The Two Wings of Postmodernism

https://wokaldistance.substack.com/p/the-two-wings-of-postmodernism

by cm_silva • 4 years ago

6 8 4 years ago

wokaldistance.substack.com

PaulHoule2• 4 years ago

... right wing criticism of postmodernism has gotten popular since the 1980s when the right discovered Antonio Gramsci.

It's never been coherent because postmodernism is basically a characteristic of the culture and not an intellectual movement. (Although various intellectual movements claim the term) In short, modernist ideologies, particularly Marxism, became untenable post-1970 or so. The right wing has been a beneficiary because now it's hard to convince people that you can get ahead rationally planning anything and you might as well just be Lassez-Faire. This is just one of the of the cautionary tales

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Hanoi_Rat_Massacre

but you can see it in two great anti-architecture books that advocate for (alternatively) traditional downtowns and strip-mall construction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_from_Las_Vegas

Robert Jay Lifton described two examples of postmodern personality types in this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Protean-Self-Human-Resilience-Fragmen...

one of those was environmental activists, the other was fundamentalist Christians, which represent a particularly stark example of turning their back on rationality. Fundamentalists believe they've got the right to pick some book and decide it is absolutely true; their original sin is that they stole a book from Jewish people and added a few mor chapters. Nothing stops Muslims or Mormons from adding more books, or for anyone who wants to drop out of rational discourse with other people from inserting any axioms or postulates they want into their own closed system.

It's true that the "woke" are just as interested in creating their own reality like Shirley McClaine as the postmodern right (witness the poor man's dialecticalism of How to be an anti-racist) but postmodernism is the ocean we swim in woke or not. It's depressing because when I asked a philosopher what comes after postmodernism the answer was "post-humanism".

gizajob2• 4 years ago

Why is it depressing? What struck me about the article is it banging on about postmodernism like it was the be all and end all, where the philosophically trained and inclined have seen for a while now that we're past postmodernism and into something else, which of course needs a label of some kind, that many think should be posthumanism, even though I think post-Capitalism is probably more aligned with where we are, as humans.

PaulHoule2• 4 years ago

I think they tried post-Capitalism in October 1917 and it was a disappointment.

I see the post modern situation as depressing because a general theory of progress (e.g. Marxism) or even justice in the abstract (e.g. Rawls or Christianity) doesn't seem possible.

There is a "post human" philosophical movement, interested in things like Schwarzenegger's character from The Terminator, but I think the philosopher and I shared an additional meaning equivalent to "extinction".

I would point to Reason magazine as an example of people using the word "Reason" to create a frame in which people who believe that people have the right to form unions or that the state should regulate pollution or provision health insurance or public schools.

If you withdraw to pure mathematics you'll find Godel, Tarski, Turing proved that there is no salvation in logic.

The collapse of master narratives leave us scrambling for meaning, finding some, but with the feeling the apocalypse happened some time ago (1945?) and we are now living in some movie like Mad Max.

If there is moral rot in postmodern philosophy it is the moral rot of the age which is documented here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Narcissism

(big in Japan because Japanese people think it describes the Tokugawa culture)

https://www.amazon.com/Cultural-Contradictions-Capitalism-20...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra_and_Simulation

nanomonkey• 4 years ago

It's depressing because when I asked a philosopher what comes after postmodernism the answer was "post-humanism".

Or Metamodernism. The ability to hold multiple models in your world view concurrently, depending upon scale, or nuance.

A good introduction is "The Listening Society" by Hanzi Freinacht.

lordleft• 4 years ago

Controversial opinion, but I think any substantive critique of postmodernism has to acknowledge the fact that the postmodernists have a point. That supposedly neutral institutions or concepts do contain biases that favor certain interests. My objection to postmodernism is that instead of arguing for a better rationality, a more self-aware rationality, it jettisons rationality, and leaves us with no cogent foundation for morality, justice, etc.

gizajob2• 4 years ago

Smart philosophers call that phenomenon "hypernegation"

brokenkebab2• 4 years ago

It's not a point if postmodernism, however. Noting that earthly life is unfair, and humans (and therefore human institutions) are inherently morally fallible predates postmodernism by millenia. The novelty of postmodernism thought was their claim that reality is not defined externally, and therefore its presumed unfairness makes it a sort of conspiracy intended to perpetuate that unfairness.

crotho• 4 years ago

It seems the problem the author has is twofold:

1. Having failed to recognize that mutual aid is an objective truth of evolutionary successful behavior in social animals and is absolutely rational behavior and that so-called self-interested behavior (at the expense of other people) is in fact not really self-interested because we live in groups, and is irrational behavior in social animals...

2. ... that therefore 'social justice' is relativistic and arbitrary, when in social animals, it most certainly is anything but.

The Two Wings of Postmodernism

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