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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

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.

deleted 6y ago
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robocat 6y ago
I love this article “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure” written by a software engineer: https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html Edit: it is the best explanation for “it seemed that their insights were always communicated in the most impenetrable writing” I have seen.
- ducharmdev 6y ago
  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.
  - TeeMassive 6y ago
    > 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.
coldtea 6y ago
>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). Good luck with today's students...

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robocat 6y ago

I love this article “How to Deconstruct Almost Anything--My Postmodern Adventure” written by a software engineer: https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html https://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html Edit: it is the best explanation for “it seemed that their insights were always communicated in the most impenetrable writing” I have seen.

ducharmdev 6y ago
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.
- TeeMassive 6y ago
  > 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.

coldtea 6y ago

>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). Good luck with today's students...