
Postmodernism and Its Impact (2017) - bluetomcat
https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27/how-french-intellectuals-ruined-the-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/
======
mathieuh
I like Zizek's take on postmodernism and how it relates to authority.

> Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives
> rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this
> paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the
> unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother
> instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned
> authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I
> don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave
> there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all:
> although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain
> his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal
> authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern”
> non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you!
> But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if
> you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are
> definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this
> permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an
> even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional
> authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the
> grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will.
> Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the
> child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what
> to want to do.

~~~
m0zg
As a father of a 16 year old young man, given a choice, even a "false" choice
like this, he simply won't do shit. And that's _bad_, since when he grows up
not doing shit won't be an option conducive to putting food on the table or
providing for his family. Frankly I wish I were more authoritarian when he was
younger. I bought into the "modern" parenting hook line and sinker early on,
and in retrospect it could have ruined my child's prospects in life. And now
it's too late to fix it - the kid has a work ethic of an inebriated sloth and
only does what he wants and nothing else.

~~~
afiori
In a sense I am exactly in your son position (even if quite older already) I
don't really have to blame my parents, but sure as hell I did everything I
could to avoid learning any discipline and now I am paying for it in
predictable ways.

As often happen Scott Alexander has written a nice article on the topic; in
this case it is a review of a Chinese-American mother that lives the Chinese
education system through a western lens and comes to like some of the
differences.

[https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-
lit...](https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-little-
soldiers/)

~~~
adwn
As with all articles on SSC, the comments are also very much worth reading.

In addition, one should keep in mind that there are ways to instill some
discipline and self-control into one's children that don't turn them into
mindless little automatons (as the Chinese school in the reviewed book tries
to do).

------
twic
I have come to see postmodernism and critical theory and all that stuff not as
inquiry, but as a game.

Usually, academia is inquiry: physicists are inquiring into how matter and
energy work, historians are inquiring into what happened and why, etc. From a
distance, postmodern philosophy looks like it is inquiring into how society
works, what hidden assumptions we have, etc.

But it isn't, really. It's a game about who can say the most interesting
thing, constrained by some rules about how things being said have to be
grounded in other things that have been said, and with some way of scoring
interestingness that i don't have a firm grip on. There's no genuine attempt
to understand things, or to test what is said against reality. Truth doesn't
matter at all. Foucault, for example, was successful not because he said true
things, but because he said new and previously unimaginable things, and
expressed them lyrically.

~~~
MadSudaca
This take is interesting. It reminds me of a concept I came up with to explain
some behaviors I've observed. I called it "moral entrepreneurship". It's
basically a game where the goal is to signal one's virtue in a way that one
ups your peers. In order to succeed you have to be creative and do things
that, when looked at from the perspective of practicality or effectiveness
seem completely preposterous, but when seen from how you can "appear" to be
virtuous make complete sense.

I came across this article some time ago:
[https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2019/09/20/3-concordia...](https://www.concordia.ca/news/stories/2019/09/20/3-concordia-
researchers-collaborate-to-engage-indigenous-knowledges-in-the-study-of-
physics.html)

At first the concept seemed completely ludicrous. Three white researchers from
Canada want to "decolonize" science and will try to integrate "indigenous"
knowledge into physics. Then I remembered the concept of moral
entrepreneurship and it all made sense. The goal is not to advance physics or
to achieve "social justice" whatever that means, it is to appear virtuous in a
novel way.

~~~
froasty
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_entrepreneur)

~~~
MadSudaca
Interesting, could it be that I heard of this term before and I appropriated
it without consciously remembering it? Let's say a terminology appropriation.

~~~
twic
See also "purity spiral": [https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-
fell-into-a...](https://unherd.com/2020/01/cast-out-how-knitting-fell-into-a-
purity-spiral/)

------
azangru
The question, for me, is how did postmodernism gain traction. The texts of its
founding fathers are notoriously difficult, sometimes headsplittingly so,
especially in translation. It does not seem to offer any immediate benefit,
any obvious solutions to problems that previous ways of thinking couldn't
solve. What made their peers go, aha! This is new, interesting and important
stuff that I want to spend time learning and teaching to my students? How come
it did not remain just a fringe cultural phenomenon?

~~~
dang
It's because they identified genuine problems and self-contradictions in the
preceding traditions. That was a big deal. It was a resurgence of skepticism,
but one which brought a new kind of analysis, inspired by Nietzsche and (less
obviously) Freud, about how people convince themselves of things which they
don't actually know, for reasons that are different from the ones they claim,
and reveal all of this by contradicting themselves in interesting ways.

~~~
azangru
> they identified genuine problems and self-contradictions in the preceding
> traditions

Could you give examples of some of the problems and self-contradictions that
postmodernism identified?

The most important lesson for literary criticism, as far as I (very vaguely)
remember, was an emphasis on intertextuality, which downplayed the role of
individual author (Barthes' "death of the author"), and thus downplayed
authority of the author. It may be one way of looking at things; although not
particularly productive and known to previous literary scholars, especially
those who had been studying folklore.

> inspired most of all by Nietzsche

The will to power, you mean? Is there a textual link between Nietzsche and the
founders of postmodernism?

~~~
dang
The death of the author became a fashionable trope but it wasn't the central
idea—more a corollary.

The postmodernists worshipped Nietzsche; he was their lodestar. (There are
many textual links, but I'm a long way out of grad school—someone else will
have to provide them). If you think of Foucault's concentration on the topic
of power, that's entirely in the Nietzschean line. The postmodernists were
mostly following through on the explosion that Nietzsche and Freud wrought on
Western ideas of rationality and objectivity.

I started writing a comment about this when I saw the thread, but could feel
it starting to turn into more of an essay, and that's not a good thing at 3am.
I remember going to see Derrida when he came to Stanford shortly after 9/11\.
It was impossible to understand a single thing he was saying—I have a funny
story about that for another time. (Edit: turns out I posted it years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341350](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=341350))

And yet...for all the obscurantism and bullshit, the Sokal hoax and everything
else—I came to the conclusion that the postmodernists touched something deeper
than their critics, something which we have yet to reckon with.

The real problem with the postmodernists is not that their texts are full of
ornate bullshit (look up the story about Searle asking Foucault why he can't
just write straightforwardly, and Foucault saying no one in Paris would take
him seriously if he did). The real problem is that their program is only
negative. Unless I missed it, they never point to anything new.

After deconstructing all the self-contradictory things that humans call
knowledge, they have no recommendation for what anybody should actually do.
They reach the limits of the human, at which point the only answer is
spiritual—but having rejected any possibility of spirit, they end up with
nothing. Or, to put it in a different way: deconstruction is fine, but what
are you adding? Or another way: criticism, even consummate criticism, isn't
enough. (Edit: I found another old comment about this -
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713432](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713432))

p.s. I didn't answer your question about examples. It's not so easy to give
clear examples, because the postmodern analysis isn't definitive on isolated
data points—it's more a preponderance-of-the-evidence thing. Also, it's been a
large and unspecified number of years since I worked with this material.

~~~
azangru
> After deconstructing all the self-contradictory things that humans call
> knowledge

And yet we proceed, at least in STEM subjects, with the epistemological
methods that we trust and that we believe to work, as if postmodernists didn't
happen. They may have influenced the politics of science, or the philosophy of
science, but they have not changed a thing about how scientific or engineering
knowledge is acquired.

~~~
dang
I think that if we could zoom out to a more historical perspective, things
would probably look different. History isn't linear and overlapping things are
always going on at the same time. The new coexists with the old. It's true
that most practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge don't give a
fig about what the postmodernists had to say, but it doesn't follow that the
postmodern critique is without effect. It would be interesting to know who
'wins' a hundred years from now. I wouldn't bet on the practitioners of
scientific and engineering knowledge as we know it today.

~~~
azangru
> It's true that the practitioners of scientific and engineering knowledge
> don't give a fig about what the postmodernists had to say, but it doesn't
> follow that the postmodern critique is without effect.

Are there historical examples when radical philosophical scepticism changed
the way science is done? Descartes, with his "evil demon", Hume, the solipsism
of George Berkeley — they all have valid points, and they all have pointed out
contradictions in things we call knowledge, with sufficient force to have been
immortalised in textbooks on the history of philosophy, but they haven't
changed the practice of engineering and science, I don't think.

~~~
orwin
Depends of your definition of science, but historical science definitely
changed in the 70s. Was it under the inflence of postmodernists or skeptics?
Was it by comparison to other scientific fields? Was it because historian now
had real formations?

~~~
azangru
Hard sciences, I think, are based on the correspondence theory of truth –
their statements are tested by whether or not they correspond to what's
observed in what's believed to be reality. I realise that for some sciences,
such as physics, it's becoming increasingly difficult, with such proposals as
string theory or many-world theory. I don't know how much of a reality, apart
from physical artifacts, there is in historical science.

------
neel_k
Well, this was an utterly nonsensical waste of time.

A much wiser and more humane attitude towards continental philosophy was
expressed by the great analytic philosopher Michael Dummett, who remarked that
the division of philosophy into two traditions which largely don't talk to
each other represented a great failure of philosophers to live up to the
ideals of their subject. It's hard to claim you are seeking wisdom when you
are unwilling to listen to your brethren.

Dummett wrote a whole book about this, _Origins of Analytical Philosophy_. It
will take substantially more time to read than this article, but on the other
hand, it will actually leave you better-informed at the end of it. (He has a
hilariously specific answer to when analytic philosophy diverged from
continental philosophy: page 62 of Frege's book _The Foundations of
Arithmetic_. And it's a really good answer, too!)

------
082349872349872
Eh, les gars, le postmodernisme, c'est du XXe siècle. On est au XXIer ou bien
?

We are now about as far away from postmodernism as postmodernism was from,
say,
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatism)

~~~
dang
I don't think so. The postmodernists haven't yet been succeeded by anything,
so in that sense they're still the leading edge, despite the obvious problems
with postmodernism.

The postmodernists and the pragmatists have a lot in common actually.

~~~
orbifold
Luckily it is also not terribly important what those intellectuals think. The
large majority of academics are not engaged in these games, but working on
serious science like theoretical physics, mathematics, biology and politely
ignore them. Also in case you are not aware, there already is
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-
postmodernism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-postmodernism), I'm sure
they will come up with Post-post-postmodernism soon enough.

~~~
dang
They would have gone on as before no matter what, so this objection doesn't
carry any charge. The old always continues alongside the new, individual
practitioners almost never change their minds, and institutions have inertia.
(I'm not saying that "serious science" is the "old" while postmodernism is the
"new"—I'm just saying that if it were, someone would still be making this
objection.) Reductionist putdowns don't add anything; they're just a way of
saying that you think X is good and Y is bad. If you wanted to look for
interesting examples of the postmodernists' influence, the social sciences
would be a better place. One can hear echoes of their critiques in, for
example, the reproducibility crisis.

If your point is that postmodernism was dominated by fashion and cant, sure.
That was clear decades ago. But it doesn't follow that there was nothing
there, and one ought not to throw the baby out with the bullshit. People often
dislike something not because of what it got wrong, but because of what it got
right.

~~~
082349872349872
Is Habermas worth reading to attempt to figure out what postmodernism got
right?

------
kilowatt
Fear that postmodernism "infects" the humanities has always read as
condescension to me: "this idea is too dangerous and 'normal' people won't be
able to see the ways it will be abused, so we'd better reject it."

~~~
dang
I think the criticism is more that it ate the humanities from within and
replaced them with something less serious.

------
artem247
So, I've read a linked article and it's a bit more specific than "Americans
don't like continental philosophy".

First of all, I think there are a lot of issues with how the term
"postmodernist" is applied. One should always distinguish valid applications
such as Postmodernist Architecture, which is a very distinctive movement that
does push forward certain concepts that existed in the Modernist architecture
(you can look up the Bateson building and the philosophy behind it).
Postmodernism in contemporary art is a much weaker application, in a sense
that to kind of put every post-war artist(or post 70's) under this moniker
doesn't really achieve much.

The article discusses something which came to prominence not so long ago, the
inclusion of the radical ideas in the mainstream left-wing discourse in
States. I don't want to touch the identity/gender politics part here, but the
death of meta-narrative the author attributes to Lyotard is an interesting
part.

What her main problem is if I understood that correctly - there are a number
of ideas and symbols, which are close to the heart of "liberal democrat", and
there is a certain metanarrative that she holds as true. And that is being
attacked by relativists and deconstructionists. What are those symbols -
Equality, Freedom, Science, Reason. And the metanarrative is the Path of
Progress, move from the darkness to the light of civilization.

Yet all of these symbols are quite problematic. Freedom often means free
market and representative democracy and in extreme cases neoliberal worldview.
Civilization served as the main excuse for subjugating the natives. Language
of science was deployed to effectively introduce questionable government
social policies by using "objective", "approved by experts" approach. Most of
the slaves were sold in the Age of Enlightenment yet in the "bad" Dark Ages
and Middle ages slavery was almost non-existent in the western world.

My issue with her worldview is that she sincerely believes that good things
that happened during Modern age - progress of sciences and bad things -
Belgian Congo, for example, are not the inverse side of the same coin but are
totally unrelated.

James Watt research into steam was funded by slavery, not in a metaphorical
sense but literally - his research was funded by plantation owners, and he
himself had profited from slave trade.

