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Postmodernism Disrobed by Richard Dawkins

• hga 16y ago
  From the comments, the current location of the Postmodernism Generator is: http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/ http://www.elsewhere.org/pomo/
  • Qz 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.
• ThomPete 16y ago
  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.
  • barrkel 16y ago
    We might have difficulty with truth, but we can evaluate the falsity of a statement about the world. To the degree that statements cannot be falsified, they are arguably without meaning.
    • ThomPete 16y ago
      You can evaluate the falsity of a statement about our interpretation of the world. But that is quite different than claiming that our way to interpret reality is the right now.
      • barrkel 16y ago
        For sure, but I don't think you can go beyond truth as correspondence. In so far as our brains are physical, and changes are wired up through physical causality with our senses, you can't break through to some notional Platonic ideal, where Truths are Relations on Forms in a mathematical way, and still have those truths apply directly to the way things "really are". Truths about e.g. mathematics, on the other hand, I would say are analytic in the Kantian sense. They are a different kind of truth, and in many ways are like self-contained games. Useful as formalisms for theories about the world, etc.
  • hugh3 16y ago
    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. If postmodernism had "a point" which could be so readily expressed in comprehensible terms, would it have ever have gotten so far as it did?
    • ThomPete 16y ago
      That is how it got so far. It shows that there are multiple ways to interpret reality. The way that we are using the internet right now is in many ways supportive of postmodernism.
      • 16y ago
• jamespitts 16y ago
  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.
  • cageface 16y ago
    Poetry and fiction don't masquerade as serious philosophy. As long as this stuff dominates academic humanities and soaks up precious grant money I'll take all the wet blankets I can get.
  • rdtsc 16y ago
    > 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 16y ago
      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.
• _delirium 16y ago
  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.
  • hugh3 16y ago
    Derrida is just one of the most famous names, so he gets an extra helping of scorn. No doubt there are plenty of others who are just as bad or worse, but there's no fun in attacking someone that nobody has ever heard of. But yes, postmodernism is starting to seem rather last-century nowadays. The cutting edge appears to have moved on from "if you disagree with this it's because you're too stupid to understand" to "if you disagree with this it's because you're a racist. Racist!"
    • _delirium 16y ago
      Yeah, that makes sense, but somehow Derrida himself doesn't seem the most objectionable to me, at least on philosophical grounds. I suppose one can legitimately blame him for some of the writing style, though. In particular, although he argued that all language has multiple meanings / shifting references / etc., he seemed to like emphasizing it by using a writing style that added deliberate multiple readings. For example, something like "we need to (re)construct this meaning", leaving it deliberately ambiguous, with a sort of self-aware textual wink, whether he was "constructing" or "reconstructing" things. Also, lots of puns. I think he actually pulled it off reasonably well in some parts, and is kind of amusing to read, if you like that sort of thing. In the years since, it's become a really annoying habit that a bunch of folks have picked up, though, most of whom don't do it very well, and take it way too seriously. Now I have this instinctive "argh, I hate you" reaction whenever I see some paper or book title with a construction like "(re)engage". edit: An interesting oddity is that a lot of the writing style traces back to Nietzsche, even though he himself was quite readable (so much so that teenage kids loving Nietzsche are even a sort of stereotype). He initiated some of the general style of writing half philosophy, half literary performance: jumping from subject to subject, making assertions that you run with and don't carefully argue for, making heavy use of puns in arguments, etc. Maybe the problem is just that most people who try to write like that need to realize that they aren't Nietzsche, and can't pull it off.
• dmlorenzetti 16y ago
  Related piece "How to Deconstruct Almost Anything" by a software engineer, Chip Morningstar: http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html
• Keyframe 16y ago
  "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." - Bertrand Russell
  • philwelch 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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.
• prospero 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    "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?
    • prospero 16y ago
      I realize that we're all programmers here, and that we live and die by unambiguous semantics. But human languages are awash in ambiguity and borderline nonsense, and the only thing holding it all together are some shared concepts and idioms. The disjoint between the clarity of science and the ambiguity of human communication is really interesting, and by that token something can be both incoherent and rich with meaning (though obviously this isn't always the case).
    • deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
      • philwelch 16y ago
        As a rule, I choose the most charitable interpretation of anything. The most charitable interpretation of most postmodernism is that it's a joke.
• metamemetics 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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.
    • amackera 16y ago
      I am by no means a philosopher, but I've read some Rawls and found him both clear and accessible. I wish more philosophical writing was this way!
• shalmanese 16y ago
  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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogdanov_Affair
  • Qz 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      Nailed the post-modernist response to Sokal - nice work!
      • Qz 16y ago
        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.
• Tycho 16y ago
  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 16y ago
    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 16y ago
      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 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.
• Qz 16y ago
  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).
• crux_ 16y ago
  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.
• diziet 16y ago
  Postmodern literary theory is a mess. Postmodern literature, on the other hand, is wonderful and often beautiful.
• lhnz 16y ago
  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."