Tuesday, September 20, 2016

What do we moan about when we moan about postmodernism?

Some philosophers are very dismissive of (what they call) postmodernism while others think it is unfairly dismissed, often on the basis of ignorance. If I speak dismissively of it I don't mean the work of Derrida, Foucault, or any other philosopher. I mean a kind of ideology or cloud of tendencies that seems very widespread outside philosophy. According to this (kind of) view:
  • there is no such thing as truth (or else, at least, we should not talk about truth, perhaps for some other reason, but only ever as if there are either no truths at all or else many (mine, yours, etc.)) 
  • the same goes for goodness and beauty (and probably logical validity too)
  • the purpose of education, therefore, is not knowledge of truth or appreciation of goodness or beauty but rather politics
  • one aspect of education in politics is simply coming to accept that everything is political, that belief in truth and beauty (etc.) is naive and that to think otherwise is to fall victim to someone else's power play
  • the other aspect is coming to accept that a) history, literature, and pretty much everything else show that dominant groups are (unfairly) dominant over others, and b) this is the point of studying history, literature, and pretty much everything else
Parts of this are true. Dominant groups are dominant. And this is either always or at least almost always unfair. (Murderers' being in prison doesn't strike me as unfair, but sexual and racial inequality do, for instance.) But other parts are absurd to varying degrees of obviousness. To assert as if true the claim that there is no truth strikes me as deeply problematic. Skepticism about truth (etc.) also, I think, helps right-wing extremists promote their causes. And then there is also the question of why anyone would want to study history or literature or religion or psychology or anything else if none of it is true or good and the only point of the exercise is to change your political views. Why would I want someone else to change my political views in a way that is explicitly not in the direction of truth or goodness? Why would I pay to have this done to my children? Why would governments pay for it? Why would employers want to hire people whose education had been of this kind? (I don't mean that education should be all about employability. I'm just going through possible reasons for education: to enlighten; to give students something that they want; to give students something that their parents want them to have; to give them something that the state wants them to have; to give them something that potential employers want them to have. Postmodernism as I've defined it seems to offer none of this.)

I don't know where this ideology comes from. One source seems to be scientism. Scientific claims might be true or false, the idea seems to be, but the humanities are a different kettle of fish. Here all is opinion and anything goes. Along with this is the existentialist idea that I am free, as you are too, to commit myself to anything with equal justification. It follows, of course, that racism is not actually unjust or unfair or evil or wrong, but also that we are perfectly entitled to commit ourselves to the view that it is any or all of the above. I don't know how much sense this makes, but I reject any view that denies the wrongness of racism. Nietzsche and Wittgenstein seem in some ways to be behind these ideas. Perhaps Foucault is too. But what I've read of Foucault's work is much better than this (i.e., the set/cloud of points listed above), and both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein would surely have rejected it. Variations on it, though, are very widespread, even standard, in large areas of the humanities, as far as I can tell. For instance, the religious studies course I gave up on a while ago presented a kind of relativism as a key feature of the religious studies approach to the study of religion. In The Good Story Coetzee defends belief in truth but is clearly aware that acknowledging the existence of such a thing is unfashionable, perhaps even rude:
Although, like most well brought up people nowadays, I am careful to avoid the impolite locution 'transcendent truth', I confess that privately I continue to distinguish between things that really happened in the past and things that did not really happen. (p. 74)
Coetzee is led to say this about halfway through his dialogue with Arabella Kurtz partly because she seems so deeply resistant to the idea of this kind of truth, which is not transcendent in any very mysterious way. It is simply the difference between what really happened and what didn't, between whether Don Quixote tilted at windmills or at giants. Kurtz is not alone in this resistance. It seems, as Coetzee notes, to be something people are brought up with.
 
I don't know whether anyone believes (or claims to believe) the full list of points, but something like it seems to lurk behind a great deal that is said and taught by a great many people in the humanities. And philosophers are kidding themselves if they think these ideas have all been put to bed. Of course, it might seem as though once an idea or set of ideas has been shown to be false or incoherent or otherwise implausible then there is nothing more for philosophers to do about it. But if the ideas won't die then someone needs to do more. This might be a difference between the idea of philosophy as something like a science and philosophy as therapy. Scientists prove and move on. A therapist's work, on the other hand, is never done.

I remember hearing years ago that even philosophers who are postmodernists dislike that label because it suggests something shallow and incoherent. So I'm curious about the relation between the postmodernism I'm moaning about and what we might call postmodernism proper. If the latter makes far more sense then perhaps the problem is less with bad philosophy and more with badly understood philosophy. In which case, what should we do? I'm still inclined to think that we should combat confusion wherever we find it, but that's much easier said than done. Perhaps it is simply that there are always people who talk as if influenced by philosophical works that they barely understand, and these people will move on to mangling other ideas soon enough. In short, I come and go between thinking there is a major intellectual crisis that philosophers ought to to ignore and thinking that there is really no crisis at all. But if I ever talk as if there is a crisis, or as if something called postmodernism is a very bad thing, then this is the kind of thing I'm talking (or moaning) about.  

12 comments:

  1. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n21/richard-rorty/to-the-sunlit-uplands

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    1. Thanks! If I've ever read that it was some time ago. But a) most people aren't Rorty, and take ideas like this to places I don't think Rorty would go, and b) http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/faculty/files/conant/conant%20-%20rorty%20and%20orwell%20on%20truth.pdf

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  2. sure was just offering a pretty good nutshell of the pomo high-ground, yeah I pushed him some on this around the hard sciences and all and he had quire a bit of wiggle room there, thanks will check out the Conant.
    Would you agree that it is a different kind of question to ask whether or not say that current immunization shots cause autism than it is to ask if the state should require all citizens to get said shots?

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    1. Yes, I'd agree with that. And I'm not defending a correspondence theory of truth either (not that anyone has suggested I am). Just the ordinary use of the words 'true', 'truth', etc.

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    2. but i think (high and low cult) that's where things get messy as say "marriage" isn't like gravity, if the folks in higher-ed are at fault in all of this i think it's more in lines of the bigger problem of institutionalizing kinds of in-group socialization instead of knowing how to teach "thinking" in whatever discipline, in the various identity politics for instance one generally just learns how to signal various totems and taboos while never really learning anything like a slow-reading of a single text and as the tech of cut and paste continues to advance this is likely to only get worse, plus we don't really generally teach folks in humanities (and even in social sciences) how to ask a question that we don't know the answer to as opposed to starting from some theoretical base and than piecing together supporting evidence.
      http://www.heideggercircle.org/Gatherings2013-01Adrian.pdf

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    3. Yes, "institutionalizing kinds of in-group socialization" is a big problem. In philosophy, too, (as far as I can tell) although mostly in different ways than other humanities disciplines.

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    4. ah yeah saw a woman who did philo via psychology try and get thru a talk (part of an interview) in the analytic philo dept at syracuse u. and even as she prefaced it by foregrounding the differences in her approach and almost begging them to give her some understanding if not leniency they went right after her with the sort of dismissive/angry tone that one might associate with a stereotype of a bothered engineer. the folks on the continental side tend to fall into the kind of lefty theory jargon and pc/policing one often finds in yer other blog but which as far as i can tell doesn't add anything to the non-philo lefty stances.
      if we leave behind the kind of theological positions that often con-fuse the is/oughts not sure how philo (when done well by folks like you or jcogburn really differs from a kind of ethnography that sorts out as best as possible what's what?

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    5. The bothered engineer story is all too believable. (I had another comment here before that I've deleted because I think I mixed up ethnography and ethnomethodology. Apologies.)

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  3. part of Rorty's point was that what we need are accounts of what is happening (from reporters, anthropologists and all, even novelists)that are both convincing and which provide us enough info for making informed decisions but that there is no method/discipline that can tell us what to do or not given the state of things, comes close here I think to John Caputo's work (after Foucault/Derrida) against ethics (as routine/programs/codes), have to go back sometime and reread james c edwards ethics without philospohy, have you read that?

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    1. Yes, I remember reading it and liking it, but that was a while ago. Think Rorty is quoted on the back saying it's good.

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  4. in the various identity politics for instance one generally just learns how to signal various totems and taboos while never really learning anything like a slow-reading of a single text

    But slow-reading texts can itself be a means of signalling the various totems and taboos, not least through the choice of the texts themselves. At least for the 20+ years I've been part of the humanities scene in this corner of the world, some of the strongest signals you can send about yourself have been through the reading groups you belong to and the things you do and say there. There is a local Lacan reading group, for instance, which has grown to be almost as exclusive and mythologised as Lacan's own seminars.

    Even within the humanities, I guess that this may be the case most acutely in continental philosophy, because it revolves so much around the exegesis of classic texts and the unacknowledged idea (coming to grasp which is itself part of the in-group socialisation) that to criticise the classics of one's own tradition is somehow automatically philistine. (Here is an excellent blog post on this.) I'd even be prepared to say that, while many have said that the problem with analytical philosophy is its vacuousness and the problem with continental philosophy its obscurity, a significantly worse problem with the latter is actually its deference.

    As an undergraduate I myself was a member of a wonderful reading group that read both analytic and continental philosophy and a lot of non-philosophical humanities scholarship, and met regularly for years and years. But it finally collapsed, mainly because I, who was the central figure, became so irritated precisely with the signalling aspect of it. Although we all remained good friends – and indeed the timely collapse was what enabled us to remain so. (Matters came to a head when I'd have liked us to read M. O'C. Drury's The Danger of Words next, while others sided with the competing suggestion of Hegel's Philosophy of Right...!)

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    1. Hi Tommi!

      Yes, deference can be a big problem. And one way it could come out would be in slow reading of the person or text deferred to. Non-philosophers often seem to have this attitude, often toward continental philosophers, taking this or that philosopher to have shown whatever it is they claim. If the alleged showing was recent then it is treated as the findings of the latest research (so it must be believed). If it is old then it is venerated for being well established ("Since at least xxxx it has been observed that ..."). Either way you have to accept it. This strikes me as profoundly unphilosophical, but perhaps there are philosophers who think this way.

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