
Postmodernism disrobed by Richard Dawkins - absconditus
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.html
======
crux
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?

~~~
akamaka
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>

~~~
tybris
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...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_publications_by_Richard_Dawkins)

~~~
akamaka
Yes, I specifically said books, because the three writers I mentioned are all
smart guys who did important work early on in their careers, but then went on
to write a lot of junk on other subjects.

The problem is that it's not Dawkins' or Chomsky's academic articles that have
showed up on HN, it's the other stuff.

------
abstractbill
_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.

~~~
xtho
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.

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

~~~
randallsquared
I do not often literally laugh out loud while reading HN. Today, I did. :)

------
Estragon
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...](http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7097/full/nature04789.html)

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

[4][http://www.springerlink.com/content/g447683933t14555/?p=6bff...](http://www.springerlink.com/content/g447683933t14555/?p=6bff597af0724e40ae7f70240cb903f5&pi=0)

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

~~~
johnnybgoode
There isn't much: <http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

~~~
Estragon
Thanks, I'll edit out the markdown markups, then.

------
nimbix
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...

------
absconditus
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.

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

------
ewiethoff
Obligatory xkcd comic: <http://xkcd.com/451/>

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

~~~
Adlai
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.

------
shalmanese
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.

~~~
Confusion
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
How convenient.

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

------
jk4930
Customers Who Liked This Item Also Liked
<http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/dictionary.php>

~~~
ovi256
Why have comedy when you have postmodernist 'academia' ? So much funnier.

------
ThomPete
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.

------
rcorsaro
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.

------
knowtheory
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.

------
donniefitz2
That article was awesome. Those excerpts sound more like something from The
Onion.

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

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

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

~~~
scott_s
Read the motivation behind it more carefully. It got accepted to a _scam_
conference. These are conferences that accept all papers, and exist to
generate a profit for the conference organizers. Nobody takes the scholarship
of those conferences seriously.

The entire point of the exercise was similar to the stunt Sokal pulled: to
demonstrate the quality of the venue by submitting a paper that anyone
competent in the field would recognize as garbage.

------
grantmoney
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.

