"... the most ardent constructionists would wish to teach their children, 'This is a dog' and 'that is a cat'.
And if the constructionist screamed, 'Run, there's a fire!', he or she would not wish others to look with suspicion and retort, 'Oh, that's just your construction'.
Gergen, K. (1998)
"Constructionism and realism: how are we to go on?"
In: I. Parker (ed)
Social Constructionism, Discourse and Realism.
quoted here
Postmodernists (if not exactly Postmodernism), have been guilty of lapses so varied and so egregious (against, for example, reason, common sense, good taste, rhetoric, and simple consideration for their readers) that I have never been able to regard them without hot suspicion.
However, over the course of working on this section of the site, I have gradually become aware that there are aspects of Postmodern theory worth considering seriously (which is not, n.b., the same as "accepting uncritically".)
"In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths - - the utter absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious language. ... Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. (I'd like to point out here that though obscurantist academic deconstructionism has largely been the preserve of the Left, the Right has certainly generated its share of populist -- and occasionally scholarly -- nonsense. --ed.) We're witnessing here a profound historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries , the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful - - not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent turn of many ``progressive'' or ``leftist'' academic humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social critique. Theorizing about ``the social construction of reality'' won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity. ... In the end, I resorted to parody for a simple pragmatic reason. The targets of my critique have by now become a self-perpetuating academic subculture that typically ignores (or disdains) reasoned criticism from the outside. (Strike "academic" and in my opinion this is a perfect description of most religions --ed.) In such a situation, a more direct demonstration of the subculture's intellectual standards was required. ... I say this not in glee but in sadness. After all, I'm a leftist too (under the Sandinista government I taught mathematics at the National University of Nicaragua). On nearly all practical political issues - - including many concerning science and technology - - I'm on the same side as the Social Text editors. But I'm a leftist (and feminist) because of evidence and logic, not in spite of it."
"Jeremy Stribling said on Thursday that he and two fellow MIT graduate students questioned the standards of some academic conferences, so they wrote a computer program to generate research papers complete with nonsensical text, charts and diagrams.
The trio submitted two of the randomly assembled papers to the World Multiconference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics (WMSCI), scheduled to be held July 10-13 in Orlando, Florida.
To their surprise, one of the papers -- "Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy" -- was accepted for presentation.
The prank recalled a 1996 hoax in which New York University physicist Alan Sokal succeeded in getting an entire paper with a mix of truths, falsehoods, non sequiturs and otherwise meaningless mumbo-jumbo published in the journal Social Text.
Stribling said he and his colleagues only learned about the Social Text affair after submitting their paper."
"... to critique reason and logic as being at the root of science's many evils is wrong and has no role in making the world better. And that is what rejecting the scientific method amounts to. Consider poetry. There are many poems with racist, sexist, classist and otherwise oppressive and dishonest content. There are plenty of poets who behave in vile ways. Yet no one would accept that these prevalent ills of poetry (quite analogous to the same ills of science) are evidence that the practice of writing poetry inexorably give rise to these horrible outcomes."
. . . . "... I wrote:"Most pomo is a swamp of needlessly obtuse language hiding (a) sophomoric truisms, (b) patent falsehoods, and (c) meaningless, barely literate phraseology, all melded incoherently together and dolled up to seem like wisdom. Sure there is some serious work done under the broad rubric of postmodernism, but it is against the grain and beside the main point of the school of thought."
This formulation offended many people, I think."
"People lined up for and against Sokal, and the discussion nearly turned into a shouting match.
What was extraordinary about this, my friend said, was that no one in the group had read the article..."
"Ellsworth had a plan: She would pre-empt criticism by playing the critic, offering a social history of psychological approaches to the topic. But no sooner had the word "experiment" passed her lips than the hands shot up. Audience members pointed out that the experimental method is the brainchild of white Victorian males (Actually, the experimental method dates from such pre-Enlightenment and Enlightenment figures as Francis Bacon, Galileo, and Newton) Ellsworth agreed that white Victorian males had done their share of damage in the world but noted that, nonetheless, their efforts had led to the discovery of DNA. This short-lived dialogue between paradigms ground to a halt with the retort: 'You believe in DNA?' "
"One of the least contestable features of postmodernism is its refusal to accept the hierarchy of value and élitism implied in the distinction between high culture and popular culture. In the genealogies frequently circulated, postmodernism is pictured in opposition to two versions of modernism: a modernism codified and conquered by the academy and museum, incorporated as a high cultural artefact precisely because of its disengagement with the popular or commercial; and a modernism which lost its adversary status and entered mainstream chiefly through its contamination by mass production and culture industry. Leaving aside the paradoxical nature of these observations, Jameson and others identify as a central premise of postmodern art, literature, architecture or critical theory the effacement of key boundaries or separations, 'most notably the erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture'. ... However, the exploitation of this fascination as an oppositional cultural strategy was not unique to postmodernism. The anti-disciplinary politics of the sixties counterculture was also based on deploying captivating popular culture themes in its language of protest."
(quote beginning "most notably the erosion..." has no end quote in original,
I have inserted it where I assume it belongs -- ed.)
"Western culture has not survived this century; we float and make our lives, says Steiner, from the surface wreckage, the post-culture, and in the depths the largest fragments anchor vast, proliferating reefs of coral scholarship. ...
The death of the culture is not just the breaking of the chain of tradition, of reference. The confidence of the culture has been shattered as well. The automatic, unself-conscious elitism it once possessed is gone --- Western culture is unique for its assaults on itself --- and the unforced ease with which it distinguished and evaluated, created hierarchy and gave itself a high place therein is lost to all but the fatuous. That the great events of our century --- the ``Thirty Year's War'' of 1914--1945, the genocides, the bureaucratization of terror and torture and death, the real possibility of deliberate human extinction at the press of a button --- that these were even possible would have struck those of prior centuries as ``nightmarish jokes.'' The optimistic beliefs of those centuries, of the prior tradition --- that there is progress, that the humanities make one humane, that ``the future is holy'' --- in their turn begin to seem like nightmarish jokes."
"The Modern Age was the time of the bourgeois, a special kind of person who should not be confused with the statistical concept of the “middle class.” The bourgeois world is only incidentally democratic; the growth of early modern absolute monarchies was also a bourgeois phenomenon, since the power of the monarch served to eclipse the influence of the aristocracy. The bourgeoisie was chiefly distinguished by its personal habits. It cultivated privacy, but not for the sake of individualism. The bourgeois invented the family, indeed the bourgeoisie invented childhood. The bourgeois habit of keeping children at home rather than sending them out to work is historically eccentric. A mark of the end of modernity is the trend toward again treating children as little adults. ...
Another mark of the end is the decline of reading, except presumably as a purely utilitarian skill. The Modern Age was preeminently the age of the book. ... the popular mind, even the educated popular mind, is once again being informed primarily through images and spectacles, as it was in the Middle Ages."
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"People kept saying the most remarkable things using the most remarkable language ...
The things they said were largely incomprehensible. There was much talk about deconstruction and signifiers and arguments about whether cyberspace was or was not "narrative". There was much quotation from Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Saussure, and the like, every single word of which was impenetrable. I'd never before had the experience of being quite this baffled by things other people were saying. I've attended lectures on quantum physics, group theory, cardiology, and contract law, all fields about which I know nothing and all of which have their own specialized jargon and notational conventions. None of those lectures were as opaque as anything these academics said.
I figured that one of three cases must apply. It could be that there was truly some content there of value, once you learned the lingo. If this was the case, then I wanted to know what it was. On the other hand, perhaps there was actually content there but it was bogus (my working hypothesis), in which case I wanted to be able to respond to it credibly. On the third hand, maybe there was no content there after all, in which case I wanted to be able to write these clowns off without feeling guilty that I hadn't given them due consideration.
The really telling factor that neither side of the debate seems to cotton to, however, is this: technical people like me work in a commercial environment. Every day I have to explain what I do to people who are different from me -- marketing people, technical writers, my boss, my investors, my customers -- none of whom belong to my profession or share my technical background or knowledge. As a consequence, I'm constantly forced to describe what I know in terms that other people can at least begin to understand. My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I'm doing is worth having them pay for it.
Contrast this situation with that of academia. ... What you have is rather like birds on the Galapagos islands -- an isolated population with unique selective pressures resulting in evolutionary divergence from the mainland population. There's no reason you should be able to understand what these academics are saying because, for several generations, comprehensibility to outsiders has not been one of the selective criteria to which they've been subjected. What's more, it's not particularly important that they even be terribly comprehensible to each other, since the quality of academic work, particularly in the humanities, is judged primarily on the basis of politics and cleverness. In fact, one of the beliefs that seems to be characteristic of the postmodernist mind set is the idea that politics and cleverness are the basis for all judgments about quality or truth, regardless of the subject matter or who is making the judgment. A work need not be right, clear, original, or connected to anything outside the group."
I like this, so
I've excerpted more of it than I'm really comfortable with.
That penultimate sentence ties in nicely with thoughts on
the transmission of
memes.
"Nearly half the book consists of extensive quotations of scientific gibberish from name-brand French intellectuals, together with eerily patient explanations of why it is gibberish. ...
We are offered reams of this stuff, from Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Bruno Latour, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, Régis Debray, and others, together with comments so patient as to be involuntarily comic. ...
The writers arraigned by Sokal and Bricmont use technical terms without knowing what they mean, refer to theories and formulas that they do not understand in the slightest, and invoke modern physics and mathematics in support of psychological, sociological, political, and philosophical claims to which they have no relevance. It is not always easy to tell how much is due to invincible stupidity and how much to the desire to cow the audience with fraudulent displays of theoretical sophistication. Lacan and Baudrillard come across as complete charlatans, Irigaray as an idiot, Kristeva and Deleuze as a mixture of the two. But these are delicate judgments."
(After fighting my way through tangles of pomo verbiage,
I'd like to propose that all postmodernists
be required to demonstrate an understanding of
George Orwell's essay
"Politics And The English Language"
before being allowed to set fingertips to keyboard.)
From the song "Jimmy Tomorrow"
by The Waitresses
Quoted
here