Postmodernism Disrobed by Richard Dawkins

by rikthevik • 16 years ago

48 80 16 years ago

hga• 16 years ago

From the comments, the current location of the Postmodernism Generator is: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Qz11• 16 years ago

Having read a non-trivial amount of postmodernist work, the generator is pretty funny at first, but isn't actually all that good at creating convincing post-modernist text. There's no there there.

_delirium8• 16 years ago

I don't think it's a good simulator of the actual content, but it does capture enough of a particular kind of writing style to be funny. For whatever reason, people in this area really do seem to over-use a lot of the grammatical constructions that it parodies. Maybe it'll have some positive benefit if it convinces people to avoid those constructions, now that they've been sort of called out as cliche.

ThomPete4• 16 years ago

But don't the postmodernists claim only to be 'playing games'? Isn't it the whole point of their philosophy that anything goes, there is no absolute truth, anything written has the same status as anything else, no point of view is privileged?

And in one paragraph Dawkins shows that he has no understanding of postmodernism what so ever.

The point of postmodernism is not that everything goes, but that we have no absolute frame of reference to judge the trueness of a statement on.

It's not "hey you can do everything you want" but "hey just know that whatever we find out, ultimately we don't know if that is the correct conclusion, as we have no absolute metrics to judge it by.

barrkel2• 16 years ago

We might have difficulty with truth, but we can evaluate the falsity of a statement about the world. To the degree that statements cannot be falsified, they are arguably without meaning.

ThomPete4• 16 years ago

You can evaluate the falsity of a statement about our interpretation of the world.

But that is quite different than claiming that our way to interpret reality is the right now.

hugh33• 16 years ago

The point of postmodernism is not that everything goes, but that we have no absolute frame of reference to judge the trueness of a statement on.

If postmodernism had "a point" which could be so readily expressed in comprehensible terms, would it have ever have gotten so far as it did?

ThomPete4• 16 years ago

That is how it got so far. It shows that there are multiple ways to interpret reality.

The way that we are using the internet right now is in many ways supportive of postmodernism.

ugh6• 16 years ago

I think that’s a misreading. “We have no absolute metrics to judge [our findings] by” to me seems to imply that no statement is better than any other statement, that the concept of “truth” is useless; i.e. anything goes (as long as statements about the universe are concerned).

And that’s all Dawkins says, not “you can do everything you want”. Rather “you can say everything you want, everything is equally true because nothing is true”.

That, to me, is obviously rubbish and rightly attacked. There surly is no such thing as absolute certainty or absolute truth but we can get damn close and find out what’s more likely and what’s less likely.

I don’t think I’m attacking a straw man here but I might, so correct me. “Anything goes (as long as statements about the world are concerned)” seems like a fair characterization to me, though.

ThomPete4• 16 years ago

The difference is that the former tells you that it doesn't matter what you do everything goes.

The latter tells you to be careful to think that what you know is certain.

sp3322• 16 years ago

Modernism believes in absolute truth. Postmodernism is not the nullification of all truth, but rather it's truth in context. Even in the absence of absolute metrics, it's still possible to create local meaning.

Qz11• 16 years ago

"That, to me, is obviously rubbish and rightly attacked."

Let me get this straight -- faced with the proposition that "we have no absolute metrics to judge [our findings] by", you made up your own metric and used it to denounce the statement in question?

...Which is of course precisely what the statement is addressing. Rather than acknowledge that we're all standing in quicksand, we prefer to gather up our quicksand into a small lump, stand on it, and announce that we are on a mountain. All the mountains are quicksand, buddy.

ubernostrum• 16 years ago

And in one paragraph Dawkins shows that he has no understanding of postmodernism what so ever.

So far as I'm concerned, no-one -- including everyone who's ever called themselves a postmodernist -- has any understanding of it. There's no "there" there, only a few trite remarks about absolutes and a race to see who can out-jargon, out-pigeonhole and out-frame whom.

(all of which makes me incredibly glad that I earned my degree from a program which leaned heavily toward the analytic tradition; analytic philosophy has certainly had its big screwups, but A) it tends to be much more honest about itself and B) it still manages to occasionally produce useful results in spite of that)

Qz11• 16 years ago

There's no "there" there...

What's funny is that is (in a way) exactly what post-modernism is talking about. There's no "there" there anywhere. "There" is a shifting frame of reference, gone before you finished contemplating it.

Tycho3• 16 years ago

It sort of makes sense to me within the domain of literary fiction. Mordernism was all about showing the cracks of the modern world - disintegration of institutions like religion, the damage done by WW1, differing-perspectives/unreliable-narrators, proliferation of media, abandoning rural life, etc. Modernist literature strained to show/express these cracks. Post-Modernist literature simply accepts them and works from there.

But yeah 'what is Post-Modernism?' is one of those 'ahhh, ummm...' questions.

Locke16893• 16 years ago

I'd like to back your applause of analytic philosophy but would like to defend continental philosophy against postmodernism for a moment, as well.

I think the prototypical example of dense prose in continental philosophy would be Heidegger, but at the same time I don't think that people would say that Sein und Zeit is gibberish. Now, many analytic philosophers (including myself) would probably agree that Sein und Zeit probably falls to the same psychoanalytic-assumption-as-truth that is categorical of existentialism but I definitely didn't have a problem seeing an argument from Heidegger.

Simply, I just wanted to note that simply because a work appears dense or confusing doesn't mean that it is gibberish. Now, in the case of postmodernism, most of it happens to be both dense and gibberish.

jamespitts2• 16 years ago

I'll be among the first to stand up and defend whatever Richard Dawkins has to say (because he provides a much-needed service: skepticism). However, I do appreciate postmodernism for its (accidental?) beauty. This is truly poetic stuff, collages made out of the well-wrought output of the highly educated.

You do have to suspend some of your higher-thinkng to appreciate postmodernism. But you have to do the same to enjoy Neuromancer, which could be seen as a postmodern conference-dump posing as a science fiction story.

So I say: Mr. Dawkins, don't be such a wet blanket.

cageface• 16 years ago

Poetry and fiction don't masquerade as serious philosophy. As long as this stuff dominates academic humanities and soaks up precious grant money I'll take all the wet blankets I can get.

rdtsc2• 16 years ago

> So I say: Mr. Dawkins, don't be such a wet blanket.

I think he is a wet blanket because he realizes that many of these post-modernists suck public money with their tenure and wield quite a bit of power over up and coming academics.

In other words, nobody minds the insane person as long as they are safely locked away in an asylum. However the same insane person becomes very dangerous once they have control and authority over people's careers, sit on academic committees, there are thousands hours spent by students who are told to "read and interpret" these crazy writings with the insinuation that these are the great philosophers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

jamespitts2• 16 years ago

Power will corrupt any interesting intellectual movement. Still, postmodernism cannot be discredited just because it does not make sense to people outside of its paradigm. It must have been quite irritating for the old art establishment when Abby Rockefeller put together the Museum of Modern Art... one among many cases of funding chasing what appears to be insane.

Lastly, I'd argue if people do not want to deal with what is "funded", they can rebel and create a new movement. This is how humanity moves forward.

_delirium8• 16 years ago

Isn't attacking postmodernism kind of boring/easy these days? Even fellow continental philosophers enjoy indulging in a little pomo-bashing now and then--- it's a favorite pasttime of Slavoj Žižek, for example.

While I don't much like the "school of thought" as a school of thought, I've been somewhat confused by why Derrida in particular seems to anger everyone. As far as I can tell, he's mostly working through some pretty narrow problems in linguistics and literary theory about the difficulty of resolving webs of mutual references into logically consistent, stable frames, not making some sort of general claim about reality (and he rarely mentions science at all). The "Derrideans" may be another story, as often is the case with disciples.

hugh33• 16 years ago

Derrida is just one of the most famous names, so he gets an extra helping of scorn. No doubt there are plenty of others who are just as bad or worse, but there's no fun in attacking someone that nobody has ever heard of.

But yes, postmodernism is starting to seem rather last-century nowadays. The cutting edge appears to have moved on from "if you disagree with this it's because you're too stupid to understand" to "if you disagree with this it's because you're a racist. Racist!"

_delirium8• 16 years ago

Yeah, that makes sense, but somehow Derrida himself doesn't seem the most objectionable to me, at least on philosophical grounds.

I suppose one can legitimately blame him for some of the writing style, though. In particular, although he argued that all language has multiple meanings / shifting references / etc., he seemed to like emphasizing it by using a writing style that added deliberate multiple readings. For example, something like "we need to (re)construct this meaning", leaving it deliberately ambiguous, with a sort of self-aware textual wink, whether he was "constructing" or "reconstructing" things. Also, lots of puns.

I think he actually pulled it off reasonably well in some parts, and is kind of amusing to read, if you like that sort of thing. In the years since, it's become a really annoying habit that a bunch of folks have picked up, though, most of whom don't do it very well, and take it way too seriously. Now I have this instinctive "argh, I hate you" reaction whenever I see some paper or book title with a construction like "(re)engage".

edit: An interesting oddity is that a lot of the writing style traces back to Nietzsche, even though he himself was quite readable (so much so that teenage kids loving Nietzsche are even a sort of stereotype). He initiated some of the general style of writing half philosophy, half literary performance: jumping from subject to subject, making assertions that you run with and don't carefully argue for, making heavy use of puns in arguments, etc. Maybe the problem is just that most people who try to write like that need to realize that they aren't Nietzsche, and can't pull it off.

asdflkj• 16 years ago

It's boring and easy, but it's necessary if one wants to get rid of it. I don't feel like fighting the good fight myself (or even watching it happen), but I'm glad somebody out there is. Really, it's the same situation as with religion.

VengefulCynic3• 16 years ago

Exactly! While pointing out that the emperor has no clothes may be a trivially simple exercise, so long as people are willing to support the emperor, we need to keep shouting about his choice of apparel. All the more when (at least in the US) our tax dollars are going to fund his "clothes."

jseliger2• 16 years ago

As far as I can tell, he's mostly working through some pretty narrow problems in linguistics and literary theory about the difficulty of resolving webs of mutual references into logically consistent, stable frames, not making some sort of general claim about reality (and he rarely mentions science at all). The "Derrideans" may be another story, as often is the case with disciples.

I think the real problem is not Derrida, who very few people have actually read, but what some of Derrida's followers and imitators have done. If you're interested in how this plays out in a deeper level, Francois Cusset wrote a book called French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, which delves into how theory and postmodernism became so powerful in the United States. He treats them as epiphenomenon as a way to explore what's happening.

In his description of the 1970s academic milieu, Cusset says that a number of avant garde journals came about, which, although wildly different in concerns, were similar in style: "Acronyms and wordplay, together with a ludic relation to the translated concepts, reduced [the writers'] cultural distance. A similar allusive or parodic relation to one's own erudition signaled a self-critique of academic procedures" (62). That's part of the problem: these kinds of writers lacked Derrida's rigor and narrowness. Some of them still do. The "allusive or parodic relation to one's own erudition" can quickly devolve into "lacking erudition or rigor."

_delirium8• 16 years ago

Thanks for the reference; sounds like a book I'd find interesting.

As far as allocating blame, that matches my impression that, although it's often seen as a problem of "French theory", much of the worst stuff is actually by American critical theorists developing it, rather than the original stuff. At least, they're the ones who developed it into a somewhat poisonous and derivative culture, full of political posturing and semi-nonsense writing, and dominated entire fields with that sort of thing (I don't think it has nearly the same dominance in French universities, oddly enough).

In one case (Julia Kristeva), the original author even seems somewhat appalled at what Americans did with her work: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/arts/14KRIS.html

dmlorenzetti• 16 years ago

Related piece "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" by a software engineer, Chip Morningstar: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html

Keyframe• 16 years ago

"The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell

philwelch4• 16 years ago

I'll raise you one: Russell on the 19th century forebears of postmodernism:

"Hitherto the people attracted to philosophy have been mostly those who loved the big generalizations, which were all wrong, so that few people with exact minds have taken up the subject."

anigbrowl• 16 years ago

On the other hand, Russell came badly unstuck when he attempted to extrapolate all math from first principles with Principia Mathematica. Soon after, Kurt Godel demonstrated that in any given formal system, consistency and completeness were mutually exclusive.

It seems to me that this had the same devastating impact on philosophy as Einstein's relativistic theorems did on classical mechanics and the popular acceptance of scientific determinism (please note I am not positing any scientific relationship between Godel's theorem and Einstein's work on relativity). Einstein apparently found quantum mechanics an equally alarming intellectual innovation.

So between incompleteness, relativity and QM, 20th century intellectuals were hit with a kind of triple whammy showing that our beliefs about logic, observation and causality were all inherently limited and that in many respects The Truth is fundamentally unknowable. Prior to this one could argue that philosophy as an intellectual pursuit was the foundation which underpinned all other kinds of academic endeavor, even if one felt privately disappointed about the prospects of finding any sort of ultimate truth or philosophical 'theory of everything'.

For every philosopher who could accept this with a shrug and move on to examining the limitations of critical thinking itself, there are probably 9 others that can't bring themselves to stand up and say plainly that there's not really anywhere else to go from here, and that their legacy is likely to be no more than another footnote to Plato.

prospero2• 16 years ago

I've read several books by Deleuze and Guattari, but haven't had any formal instruction on postmodernism. They're hilariously opaque, but also pretty interesting if you have the patience.

At one point in A Thousand Plateaus, the authors say that vaginas are just penises travelling faster than the speed of light. Does anyone think this is meant to be analyzed scientifically? To say that there's no scientific rigor in this statement misses the point; scientific rigor has almost no impact on how people live their lives.

For someone analyzing human beings, the truth of science is much less interesting than how scientific concepts can be misunderstood, and the authority of science misapplied. The co-opting of a precise scientific term can be frustrating to someone who has spent their entire life studying it, but that doesn't mean it's all hot air and empty words.

Most feminist criticism is pretty silly, though.

philwelch4• 16 years ago

"At one point in A Thousand Plateaus, the authors say that vaginas are just penises travelling faster than the speed of light. Does anyone think this is meant to be analyzed scientifically?"

Does anyone think that's actually a coherent statement?

prospero2• 16 years ago

I realize that we're all programmers here, and that we live and die by unambiguous semantics. But human languages are awash in ambiguity and borderline nonsense, and the only thing holding it all together are some shared concepts and idioms. The disjoint between the clarity of science and the ambiguity of human communication is really interesting, and by that token something can be both incoherent and rich with meaning (though obviously this isn't always the case).

hugh33• 16 years ago

Sure, the proposition that "penises are vaginas travelling faster than the speed of light" is perfectly coherent. Vaginas and penises are perfectly well-defined, and the notion of a penis travelling faster than the speed of light is, while not considered possible by any existing physical models, is entirely logically sensible.

It remains to determine whether vaginas are, in fact, penises travelling faster than the speed of light. The short answer is no, since anything travelling faster than the speed of light would be travelling faster than the speed of light, and vaginas typically travel subluminally. Thus, we have proven this well-formed statement false.

Now we're getting somewhere!

metamemetics2• 16 years ago

I don't think of this as an attack of Postmodernism as much as analytic philosophy in general. You cannot construct a proof of a philosophical statement by referencing chunks of math and physics. Analytic philosophy is science for those who do not understand science and better left to the field of science. The real philosophy is moral and ethical philosophy, because everyone uses it to decide on every conscious prescriptive actions they undertake, yet they cannot be derived from science and are arbitrarily agreed on by societies. Pure science is purely descriptive and observational, it does not provide a proof for correct future action. Individuals often reference science as post-facto justification for their actions, for example I would reference my knowledge of natural selection as justification for pursuing a job, whereas the Nazis also used natural selection as justification for undertaking the Holocaust. Moral and ethical philosophy are the most important area of philosphy, it is a discussion that guides every action we take yet one with no completely "correct" answers.

philwelch4• 16 years ago

I was trained in analytic philosophy, and I'm not convinced you know what analytic philosophy is. Postmodernism isn't analytic philosophy--it's close to the exact opposite. In fact, analytic philosophy originated as a response to continental philosophy, the intellectual cesspool of Hegel and friends from which postmodernism is spawned.

Some analytic philosophers you may have heard of include: Bertrand Russell, Karl Popper, Ludwig Wittgenstein, G.E. Moore, R.M. Hare, A.J. Ayer, Saul Kripke, David Lewis, Edmund Gettier, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and Nick Bostrom. Many of these philosophers discussed morality and justice a great deal. Others discussed the logical underpinnings of science and mathematics--Popper in particular is highly esteemed by many scientists I've known, and Russell needs no introduction.

EDIT: There are of course many great analytic philosophers I forgot, but I found it worth editing this post to include W.V.O. Quine, in honor of whom we write programs which print their own source code.

amackera• 16 years ago

I am by no means a philosopher, but I've read some Rawls and found him both clear and accessible. I wish more philosophical writing was this way!

alsomike• 16 years ago

If you think postmodernism comes from Hegel, I'm not convinced you know what continental philosophy is.

_delirium8• 16 years ago

It's not a universal view, but there's a decent number of scholars on both sides of the Atlantic who see Derrida and the later Wittgenstein as actually getting at pretty similar ideas. Both are fundamentally concerned with the indeterminacy of language, language as a kind of game, etc.

metamemetics2• 16 years ago

If you reread the original link you'll see the main source of Dawkin's frustration comes from the misappropriation and misuse of mathematical logic and scientific fact with disregard for the preserving precise meaning.

This is a large problem not just in Postmodernism but in many areas of modern analytic philosophy as well, especially Philosophy of Mind.

shalmanese• 16 years ago

While Sokal is amusing, it's not the smoking gun everyone loves to dress it up us. That is, unless you're willing to concede the same thing of Physics:

"The Bogdanov Affair is an academic dispute regarding the legitimacy of a series of theoretical physics papers written by French twins Igor and Grichka Bogdanov (alternately spelt Bogdanoff). These papers were published in reputable scientific journals, and were alleged by their authors to culminate in a proposed theory for describing what occurred at the Big Bang. The controversy started in 2002 when rumors spread on Usenet newsgroups that the work was a deliberate hoax intended to target weaknesses in the peer review system employed by the physics community to select papers for publication in academic journals."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair

Qz11• 16 years ago

Exactly -- the Sokal paper makes the claim that since the paper was obviously nonsense, the incident proves that the 'vaunted academia' is off their rockers. But this is hinged on the assumption that the meaning of the text is derived from the intention of the author, and since the author intended it to be nonsense then the paper must be nonsense. But this is hardly something that we can assert unequivocally. The question of where the meaning of a text comes from is exactly one of the thorny questions that 'postmodernism' aims to address (among other disciplines).

hmahncke• 16 years ago

Nailed the post-modernist response to Sokal - nice work!

Tycho3• 16 years ago

I tagged along to a lecture on 'Phenomenology' recently. I cannot for the life of me tell you what was said. Something about 'Being' in 'historical context.' It was almost completely unintelligible.

This sort of thing is an assault on the mind. I wouldn't say it's harmless either, it's potentially depressing.

jseliger2• 16 years ago

This sort of thing is an assault on the mind. I wouldn't say it's harmless either, it's potentially depressing.

It might be -- or you might lack the background to digest how writers and scholars are using technical phrases with long histories behind them. The idea of "being" and its cousin ontology go back at least, most notably, to Hegel (consider Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" series if you're interested), and various philosophers have been dealing with the idea ever since: Sartre's Being and Nothingness being one example a century and a half after Hegel.

In any event, "this sort of thing" might still be "an assault on the mind," but it's hard to judge it as such unless you have the context to do the judging.

Tycho3• 16 years ago

Well the thought crossed my mind, but this article reminded me of all the linguistic obfuscation that was going on. The lecturer would seldom make a statement without several tangential subclauses/digressions getting in the way. I started to wonder why this professor was deliberately making a complex matter harder to understand...

At any rate you can see for yourself http://jhfc.duke.edu/globalstudies/pdfs/VattimoPaperdoc.pdf although this was not the paper he was presenting, it would be interesting to know your judgement.

Qz11• 16 years ago

Title incorrectly credits Dawkins with said disrobing -- he's only reviewing a book by two other authors who should be getting the actual credit (assuming credit is due, a different debate).

crux_• 16 years ago

It's interesting to read the heaps (and heaps and heaps!) of scorn here upon postmodern philosophy, which I'm only passingly familiar with -- all while living and participating in a society where "postmodern" is far and away the best single-word description of huge swaths of our culture.

diziet• 16 years ago

Postmodern literary theory is a mess.

Postmodern literature, on the other hand, is wonderful and often beautiful.

lhnz• 16 years ago

John Locke said it best: "Vague and insignificant forms of speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of science; and hard or misapplied words with little or no meaning have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either those who speak or those who hear them, they are but covers of ignorance and hindrance of true knowledge."

Postmodernism Disrobed by Richard Dawkins

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