
Postmodernism Disrobed by Richard Dawkins - rikthevik
http://richarddawkins.net/articles/824
======
_delirium
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.

~~~
jseliger
_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."

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

------
shalmanese
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>

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

~~~
Qz
One could claim that having read enough post-modernist work to be able to
successfully emulate it, he had in fact become able to coherently express
ideas which he could then also look at and proclaim to be nonsense.

Alternatively, given Sokal's own description of the paper as "a pastiche of
left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright
nonsense . . . structured around the silliest quotations [by postmodernist
academics he] could find about mathematics and physics", one could argue that
Sokal was merely repeating back ideas which post-modernists had already
espoused, which leaves their resulting publication of his "nonsense" rather
unsurprising.

------
crux_
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.

------
ThomPete
_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._

~~~
ubernostrum
_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)

~~~
Tycho
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.

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

~~~
philwelch
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
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.

------
metamemetics
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.

~~~
philwelch
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.

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

~~~
astrec
That depends on your view of Heidegger, doesn't it?

~~~
Locke1689
Let's be clear, though. Heidegger was an existentialist (in the continental
tradition). He was dense, but understandable. Postmodernism is just gibberish.

------
prospero
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.

~~~
philwelch
"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?

~~~
hugh3
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!

------
jamespitts
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.

~~~
rdtsc
> 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.

~~~
jamespitts
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.

~~~
rdtsc
> Still, postmodernism cannot be discredited just because it does not make
> sense to people outside of its paradigm.

The idea that outsiders do not understand pomo is handled well in the article.
The physicists, specifically focused on mathematical and physics jargon in the
writings. They concluded that it was complete gibberish. Stuff like 1 =
sqrt(-1) and so on.

The claim that there are some for whom this stuff does make sense is a little
scary, as that implies some kind of secret coded language that makes sense,
but has to be decoded, or the fact that they are just as crazy as the author.

------
Qz
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).

------
lhnz
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."

------
Tycho
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.

~~~
jseliger
_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.

~~~
Tycho
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.

------
diziet
Postmodern literary theory is a mess.

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

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

~~~
Qz
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.

~~~
_delirium
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.

