It is lees post-modern and more pre-Enlightenment thought at work.The progresives are regressing.
An excellent interview. I was particularly struck by this bit from Stephen Hicks:
In politicized forms, then, postmodernists will behave like the stereotypical unscrupulous lawyer trying to win the case: truth and justice aren’t the point; instead using any rhetorical tool or trick that works is the point
Unfortunately, having won the case, the pomo lawyers are now in charge of the world, just as the wheels are coming off the machine.
I was interested to see your mention of bridges falling down. Some years ago I took a look at Rorty, and ran into his concept that a discourse system defines its own criteria for evidence, proof, and refutation and therefore cannot be refuted or criticized from outside. And the first thing that occurred to me was that if an engineer builds a bridge, his assumptions about structural statics can be refuted from outside—by physical reality which can make his bridge fall down. Rorty does not seem to get the idea that the human race is engaged in a long-sustained dialogue with physical reality, in which physical reality gets to say "Bullshit!" every now and then. Or perhaps he merely holds anyone who would stoop to such dialogue in too much contempt to pay any attention to them.
I have this urge to write a lot here, but instead I'll merely link to this, because it's hilarious.
Good stuff. But I wonder why you write,
I would not recommend spending major chunks of one's only life helping to clean up the intellectual mess inflicted by post-modernism?
I wonder what 'power' and 'truth' you can discern in pre-modern art. 'Mona Lisa', wearing black, is expressing her contempt of the man painting her and his complicity in the subjegation of femininity. The smallness of the landscape is a sneering mindset in regard to nature, which is miniaturised, as though only people are important.
The statue of David is another attempt by humans to overpower the landscape- not even a lamb in sight!. Obvious, when you think about it!
'Venus de Milo'- sexploitation all over! Women as helpless (unarmed) objects of lust.
They're right! All art is about class warfare! How could I have been so blind as just to 'enjoy' (be subliminally brainwashed by) art? Silly me!
The reason post-modernism is so popular in academia is that it is a welcoming environment for any and all forms of mediocrity.
One doesn't have to have anything to say, or the talent to say it with any artistry or grace, as long as it can be said as obscurely and tendentiously as possible.
The more opaque, the more worthy. And, especially in art, the more offensive and corrosive, the higher it is held in the esteem of the talentless.
Stop and think: Who is it these sneering little weasels enjoy mocking and castigating? Anyone who strives to produce a valid expression of human value, or even claims that such a thing is possible.
Who do they adulate, and chatter endlessly on about?
Artists who produce no art, writers who are incomprehensible, philosophers who deny the possibility of philosophical meaning in life, social scientists who deny that science exists, or that rational inquiry can produce meaningful truths about the nature of reality, if that even exists.
Men of the mind who deny its existence, its utility, or the value of its products.
If you went to see a doctor about a pain in your abdomen, and she spent all the time of your appointment telling you your abdomen didn't exist, that she couldn't do anything for a pain in it anyway, and, finally, that you deserved to suffer for being so foolish as to believe in physicality, medicine, or good health itself, you would get up and walk out the door.
At least, one would hope that a rational person would reject such self-contradictory nonsense.
And yet, we send our children to such people, on every school campus, from kindergarten to university, year in and year out, and then wonder what's the matter with them when they seem so confused and at sea.
The gospel says, "Which of you, if your child hungered and asked for bread, would hand him a stone?"
Well, our childrens' minds and souls hunger for knowledge about the world, and the meaning of their lives in it.
And we have given them the gravel of small minds, and smaller souls.
An English sculptor loses his head.
06/20/06 - WSJ OpinionJournal
In this year's summer show at London's Royal Academy of Arts, "Exhibit 1201" is a large rectangular tablet of slate with a tiny barbell-shaped bit of boxwood on top. Its creator, David Hensel, must be pleased to have been selected from among some 9,000 applicants for the world's largest open-submission exhibit of contemporary art.
Nevertheless, he was bemused to discover that in transit his sculpture had gotten separated from its base. Judging the two components as different submissions, the Royal Academy had rejected his artwork proper--a finely wrought laughing head in jesmonite--and selected the plinth. "It says something about the state of visual arts today," said Mr. Hensel. He didn't say what. He didn't need to.
By the way, Brian, another aspect to post-modernism is how it has even infected businesses. Arguably, a lot of the crap about "off-balance" sheet accounting etc is how firms increasingly try to ignore objective reality in managing their own affairs. Some of this is in response, of course, to market signals. But some of it also reflects the "spirit of the times". A whole generation who imbibed some of this intellectual BS in their youth, are now running things. Arguably, Enron was a post-modernist business. Gordon Brown and NuLab, with its cavalier attitude towards the truth and economic realithy, is post-modernist. All that matters to these folk is "the narrative", another PM phrase.
The consequences run very wide and deep.
All these references to physical reality and the natural sciences while refuting postmodernism overlook the fact that its influence is only really important in the arts and the humanities, i.e. in relation to "text". I doubt that there is such a thing as an objective position in the evaluation of literature or film, or is there?
(I'm afraid that we're not even sure here whether the objective position exists in history and economics, for that matter.)
Daniel J, you posted your comment just as I put up mine, so I'd argue that part of business/economics has been arguably affected by this post-modernist denial of objective reality, if only at the margins.
Jonathan, I agree that business/economics has been affected by post-modernist relativism (history probably also). But the difficulty always arises if you want to show that to someone who does not share your basic assumptions.
If things reach a certain degree of complexity, like in a modern economy, it becomes very hard to agree on what constitutes objective reality.
There have recently been discussions on samizdata whether you can "prove" an Austrian perspective on this crisis as opposed to a (Modernist) Keynesian one, and I did not detect much agreement on that matter.
How do you argue in such discussions?
Speaking of Austrian economics...
A few Post-Modernists make points very similar to those Hayek makes in "The Counter-Revolution of Science".
The better arguments are not against science but against the spurious stamping of numbers on phenomena because doing so works in the natural sciences.
I don't think Post Modernism is limited to the humanities.
A major factor behind the creation of Environmental Science as a subject is surely the desire to protect the environment. The obvious corollary being that traditional sciences are subject to "traditional modes of thought", "existing power structures", "insert PoMo cliché here" and hence support the "dominant ideology" of capitalism.
TDK:
You need a 'hegemony' in there somewhere. Oh, and 'dead white males' are surely part of the 'dominant paradigm'.
Postmodernists probably think that Chaos Theory is a rightwing construct.
Wasn't it e=mc2 that was declared by a pomo to be a symbolic representation of patriarchal oppression?
Unfortunately few English speaking academics know what is really behind (and I am not using that word ironically) the French pomo nonsense. When involved in intimate communication with one another - like their literati predecessors of the nineteenth century - the pomo philosophes complain endlessly of their inability to create great movements (and I'm not using that term ironically - or maybe I am).
Ian B,
“Wasn’t it e=mc2 that was declared by a pomo to be a symbolic representation of patriarchal oppression?”
Maybe you’re thinking of the ludicrous Sandra Harding.
Oops. Here's the link.
http://davidthompson.typepad.com/davidthompson/2008/09/womanier-stuff.html
Is e=mc2 a sexed equation?...Perhaps it is. Let us make the hypothesis that it is insofar as it privileges the speed of light over other speeds that are vitally necessary to us. What seems to me to indicate the possible sexed nature of the equation is not directly its uses by nuclear weapons, rather it is having privileged what goes the fastest...
Luce Irigaray
--Le sujet de la science est-il sexue?
The privileging of solid over fluid mechanics, and indeed the inability of science to deal with turbulent flow at all, she (Irigaray) attributes to the association of fluidity with femininity. Whereas men have sex organs that protrude and become rigid, women have openings that leak menstrual blood and vaginal fluids... From this perspective it is no wonder that science has not been able to arrive at a successful model for turbulence. The problem of turbulent flow cannot be solved because the conceptions of fluids (and of women) have been formulated so as necessarily to leave unarticulated remainders.
Katherine Hayles
Quoted from Postmodernism Disrobed Published in Nature, 9 July 1998, vol. 394, pp. 141-143.
I am going to be a bit of a heretic here and suggest that actually post-modernism may well have something to contribute to knowledge. Not a lot of the crap that goes out under it, but then neither does a large proportion of analytic political philosophy coming off the American PhD factory line either. The nature of academic work is that a lot of it is mediocre and quite a lot of it defective, whichever line of inquiry you take. I know I am not the only libertarian to be leaning this way either as Guy Herbert is known to deploy Foucault on occasion.
The essence of what post modernism from my very limited look so far is that it interrogates the underlying power structures that allow historicised and social truths to be constituted. This is perfectly decent ground for libertarians to examine, as it is as applicable to how "Enlightenment" states legitimated the coercive medicalisation of homosexuality, and how they generate consensus about things like drug use and global warming now.
Indeed, the fact that we are not examining these problems in terms of discourses and power structures (besides what we are already succesful at, mainly economic and analytic) means that the collectivist left has been able to appropriate the tools of post-modern thought and use it pretty much for whatever ends they want.