This idea of de-privileging any one meaning
Thanks to Terry Glavin, I saw this postmodernist article on postmodernism, by one Edward Docx. Now there’s a postmodern nym. Let’s all change our names to App.
It’s too stinking long (shouldn’t pomo articles on pomo be wittily short? or do I mean ironically short?) so I might cut it up into bits. Or I might just say one bitty thing and leave it at that. Who knows. That’s postmodern.
Postmodernism was a high-energy revolt, an attack, a strategy for destruction. It was a set of critical and rhetorical practices that sought to destabilise the modernist touchstones of identity, historical progress and epistemic certainty.
Or, to put it another way, it was a set of conceited goons in literature departments who thought they had invented everything simply because they didn’t know very much. Like, for instance, that “epistemic certainty” was not a “modernist touchstone.”
Philosophical skepticism has been around for a good deal longer than postmodernism, and the difficulties of “epistemic certainty” were not discovered in 1960.
So, let’s now turn with a little more confidence to the quagmire of sociology, politics and philosophy—Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault and so on…There are two important points. First, that postmodernism is really an attack not just on the dominant narrative or art forms but rather an attack on the dominant social discourse. All art is philosophy and all philosophy is political. And the epistemic confrontation of postmodernism, this idea of de-privileging any one meaning, this idea that all discourses are equally valid, has therefore lead to some real-world gains for humankind. Because once you are in the business of challenging the dominant discourse, you are also in the business of giving hitherto marginalised and subordinate groups their voice.
Like the Taliban. Like al-Shabaab. Like child-raping priests. Like the BJP. Like the Tea Party. Once you think that “all discourses are equally valid,” you’ve relinquished the tools you need to argue that some discourses are wrong and bad and harmful. Hooray; rejoice in the play of the signifier.
If all discourses are equally valid, then pomo does not get to be priviledged over its predecessors. It can’t destroy anything because it just joins the pantheon that existed before it. It can’t claim that it is better than anything without contradicting itself.
My very limited understanding of pomo leads me to believe that some few things were improved after re-evaluation. There were / are some cases where a dominant view is overshadowing other valid views and some ideas were wrongly marginalized or ignored.
Their biggest mistake (and this is a common error by folks who shift paradigms) was to extrapolate their specific success to a universal truth and insist that everything else was wrong in all areas of knowledge and experience.
For example, the laws of physics and the rules of logic and mathematics are not relative. They are true for everyone, everywhere and not because of western-european-imperalist-materialist-atheist domination. They are, however, subject to change and improvement as “we” gather new evidence and develop better models of reality.
Some instruction manuals seem to be written (or at least translated) with the idea in mind of de-privileging the meaning that would result in the proper operation of the items with which they came…..
If “all discourses are equally valid” then what reason is there for giving “hitherto marginalised and subordinate groups their voice”?
Hmmm. I am as ill-disposed toward postmodernism as you, OB, but nevertheless on one prominent conception of modernity, it begins with Descartes and in the Cartesian tradition (still alive and well in some now admittedly diminished quarters, but certainly not all that diminished in the 1960’s), epistemic certainty is a touchstone….
This is my (also limited) understanding as well. There’s certainly value in attempting to deconstruct a work of literature to try and tease out its political, philosophical, historical, etc. underpinnings. And in recognizing that those underpinnings can be arbitrary, the results of historical accidents, say. I think pomo helped literature outside the Canon, especially stuff by marginalized groups, begin to be taken a bit more seriously.
But…yeah, they overstepped, big time. The Sokal hoax showed that, beautifully.
BTW I once got into an argument on Facebook with a grad student in Philosophy who was cheerfully proclaiming his love of some pomo philosopher (I forget who). Student said something like, “I don’t know what he’s saying half the time and I pretty sure he doesn’t either, but he says it so beautifully!”
That made me feel all stabby. And for the record, I was an English major.
Stacy, ditto. That’s all right for a certain kind of poetry, but philosophy? No
Karl – there’s a prominent conception of modernity – just modernity, modernity as such – that says it begins with Descartes? Really? And it’s prominent enough that educated readers in general – Prospect-reading types – can be expected to understand “modernity” that way?
I can see saying that of some kind of adjectival modernity (or modernism), but not the naked kind. But maybe I’m wrong. (I gots no epistemic certainty.)
Postmodernism(or the “Naked Emperor conjecture”)..”a strategy for destruction” definitely, self destruction. Does this mean that postmodernism is finally disappearing? I’ll miss such marvellously entertaining fantasies as the equation of the penis with imaginary numbers and the ‘privileged’, or is it “sexed”, speed of light.
Even advertizing copy writers don’t garble science as much as the postmodernists.
Thanks Ophelia.
It’s that separate discourses that puts one ill at ease as to what may or may not have been immeasurably affected for the better.
This isn’t quite in the same nastiness ballpark with the above, but don’t forget Steve Fuller, postmodernist flag flying proudly, testifying on behalf of the creationist school board in Kitzmiller and arguing that IDiocy should be taught in public schools to provide it with “affirmative action” to challenge that old dominant paradigm, evolution.
Hey, that’s one thing I can be proud of my profession for, right? We (personified here by Judge Jones) have no time for such nonsense.
What not Bruce said: why privilege intelligibility?
Here’s something I wrote in a programme note a few years ago, when I conducted a performance of Beethoven’s Mass in C.
My point is, is this “political”? If any of you have ever tried to compose a piece of music you will know that after the first few bars the music takes over. It does what it does and it says what it says and there comes a point when one is simply writing the notes, or pondering what notes would be best given x and y. The integrity of the music is something very different from any doctrine or philosophy, and there is even a sense in which it is completely independent of any words one might happen to be setting. The music says something…but does one know, can one say, what it is saying? I think that any art not tied to words produces exigencies of its own. Does that mean that such art is less “valid” or “relevant”? To say something in a language which has no meaning that can be tied to words, that has its own logic — even, perhaps, its own message?
I have recently discovered the piano sonatas of Clementi. Odd thing to say for a piano teacher, perhaps, but the repertoire is so big and it’s so easy to lose people. But what the hell, it’s a great discovery. They are wonderful music. I have no idea what they are saying, but I do know that they say it very well.
Sorry, completely irrelevant. Just needed to say it. As you were.
Quite right, Rieux. Judge Jones, Republican, Bush appointee. One felt like sending him a case of champagne.
Why? It’s only discourse, after all. Why should marginalised voices be more valid? Why should anyone privilege one voice rather than another?
I am glad, proud to travel in intellectual circles where “solipsistic” is an insulting adjective.
That is all.
@GordonWillis
Well, it doesn’t say they are more valid. It says they’re equally valid.
Yes, but if they are all equally valid why listen to any of them? What is so good about letting marginalised people speak if what they say is no more valid than what anybody else says? It’s like saying “so what?” to everybody.
Yeah, if everything everyone writes is equally valid there are no literary standards any more. Barbara Cartland is as much worth reading and deconstructing as Will Self. (Come to think of it her stuff might be fun to deconstruct. But you’d have to read her to do it–bummer.)
I think the abandonment of literary standards was one of the fears the critics of pomo had. Don’t know enough about the postmodernists themselves to know how they addressed the point. Literature has survived, though.
Stacy: Literature has survived, but literature departments have been irreparably harmed. They’re cesspools of self-important, self-indulgent gits* whose work sullies and demeans not just their own field, but all of the humanities and academia itself to some degree. Postmodernist idiocy is high-octane fuel for the already too-raging fires of anti-intellectualism in the U.S.
*Not universally, of course. Many individuals, and some departments, still exhibit intellectual integrity.
Unfortunately the meanings teased out have sometimes been meanings that were not put in there by the authors in the first place…..
BTW (personal irritation warning here….) the past participle of lead is led not lead – which is a heavy metal
that doesn’t make any sense. Or, I guess it would, if you didn’t listen to the dominant narrative, either, which is pretty much impossible unless you were raised by wolves and still live as a hermit somewhere. It’s the reverse of the church and state thing: the choices are to promote none or promote all equally, but since it’s not possible to promote no narratives in this case, it’s necessary to give the narratives of marginalized people a chance and a stage to be heard, to even the playing field. That’s what, for example, a lot of feminist “consciousness raising” is about. That’s what this whole thing about bringing more diversity to the atheist & skeptic movements, currently dominated by white straight older dudes, is about.
what it is shitty phrasing (possibly from fuzzy thinking). it’s not that the narratives of marginalized people are equally valid as the narratives of the socially dominant demographic; it’s that they’re no less likely to be valid, and therefore accepting a mainstream and/or dominant narrative just because it’s the mainstream and/or dominant narrative is invalid (depending on the situation, it’s either an ad populum fallacy or an appeal to authority; or both)
I’ve no idea who these people are, but I find slacktivist’s deconstruction of “The Worst Book in the World” (Left Behind) to be immensely valuable. Good social analysis can be had from shitty literature, too :-p
Jadehawk, Cartland wrote romance novels. Will Self (contemporary) writes satiric fiction. No particular reason for me to pair them except they’re both English–herp derp :)
I agree. And I like that pomo helped tear down some of the walls separating “high” and “low”, “serious” and “pop” culture.
(O/T) Ever read Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle? MA does a pretty neat (and very funny) deconstruction of Harlequin-type romancers in that (decidedly good) comic novel!
Must read slacktivist’s take on Left Behind–thanx
The real issue is that concluding that you cannot conclude that all positions are equally valid from the premise that validity can be measured only from a point of view, and no objective standard can exist to judge those points of view. Your premise doesn’t lead to the conclusion that all positions are equally valid, it leads to the conclusion that the form of validity in the phrase “equally valid” is a stupid concept.
Its like…
Suppose that many people believed that the best political candidate was the one with the most Quarmokishness. They have a bunch of beliefs about Quarmokishness, argue at length about which candidates have more of it, and make decisions based upon this idea.
Then some philosophers and scientists come along and prove that Quarmokishness is an internally inconsistent concept, and doesn’t exist.
If you conclude from this that all candidates have equal Quarmokishness, so there’s no reason to prefer any one to any other, you’re being a moron.
It may be true that because there is no such thing as Quarmokishness, everyone is equally possessed of none of a nonexistent thing. But nothing flows from that. The same proof that demonstrated that also demonstrated that Quarmokishness isn’t a standard of judgment. So… stop making judgments based on the fact that everyone has an equal amount of none of it. That clearly isn’t relevant.
That’s the same place postmodernism gets when it purports to prove that every perspective is equally valid. The type of validity being discussed is nonexistent. It can’t serve as a standard of judgment. So the fact that everyone has the same amount of it doesn’t matter.
My first sentence has a typo from being rewritten without proper editing while I was tired. It should have read,
The real issue is that you cannot conclude that “all positions are equally valid” from the premise that “validity can be measured only from a point of view, and no objective standard can exist to judge those points of view.”
OMG what have I wrought; there’s a distinct chance of not seeing Stacy for about a month (assuming of course she likes it), considering the length of that series, heheh
Jadehawk–O noes…so much to read, and they still haven’t invented an implant thingy so I can just download it into my brain!
BTW I realized why I thought of Will Self (who’s very good–I meant him in opposition to Cartland, hope that was clear)–he wrote a book about a present-day em ar ay* whose bitter journal becomes the basis of a religion in the future. It’s called The Book of Dave.
* Just trying to avoid getting certain firestarting acronyms on the Google radar.
added to Teh Neverending Reading List
Docx quotes Philip Johnson’s artistic collaborator Judith Grinberg about their transition from modernism to postmodernism:
That confuses me on two points:
1) Between a modern glass box and a postmodern Chippendale, I’m not judging either style to be good or bad, I’m just skeptical which style is attempting an illusion. From Le Corbusier, I thought the box was just supposed to be a box.
2) About money and power, a Google search on “Philip Johnson” and “whore” returns quotes from Johnson like, “I am a whore and I am paid very well for high-rise buildings.” And he said that late in his postmodern career. Again, I’m not saying either style is good or bad, I’m just skeptical which style is more about money and power.
Ceci n’est pas une chaise.
no idea what the two were talking about, but a lot of post-modernist art stripped away the illusion (“art for art’s sake” and other aspects of “avant-garde”), not the “power and money” part, and meant it that way, too. So Johnson’s quotes would be entirely consistent, if that’s the direction he went with his postmodernism
I think it’s important to distinguish between postmodern art and postmodernism as a philosophy, especially when it delved into epistemology. Postmodern art has brought us Ballard and Burroughs and Philip K. Dick and Pulp Fiction and Spiral Jetty.
The problem with postmodern philosophy, though, was that it took these thought experiments and mash-ups and reformulated them as if they were the fundamental bedrock of reality. If all science is political, then it should be possible to determine whether the crystalline structure of NaCl leans more to Republicans or Democrats.
As for epistemological uncertainty, that was already explored *by scientists* from about 1905 onwards, and the exploration by scientists was orders of magnitude more subtle, sophisticated, readable, and useful than anything that came out of an English or Sociology department from any of the postmodern schools.
1. People of all races should be treated as equal in their entitlements under the law.
It is difficult to see how anyone could argue otherwise, except on the most arbitrary grounds.
2. But all cultures are not equal. Some are better than others in particular aspects.
I think that the vendors of pomo have great trouble with reconciling 1 and 2.
Some particular cultures are better than particular others in just about every aspect.
3. Tortuous language is commonly a smokescreen for quackery. Ben Jonson portrayed this very well in The Alchemist, but the idea is probably much older. Translated out of its verbiage and into more basic equivalent propositions, pomo becomes trite. Which is no doubt what its vendors are afraid of.
People who buy it and hire its vendors (like university hierarchs) generally do so using other peoples’ money. Rarely their own.
Ophelia:
I first read that definition from Stephen Toulmin’s Cosmopolis. He thought that certainty or the quest for it be it religious or scientific was something that defines modernity. I don’t know if it’s prominent.
Stephen Toulmin…one of those names I recognize, but without any accompanying adjectives.
If he thinks the quest for certainty is scientific, he’s clueless.
Ah! A philosopher. I think I did his obit for TPM, actually.
Descartes is definitely part of the early modern period, and the modernists are sometimes credited with giving birth to epistemology as a separate branch of philosophical inquiry. The quest for apodeictic certainty is supposedly a modern thing. And a unique branch of skepticism starts with Descartes. So to that extent, the quoted author does not have idiosyncratic views.
But for sure, philosophical skepticism is as old as philosophy. If we (plausibly) think skepticism is about epistemology, not metaphysics, then that might raise some legitimate doubts about whether or not epistemology really is a modern thing. History in general leaves a lot of room for interpretation, and the history of philosophy doubly so.
Off the top of my head, I only recall reading the name Toulmin from two contexts. First, being thoroughly cursed out by Kuhn on the subject of scientific revolutions. Second, as a proponent of casuistry in ethics. Neither doctrine struck me as persuasive. Actually, that’s not quite right — casuistry struck me as being batty. Oh well.
<blockquote>All art is philosophy and all philosophy is political.</blockquote>
When I read shit like that, I reach for my TP.
“Taking a shit is a political act.
Smoking it is even more political.”
–Hugh Romney, 2/9/73
I don’t have Toulmin’s book at hand and may have misrepresented/oversimlified his views. I read it a long time ago. I think he thought Descartes was influenced by the Thirty Years’ War and saw it as a failure of pluralism or something.
It’s also important to distinguish between the postmodern condition and postmodern philosophy. The former is defined by the experience of having all space and time laid out before the observer with no enforced distinction between any thing and any other – the default condition of the internet. That experience is the dominant experience of our time and of course every time has its philosophers for rent who will demonstrate that its dominant experience is the “fundamental bedrock of reality”. But then a generation grows up for which that dominant experience is just another part of reality and the philosophy starts to look as tawdry as it really is. Which I sincerely and non-ironically hope is happening right now.
A concrete example: hipsters may be defined by irony but they’re not postmodernists (or maybe they’re the true postmodernist) because they’re ironic about irony – they see it as both unavoidable and amusing but not serious. And while that attitude can lead to a descent into triviality it’s also entirely compatible with the idea that there’s serious stuff elsewhere. Why, for example, put so much effort into Wikipedia if you don’t believe there’s some sort of non-superficial truth you’re working towards.
Ah but is it hipsters who put so much effort into Wikipedia? Or postmodernists?
Can a nerd be a postmodernist? Or a hipster?
Surely not.
Or are postmodernists nerds who think they’re hipsters. That could be it.
I see poor old pomo is being blamed (at least in part) for the recent London riots, and the general state of degeneracy afflicting many western nations.
Truth is relative. So is justice.
;-)
<eyeroll>Yeah, because no one ever made up lame excuses for criminal behavior before the postmodernists provided the basis for all such excuses.</eyeroll>
Just ask Leopold and Loeb!
Mwimply woopforn.
Jadehawk, good, your general understanding about post-modernist art at #30 helped me sort out these points:
— Consistent with you, Docx’s article says how postmodernist art and architecture eventually valued commodity as an end in itself, since art and architecture were stripped of other values or meaning.
— Docx quoted architect Philip Johnson’s collaborator Judith Grinberg (in my blockquote at #29) as part of Docx’s storyline, to say that was irony to think they were getting away from statements of money and power.
— Independent of Docx’s storyline, now I see that the whole time (modern and postmodern), Philip Johnson spoke of the architect as a whore to mean that for a high-rise building to go forward, the corporate clients must agree. Johnson said that about the profession, not the style. Like a Hollywood producer warned a director: “It’s their money.”
Ceci n’est pas une Chippendale.
I’m not really sure why there’s a need for animus here, sub specie aeternitatis. Postmodern ideas are as much part of the evolution of late twentieth-century western culture, speaking anthropologically, as absolutism was to the C17, nationalism to the mid-C19, or scientific racism to the period 1880-1940. Each period clears out the baggage of what went before, and puts down new baggage for the next era to dispense with.
OTOH, if you really look at how hard-wired certain foundationalist ideas were in the [particularly] European Left up to the 1980s at least – in particular an unrepentant and ugly vanguardism based on ‘scientific socialism’ – then postmodernism did some real, ethical good in making, for example, identity-politics an issue.
Dave:
If my memory serves me well, identity politics (think anti-colonialism, anti-segregationism, anti-apartheid, feminism) all came before pomo, which was a later accretion. Or should that be excretion?
Pomo was, and its remnants still are, more about obscurantism and academic careerism than about explanation and enlightenment.
It has been like an epidemic mental illness in humanities departments of western universities. Always just one abstraction short of being a parody of itself, Sokal merely took it that one step further and tipped it over its own edge.
And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t put Pomo together again.
In short, it was glorified and pretentious bullshit, and an obstacle in the way of campaigns against genuine unjustified ‘privilege’.
A sortal of schizoanalytic and textual Modalities, shurely?
No, Ian, ‘it’ wasn’t. To take another example, if you had, as I have, waded through what was available to students in England to introduce them to the discipline of history c. 1990, which is to say EH Carr and Geoffrey Elton contesting over whether the one’s subliminal Marxism was more important than the other’s Gradgrindian Tory empiricism, with a side-dose of Arthur Marwick, JH Plumb and Herbert Butterfield all sticking up for solid, uncontestable narrative over anything that passed for interpretation, and all actively colluding to pretend that they were none of them engaged in actual active interpretation, and should all be taken as gospel – if, I say, that was the intellectual landscape available to you, as it was to most mainstream history undergraduates at the time; then someone like Keith Jenkins and his ‘postmodern’ insistence that history can be made to serve anyone’s purpose, and that should be recognised before you decide what you want it to do, was a thunderous explosion of new possibilities.
The fact that Jenkins went on to write basically the same book another half-dozen times, growing only more pessimistic each time with the point of it all, is irrelevant to the initial liberatory impact. Indeed, one could well argue that the historical profession in this country has already forgotten the debt it owes to such a ‘postmodern’ infusion. But at the time it made a real difference. Academically – which for some people is not at all, I appreciate.
That ‘pomo’ academia also produced a load of pointless shite is also uncontestable – but then an awful lot of pointless shite is produced in all the humanities disciplines, all the time, from every perspective. 90% of everything is crap.
Dave:
Noted.
A bit of legerdeshite here. I suggest that the percentages are not equal, and that Pomo academia produced far more than the usual academic output and more than its fair share of it.
Enthusiastic Christians have been known to get into contests with one another as to who is the most righteous. Hence the expression ‘holier than thou’. Just as an earlier generation of students of English literature learned that the name of the Eng. Lit. Crit. game was ‘spot the allusions’, so Pomo lured its adherents onto a never-ending treadmill of ‘spot the privilege/s’.
“More politically correct than thou’ was the morass that followed.
[Have to catch a plane now.]
Dave – really? C. 1990? That sounds awfully crude for that late. I managed to grasp (because I was taught) that history was interpretive in the late 60s – or even earlier, since I remember some comparative collections in secondary school. Was the UK really that far behind?
The distinction is between the assertion – as you find for example in EH Carr – that every historian has a bee in his [sic.] bonnet, and the claim – ditto – that nonetheless I am imparting the real truth… JH Plumb’s Death of the Past, for example, which was still one of the only handful of really influential ‘what is history’ texts in the late 80s, despite being 20 years old, goes out of its way to critique the misuse of history to conjure up ‘usable pasts’ for national or ideological purposes, while at the same time making an explicit claim for the capacity to construct a ‘proper’, ‘true’ historical account, if one just happens to agree with JH Plumb about everything that’s important.
One of the key passages in Jenkins’ Rethinking History [1991] is where he shows people like Marwick and EP Thompson making exactly the same claims to empirical veracity for their ideological positions, with exactly the same absence of real grounding. That’s the change that ‘pomo’ made possible, the break with the contest for foundations that was, in hindsight, ridiculous.
What’s worrying about history education in UK schools now is that it’s going backwards – to meet test targets kids are taught even less about historiography and interpretation than they ever were; and they’re encouraged to position ‘truth’ at the mid-point on a line between any two stated positions. But that’s another rant…
Ian, meanwhile, you can suggest what you like, but I will counter that the proportion of bollocks produced by, say, leading practitioners of eugenics, or Great Awakening theology, or Marxism-Leninism [as a Soviet college subject] were, taken out of their contexts, much higher than 90%. And you are conflating ‘pomo’ with the ‘culture wars’ in a way which opens a whole other can of fish… Hope you had a nice flight.
I interpret this to mean that the promoters of Pomo are not the world’s most outstanding vendors of bullshit: just up there with the best (sorry) worst of them. On that interpretation, point conceded.
Obviously, when both pomo and the culture wars are nested in parentheses, particular but so far unspecified interpretations or definitions of each are being called for. I await your further elaboration of this with interest.
Now I admit that I am not the world’s most eminent authority on Pomo. It is just that every bit of the stuff that I have read from those under its influence strikes me as pure banality dressed up and presented as profundity. (That is of course after its deverbosification and translation out of Pomoese.) It is also why its critics have such an easy time knocking the stuffing out of it. It is empty anyway.
Pomo, as far as I can see, is a bastard offspring of Marxism. Marx got some things wrong, but some things spot-on right. Like the role of ideology, which idea the Pomoists extended to the point of absurdity.
I don’t see how in any fairness, Marx can be blamed for the sins of the Lenin-Stalin gang (or the Maoists and their ilk for that matter). Marx and his writings have had in and of themselves a very positive influence on the modern world. But the Postmodernists are different. I cannot see any positive contribution they have made. But I may of course, be short of the full story, and stumbling around in the dark here.
In what way have they, or should they have, illuminated the world for me?
In what way have they made it a better planet?
Well, I guess it depends how much you value problematisation. If not at all, then in no way. Last time I looked, 99.9% of all human activity was not in any way making this a better planet. Ask a coral reef.
But if you’re going to claim that Marx, despite ‘Marxism’, is a cool dude, then I am entitled to riposte that Foucault, for example, despite ‘Foucaultianism’, is a cool dude. Like Marx, he should be read – and like Marx can be bloody heavy going. However, I would add that it’s really not a very productive exercise to tell us that Marx is good and pomo is bad. Nor is your claim to distinguish the master from his acolytes terribly convincing.
You have a basic triangle of elements in Marx’s writing, and in all that followed from it. One is a positive ethical commitment to human equality, the second is a conviction of foundational rectitude about the true essence of social interaction, and what political action should follow from that understanding, and the third is an absolutely scathing dismissal of any challenge to that rectitude. Out of the one came a great desire for positive change, but out of the other two came some of the very things that would turn that desire into a real social and political poison – if you read the way Marx himself treats opposition and disagreement, you can see very clearly the roots of ‘Marxism’ as an intolerant ideology. And that’s before you get into questions of whether some of his basic intellectual concepts, like the labour theory of value, are really just empty question-begging assertions.
Dave, your case might be a lot stronger (and more in line with the initial post) if you were able to show that problematization of history and society is done more effectively by postmodernists than by skeptics.
Skeptics?
Anyway, my ‘case’ is as strong as I want it to be, thanks. I’m just pointing out that there is a counter-argument to people who would say blithely that ‘all pomo is just nonsense’, especially when such people equally blithely assert that some other equally historically-situated ideological construct is just so much better.
Anyway, if you want a real laugh, you can go to the latest London Review of Books, where Zizek blathers about the recent English riots in a way that might be mistaken for postmodernism, if he didn’t get to the end, and in pretty much so many words, announce the need for a revolutionary vanguard party…
http://www.lrb.co.uk/2011/08/19/slavoj-zizek/shoplifters-of-the-world-unite
Skeptics. Especially skepticism who problematize testimony — Hume, for instance. If you think problematization is a benefit of some intellectual current, then you ought to at least try to distinguish postmodernists from skeptics. If you don’t want to do this, then you’re ignoring the point of the original post.
Mind you, I’m not a skeptic. I think the best work by the Whigs, Marxists, Tories, feminists, etc. are objective. I also think there are better and worse ways of doing social science. On the one hand, there’s the social science that responds to evidence from the other sciences by the use of reasons; on the other hand, there’s the social science that lampoons intellectual disagreements by treating them as if they were only a fight between children squabbling for attention. Ideology matters at lot, but it’s not every damn thing.
Since you mention it, I thought Zizek’s article was pretty good (minus the ominous final paragraph that you mentioned). I enjoyed that article in part because his critique of Marcusean repressive desublimation. Marcuse’s argument for repressive desublimation is only shades away from a theory of deindividuation. But a meta-analysis of the work in crowd psychology rejects deindividuation in crowd behavior. (Postmes, Tom; Russell Spears. “Deindividuation and Antinormative Behavior: A Meta-Analysis.” Psychological Bulletin (May 1998), 123 (3), pg. 238-259) Whether by accident or by design, Zizek is consistent with the science. Putting aside his crazy Stalinism, I give props to him for that.
Hmm, but I’ve read almost everything Z says on someone else’s blog in the last 2 weeks, minus the Stalinism… yet he gets ‘props’ [and a cheque] for bolting it together avec… Something wrong with that picture.
I like Zizek in part because he’s wacky and has a lively sense of humor, but mostly because every so often he makes a point in such a way that nobody else could. (This is my favorite example.) In this way, Zizek outpaces any postmodernist that comes to mind. e.g., I’ve only seen Derrida come close once, in a debate over human rights. But the thing is (IIRC), in order to talk about ethics, he basically had to say: forget all my deconstructionist stuff. Well, the rest of us say, fine by us, since we forgot to remember it.
That having been said, it’s not high praise for Zizek. Zizek is Puckish, so his output is uneven and his intent is largely just to get people to think about things by irritating them. e.g., his exchange with Julian Assange struck me as a ramble, an attempt to provoke only by playing with the meaning of bad words like ‘terrorism’. There may be some benefit to hearing that kind of cheeky semantic inversion in a public forum, just because it steals power from misused words by turning them into something banal and stupid. But I found it boring because it didn’t get at anything interesting; like an episode of the Outer Limits that has a brilliant cold open and a ridiculously contrived final act.
On his “Stalinism”, see here. It’s a matter of interpretation what he means when he calls himself a Stalinist. It could be trolling, or it could be the rants of a madman. Hard to say.
Dave:
And a merry Christmas to you, too.
As a dodge, I would give that perhaps 5/10. If ‘problematisation’ has no value then the rest of your post, dealing with problems that you assert arise out of Marx (his thought, personality, haemorrhoids, rectal issues, rectitude, whatever…) is either self-contradictory or pointless.
Marx died in 1883. The categories he though in terms of shed an enormous beam of light on the history of the world (coral reefs included) in the subsequent 120 years or so, and would be hard to avoid in explaining to a child why the British House of Commons still divides into two major groupings, one calling itself ‘Labour’ and the other ‘Conservative’. Not, say, Soccer and Rugby or Rock and Classical, or Omnivores and Vegetarians. But don’t get me wrong. I do not identify myself as a Marxist. I just find his thought valuable.
I wish I could say the same about Pomo. But where in answer to my question you go into some detail both positive (if I read it correctly) and negative (problematisational?) about Marx “…positive ethical commitment to human equality … foundational rectitude about the true essence of social interaction… absolutely scathing dismissal of any challenge… ” etc, I am still left here holding the bag, still seeking an answer to my question about the virtues of the aforesaid Pomo. Never mind its vices: I have a better grasp on those.
It seems to me that the forces driving the rise to supremacy of Pomo in academia have not exactly been about improving human understanding of humanity. I am ready and waiting to be convinced otherwise. But glib dismissals do not work for me.
Or on me.
After writing the above I read the link to the Prospect article by Edward Docx [sic – it just has to be a nom de Micro$oft]. Though it covers some interesting ground, I think Ophelia’s critique of it is spot on.
The heading of the Docx article ‘Postmodernism is dead’ is interesting in itself, though we must remember Derrida’s aphorism that ‘there is nothing outside the text’. That can be taken to mean that Pomo always was dead. In any case Docx argues that Pomo demolishes and deconstructs itself.
He begins thus:
But he ends thus:
Docx does not just write about postmodernist philosophy, but also about other areas under Pomo influence, like art, and literature. But he fails to mention the stranglehold Pomo has manged to get on cultural studies generally, to the point that students of literature cannot avoid it, or being assessed on their knowledge of it, so that knowledge of it becomes an essential qualification for those wishing to pursue careers as high school and college teachers, in which institutions they in turn will likely inflict it, one way or another on the rising generation. En masse. Criticising and attacking it in academia I would think is not likely to get one as far as accepting it, subscribing to it, and praising it, sincerely or otherwise.
With its impenetrable jargon, Pomo arguably confers on its students the same other-worldiness that they might only acquire through immersion for years in quantum physics or one of the loftier reaches of mathematics.
Australia boasts an outstanding example of Pomo architecture, in the National Museum in Canberra. It is a must IMHO for architecture students, in that it shows so clearly why there are certain basic rules, and what sort of disaster can happen when these are ignored. It is the most appallingly bad building I have ever been in, and a total waste of taxpayers’ money. Worse, this excrescence replaced a perfectly functional and well designed hospital, whose demolition the Canberra medical fraternity opposed. The Museum has a brilliant lakeside site well suited for a hospital, where patients had a beautiful view out across the lake to the Brindabella Mountains. The Museum on the other hand is designed to focus visitors’ concentration on the interior and its displays, for which constant artificial lighting is essential. Consequently, the building has virtually no windows. It might as well be in the local industrial area.
One of the duties of museum attendants is explaining the symbolism in the architecture to visitors, subtle well beyond impenetrability, lest they miss it.
As Derrida said, “there is nothing outside the text”. Not much inside it either, in this case. Ludicrously, Braille is mainly intelligible to the blind. But the messages are out of the reach of the hands that might read them.
AC Grayling’s book To Set Prometheus Free includes a chapter “Why I do not subscribe to religious beliefs” that includes a discussion that says: A) The existence or nonexistence of a god is not a matter of probability, and B) Religious apologists who say so are doing Bayesian probability incorrectly when they set the initial probability to 0.5.
Is Grayling a fool, by defining a category error in A, then committing his category error in B? No, Grayling puts on a Bayesian hat to say that when you see an apologist present a Bayesian argument for the existence of their god, the apologist is doubly wrong (in their methods), so the reader can feel confident to dismiss that apologist line of thinking.
I read Docx’s article in a similar way. I read the beginning and ending as standing outside postmodernism (where the beginning says postmodernism is dead, and the ending speculates what is next). And in the body of the article, Docx puts on a postmodernist hat to narrate the intellectual train wreck. Because the alternative way to write this — to caveat every postmodernist position with an asterisk (to say, “That’s their position, not mine”) — would be cumbersome, distracting, and make the article longer without adding any value.
In this thread, postmodernism is a crime so heinous that Docx standing outside it and criticizing it is evidence that Docx is a postmodernist — wat? And some commenters here quote Docx verbatim — because Docx worded the absurd implications so well — as evidence that Docx is wrong — wat?
By the way, I’m not writing this to support postmodernism, and wow, that museum is the worst building I have seen.