7 ms·

The question, for me, is how did postmodernism gain traction. The texts of its founding fathers are notoriously difficult, sometimes headsplittingly so, especia

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?
  - dang 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      > 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.
- afiori 6y ago
  I might believe you are right, and that saddens me. I am not an expert in post-modernism, but it all sounds a lot like it found the really fundamental timeless question that was emerging in the collective unconscious of their time but then decided to give a severely incomplete and exaggerated answer. I would have preferred if history had moved toward a focus toward inward inspection and recentering rather than outward criticism and deconstruction.
zozbot234 6y ago
Postmodernism gained traction as a critique of high-modernism, viz. the broad idea that the natural and social world can be reliably understood through large, complex theoretical frameworks and that this extends to remolding them more-or-less arbitrarily in a way that will create a kind of technological, economic etc. 'progress', 'evolution; or 'growth'. If you think that 'large, complex theoretical frameworks' are mostly BS and inherently subject to all sorts of observer biases, etc. that's at some level a postmodern idea, even though other broad viewpoints (such as pragmatism) would also agree with this. The "postmodernism" that's criticized today has drifted quite a bit towards high-modernism itself. There was a shared sense when this first came up that you can only critique "large, complex theoretical frameworks" by building a new large, complex theoretical framework of your own. But ultimately it turned into a key weakness.
m4r35n357 6y ago
The hippies.
smitty1e 6y ago
For a concise, clear summary, one cannot recommend Hicks enough: https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406/ref=mp_s_a_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-S...
- cygx 6y ago
  https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/17/a-review-of-explaining-postmodernism-by-stephen-hicks/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/17/a-review-of-explaining-p...
  - smitty1e 6y ago
    > Hicks talks about postmodernism as a whole, but seems uninterested in the thinking of individual authors, who might problematize his tidy narrative generalizations. Well, yes. Hicks is in the Sagan/Diamond mode of summarizing for a general audience.
orbifold 6y ago
I think there basically was a crisis in philosophy, most sane and interesting perspectives had already been explored. Western Europa had almost self-destructed in the first half 20th century. France, Great Britain lost almost all of the rest of their empires right when post modernism developed. Many intellectuals were permanently high on one substance or another. It isn't super surprising that someone like Lacan, who wrote incomprehensible gibberish, laced with spurious references to advanced concepts from pure mathematics like algebraic topology, became an idol in such a climate. Basically I think it is time to recognise that baby boomer philosophers produced tons of intellectual garbage. They have been in positions of power in the philosophy and social science departments for the last few decades. Their "Marsch durch die Institutionen" (march through the institutions) is complete. Turns out they were far less competent and talented overall than the people they rebelled against.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  The brilliant and sane philosophy of the 19th century can't be disconnected from the insane and tragic events of the 20th century. It seems like the only logical thing was to try something very different and question really basic assumptions. I would be genuinely fascinated to hear about a better alternative course that keeps in mind the situation they were in and the role of plenty of philosophers in bringing them there.
  - cheezymoogle 6y ago
    Here's a story. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. But not any jigsaw puzzle. An unbelievably huge jigsaw puzzle that's been mixed up with other jigsaw puzzles. Some of them are really old and faded. Some of them are brand new. Some are larger and some are smaller. The edges change from jagged to smooth. Like everyone else at the table, you've been trying to put this one puzzle together for years, trying out numberless pieces until one day you realize that you don't even have the box for it. Like everyone else, you were told what it looked like when you were first sat down in this room and left to it. But you're not making any progress and the solution, the memory faded by time and others, doesn't feel right and you abandon it. Now, you ask everyone around you about what the puzzle looks like. And they are all certain about what it looks like when it's finished, despite the fact that you know they haven't spent nearly enough time looking in the box, or the pieces, and you're pretty damn sure it's not a picture of your loved ones burning, a giant man creating smaller men, or nothingness. And you start to talk with other people who don't believe in these solutions. They have their own ideas about the puzzle. The vast majority of them think the idea of a pre-solution is the problem. If only those who have been working on their own sections piece by piece were allowed to work together with their work corroborated by other piece-by-piece sectioners, without pre-solutionists telling them what it looks like, it'd be put together by now. You think this is the right course of action going forward. So you dabble in doing your own piece-by-piece work, keeping up with the latest pictures of the latest additions to different sections, published and funded by the people who originally sat you down at the table. And everything is fine. For a while. Then you begin to see that the sectioners' works are being used to justify new pre-solutions by onlookers that aren't compatible with each other. Some sectioners are just producing pictures of themselves and their funders. And you realize that this just doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. Not the pre-solutionists, not the sectioners. It's all a giant question with no authority and no one seems to realize how insane and un-ending the whole process is. Then you pick up a piece that changes everything. In it you merely see the Self and your own reflection in it. But it changes everything. You look up from the table and see through eons. You see everyone who has ever been sat down at this puzzle table. You see the same people wearing different costumes as the endless passage of time flows. You see the same puzzle processes and sections arising, maturing, then being scattered. You notice this and infinite other things, lost to the ephemera of cognition and memory. Then the pieces fall into place in your brain. And you see that it isn't a puzzle. It was never a puzzle. You realize in your vision that there were countless people throughout time who stood up from the table. And they saw a door and went through it. And came back. And they said in exaltation in the plurality of dialects and tongues that this is not a puzzle. It is a map. A map to exit the room. These chosen few make a new map of the room, offering it triumphantly to the rest. Some see it and in turn stand up and leave the room to go outside. Others follow. But the stream of people slows and stops. The map is left, abandoned by those who followed it to those that didn't or couldn't. And those remaining beings slowly rip it apart, piece by piece, to fit in their view of the puzzle until it too resembles... a puzzle. You proceed to come down from grasping this piece, realizing the truth of what you have seen; That this in fact a massive collection of old, incomplete maps, made puzzles by mankind, all showing the way to a door that leads to outside the realm of the puzzle. So you stand up from the table, go to the exit, and open the door. And there it is. Outside. The Sun. Indescribable to anyone who has been left inside the cave their entire lives. This is so apparent to you that it is the very definition of self-evidence, bound with knowledge ascertained by pure observation. And you realize that nothing, absolutely nothing can erase the certainty that outside and the Sun exists, having been there. You now have a decision to make. In an act of compassion, you return to the room and proceed to draw yet another map for those left behind...
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
It gained traction because it was supported and funded by the Ford Foundation and other US agencies - possibly because it undermined traditional Marxism and replaced hardcore street-fighting leftism with a soup of politically and economically impotent pseudo-profound nonsense garnished by divisive identity politics. It was also enthusiastically imported into US academia, where it became the new normal - a good way to keep intellectuals distracted while not being a real threat to established power. Unlike traditional Marxism and its offspring, which it successfully replaced.
abtinf 6y ago
You seem to think incomprehensibility is a bad thing--and you are right, if one's goal is to understand, act, and thrive in this world. Your only tool would be reason. But what if one draws their self-esteem not from their own accomplishment, but from the feelings of others? Then, incomprehensibility is ammunition for the argument from intimidation. You simply threaten to attack the character of anyone who disagrees. It takes the form of: “Only a fool/deviant/sinner/idiot/ can fail to see that X argument is false/true.” "Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize...that that’s a pretty narrow vision..." The goal isn't to win the argument; the goal is to prevent any discussion at all. The only way to fight it is with moral certainty.
- azangru 6y ago
  > You seem to think incomprehensibility is a bad thing I do, but specifically, I would have thought that incomprehensibility is bad for spreading ideas. In order for ideas to spread, someone has to be willing to read these texts, overcome the hurdles of the dense language, and recognise something new, interesting and important; something they agree with. Incomprehensibility stands in the way of this process.
  - abtinf 6y ago
    Then whatever else it is that is spreading, it is certainly not an idea and none of the requirements you listed could have happened.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    It depends. If the idea is spread by people understanding it and agreeing with it, then incomprehensibility is bad. But if the idea is spread because people want to feel pride in knowing something beyond the reach of most people, then incomprehensibility is a positive. The obscurity makes it a kind of intellectual "Veblen good". But at that point, it's not being propagated based on its truth or usefulness, but merely as a form of signalling "I'm one of the smart ones". I suspect that at least part of the success of postmodernism is due to this.
froasty 6y ago
Let's consider two academics. Academic A is constrained to traditional rational discourse and Academic B is constrained to post-modernism. Which of these two is going to publish more articles? The person that must meticulously build on prior research, or the person who can publish non-falsifiable articles with no chance of collision with prior work? Which of these two is going to get more grants for their institutions? Which of these two is going to get promoted and get tenure? Which of these is going to be in charge of advising the next generation of graduate students? Consider Steve Jobs answer to why Xerox failed and meditate on the implications in higher education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0 Or consider this scene from Mad Men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcneQ6N50Q&t=39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcneQ6N50Q&t=39 Different industry, same phenomenon. Pursuit of truth and a notion of objective reality constrains discourse to a very limited band of possible outcomes, let alone actual outcomes. If you remove those constraints, the floodgates open and the signal will immediately be drowned by intentional noise. And if you don't play ball, your institutions will inevitably replace you with someone who will.
- lasagnaphil 6y ago
  Ironically, this is a good Foucaultian critique of postmodernism as an academic field today. Foucault emphasized the relationship between knowledge and power relations, saying that the process of knowledge creation is no independent of the power structures which creates it (in this example, the academic institutions, the journals, and the allocation of capital) Honestly, if Foucault came alive today and saw how the neoliberals took advantage of postmodernism (by stealing their language of difference and deconstruction to distract and prevent people from thinking about capital alongside to race/gender relations), he would be very disappointed.

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?
- dang 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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.
afiori 6y ago
I might believe you are right, and that saddens me. I am not an expert in post-modernism, but it all sounds a lot like it found the really fundamental timeless question that was emerging in the collective unconscious of their time but then decided to give a severely incomplete and exaggerated answer. I would have preferred if history had moved toward a focus toward inward inspection and recentering rather than outward criticism and deconstruction.

zozbot234 6y ago

Postmodernism gained traction as a critique of high-modernism, viz. the broad idea that the natural and social world can be reliably understood through large, complex theoretical frameworks and that this extends to remolding them more-or-less arbitrarily in a way that will create a kind of technological, economic etc. 'progress', 'evolution; or 'growth'. If you think that 'large, complex theoretical frameworks' are mostly BS and inherently subject to all sorts of observer biases, etc. that's at some level a postmodern idea, even though other broad viewpoints (such as pragmatism) would also agree with this. The "postmodernism" that's criticized today has drifted quite a bit towards high-modernism itself. There was a shared sense when this first came up that you can only critique "large, complex theoretical frameworks" by building a new large, complex theoretical framework of your own. But ultimately it turned into a key weakness.

m4r35n357 6y ago

The hippies.

smitty1e 6y ago

For a concise, clear summary, one cannot recommend Hicks enough: https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-Socialism-Rousseau/dp/0983258406/ref=mp_s_a_1_1 https://www.amazon.com/Explaining-Postmodernism-Skepticism-S...

cygx 6y ago
https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/17/a-review-of-explaining-postmodernism-by-stephen-hicks/ https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/17/a-review-of-explaining-p...
- smitty1e 6y ago
  > Hicks talks about postmodernism as a whole, but seems uninterested in the thinking of individual authors, who might problematize his tidy narrative generalizations. Well, yes. Hicks is in the Sagan/Diamond mode of summarizing for a general audience.

orbifold 6y ago

I think there basically was a crisis in philosophy, most sane and interesting perspectives had already been explored. Western Europa had almost self-destructed in the first half 20th century. France, Great Britain lost almost all of the rest of their empires right when post modernism developed. Many intellectuals were permanently high on one substance or another. It isn't super surprising that someone like Lacan, who wrote incomprehensible gibberish, laced with spurious references to advanced concepts from pure mathematics like algebraic topology, became an idol in such a climate. Basically I think it is time to recognise that baby boomer philosophers produced tons of intellectual garbage. They have been in positions of power in the philosophy and social science departments for the last few decades. Their "Marsch durch die Institutionen" (march through the institutions) is complete. Turns out they were far less competent and talented overall than the people they rebelled against.

jrumbut 6y ago
The brilliant and sane philosophy of the 19th century can't be disconnected from the insane and tragic events of the 20th century. It seems like the only logical thing was to try something very different and question really basic assumptions. I would be genuinely fascinated to hear about a better alternative course that keeps in mind the situation they were in and the role of plenty of philosophers in bringing them there.
- cheezymoogle 6y ago
  Here's a story. Imagine a jigsaw puzzle. But not any jigsaw puzzle. An unbelievably huge jigsaw puzzle that's been mixed up with other jigsaw puzzles. Some of them are really old and faded. Some of them are brand new. Some are larger and some are smaller. The edges change from jagged to smooth. Like everyone else at the table, you've been trying to put this one puzzle together for years, trying out numberless pieces until one day you realize that you don't even have the box for it. Like everyone else, you were told what it looked like when you were first sat down in this room and left to it. But you're not making any progress and the solution, the memory faded by time and others, doesn't feel right and you abandon it. Now, you ask everyone around you about what the puzzle looks like. And they are all certain about what it looks like when it's finished, despite the fact that you know they haven't spent nearly enough time looking in the box, or the pieces, and you're pretty damn sure it's not a picture of your loved ones burning, a giant man creating smaller men, or nothingness. And you start to talk with other people who don't believe in these solutions. They have their own ideas about the puzzle. The vast majority of them think the idea of a pre-solution is the problem. If only those who have been working on their own sections piece by piece were allowed to work together with their work corroborated by other piece-by-piece sectioners, without pre-solutionists telling them what it looks like, it'd be put together by now. You think this is the right course of action going forward. So you dabble in doing your own piece-by-piece work, keeping up with the latest pictures of the latest additions to different sections, published and funded by the people who originally sat you down at the table. And everything is fine. For a while. Then you begin to see that the sectioners' works are being used to justify new pre-solutions by onlookers that aren't compatible with each other. Some sectioners are just producing pictures of themselves and their funders. And you realize that this just doesn't make any sense. None of it makes any sense. Not the pre-solutionists, not the sectioners. It's all a giant question with no authority and no one seems to realize how insane and un-ending the whole process is. Then you pick up a piece that changes everything. In it you merely see the Self and your own reflection in it. But it changes everything. You look up from the table and see through eons. You see everyone who has ever been sat down at this puzzle table. You see the same people wearing different costumes as the endless passage of time flows. You see the same puzzle processes and sections arising, maturing, then being scattered. You notice this and infinite other things, lost to the ephemera of cognition and memory. Then the pieces fall into place in your brain. And you see that it isn't a puzzle. It was never a puzzle. You realize in your vision that there were countless people throughout time who stood up from the table. And they saw a door and went through it. And came back. And they said in exaltation in the plurality of dialects and tongues that this is not a puzzle. It is a map. A map to exit the room. These chosen few make a new map of the room, offering it triumphantly to the rest. Some see it and in turn stand up and leave the room to go outside. Others follow. But the stream of people slows and stops. The map is left, abandoned by those who followed it to those that didn't or couldn't. And those remaining beings slowly rip it apart, piece by piece, to fit in their view of the puzzle until it too resembles... a puzzle. You proceed to come down from grasping this piece, realizing the truth of what you have seen; That this in fact a massive collection of old, incomplete maps, made puzzles by mankind, all showing the way to a door that leads to outside the realm of the puzzle. So you stand up from the table, go to the exit, and open the door. And there it is. Outside. The Sun. Indescribable to anyone who has been left inside the cave their entire lives. This is so apparent to you that it is the very definition of self-evidence, bound with knowledge ascertained by pure observation. And you realize that nothing, absolutely nothing can erase the certainty that outside and the Sun exists, having been there. You now have a decision to make. In an act of compassion, you return to the room and proceed to draw yet another map for those left behind...

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

It gained traction because it was supported and funded by the Ford Foundation and other US agencies - possibly because it undermined traditional Marxism and replaced hardcore street-fighting leftism with a soup of politically and economically impotent pseudo-profound nonsense garnished by divisive identity politics. It was also enthusiastically imported into US academia, where it became the new normal - a good way to keep intellectuals distracted while not being a real threat to established power. Unlike traditional Marxism and its offspring, which it successfully replaced.

abtinf 6y ago

You seem to think incomprehensibility is a bad thing--and you are right, if one's goal is to understand, act, and thrive in this world. Your only tool would be reason. But what if one draws their self-esteem not from their own accomplishment, but from the feelings of others? Then, incomprehensibility is ammunition for the argument from intimidation. You simply threaten to attack the character of anyone who disagrees. It takes the form of: “Only a fool/deviant/sinner/idiot/ can fail to see that X argument is false/true.” "Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18 and feeling misunderstood, we’d pick up. Then, as we get older, we realize...that that’s a pretty narrow vision..." The goal isn't to win the argument; the goal is to prevent any discussion at all. The only way to fight it is with moral certainty.

azangru 6y ago
> You seem to think incomprehensibility is a bad thing I do, but specifically, I would have thought that incomprehensibility is bad for spreading ideas. In order for ideas to spread, someone has to be willing to read these texts, overcome the hurdles of the dense language, and recognise something new, interesting and important; something they agree with. Incomprehensibility stands in the way of this process.
- abtinf 6y ago
  Then whatever else it is that is spreading, it is certainly not an idea and none of the requirements you listed could have happened.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  It depends. If the idea is spread by people understanding it and agreeing with it, then incomprehensibility is bad. But if the idea is spread because people want to feel pride in knowing something beyond the reach of most people, then incomprehensibility is a positive. The obscurity makes it a kind of intellectual "Veblen good". But at that point, it's not being propagated based on its truth or usefulness, but merely as a form of signalling "I'm one of the smart ones". I suspect that at least part of the success of postmodernism is due to this.

froasty 6y ago

Let's consider two academics. Academic A is constrained to traditional rational discourse and Academic B is constrained to post-modernism. Which of these two is going to publish more articles? The person that must meticulously build on prior research, or the person who can publish non-falsifiable articles with no chance of collision with prior work? Which of these two is going to get more grants for their institutions? Which of these two is going to get promoted and get tenure? Which of these is going to be in charge of advising the next generation of graduate students? Consider Steve Jobs answer to why Xerox failed and meditate on the implications in higher education: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHaTRWRj8G0 Or consider this scene from Mad Men: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcneQ6N50Q&t=39 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKcneQ6N50Q&t=39 Different industry, same phenomenon. Pursuit of truth and a notion of objective reality constrains discourse to a very limited band of possible outcomes, let alone actual outcomes. If you remove those constraints, the floodgates open and the signal will immediately be drowned by intentional noise. And if you don't play ball, your institutions will inevitably replace you with someone who will.

lasagnaphil 6y ago
Ironically, this is a good Foucaultian critique of postmodernism as an academic field today. Foucault emphasized the relationship between knowledge and power relations, saying that the process of knowledge creation is no independent of the power structures which creates it (in this example, the academic institutions, the journals, and the allocation of capital) Honestly, if Foucault came alive today and saw how the neoliberals took advantage of postmodernism (by stealing their language of difference and deconstruction to distract and prevent people from thinking about capital alongside to race/gender relations), he would be very disappointed.