20 ms·

Postmodernism and Its Impact (2017)

69 points by bluetomcat 6y ago

mathieuh 6y ago
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.
- WJW 6y ago
  Pretty interesting! Where is this quote from? I'd like to read the surrounding text as well if it contains the same level of insight.
  - mathieuh 6y ago
    I'm not 100% sure, I saw him talk about it in a YouTube video a while ago, the name of which I can't recall. I typed some keywords into Google and found the full quotation here: https://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=184 https://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=184, but I'm not sure if he expands on it further in any of his books.
  - not_a_moth 6y ago
    He brings it up in this interview about his book "The Puppet and the Dwarf". I remember this clip from years ago because the interview is such a wild contrast of headspaces! https://youtu.be/KjEtmZZvGZA https://youtu.be/KjEtmZZvGZA
- dang 6y ago
  That's amusingly written and I agree with it, but how is the second father, the non-authoritarian one, being postmodern, exactly? Zizek is the postmodernist here—he's the one offering a postmodern analysis. More precisely, this is pure Foucault: power that forces physical compliance is lesser, while power that reforms your own relationship to yourself is more insidious. Zizek just describes it with a more earthy example than Foucault ever would. Real postmodernists don't do earthy.
- m0zg 6y ago
  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.
  - dang 6y ago
    He'll come around.
  - afiori 6y ago
    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-little-soldiers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-lit...
    - adwn 6y ago
      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).
    - m0zg 6y ago
      Admitting you have a problem is the first, necessary step to solving it, so kudos to you - better late than never. A lot of people go through their entire lives without realizing they have a problem in the first place.
- ldeangelis 6y ago
  That's a really good analysis. I never really though about it that way.
- JacksonGariety 6y ago
  Keep in mind that Zizek has placed the word 'postmodern' in heavy scare quotes here. When I read this passage (it's from Ticklish Subject, I think?) I understand Zizek to be critiquing the pseudo-permissiveness of neoliberalism rather than French theory. (Zizek is a hardcore Lacanian, after all.)
azangru 6y ago
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?
- Kednicma 6y ago
  Postmodernism in literary analysis was the capstone. By that time, we had already finished postmodernism in logic and physics, establishing that there is no algorithm for truth, that truth is undefinable, that words are only symbols without inherent meaning, that there is no absolute coordinate system, that time is relative and only partially-ordered, and that the Planck limit prevents direct precise observation of subatomic particles. These are all claims held forward variously by postmodernist theorists, but by the time they were claimed, they had already been proven or incorporated into scientific theories.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  two world wars
- dang 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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?
neel_k 6y ago
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 6y ago
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 6y ago
  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.
  - afiori 6y ago
    I know it is a controversial name, but I hope/believe that Jordan Peterson's philosophy will actually have a chance at that. At least as an healthier approach to Nietzsche.
  - orbifold 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
kilowatt 6y ago
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 6y ago
  I think the criticism is more that it ate the humanities from within and replaced them with something less serious.
twic 6y ago
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.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  I think if Foucault had waited until he could demonstrate everything he said with proofs and experiments he would have failed to the same extent as a physicist who makes provocative claims without any evidence. There are endeavors that call for lots of rigor and little creativity and others that call for the opposite. Not everyone has those two qualities at the same time so there has to be some division of labor.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    OK, but... at some point, don't you have to start caring about correspondence to reality? Or is Postmodernism the String Theory of philosophy, that it can go on for decades untethered by any connection to the actual world?
    - jrumbut 6y ago
      I have no idea about string theory or how it ties into this but if it's untethered from the actual world yet provides new perspectives and poses new questions that (on occasion) yield new avenues for inquiry I think that it's practical and important even if it isn't true on its own. Also something can be great for other reasons but I am focusing on why someone who cares solely about the advancement of science should love Dadaism and critical theory.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
artem247 6y ago
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.

69 points by bluetomcat 6y ago

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.

WJW 6y ago
Pretty interesting! Where is this quote from? I'd like to read the surrounding text as well if it contains the same level of insight.
- mathieuh 6y ago
  I'm not 100% sure, I saw him talk about it in a YouTube video a while ago, the name of which I can't recall. I typed some keywords into Google and found the full quotation here: https://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=184 https://www.lacan.com/essays/?p=184, but I'm not sure if he expands on it further in any of his books.
- not_a_moth 6y ago
  He brings it up in this interview about his book "The Puppet and the Dwarf". I remember this clip from years ago because the interview is such a wild contrast of headspaces! https://youtu.be/KjEtmZZvGZA https://youtu.be/KjEtmZZvGZA
dang 6y ago
That's amusingly written and I agree with it, but how is the second father, the non-authoritarian one, being postmodern, exactly? Zizek is the postmodernist here—he's the one offering a postmodern analysis. More precisely, this is pure Foucault: power that forces physical compliance is lesser, while power that reforms your own relationship to yourself is more insidious. Zizek just describes it with a more earthy example than Foucault ever would. Real postmodernists don't do earthy.
m0zg 6y ago
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.
- dang 6y ago
  He'll come around.
- afiori 6y ago
  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-little-soldiers/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-lit...
  - adwn 6y ago
    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).
  - m0zg 6y ago
    Admitting you have a problem is the first, necessary step to solving it, so kudos to you - better late than never. A lot of people go through their entire lives without realizing they have a problem in the first place.
ldeangelis 6y ago
That's a really good analysis. I never really though about it that way.
JacksonGariety 6y ago
Keep in mind that Zizek has placed the word 'postmodern' in heavy scare quotes here. When I read this passage (it's from Ticklish Subject, I think?) I understand Zizek to be critiquing the pseudo-permissiveness of neoliberalism rather than French theory. (Zizek is a hardcore Lacanian, after all.)

azangru 6y ago

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?

Kednicma 6y ago
Postmodernism in literary analysis was the capstone. By that time, we had already finished postmodernism in logic and physics, establishing that there is no algorithm for truth, that truth is undefinable, that words are only symbols without inherent meaning, that there is no absolute coordinate system, that time is relative and only partially-ordered, and that the Planck limit prevents direct precise observation of subatomic particles. These are all claims held forward variously by postmodernist theorists, but by the time they were claimed, they had already been proven or incorporated into scientific theories.
082349872349872 6y ago
two world wars
dang 6y ago
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 6y ago
  > 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?

neel_k 6y ago

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 6y ago

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 6y ago
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.
- afiori 6y ago
  I know it is a controversial name, but I hope/believe that Jordan Peterson's philosophy will actually have a chance at that. At least as an healthier approach to Nietzsche.
- orbifold 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.

kilowatt 6y ago

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 6y ago
I think the criticism is more that it ate the humanities from within and replaced them with something less serious.

twic 6y ago

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.

jrumbut 6y ago
I think if Foucault had waited until he could demonstrate everything he said with proofs and experiments he would have failed to the same extent as a physicist who makes provocative claims without any evidence. There are endeavors that call for lots of rigor and little creativity and others that call for the opposite. Not everyone has those two qualities at the same time so there has to be some division of labor.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  OK, but... at some point, don't you have to start caring about correspondence to reality? Or is Postmodernism the String Theory of philosophy, that it can go on for decades untethered by any connection to the actual world?
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    I have no idea about string theory or how it ties into this but if it's untethered from the actual world yet provides new perspectives and poses new questions that (on occasion) yield new avenues for inquiry I think that it's practical and important even if it isn't true on its own. Also something can be great for other reasons but I am focusing on why someone who cares solely about the advancement of science should love Dadaism and critical theory.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

artem247 6y ago

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.