Postmodernism
From RationalWiki
Postmodernism is a philosophical, literary, cultural and art movement which developed in the twentieth century. It developed out of philosophical criticisms of modernism and disillusionment which resulted amongst European philosophers on the political left following World War Two and the damage to Marxism done by the communist governments of Eastern Europe.
Postmodernism asserts that the meaning of any text (where the term 'text' is taken to mean any system of meaning of representation) is constructed contextually and is contingent. It emphasies the fractured and 'heterogeneous' nature of the social, natural and literary worlds. Methodologically, it often focuses on questioning the inherent presumptions and concepts which underlie any ideological system. It is most commonly associated with the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida, historian Michel Foucualt and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.
Whilst extremely popular in literary circles, and also influential in architecture, social science and cultural studies, its dense writing style and commitment to relativist morals have led to criticism. Many outside literature and philosophy circles (liberal and conservative alike) reject doctrinaire postmodernism as being pretentious and intellectually lazy; many, especially those in scientific fields, have asserted that its theories are a form of denialism which prevent theoretical development.
Its attempts to analyse scientific practice have proved particularly controversial (especially in light of the lukewarm-at-best reception in the scientific world of non-postmodernist science philosophers such as Popper and Kuhn). Of particular note was the 1994 Sokal Affair, which in which NYU physicist Alan Sokal submitted and had published a paper in the literary journal Social Text. The paper was intended by Sokal to be nonsensical and ridiculous: he asserted that gravity was a 'social construct'. Sokal went on to argue that Derrida's book Grammatology, a study of language, was a vacuous assembly of half-truths[citation needed] and discredited theories[1] that ultimately added nothing to the corpus of the linguistics community. In defence, many of the theoreticians who initially used postmodernist approaches to study science have argued that scientific knowledge is 'constructed', rather than 'socially constructed'; [2] that interpretations otherwise have failed to appreciate the distinction between these two points.
Overall, while postmodernist themes in literature, which tend to lean towards the surreal, have proven to be quite successful among writers, postmodernist philosophy has long suffered from the problem of being extremely difficult to nail down coherently. While its supporters claim that one must be thoroughly versed in the traditions of Western philosophy to even begin to understand the jargon commonly used by postmodernist writers, its detractors are of the opinion that supporters' lack of ability to make their points in clear language is less a sign of intellectual loftiness than a potentially embarrassing lack of content, and that the invocation of tradition is something of a courtier's reply.
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[edit] Quotes
"It's the combination of narcissism and nihilism that really defines postmodernism, and that's another interview for another time, if you're interested in it." - Al Gore
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ L. Kirk Hagen, in the Skeptic article below, noted that Grammatology was based heavily on Jean-Jacques Rousseau's earlier work on linguistics, much of which was merely Rousseau's personal racial and ethnic prejudices thinly disguised with an air of philosophy. Hagen also dismissed Derrida's insistence that writing in some way preceded spoken language as being historically inaccurate and, in light of the fact that no one seemed to have a coherent explanation of what this was supposed to mean, quite possibly complete gibberish.
- ↑ Bruno Latour, 2005, Reassembling the Social
- Dawkins, Richard. "Postmodernism Disrobed", Nature, 1998. A review of Sokal and Jean Bricmont's Impostures Intellectuelles (published as Intellectual Impostures in the UK and Fashionable Nonsense in the US). Presents the argument that postmodernist philosopers not only obfuscate horribly, but are in way over their heads whenever dealing with science.
- Editors of Lingua Franca, The Sokal Hoax: The Sham That Shook The Academy. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000, ISBN 0803279957.
- Hagen, L. Kirk, "The Death of Philosophy", Skeptic Magazine 11:4 (2005), p. 18. A scathing attack on Derrida's legacy.
