Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins

http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html

by absconditus • 17 years ago

80 74 17 years ago

physics.nyu.edu

absconditus• 17 years ago

The Postmodernism Generator link in the article seems to be broken. Here is a working URL:

http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/

Information about the generator can be found at the bottom of the generated page.

ewiethoff• 17 years ago

Obligatory xkcd comic: http://xkcd.com/451/

nimbix• 17 years ago

This reminds me of a textbook from college where the author tried to explain the concept of hegemony by writing 20 pages of unintelligible language, and failed to explain anything at all. Wikipedia, on the other hand, manages to explain the concept in about 3 paragraphs.

The professor wasn't much help either because he was too busy telling stories about what it was like when he fought Mussolini's fascists in WW2. It's no surprise I dropped out...

abstractbill• 17 years ago

The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids...

I'm having a hard time believing this can be anything other than satire.

pg• 17 years ago

There's an endless supply of this stuff. Or more precisely, a supply limited only by the publication needs of thousands of professors. Just search for the relevant buzzwords on Google Scholar.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=menstrual+poststructural...

It's funny at first, but after a while just kind of draining.

sp332• 17 years ago

No, this is satire: "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" http://physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/transgress_v2/transgres... ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair )

krakensden• 17 years ago

Read your link and the article- the quote about the sexism of E=MC^2 is the real thing.

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

I sort of dread the idea of defending post-modernism, but here's my opinion. There are some interesting ideas, but unfortunately it's become buried under reams and reams of mediocrity. But that's science, and that's how science has worked for a very, very long time.

In the long run the mediocrity gets stripped away, and we're left with the interesting ideas. Phlogiston dominated scientific discourse for far longer than it needed to.

anatoly3• 17 years ago

Postmodernism isn't science. You're right in that the mediocre stuff will fade and the interesting ideas will remain. Yet I have two counterpoints to offer. First, will postmodernism leave lasting ideas at all? Has its skepticism towards language, for example, led to anything new over what was given to us by Wittgenstein? Second, even if all the dross fades and disappears, isn't it a shame about all those years when it dominated humanities and much of philosophy? What kind of genuinely interesting ideas were never explored because of that domination?

Dilpil• 17 years ago

Believe it.

xtho4• 17 years ago

At a certain point in history, those sentences were capable of initiating a new way of thinking that was impossible before. 30 years later, Mr. Dawkins enjoys himself beating a dead horse.

tybris5• 17 years ago

What point in history do you refer to?

anatoly3• 17 years ago

Precisely. You could say that those sentences filled a much-needed gap.

silentbicycle• 17 years ago

Using magical thinking to reason about scientific phenomena sounds just as out of place as using the scientific method to judge art.

crux_3• 17 years ago

It's not satire: it is metaphor.

Post-modernism (in the sense of this type of thing, anyway) arose and mostly deals with literature, where imagery, symbolism, and metaphor are the main carriers of meaning rather than spelling things out literally. Also, its purpose isn't so much to interpret the work itself as it is to look through it and see what it says about the writer and the reader. In this case, it's the same thing applied to science rather than a novel, and while it might not be very relevant to fluid mechanics, it might be saying something worthwhile about scientists and gender roles (in a stylised and heavily symbolic way) once put back into context.

That said, 90% of everything is crap and I've no doubt that this is too; it does certainly seem to be on the surface.

Edit: I'm different than that other 'crux' who is also standing up for postmodernism here. Odd coincidence!

jibiki3• 17 years ago

> it is metaphor.

For what?

> it might be saying something worthwhile about scientists and gender roles (in a stylised and heavily symbolic way) once put back into context.

Please, humor us. What might that "something worthwhile" be?

Estragon6• 17 years ago

There's a lot of crap in postmodernism, probably more than in other disciplines, because it recognizes every framework of inquiry as contingent, and this can be abused to excuse sloppy inquiry. But the fact is, there's crap in every discipline. Have you seen the CS paper generator[1]? Have you read "Genetic evidence for complex speciation of humans and chimpanzees"[2]?

Sokal et al. acted in bad faith by cherry-picking the worst instances of postmodernist discourse and setting up postmodernism as a monolithic entity universally opposed to the values of scientific inquiry. I Love To You[3] is an example of a book written by a post-modernist (one of the ones Sokal et al. made fun of, incidentally) without any obvious obfuscation. I also enjoyed the interview with her, "Thinking life as relation,"[4] although it's a bit less accessible.

[1]http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/

[2]http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/nature0...

[3]http://books.google.com/books?id=-6fSONDCgW4C&printsec=f...

[4]http://www.springerlink.com/content/g447683933t14555/?p=6bff...

Estragon6• 17 years ago

Hmm, can someone point me to the documentation for Hacker News's markup system, please?

johnnybgoode• 17 years ago

There isn't much: http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

aheilbut• 17 years ago

Just curious - what's the problem with [2]? I only skimmed it, and I see that there is some controversy, but it seems pretty harsh to lump it together with [1]...

Estragon6• 17 years ago

what's the problem with [2]?

It tries to draw conclusions about the relative divergence times of different genes based on degrees of sequence similarity. This evidence is extremely weak, as there are much more likely explanations for the observed patterns of sequence variation, such as a shift in the selection pressure on a gene down the chimp/human lineage, for instance. Despite this weakness, they chose to highlight the sensational conclusion that human and chimp ancestors must have swapped genes through mating long after the presumed speciation time. This was irresponsible, because it caused a widespread public sensation when the paper came out.

it seems pretty harsh to lump it together with [1]...

I'm not lumping them together. The common characteristic is that they're both garbage. The conclusion of [2] is a subtler form of it but not to an evolutionary scientist: the problem with it was immediately obvious to me and many others as soon as it came out. And it's a more serious corruption of scientific discourse because it's a Nature article. The data the analysis was based on has merit, though.

ewjordan• 17 years ago

Just to take on [1], the difference between computer science papers and the postmodern papers that involve physics is that while both may seem unintelligible to someone unskilled in the field, real computer science papers actually mean something if you know the terminology. Whenever postmodernists venture into areas where scientists can competently evaluate what they're talking about, the verdict is that they spew absolute rubbish, so it should make us think hard about whether any of the other stuff makes any more sense than it appears to.

It's not proof that the whole field is garbage by any means, but it is at least clear evidence that a lot of respected names in the field are publishing crap that they provably don't understand. That's really not a good sign - there may be crap published in fields like physics, but it's not coming from the Feynmans, it's coming from the relative unknowns.

Estragon6• 17 years ago

There are two aspects to this. Firstly, postmodernism hardly concerns itself with venturing into scientific arenas at all. The endeavors which Sokal et al. deride are not representative of postmodernism as a whole.

Secondly, while I haven't read the papers from which Sokal et al. take their examples, and don't know what they were about, I am certain that they're not trying to contribute to scientific knowledge in any conventional sense. I gather from a friend who studies this stuff that Irigaray was playing with the language of scientific discourse in some way. I haven't looked into it further. Some of the stuff Sokal derides certainly deserves it. One of his examples is where Irigaray's work is used to justify sloppy thinking about feminism in science education. That is definitely problematic and deserves to be dismissed out of hand. But generally speaking, Sokal picked out these quotes without clearly explaining their context and intent, and that seems problematic, too.

shalmanese• 17 years ago

I don't know why everyone constantly brings up Sokal without also mentioning the Bogdonav Affair: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair . Seems like the pot calling the kettle black.

Confusion2• 17 years ago

The difference is that the Bogdanov's did their best to seem real, while Sokal et al. did their best to seem fake.

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/bogdanov.html

telma• 17 years ago

How convenient.

crux2• 17 years ago

I am generally aware and wary of the hackerish tendency to deride mightily any intellectual undertaking or material that doesn't triumph, confirm, or conform to their strictly rationalist view of the world and its every corner. I find it boorish and stifling. More to the point, I have some incredibly intelligent friends who have spent a good amount of time with Deconstruction (not identical with Pomo, of course) and have found things of great value to them.

Which is why I am desperate, really, for someone to step in and demonstrate the worth of someone like Jacques Derrida, or more dangerously, Lacan or Boudrillard. B-d, for instance, had a bunch of cool ideas, about simulacra and maps and territory and the Gulf War. I've witnessed them, if only in aphoristic form. So how is it that a community that's at least capable of putting out a good handful of really modern, interesting notions can apparently be so firmly up to its knees in bullshit? I think it's unworth us to dismiss this entire wing of 20th-C thought altogether. But when you start trudging through the ludicrous, depressing gibberish that is on display here, it's hard not to. Can everybody have truly been absolute frauds? How am I to reconcile the two attestations of Baudrillard: obvious falsehood and farce on the one hand, and demonstrable cleverness and insight on the other?

akamaka3• 17 years ago

I'm embarrassed every time an article like this gets posted to Hacker News.

I don't think anyone here would take Ray Kurzweil's books seriously, but quite a few people would upvote an article by Dawkins or Chomsky, whose books have contributed to their respective fields in the same way that Kurzweil has to ours -- which is to say, not at all.

P.S. The last time someone submitted an article about the Sokal affair, I posted a short comment about the importance of postmodernism here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=564856

Adlai4• 17 years ago

Dawkins... , whose books have contributed to [his field]... not at all.

Ever heard of a "meme"?

Dawkins has contributed plenty to his field, and he writes very accessible books.

That essay by him obviously doesn't criticize the entire field. He's just telling his readers to put up some nonsense filters before they start reading padded fluff.

tybris5• 17 years ago

Books are not supposed to contribute at all. They are supposed to be an overarching view of the knowledge and ideas that exist in the area of interest. His books were meant to educate the public about evolution through natural selection.

For contributions to the field please refer to his journal publications. A partial list is given in: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_publications_by_Richard...

Confusion2• 17 years ago

Two possible explanations:

1) He was clever, had many interesting ideas, but was caught up in a culture that caused him to publish his ideas in essays/aticles that were largely meaningless, causing the ideas to go mostly unnoticed.

2) Even a defective clock tells the correct time twice a day.

olavk• 17 years ago

Maybe Sturgueons Law (90% of everything is crap) also applies to philosophy and postmodernism?

michael_dorfman• 17 years ago

In the case of Derrida, I'd recommend you take a look at Arkady Plotnitsky's article "But It Is Above All Not True": Derrida, Relativity, and the "Science Wars", in the journal "Postmodern Culture" (unfortunately now behind a paywall at MUSE).

The short version: Sokal (and those who follow in his footsteps) cherry-pick their quotes, and then refuse to read them in any kind of context whatsoever. To think that this has anything to do with forming an informed opinion of a philosopher (or other thinker) is ludicrous.

crux2• 17 years ago

There is a plaintext version of the Plotnitsky article, and I think it addresses the Dawkins article so directly (though it was published one year earlier) that it bears a direct link here: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.197/plotnit...

tybris5• 17 years ago

All young people think their ideas are unique and valuable. As you grow older you learn that other people have the same ideas and what makes them succeed is hard work. In case of science this is called research. Theoretical physicist Albert Einstein did not write about his stroke of genius, he wrote about the years he spent working out the equations. Postmodernism is the language of a group of lazy intellectuals, who thereby fail to become scientists.

Adlai4• 17 years ago

All your people think that their ideas are unique and valuable.

I'd say that's a good thing, though. It helps to understand that there are probably better ideas than yours, because then you don't sit put, but at the same time, it's good we all have a drive to explain and create. Otherwise, we'd still be using punch cards -- to weave our HN postings into Jacquard's loom.

IsaacL2• 17 years ago

Agree massively. If you read up on some of the ideas behind philosophy, it makes a lot of sense as a "philosophy of the modern age". Of course, there's a lot of garbage ideas in there as well, but it's worth at least reading up on the basic ideas behind it, rather than just lol'ing at some cherry-picked quotes.

I find McLuhan idea's about the role of media within society interesting, and very relevant to any working with Internet-related projects. The same could be said for a lot of postmodern ideas, which seem to partly revolve around the fact that the changes wrought by modern technology question the foundations of things like psychology, society, gender and so on.

IsaacL2• 17 years ago

anatoly3• 17 years ago

I used to be obsessed with finding out what kind of real thoughts, really important ideas postmodernism, poststructuralism etc. had to offer. I read a lot of "French theory" and secondary literature - not enough to have a really thorough grounding, but enough, I think, to be able to form my own judgements. Even though I can't remember most of it anymore, I don't think it was a waste of time. If you're not trying, maybe not daily but constantly, to test your own worldview for emergent dogmatism, you're doing it wrong. It's always worth it to kick something outside the borders of your worldview and see if it kicks back, although not every something is an equally worthy candidate.

Having read a bunch of original monographs and articles, a a stack of scathing critiques and even more scathing countercritiques, having went through two graduate seminars on Derrida and postmodernism (not for credit - I was studying math at the time), luckily with a professor who welcomed criticism, here's what my very personal opinion comes down to:

1. Most of it is bunk. There's just no escaping it. However, that's not necessarily a strong point against it, because see Sturgeon's Law.

2. Occassionally, some of it contains real insight, thoughts of depth and value; unfortunately, you have to work really hard to get to them, as they're shrouded by murkiness and vagueness to a degree that's quite astonishing. The thing is, postmodernists will tell you (and, in so many words, so will the primary texts) that this vagueness and murkiness is necessary; that there's no way to approach the deep thoughts except by deconstructing language and thought themselves. Well, I ain't buying that (I've tried very hard to buy that, it just won't get bought). In all cases where I actually reached something I thought was valuable, all the junk on the way only hindered, never helped - the horrible jargon, the bureaucratic sentences, the nonsensical code-words, the weak and unstable pulse of the argument. I remain convinced that none of this is necessary, and it's there simply because the culture encourages bad writing, in which it's easier to hide pure bunk (see 1.).

I offer Derrida as an example of a postmodern (well, poststructuralist) author who has Something To Say. In particular, after some wrangling and exasperation, I grew to appreciate his Dissemination, especially the first part, Plato's Pharmacy, which offers some brilliant observations on Phaedrus and the nature of writing (again, if you can plough your way through to them, etc.). I recommend this. I've never read his more famous Of Grammatology, and not sure I will now.

3. The quality of writing varies wildly from one author to another, even if we restrict to the most famous ones. Lacan is bullshit, pure and simple. Don't waste your time on him. Foucault seems to have been a shoddy scholar whose theories fall apart when you look at the evidence closer. Baudrillard I've come to regard as a sort of a gifted stand-up artist with an ear for impressive aphorism.

With all the occassional good stuff I found while reading postmodernist literature and arguing with friends about it, I couldn't possibly "follow" it in any meaningful way because of these (again, my personal opinion, etc.) flaws:

a) culture that accepts and encourages texts of very poor quality. This is more damning than 1. above; this makes sure the shit rises to the top. Most of writing is so obscure that it's not possible to refute it: there's nothing solid to get hold of to refute. Behind this obscurity is a huge amount of parroting, bad thinking and simply nonsense, and nothing in the intellectual postmodenist life encourages you to try to separate the wheat from the chaff; in fact, you're the enemy if you think wheat and chaff can possibly be separated, or even exist in any objective way. Think of the Bogdanov affair others recalled in comments here. In Sokal, outsiders (a physicist, other scientists, journalists) criticized the "postmodernists", who counter-attacked in the "culture wars". In Bogdanov, physicists and mathematicians themselves attacked the apparently nonsensical work, and the debate was between scientists. There's a huge difference here.

b) the double standards that pervade all texts and thought. Postmodern authors almost never scrutinize their own assumptions as critically as they scrutinize, say, the assumptions of modernists. It gets ridiculous after a while, because you find it hard to believe that someone can, say, claim that all ideologies are equally suspect and we must denounce the very possibility of knowledge itself if we are to get to the bottom of it all; and then in the next paragraph prostrate themselves dogmatically before some other thinker and quote their claims with all the reverence of Gospel truth, obviously bearing universally validity. You keep thinking, wait, it must be a joke, but the punchline never comes. Another way in which this annoyed me was how inevitably almost all those guys were ideologically extreme leftists, usually Marxists. It's not even the ideology itself that irked me the most, it's how unimaginable it was to see anything else, how dogmatically it pervaded everything, and never got a fraction of critical attention that was lavishly spent on, say, the idea of objective truth, or the simulacra in modern capitalist society. These are just two most obvious examples, but really, the amount of double standard going on, the lack of reflection at one's own thoughts is very irritating. At the end, I couldn't accept it even as a worthy way of exploring the world that's simply alien to me. I couldn't escape the conclusion that almost all of it was junk, sometimes very attractive intellectually - and therefore dangerous - junk; with some surprising exceptions, like some of Derrida I talked of above, which don't, after all, change the overall picture.

apsec112• 17 years ago

"Can everybody have truly been absolute frauds?"

Yes. There are many historical examples of fields which are simply complete nonsense, with some practitioners who are well-intentioned and wrong and others who are just blatant charlatans. Alchemy is one obvious example. More controversially, psychotherapy in our own era probably qualifies (http://www.amazon.com/House-Cards-Robyn-Dawes/dp/0684830914).

mblakele• 17 years ago

The goals of certain late-medieval alchemists were nonsense, but science and engineering often follow nonsensical goals (insert your favorite politically-funded project here). The major advances are usually serendipitous, and only a tangential relationship to the goals.

Alchemy had a long history, though, and often resembled practical chemistry much closely than it did a quest for chimerical substances. The practical side of alchemy produced some worthwhile facts and techniques, and overlapped in many places with early chemistry. Some late practitioners of alchemy are also honored as important early scientists: Isaac Newton, Roger Bacon, and Tycho Brahe among them. The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_chemistry shows quite a bit of overlap.

But alchemy had to be rejected in order for modern science to emerge. There were several reasons: first, it was illegal to practice alchemy in many areas. Partly because of this, alchemists were secretive, while science advances by sharing information. Finally, Francis Bacon's work on the scientific method came along late in the game. So the only logical way forward was to re-brand the sensible parts of alchemy as natural philosophy or natural science, and proceed from there.

asdlfj2sd33• 17 years ago

...had a bunch of cool ideas, about simulacra and maps and territory and the Gulf War. I've witnessed them, if only in aphoristic form.

Could you explain that in English?

But seriously, I have no doubt all those smart people have some interesting insights about culture etc.

It's just too bad they are covered up by their own cultural belief that things simply can NOT be expressed clearly and succinctly.

I happen to think this is a coping strategy with the fact that 90% of everything is crap. It's a strategy to make it very hard to differentiate the crap for the good stuff.

ubernostrum• 17 years ago

OK, so. Disclaimer first: I am a professional programmer and not a professional philosopher. However, I have a degree in philosophy, albeit one from a program which was heavily analytic (and thus removed from/disdainful of much of what passes for postmodern philosophy).

That said...

My biggest problem with postmodernism is simply that there seems to be no "there" there. Of course, postmodernists would likely argue that that's the point, but it's terribly hard to talk about something so nebulously defined.

But the result of decades of postmodernist (and deconstructionist, and poststructuralist, since they're all interrelated) thought, to me, has ultimately been nothing but a game. One plays the game by choosing some particular thing (the "text", which of course is not required to actually consist of text) and:

1. Denying any and all conscious intentions the author/designer/creator may have had.

2. Reading into it any and all assumptions/positions/prejudices which happen to be fashionable to assign to one's target, by liberally playing with language or context.

This is problematic to me because it has no justifiable basis -- it's just as ad-hoc and just as unsound as a Freudian constantly asserting this or that unobservable, untestable subconscious motivation. Of course, within postmodern thought this is considered valid because postmodern thought admits the existence of nothing but present subjectivity.

And the worst part is that the largest visible result has been nothing more than the fulfillment by postmodernists of what Foucault had described in his work: an entrenched power which can bring itself to bear against dissidents and which structures all discourse to its own advantage through things like its use of language.

Meanwhile, what you consider to be "cool ideas" are not necessarily new, and not necessarily foreign to people here. Take, for example, "the map is not the territory": this is not a particularly new insight, and it would be a poor programmer indeed who confused, in the style of Magritte's famous warning, an instance of a Pipe class in a program with an actual pipe.

donniefitz2• 17 years ago

That article was awesome. Those excerpts sound more like something from The Onion.

jk4930• 17 years ago

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ovi256• 17 years ago

Why have comedy when you have postmodernist 'academia' ? So much funnier.

RK• 17 years ago

A few years ago there was the so-called Bogdanov Affair in physics, which some people claimed was a "reverse Sokal hoax" (i.e. publishing bogus physics that was so esoteric that no one could tell whether it was legitimate).

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

eru• 17 years ago

Yes. But fortunately (for the phyisicists) the Bogdanov brothers were not postmodernist pranksters.

xtho4• 17 years ago

CS can be pretty postmodern too: http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/ (An Automatic CS Paper Generator)

tybris5• 17 years ago

It probably has more to do with the ability of computer scientists to create a paper generator than with CS in particular. There are people who can neither think nor write in every branch of science. The remarkable thing about postmodernism is that there are no other people in it.

scott_s3• 17 years ago

And if you submit a paper generated from that to a top CS conference or journal, it will get rejected.

xtho4• 17 years ago

Maybe, but it was sufficient to get the developers to a conference.

tybris5• 17 years ago

Postmodernism is the most embarassing thing we have to show to the archeologists of the future.

Adlai4• 17 years ago

But because it's "fluid and leaky", it's not going to fossilize...

I think that every culture has had their fair share of overly-respected sophomores. How many do you think trolled around Athens, and were forgotten by history because nobody cared to record what they said? With a bit of common sense, that's what will happen here too.

fluffster• 17 years ago

This essay by Stove is a very interesting read too: http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/wrongthoughts.html

knowtheory• 17 years ago

I think the most frustrating thing about this particular article and the way it's presented is the fact that this is, in essence, a literature overview/summary by Dawkins. Very little of the content involved in the piece is original thinking by St. Dawkins.

He's not disrobing anyone (perish the thought), he's reporting on Skoal & Bricmont disrobing people.

rcorsaro• 17 years ago

In the works of Pynchon, a predominant concept is the distinction between creation and destruction. Derrida uses the term ‘realism’ to denote the paradigm, and subsequent futility, of postcultural truth. In a sense, subdialectic textual theory holds that the task of the writer is significant form.

“Society is part of the paradigm of narrativity,” says Debord; however, according to Dietrich[9] , it is not so much society that is part of the paradigm of narrativity, but rather the genre, and some would say the dialectic, of society. Foucault uses the term ‘realism’ to denote the role of the poet as artist. However, Parry[10] states that we have to choose between dialectic objectivism and precapitalist deappropriation.

Any number of situationisms concerning capitalist discourse may be discovered. But the example of subdialectic textual theory intrinsic to Joyce’s Dubliners is also evident in Ulysses, although in a more mythopoetical sense.

Lacan uses the term ‘capitalist discourse’ to denote the common ground between reality and sexual identity. Thus, Lyotard’s essay on subdialectic textual theory implies that the law is capable of truth.

Baudrillard promotes the use of textual narrative to deconstruct hierarchy. In a sense, several materialisms concerning the futility, and eventually the paradigm, of subdialectic culture exist.

The characteristic theme of the works of Joyce is the role of the reader as observer. However, in Finnegan’s Wake, Joyce deconstructs realism; in Ulysses, although, he analyses capitalist discourse.

ThomPete• 17 years ago

Way to often people confuse what would be nice to have with what is possible to have.

Postmodernism unfortunately must often take the heat from those people.

Postmodernism is an observation is a critique of the absolute frames of references. It's not an atempt to claim how the world is but rather a tool to hack reality.

In that sense no people on HN should be against postmodernism but rather understand it instead of just showing their ignorance.

grantmoney• 17 years ago

I posted this in the other thread, but intended to post it here, so it's posted twice unfortunately. Apologies in advance!

I try not to reply to these types of arguments, but two days in a row of dissing postmoderism is a bit much, and so I'll try to defend postmodernism, cause I do think it's worth defending.

The first problem with postmoderism is it exists across fields. There was a movement in architecture. There was a movement in theatre. If you listed all the fields, you'd notice that they're all creative. That's the other problem, and the one that creates so much confusion for non-creative people. I wouldn't say all scientifically minded (digital thinking) people are not creative, but I'd guess a majority probably aren't. It's those that have problems with it, and this is why people 'that get it' call them 'stupid'. I don't agree that they're stupid, but I do think it's to do with the lack of natural creativity.

From my interpretation, the thing about postmoderism is that it measures the field using what makes that field unique as the variable. Postmodern designers feared that 'creativity' in design was disappearing, as it was the 'creativity' that designers valued, so without it - there was no more design. The postmodern philosophers, who are mostly concerned with humans, came to the same conclusion - humans were disappearing. Without humans, there was no more philosophy.

You also have to remember that these are creative people asking the questions, and creative people cannot be tamed. They love a prank, and if they choose to write, their styles become poetic and humourous. They redefine words as that is what philosophy has been doing since the origins of it. A bunch of drunk greeks sitting around defining concepts like love. Hegel re-defined practically every stylistic word he could find - to be poetic. Philosophy may have branched out into fields like science, but its origins are in human creativity, and that can't be measured by rigorous scientific method. It's art for thinkers. It explores a world that 'does' exist, but science choses to ignore as it has no other option but to. Some people can't accept that, and in this modern culture with modern people on a postmodern trajectory, they lash out, which results in some ridiculous polemics against it.

The big point of postmodernism that needs to be understood is that it is the 'end' of something. The 'end' of design. The 'end' of humans. It doesn't mean those things will cease to exist, but that what made them worthy of our attention was going to 'end'. Tech fields haven't yet hit a point where new ideas stop coming, but there will come a time where the only things coming out are rehashes of twitter or myspace. That's when a genuine postmodernism movement will rise within technology.

The ultimate test of postmoderism is to hand a naturally creative human a book by Baudrillard, and see if they get it. I would guess at least half could interpret a bulk of it.

Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins

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