well, ideas, and fit inexactly when draped over physical reality.

Indeed. And a certain set of ideas "which seem to be related by a laid-back pluralism of styles" may be termed "post-modern" - going back to the Oxford Companion of Philosophy definition I cited earlier. Post-modernism, as we're discussing it here (for all the inability to pin down what it might refer to eactly) is a thought-process, an approach (or set of approaches) and a way of thinking about the world.

This is what Lacan had to say about an erect penis: ". . is equivalent to the sqrt(-1) of the signification produced above, of the jouissance that it restores by the coefficient of its statement to the function of lack of signifier (-1)."

Nonsense. This is gibberish, in context.

I haven't read as much Lacan as I'd like, and whilst this is clearly odd for anyone who works with numbers, I'd like to know what "the signification produced above" is before I pass judgement. I have huge problems with Lacanian modes of thinking, and am happy to critique his ideas. That his thinking is both ontologically and empirically incorrect in a lot of ways I do not doubt, but this does not undermine postmodernism. Just as pointing out that a scientist is wrong doesn't undermine science, pointing out a post-modern theorist is wrong doesn't undermine post-modernism, such that it is.

Post-modernism is one approach in the dialogue that is philosophy. This dialogue has been carried on since the ancient world, and involves authors talking to each other and suggesting ways of looking at the world. Philosophy's a centuries-old conversation or a debate, every sentence of which must necessarily start with "I think that...", and post-modernism is one particular mindset within it.

Lacan says "desire is produced by lack", and this is because a, b and c". Deleuze says "No, I think desire is in itself a productive force, and this metaphor or model is a better way of looking at the world because of x, y and z". It's like a bawdy conversation in the pub that is humanity.

If science can provide a usefully empricial definition of desire, I'd love to hear it. All post-modernism does is drape one particular hue of idea over reality, as you put it, to allow people to get a grasp on it in ways hard science can't, and doesn't pretend to do.

IOW, I have read a lot of authors who would be "masterfully gestured" as PoMos. It was my job to write an annotated bibliography of this stuff at one point. I feel pretty confident I've read more of it than anyone else here, unless we have a PhD from a relevant department.

I'm halfway through a PhD which uses some theorists and approaches that may be termed "post-modern". Does that count?

And I'm saying it almost all sounds like a) nonsense b) trivially true statements, and c) statements trivially shown to be false.

Saying that gender and biological sex are separable is not a trivially true statement, nor is it nonsense or trivially shown to be false. This cannot be empirically tested.

Saying that a painting might not always "mean" what the author intended is not trvially true, nonsense nor trivially shown to be false. This cannot be empirically tested.

Questions of identity, or culture, or politics, or art or music cannot be easily determined empirically. Post-modernism is one particular subset of ways of examining issues in all these spheres. It posts ways of looking and ways of thinking that are interesting and enlightening. What's so wrong with that? I still don't quite see where all the ire comes from.

 

[volatile]

An aside:

I tend to think of these particular philosophers as tools to help crack problems. They provide frameworks and models which might help produce a more nuanced understanding of a particular question.

In my case, I'm trying to investigate, or describe, how people's sense of embodiment changes when they transformatively engage with their bodies, and I find some of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas useful in trying to do this. This is something that, at the moment, cannot be defined scientifically.

How people relate to their bodies, and how people relate to other people's bodies, is something that neuroscience, sociology and psychology can look at and perhaps quantify, but only philosophy can try and describe in such a way that it is useful. The criticisms levelled at post-modernism in this thread thus far are probably equally applicable to all of philosophy - especially that it makes claims that cannot be "proven" - but that does not mean we should ignore the wonderful insights that people like Russell or Spinoza or, yes, Butler and Kristeva, might provide.

 

[volatile]

No corresponding list exists for "postmodernism." Ergo, no corresponding proof exists that postmodernism is not useless.

I just posted one.

The post-structuralist technique, led by a postmodern mindset, discovered these things : that people with penises don't always identify with the label "boy", leading to the Gender Recognition Bill and a broad cultural acceptance of transexuality.

If we hadn't had cultural theorists pointing this out, you wouldn't be able to get gender reassignment surgery on the NHS, and a large number of people would currently be desperately unhappy, or dead.

 

[Buckaroo]

An aside:

I tend to think of these particular philosophers as tools to help crack problems. They provide frameworks and models which might help produce a more nuanced understanding of a particular question.

In my case, I'm trying to investigate, or describe, how people's sense of embodiment changes when they transformatively engage with their bodies, and I find some of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas useful in trying to do this. This is something that, at the moment, cannot be defined scientifically.

How people relate to their bodies, and how people relate to other people's bodies, is something that neuroscience, sociology and psychology can look at and perhaps quantify, but only philosophy can try and describe in such a way that it is useful. The criticisms levelled at post-modernism in this thread thus far are probably equally applicable to all of philosophy - especially that it makes claims that cannot be "proven" - but that does not mean we should ignore the wonderful insights that people like Russell or Spinoza or, yes, Butler and Kristeva, might provide.

You're making an awful lot of sense... are you SURE you're a postmodernist?

*Sigh.* Oh, all right, maybe I'll rethink my preconceptions...

 

[roger]

I'm halfway through a PhD which uses some theorists and approaches that may be termed "post-modern". Does that count?

Probably. Not a dick swinging contest, just making the point I'm not coming at this from a point of "never read it, and not gonna".

Okay, so you find value in PoMo. Some of the concepts we have discussed interest me, so you'll hear no quibble about that. But it still gets to the traction I've been unable to achieve. You stated

Questions of identity, or culture, or politics, or art or music cannot be easily determined empirically. Post-modernism is one particular subset of ways of examining issues in all these spheres. It posts ways of looking and ways of thinking that are interesting and enlightening. What's so wrong with that? I still don't quite see where all the ire comes from.

The ire comes from the seemingly purposeful attempt to write without clarity, to use muddled ideas. Note I do not in any way extend this to you; I think you are writing mostly very clearly.

So... the results. You said

In my case, I'm trying to investigate, or describe, how people's sense of embodiment changes when they transformatively engage with their bodies, and I find some of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas useful in trying to do this. This is something that, at the moment, cannot be defined scientifically.

Would you share what you have found so far? I'll state in advance that I have no idea what "people's sense of embodiment changes" or how one would "transformatively engage with their bodies" - I hope you'll take that not as an attack but a genuine statement of my confusion.

We (the public, not me and you) have had many public discussions on transgendered people and issues in the news. These conversations seem substative and important to me. There seems to be no need whatsoever for the convoluted writing style used in pomo. But, there is a difference between jibberish and jargon. I have no idea what thromboembolic meningoencephalitis means, but I have no doubt rolfe or somebody could clue me in. They could also go on and tell me why they use that term, a common term for it if it exists, why that common term might be confusing or limiting, how the condition is treated, ad nauseum. I currently have zero chance of understanding a sentence in which it is used, but that deficiency can be quickly changed.

So far, we are saying, every time a thread has come up on this topic, it just sort of goes round and round. "it's a useful lens through which to view the world". But actual examples just seem to go missing.

For example. I'm sure you are familiar with New Criticism. I shall demonstrate what a description of NC that I would love to read about PoMo: NC tried to read the text by ignoring everything external to the text - no biographies, no knowledge of history, culture, etc. This style of criticism was prominant in the early 20th century. It had its strengths and weaknesses. For example, if we examine the early imagist poetry of Stevens, circa 1920's, we are drawn to his imaginative use of language to evoke sounds, paintings, and other sensations based perceptions. NC allows us to consider these things in depth without getting confused about issues like how Stevens' mother treated him, surely an incidental issue to his use of tone and color in language. Consider, for example, "Anecdote of the Jar". This poem in itself practically states the NC viewpoint and it's antithesis - we can consider the object as itself, not in relation to it's surroundings. The poem also draws our attention to the limits of NC. The jar doesn't just sit on the hill - we are effected by it, by by being affected by it we reinterpret the landscape. NC avoids considering that, and thus misses much that is part of the poem.

Okay, you may hate that write up, but I did it off the top of my head after not thinking much about NC for 15 years, but I hope you feel it was reasonably lucid and tried to make a point. If I worked just a bit harder, I could give a more specific NC reading of the poem, and contrast it with a non-NC version, say, by reading Stevens' letters and relaying what he said about the poem, or what he was doing at the time of composition, etc. We could draw a conclusion that this reading or that was more illuminating to us, or that they were both illuminating, but just in different ways. Personally, I like NC readings, but not to the exclusion of biographical or historical approaches. I feel pretty clear that not only you, but anyone can understand what I am saying about NC even if they had never heard about it before.

But we are all still confused about PoMo.

 

[Matt the Poet]

unlike much of the writing I've seen from PoMo sources, which seems to depend on equivication of meaning and shifting goalposts to produce any kind of argument at all.

That’s because if you’re a serious critical thinker, and you’re trying to get across the idea that the whole process of using language is compromised by underlying social and cultural assumptions (which is a pretty standard ‘postmodern’ viewpoint), then the fact that you have to use language to do this places you in something of a bind.

So what you do is continually hedge your bets, undermine your own assumptions, keep making it clear that you’re never really quite saying what you’re saying. You end up walking a tightrope – make things too clear and you’ll end up importing meanings you didn’t want, but make them too murky and nobody understands you.

Granted, many theorists tend to fall off the tightrope in the latter direction,
but my point is that papers in postmodern journals are not like scientific papers. They aren’t designed to impart a small and exquisitely well-delineated bolus of knowledge in such a way that it can be assimilated by a peer group with a shared vocabulary.

Think of them more like ‘performances’ – you don’t judge a play as really good because you know more about the world than when you went in, but because you’re looking at the world you do know in a different way. Similarly, a good postmodernist text will take some hitherto unexamined assumption in your brain and blow it wide open. It will make you think about the machinery that lies underneath what you are reading, writing and saying.

with much literary importance being placed on aspects the event that were arbitrarily and simply how it actually happened.

No they weren’t. They were a description of ‘how it actually happened’ put into language. Possibly even translated from one language into another. And to say that how language is used to describe an event can bias the reader’s perception of said event is pretty much a truism. Imagine if that passage had been translated into another language by a holocaust denier – its sense would doubtless be very different from the one you encountered.

As near as I can tell, cultural theory doesn't "explain" anything, is far from being a unified framework ("feminist," "queer," "post-colonialist" etc. readings of a text all being equally valid), can't be judged for accuracy against any standard, and can make no predictions. So it must mean something else entirely, and must have completely different aims. But what are they? Could someone explain?

The different readings of the text as you describe them above are all done according to the same basic argument which, by my understanding, goes something like this:

‘Any text (by which is meant any cultural product at all – TV ads, multi-storey car parks and fast food menus count, as do factual accounts of holocaust survival) are produced by people who live in a particular culture. These people will have a particular relationship – unconscious or conscious, agreeable or adversarial – with the raft of assumptions and ideas that comprise said culture. That relationship will be reflected, to a greater or lesser extent, in the texts they produce – and investigating the ways in which that reflection happens tells us interesting stuff about how individuals respond to their culture and vice versa.’

Hence, doing a ‘queer theory’ reading of Jane Austen doesn’t (as many outraged anti-pomos insist) mean suggesting that either Jane Austen or Lizzie Bennett were secretly gay. It means looking at how her novels treat same-sex relationships, asking whether they confirm or subvert the prejudices of her time and ours. Do a ‘Marxist’ reading and you look at economic relations, a ‘feminist’ reading will mine out power relationships between genders etc. etc.

Hope that's vaguely helpful...

 

[Achán hiNidráne]

You think postmodern bunk applied to science is weird? I knew a guy online who was convinced that he could use "feminist theories" to support his woo beliefs. Apparently science is too 'phallic" to accept the plain reality of the supernatural, or some such.

If you think that's bad, look up the term "logocentric" sometime.

 

[Matt the Poet]

Or, indeed, 'phallogocentric'

 

[Achán hiNidráne]

Or, indeed, 'phallogocentric'

Don't forget Europhallologocentric.