I was always conflicted about poststructural thinkers; on the one hand I was enamored with the creativity of their ideas and analyses, but on the other hand it seemed that their insights were always communicated in the most impenetrable writing. I get that their chosen modes of communication are often interwined with the ideas themselves, but nonetheless it reminds me of engineers that create overly complex solutions to flex how clever they are.
Although I always had more fun with the continental philosophers than analytic ones, I do appreciate certain thinkers that can bring clarity to the works of Derrida, Foucault, etc. For example, I've always had an interest in Deleuze & Guattari, but it sure is helpful to have someone like Manuel DeLanda when reading works like A Thousand Plateaus. If not for him, I doubt I would've made sense of the original text at all.
That's interesting, as my experience was the inverse of this; I started in the humanities and later became a software engineer. My background makes my complaint slightly different: it is common in postmodern thought to critique essentialism, and although these criticisms can have a lot of merit, postmodern thinkers can get very meta in their arguments. To the point where even the texts themselves evade essentialism.
The trouble with this is that, for better or worse, we typically try to get at the essence of things in the learning process, i.e. we search for fundamental patterns in the domain we're learning. So at the same time that postmodern thinkers are critiquing essentialist assumptions that we may hold, they are also using the text itself to drive this point home. But for someone new to this stuff, it makes it very hard to learn.
I believe that there is value in these ideas, but they need to be made more accessible if they're to become popular outside of academia. The tech industry would benefit from exposure to other domains like this; although engineering holds a lot of power afforded to it by economics, I've noticed a lot of developers fall into the notion that their domain is the one to rule them all, and that it is enough to understand the world in it's relation to software alone.
> postmodern thinkers can get very meta in their arguments
In my experience 10 years of arguing intellectual subjects on the Internet I noticed that those who focus almost exclusively on the intellectual impact of an idea tend to neglect to even consider the merits of the idea itself. Not dissimilar to what is happening with String Theory in physics.
>but on the other hand it seemed that their insights were always communicated in the most impenetrable writing.
It's French writing, period-appropriate (50s to 70s), aimed at Europeans.
Anglosaxons need not apply, or at least YMMV.
French (and Italian, etc) students at the time, especially the phisolophical/politically inclined ones, ate such books for breakfast (and were familiar with the cultural references, often spaning millenia, from Homer and pre-socratics to Heidegger and John Ford).
Postmodernism turns structures into soup. Some corrupted structures need to be deconstructed into soup, and skepticism, cynicism, and criticism are good tools for the job.
However, you can't build with soup. And postmodernists are typically horrible builders. And overzealous postmodernists have an underdeveloped sense of when to stop deconstructing. And they seem to be unaware that most structures that come from the soup are unimaginably worse than the one that they just tore down.
If a cynical skeptic shows up to fix society with a scalpel, that's a healthy dose of postmodernism; an adult. If a skeptic shows up with an atom bomb, you're dealing with a child. There is no better phrase with which to characterize the current wave of postmodernism than perpetually "throwing the baby out with the bathwater."
Chomsky had a saying about postmodernism in general: most of their ideas are either absurd or trivial. For example, take moral relativism: it's either a trivial observation - that different cultures have different notions of exactly what is moral or not; or it is an absurd idea, that morality means nothing and you are as justified to pick a flower as you are to rip another human's arms.
>Chomsky had a saying about postmodernism in general: most of their ideas are either absurd or trivial.
Chomsky is an American linguist academic with limited understanding or knowledge of continental philosophy. His comment amounts to some rube saying Asian food is not "proper food" like meatballs, apple pies, and pizza.
>For example, take moral relativism: it's either a trivial observation - that different cultures have different notions of exactly what is moral or not; or it is an absurd idea, that morality means nothing and you are as justified to pick a flower as you are to rip another human's arms.
Both statements are true, and neither is trivial or absurd. The first, supposedly trivial, has seen the opposite idea taken for granted time and again.
And as for the second claim, under the right circumstances those saying that "morality means something" would still be ripping people's arms and feeling good while doing it, if that was the prevailling morality.
In the US South, for example, people didn't feel "bad" for owning slaves and/or treating them like cattle. They felt like honorable members of society. The Inquisition who burned people alive didn't felt much differently either.
So, yeah, morality means nothing as a general guiding principle that would prevent "ripping people's arms off" being moral.
> Chomsky is an American linguist academic with limited understanding or knowledge of continental philosophy. His comment amounts to some rube saying Asian food is not "proper food" like meatballs, apple pies, and pizza.
In addition to what you said, Chomsky is also a Philosopher and political thinker, with quite a lot of personal experience with continental philosophy. He personally knows and has debated continental philosophers, most notably Michel Foucault. He is one of the most widely read and considered intellectuals living today. Comparing him to someone who thinks Asian food is not proper food is beyond insulting.
> Both statements are true, and neither is trivial or absurd. The first, supposedly trivial, has seen the opposite idea taken for granted time and again.
Where? Who believes that all human cultures, across time, have had the same moral beliefs?
> And as for the second claim, under the right circumstances those saying that "morality means something" would still be ripping people's arms and feeling good while doing it, if that was the prevailling morality.
> In the US South, for example, people didn't feel "bad" for owning slaves and/or treating them like cattle. They felt like honorable members of society. The Inquisition who burned people alive didn't felt much differently either.
Chomsky's views here are very simple when you go away from "in principle" ideas like yours into actual human societies: morality varies between societies, but only between along certain axis and certain values along those axis, and these are fixed by human nature and other natural laws.
Furthermore, studying human societies, you'll often see similar progress of morality as a culture matures, unless and until certain traumatic breaks happen (such as subjugation by an external culture, or huge social and economic turmoil). There are very few if any societies that abandoned (chattel) slavery and later re-instituted it. Furthermore, the pattern by which this happens is usually the same: slavery and oppression are forced on people who are, for various reasons, seen as sub- or non-human, and as their fundamental humanity is recognized by society, slavery and similar oppression become seen as immoral, even as they are sometimes still practiced.
Note that it is logically impossible for morality to be completely arbitrary/relative - if it were, it would be impossible for humans to ever acquire it (by the same arguments that show that there has to be some fundamental human language structure, otherwise being impossible for children to acquire it in a limited amount of time).
>There are very few if any societies that abandoned (chattel) slavery and later re-instituted it.
There are quite a few, which goes to show that it's not some whig one-way historical progress. Heck, the European world had abandoned slavery for a millenium and the then re-introduced it en masse in the colonies and in the New World.
But the actual reason societies don't often re-institute something like slavery faster is not some moral advancement, but because other things make more economic sense. You can't sell consumer goods to a society of slaves, nor they make for good workers in more advanced jobs. If those economic conditions change, here comes slavery again.
Chomsky has demonstrated little understanding of "postmodernism" (whatever that vague term entails). I would take any criticism he has of French poststructuralist thinkers with a grain of salt.
For example I don't think any of the philosophers usually called "postmodernists" have actually argued for the type of moral relativism you're describing. Foucault didn't, Lacan didn't, Delueze didn't. I don't know if Derrida did, but I'm pretty sure Chomsky doesn't either.
> For example I don't think any of the philosophers usually called "postmodernists" have actually argued for the type of moral relativism you're describing
They openly reject the notion of aiming towards objective truth and replace it with building ideas that are better at changing power structures. There's a good reason why people are even considering 2+2=5 as an actual hypothesis.
Even if they didn't espouse those radical views themselves, it's not hard to see that they laid the framework for it.
Ooops, sorry to introduce that doubt. I had seen this as something he had said a long time ago, but you're right that I should have used another tense.
I think this is why I enjoyed Deleuze & Guattari a lot; IMO they seemed to be more aware of the futility of the "burn everything to the ground" approach and overall, their conclusions feel more additive than subtractive.
I'm rather surprised by the number of critical theory related articles on HN recently. Maybe it is because hackers are literally people who like to disassemble things to better understand them? Although I'm more cynical and I think it's more likely a bunch of people in political forums coordinating to implant those articles (this is what happened to Reddit after all).
On YouTube there was this video about how Music Theory is White Supremacy. Yes you read that right, Critical Music Theory. Of course the points made do not really stand to simple scrutiny and doesn't even direct proof of what they claim outside of "it's not the best system and those who are propagating it tend to be White". There's even reference to math not being universal, and I got into a debate where I had to make the point that 2+2 is not equal to 5, which kinda tells you the intellectual honesty of those espousing this kind of thinking.
CR is great at deconstruction, but the problem as you pointed out they entirely fail at making anything that makes sense or is useful. They openly state that it is better to make points that "have the right political impact" rather than being correct (actually a quote from Vaush) under the pretext that since there are no objective truth and that only "those in power" make the point, it's just better to pick models that destroys structures of power.
I dont know which video you watched but it's basically true that what most people call Music Theory focuses much of its attention on a narrow period of music on a narrow continent within narrow analytical frameworks (Schenkerian, for example) and comes associated with a lot of normative baggage about what is valuable and interesting in music and what is not which is biased towards specific musical traditions which, surprise, are white.
Schenker himself admitted to white supremacist values in the development of his ideas. Of course it was en vogue at the time.
The music under study isn't white supremacist itself of course, nor is the structural analysis. Whiteness is usually imputed post hoc by less talented hangers-on.
Your whole argument is based on coincidences, at best. I mean, "the guy who created it was a White supremacist", OK, but the same thing is true for the internal combustion engine. Numbered theory is said to be very popular in Asian cultures, yet it was invented by a French man who probably wasn't a saint either in terms of having more or less the prejudices of his time, are they White supremacists too? Using Music theory is like using English as the tech lingua franca instead of Latin or Esperanto, it's not about imperialism, it's just too troublesome to learn and change and does the job pretty well anyway. The idea that ideas carry over all of the context of their creation is simply insane.
He wasn't just a white supremacist, he developed the framework he did specifically because he wanted to elevate certain forms of music as superior and "White".
> Using Music theory is like using English as the tech lingua franca instead of Latin or Esperanto, it's not about imperialism, it's just too troublesome to learn and change and does the job pretty well anyway. The idea that ideas carry over all of the context of their creation is simply insane.
English is a natural language and all technical concepts are equally well expressed in most natural languages perhaps with the need to enrich the vocabulary.
A specific framework for analyzing music which emphasizes certain specific structures and discards considerations that other musical traditions hold as important creates systematic biases in the understanding of music.
A better metaphor would be perhaps be expressing algorithmic ideas in a language where only "for" loops were deemed important and everything else a derivative concept.
The fact that you think this bias towards specific forms of European music doesnt have consequences doesnt make the idea insane. I think the fact that you have to resort to that kind of labeling speaks to a fragility in your worldview.
> He wasn't just a white supremacist, he developed the framework he did specifically because he wanted to elevate certain forms of music as superior and "White".
So what? Even if that was his main intention (that's highly disputable), the intentions does not carry over like glue to the system he created. Modern music theory has nothing to do with race. Good luck finding notion about race in a recent music book. Again, you argument is purely coincidental in nature and totally lacks in causality.
> English is a natural language and all technical concepts are equally well expressed in most natural languages perhaps with the need to enrich the vocabulary.
I'm sorry but this is not true. As someone who knows French, English and is currently studying Japanese and dabbled with German and Mandarin I can tell you that not all natural languages do not have the same capacity for technical precise technical jargon or other domains such as philosophy. Somehow English "won", due to the British Empire winning wars around the world.
> A specific framework for analyzing music which emphasizes certain specific structures and discards considerations that other musical traditions hold as important creates systematic biases in the understanding of music.
All framework is going to be better at certain things and worse at others. Are the Chinese racist because their traditional system doesn't accommodate certain traditions held as important such as African dance music? Of course not. It's just not possible to accommodate everyone, and as English, modern music theory "won". And that nothings stops "systematically" people from playing other styles and user other systems.
> A better metaphor would be perhaps be expressing algorithmic ideas in a language where only "for" loops were deemed important and everything else a derivative concept.
I get it that you never tried functional programming. (which according to its supporter is superior by the way) but I digress. Programming is pretty much a free market of ideas, and nothings stops people from using other musical notations and framework or augmenting existing one, and I would be surprised that nobody does. There nothing "supreme" or "systematic" stopping people from doing so.
> The fact that you think this bias towards specific forms of European music doesnt have consequences doesnt make the idea insane. I think the fact that you have to resort to that kind of labeling speaks to a fragility in your worldview.
I'm sorry for the pejorative term, but critical theory is simply non-nonsensical by nature. Ideas can and are abstracted from the original context from which they have been created. The Rocket Equation is not Nazi just because it was mainly used by Germans first during WW2. Blaming Europeans and countries of European descent for simply having their own culture is downright ridiculous. Nations having their own culture is fine, especially when nobody is forcing anyone to use only one system.
Yes, critical theories are philosophies often meant to be executed on behalf of "ends by whatever means."
They're antithetical to liberalism. Liberalism has no ends, it's effectively JUST a description of means. If anything, the means are themselves the ends.
Liberalism is content with asserting something like "freedom of speech is a fundamental mechanism for a functioning society." Critical theory instead asserts that those with power have demonstrated the capability to amplify certain speech and marginalize other speech. Because their goal is to maximize the power of those they assert to be marginalized, rather than having a principled position on speech, they'll instead leverage whatever tools at their disposal in order to do exactly what they condemned: amplify certain speech and marginalize other speech. This is the reason it's a common statement among these people to say "never attack tactics, only attack motives." The means are completely sidelined.
Compare this to what I would consider to be a proper deconstruction of liberalism. Rather than saying "I have encountered a pattern where freedom of speech is not extended to all groups equally, therefore freedom of speech is an invalid ideal, and can only ever be used to uphold corrupted hierarchies," one could instead say "I consider any failure of freedom of speech to be an _implementation_ failure in need of examination and correction, rather than getting rid of the principle due to incidental failure to produce the outcomes I desire."
The whole pattern employed by modern critical theory seems to work backwards from "these systems have failed to produce the outcomes I desire, and these outcomes should be evidence that the whole system is corrupted." They're basically horrible scientists.
I had a lot of fun with the postmodernist thinkers in college, and they expanded my brain in the same way that Haskell did. Unfortunately, I found that much like Haskell (forgive me, Haskell, for the uncharitable analogy), I did not find much use for it after college.
As another comment alludes to here, I found the tools I learned about through the postmodernists most useful for taking things apart -- with some exceptions (Baudrillard, Lyotard, Guattari). However, when it came to putting them back together again and doing something useful, I often felt I was somewhat on my own.
Perhaps others have gone through the same realization. There are a couple of thinkers on the math/philosophy side (Gödel, Peirce, Wittgenstein, Cantor, Church), the cultural theory side (McLuhan, Paglia, Lasch), the literary fiction side (Gibson, Borges, Calvino, Tsutsui), the experimental composer side (Webern) and the pop music side (Prince, Martin, Jackson, etc) that I've been able to draw creative inspiration from. But by and large, it's been individuals, not really movements. Maybe that's just how it is with any movement?
Assuming Prince is "the" Prince and Jackson is Michael Jackson, if I understand your comment correctly, you're describing them as "postmodern thinkers". If so, why? Or maybe you're just describing inspirational individuals in general?
Sorry, I think the way I phrased it was ambiguous. I was phrasing them in contrast to literal "postmodern thinkers" in that they're pop culture creators who achieved significant impact in the postmodern cultural millieu. It's true that you could consider them "postmodern thinkers" but I don't know how much I'd agree with that. For me, it's more they fill in the gaps of what I was looking for (perhaps for guidance, perhaps for inspiration, perhaps just for a role model) when I read the postmodern thinkers, searching for tools I could use to reconstruct -- not just deconstruct.
Let me add in another thinker here who in a very literal sense fills in the gaps between the two groups -- Terre Thaemlitz [1], who is both a postmodern thinker and a DJ. I suppose one could also cite early Nick Land [2], given his seminal importance in the establishment of the CCRU at University of Warwick, which straddled the divide of postmodernism and rave culture. Unfortunately, Nick Land does end up moving into less savory territory [3] more recently; I view that era more as a cautionary tale than anything.
As far as influence on contemporary progressivist ideologies, Derrida's impact is rather minimal, likely owing to how difficult reading him is. The historian Michel Foucault is orders of magnitude more influential on American humanities departments and modern progressivist ideologies.
Most of the major American writers in the 80s, 90s, 00s, like Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, et al, are big readers of Foucault and the intense use of the word "normalize" you see amongst Left-leaning youth nowadays bears a direct lineage from Foucault as a technical term in his work.
Of course, the relationship of an author to his readers is never fidelitous, likely owning to physics, so reading Foucault, then his readers, then modern popular ideologies will always bear striking differences.
Fun fact: My first time reading Derrida or Guattari was in a US philo book club.
In english. I'm French. I read the books in my mothers tongue of course.
But it was really interesting to see how the pedantic translation gets in the way.
I'm not the only one the 'teacher' of that group speaks decent french and was using me a lot to 'demistify' some fancy translation.
"Does the sentence sound contrived in french? because it's hard to follow in English"
It's interesting, I have only the minimal French background in philosophie, it's mandatory to take 2 years in high-school. But I was less lost than some US folks with more comprensive training in that field.
( I did read some Guattari in high school, but nothing comprenhensive )
I would be very curious about your perspective myself if I were in that book club! It's interesting that you say the translation got in the way of understanding the text; I can see how the literary quality of this type of philosophy would not do well with one-to-one translations.
In France, no one reads Derrida. No one ever did. He never really mattered. People never really considered him as an important philosopher neither a second tier one. It always amazed me that americans embraced him. I tried a few times reading him it is just an horrible vain experience full of really vain writing. He was probably the closest to what is modern american philosophy: marketing. no depth and all in appearances.
funny that now his thoughts -that contributed to all the skin-color related communitarianism and destructuration that is pushing american middle/lower class into race-centric battles (while educating everyone at the same time that race doesn't exist) instead of focusing on class issues (occupy wall street)- are coming back to france imported from all the american minds and social movements.
Just like USA thought they won the cold war going to space while the communists entered their schools and educated their kids we see similar things in france with us fighting the ideas of derrida decades ago not to enter into society just to see them coming back x10 from the american empire through netflix,twitter, facebook and even hacker news of today. and obviously the vicious thing of this americanized destructuring system is that they developed tools to annihilate any alternative thoughts (Censorship on twitter/fb, downvote on HN/Shaming individuals at work or even remove them from their job for daring to think by themselves) deeming them racist,supremacist or whatever is it. even if it comes from minorities - like me- then they will call us uncle tom or "race traitor" because we try to debate instead of siding with the people who think they are right and that destructuring should happen
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic battle on top of ideological battle. We don't want either of those here, and the two together are toxic.
What we want is curious conversation. It's certainly possible to have that on these topics, low-probability though that may be on the internet. Actually the OP is a nice basis for curious conversation—thoughtful, open-minded, interesting, and easy to read. (Though the Althusser bit seems gratuitous.) It's noteworthy for considering Derrida without either subscribing to or denouncing him. That's unusual, and very much in the spirit of curiosity. As long as we're talking about this, we should follow that example.
Although I always had more fun with the continental philosophers than analytic ones, I do appreciate certain thinkers that can bring clarity to the works of Derrida, Foucault, etc. For example, I've always had an interest in Deleuze & Guattari, but it sure is helpful to have someone like Manuel DeLanda when reading works like A Thousand Plateaus. If not for him, I doubt I would've made sense of the original text at all.